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ARCHIVES | 1987

THE BOOK IS DEAD, LONG LIVE THE BOOK!
By JOHN STURROCK

GLAS By Jacques Derrida. Translated by John P. Leavey Jr. and Richard Rand. 262 pp. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press. $50. GLASSARY By John P. Leavey Jr. Essay by Gregory L. Ulmer.
Foreword by Jacques Derrida. 320 pp. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. $50. JACQUES DERRIDA
is a teacher of philosophy in Paris, and for some years he wrote only the sort of books that a French
philosophy professor of inordinate brilliance might be expected to write - difficult books to say the least,
but conventionally philosophical so far as the language they were written in went. They advanced a
radical thesis about language, however: when we use it we cannot expect it to mean only what we want it
to mean, because it has a semantic life of its own, and its meanings escape from us. There can be no such
thing as a mastery of language. Worse, language is sounds and forms before it is concepts, and when we
write or speak sounds and forms will come into our minds uninvited because one word can but lead to
others. So, it is as much to the resources of the language as to our own proud genius that we owe ''our''
concepts. All of which is the blackest heresy for a philospher, of course, because rational thought is in
peril if the thinker cannot be seen as being in full command of his utterances. Irresponsible views such as
Mr. Derrida's are better left to poets, who may positively welcome such voluptuous surrender to the
surfaces of language.
In ''Glas'' Mr. Derrida finally throws in his lot with the poets and stops pretending he has language
under control. Or pretends to stop pretending, for this is a very ambiguous enterprise, and Mr. Derrida is
too cunning and witty a thinker to wish to be thought quite sincere. But ''Glas'' is philosophy no longer; as
a piece of writing it has no known genre. It will disgust orthodox philosophers with its fantastic wordplay,
yet seem barbarously abstract to innocent literary persons. In the best avant-garde tradition, it is a work
that courts unpopularity, to be idolized by a few and despaired of by the many.
We are not allowed to call ''Glas'' a book either, because Mr. Derrida would have it that, as a literary
category, the book is dead; the egregious ''Glas'' is something more futuristic, a text. The text does not
pretend to the coherence, rationality or authoritativeness of the book, but rather collaborates joyously
with the anarchy of language and starts semantic hares running in all directions. ''Glas'' goes on a joy ride
into the great unconscious of language in an orgy of ''dissemination,'' or the uninhibited scattering of
meanings; what Mr. Derrida sardonically calls ''the police forces of language'' are overrun. This is a text
that sometimes makes sense, but often does not. It is too dense and too mobile in its ideas to be readable
- readability is for books. Many who enter into it benevolently or even hopefully at page one will soon
curse its waywardness and leave off; as for the hapless reviewer, for whom perseverance is a duty, he
cannot at the end say what ''Glas'' is about, because it is about all too much. He must take refuge first in
offering a typographical description of the text.
Inside, ''Glas'' is not as other books are; there are echoes in the format of what was once called
concrete poetry. Each page contains two slender columns of prose, set in different sizes of type, with a
narrow corridor of white space down the middle. Let into these columns at the side are interpolations, in
bold type, some of them short, some long. These are like footnotes insofar as they relate to matters raised
on the page in question, but they are unlike footnotes in that they do not relate to any particular word or
sentence. Mr. Derrida's side notes float free and can be read at whatever point you fancy.
Reading ''Glas,'' in fact, is a scandalously random experience, for, quite apart from when to turn
aside to these insets, there is the larger question of how to read the two main columns of print. The left-
hand column is a commentary or exposition or, in Mr. Derrida's own description, a ''violent
decipherment'' of the philosophy of Hegel, the right-hand column a similar maltreatment of the works of
the French novelist and playwright Jean Genet. On the left, Hegel's all-embracing dialectics of absolute
knowledge, dazzlingly glossed by Mr. Derrida, and on the right, the seditious, homoerotic fantasies of the
jailbird-turned-writer Genet, forced for once to keep respectable company. Those who want Hegel but
not Genet may read exclusively down the left-hand columns; those who want Genet sans Hegel must
