Review: Paracriticisms, Postmodernism, and Prophecy

Author(s): Robert L. Caserio

Review by: Robert L. Caserio
Source: boundary 2, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Autumn, 1976), pp. 167-173
Published by: Duke University Press
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Paracriticisms,Postmodernism, and Prophecy*

Robert L. Caserio

Ihab Hassan wants to define nothing less than the future state of
human beings and of literature. For the sake of so grand a purpose, he asks
to be indulged and excused for vagueness and confusion in his latest book.
But if his grand purpose is to be respectable and moving, it must appeal to
intellectual rigor, not to indulgence. Paracriticisms requires more excuses
than first-rate speculations would.
But there is one especially interesting excuse for it. The book is
pervaded by its writer's desire for the power of divination. Hassan's motive
and his unconscious subject is prophecy and prophecy's relation to
writing. The effort to investigate this subject shows itself in other literary
speculators nowadays. On this point therefore Hassan's convergence with
others asks for comment. If we in fact inhabit a "postmodernism," this
convergence may help define it.

*Ihab Hassan. Paracriticisms: Seven Speculations of the Times. Urbana: The

University of Illinois Press, 1975.

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 I must begin, though, by getting the worst of Hassan out of the
way. Does he need his favored terms? "Paracriticisms" are "essays in
language, traces of the times, fictions of the heart" (p. xi). Only "fictions
of the heart" suggests that these essays are worthy a neologism. But since
these "fictions" seem to mean only private, unreasoned enthusiasms, is it
necessary or illuminating to call them "paracritical"?
The writer also uses the term to identify his writing with "playful
discontinuity" (p. 24), with "gaiety" of form (p. 78). Hassan does not
genuinely examine or justify the discontinuity, in spite of his assertive
practice of it. It therefore seems an attention-getting antic. And there is an
egoism or exhibitionism about it not identical with gaiety. Criticism
"should offer the reader empty spaces, silences, in which he can meet
himself in the presence of literature" (p. 25). I recommend the
typographical tricks on pages 43 and 123 as a measure of the necessity in
any such meeting of empty spaces and silences. As for "silence," Hassan
uses it as "a metaphor for many languages which place themselves in
radical doubt" (p. xiii). He goes on to assert the metaphor literally,
however, as if he were talking not about doubt but about absolute silence.
I fear Hassan's special terms and his format, which originate in a hatred of
formalism, amount to a pedantry of informalism.
Since it would not be pleasant to go on noting these
self-dramatizing aspects of Hassan's book, I turn to his treatment of
"postmodernism" and of "gnosticism," the two subjects which bring up
the issue of prophecy. With "postmodernism" Mr. Hassan shows modesty
and good sense. Although he does not successfully distinguish
postmodernist from modernist ideology, this seems intentional, and he
makes a virtue of not doing it. He keeps the claims for postmodernism
genuinely speculative. Postmodernism for him is not an achieved aesthetic
or ideology, but a tentative, "anticipated history" (p. 31). It is a term for a
provisional estimate of novelty.
Can it be anything more? The appearance of a new "ism" suggests
unqualified novelty and originality. But it seems essential to
postmodernism to call all novelty and originality - even its own - into
doubt. This kind of doubt is apparent in the work of Northrop Frye, Paul
de Man, and Harold Bloom. If I follow Bloom correctly, for example, a
poet who convinces us of originality has persuaded us only rhetorically
that he does or says something not yet anticipated. His discontinuity with
his past may be his cherished fiction, but "every poet is a being caught up
in a dialectical relationship" with a predecessor.1 Novelty resides in what a
later poet makes of an earlier one, but this has everything to do with what
the earlier poet has made of the later.
Nevertheless, on this point Hassan compounds his good sense
with a perplexing self-division. He seems to agree with our strain of
skepticism towards literary innovation. He simultaneously desires ecstatic
newness. For the sake of this desire he will risk silliness: "Unabashedly I

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would ask not only to save the heavy ark [by this figure of speech he
means Finnegans Wake], nor only to seek the rainbow sign in the sky, but
even to become the very matter of which all rainbows are made. Or
perhaps more: NEW LIGHT . . ." (p. 94). Questing for both literary and
human "new light," he goes outside literature. He attempts to take his
bearings from Messrs. Kahn, Skinner, Marcuse, and Fuller. He wants to use
them to stress the radical discontinuity of present humanity vis-a-vis its
past. But I think his witnesses fail him. They are not seeing a novelty
outside of art which might be the condition of a new aesthetic. Hassan
admits they are only proposers of "models of change" which are strictly
imaginary. As much as they dream of change, they can not testify to its
actual occurrence. Their "models" are tropes, which do not substantiate
claims either for human or for literary novelty.
Bloom argues toughly:
Poets and their readers prefer to believe otherwise, but
acts, persons and places, if they are to be handled by
poems at all, must themselves be treated first as though
they were already poems, or parts of poems. Contact, in
a poem, means contact with another poem, even if that
poem is called a deed, person, place or thing.2
Hassan's non-literary speculators turn out to be only in contact with
"models" which are already poems, and which are not as disconnected
from the past as they appear. But Hassan passes on to science fictions and
to Love's Body, asserting that these too testify to an unparalleled new
condition of deeds, persons, places, things, situated and summed up
beyond writing in a radically new consciousness.
According to Hassan this new consciousness is characterized by
an unprecedented inclusiveness. He insists on calling it a new gnosticism -
although he says it has nothing to do with historical gnosticism. It is a
dream of "complete knowledge" (p. 131), "a gnosis, of a universal conscious-
ness that transcends time, and transcends the organization of our most com-
plex language" (p. 134). It presages "the transformation of man into a vast
noetic reality," with a "decentered" ego and a "diffused" brain (p. 144).
What is Hassan's prophecy founded on? On science fictions, on N.
O. Brown, and on the hope that "the imagination is the true teleological
organ in our evolution" (p. 98). Yet I do not see how "teleology" and
"evolution" are compatible with "decentering" and "diffusion." Hassan's
model of progressive change is at odds with the structure and the content
of his postmodern gnosis.
His desire to prophesy and to decipher definitively the auspices of
the future is equally at odds with it. The assumption that a literary
imagination and literary texts alone can tell us vital news I still find
appealing. It implies or projects a wish to make literature the authoritative
center of all human endeavor. But surely distrust of this wish prevails

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among us. What is human, and what is central? Hassan himself writes his
best note on postmodernism's version of "dehumanization." He says it
means an end to