travel on the right. Or you can enter into the spirit of the thing and read both, hoping to discover what
these two weirdly different figures are doing face to face like this. The two columns resonate off one
another, we are told; they are two sounding bells with but a single clapper -the ricocheting reader. ''Glas''
is so made as to impose a certain vagrancy on the eyes and attention of whoever reads it and to break us
of our nasty linear habits.
If knowing what order to read it in is already a problem, making sense of it is another, and more
intractable, one. It helps to have read something of Hegel and Genet first, because there is, by Mr.
Derrida's own avowal, an element of ''decipherment'' in all this. Why ''violent'' however? Because he only
''reads'' other thinkers or writers in this fashion in order partially to expropriate them of their writings.
This is done not so that he can usurp what they have written by making them a part of his own text - or so
he would claim -but to demonstrate the limits of an author's authority over his writings and the secret
paths by which meanings circulate in them by virtue of the ungovernable latencies of words. Thus in
''Glas,'' it is the turn of Hegel and Genet to join the hit list of writers whom Mr. Derrida has already
''dispossessed'' - a good joke in Genet's case, for he is an author famous for having been a convicted thief
early in his life.
NATURALLY, the pitiless law which says that no writer owns what he writes is one by which Mr.
Derrida himself must be seen to abide.
Hence ''Glas,'' an exuberantly clever, punning text, is as much ours as his, since what we get out of it
may not be at all what he put into it. Even Mr. Derrida is at the mercy of language - only he knows
himself to be so, whereas Hegel and Genet believed otherwise. When this book first came out in France
13 years ago, Mr. Derrida was accused of being little better than a punster, crazily adrift amidst the sound
effects of language. In the preface he has written for ''Glassary,'' by which ''Glas'' in translation comes
attended, he defends himself against that charge on the grounds that he is not making puns, but
discovering and analyzing them, following them up to see where they may lead semantically. That is a fair
defense. ''Glas'' is not a case of the philosopher copping out altogether, because there is hard, instructive
thought here, even if to extract it can seem a tedious task.
''Glas'' was not meant to be translated; indeed, it was a book so written as to be untranslatable. Yet
now here it is, in an ingenious English translation, and supported by a ''Glassary,'' which is for those
many readers who would find ''Glas'' on its own quite beyond them. But ''Glas'' in English is not the same
text as ''Glas'' in French; the title is the same but the words have changed, and English words cannot be
played with to exactly the same effects as French words. Who is to say whether the meanings given off -
or ''disseminated'' - in the translation match those disseminated by the original? We have no third
language, somewhere between French and English, against which to test them to see whether they are
identical. Thus ''Glas'' in English mocks, among so many other standard literary ideas, the notion that
translation achieves a semantic identity from one language to another.
 Jacques Derrida is a philosopher from whom many of us have learned what we judge to be important
and seductive truths about the nature of language, and it would be good to go on learning from him. But
pedagogy seems now to bore him and few except devotees with time on their hands will learn much from
the contortions and excesses of ''Glas.'' Nor is ''Glassary'' the most helpful of accessories. It contains lists
of textual allusions in ''Glas,'' along with key words, as well as an opaque essay by one of the two
translators, John P. Leavey Jr., which is more imitative than explanatory of Mr. Derrida's writing. But it
contains also a sensible and enlightening general account of Mr. Derrida's thought by Gregory L. Ulmer,
which bears on ''Glas'' without exactly clarifying it. ''Glas'' itself, I fear, asks too much of one's patience
and intelligence; our defense against a text declaring itself to be unreadable may be to call its author's
bluff and simply leave it unread.
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John Sturrock is the author of ''Structuralism & Since: From Levi-Strauss to Derrida.''

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A version of this review appears in print on September 13, 1987, on Page 7007003 of the National edition with the headline: THE
BOOK IS DEAD, LONG LIVE THE BOOK!.

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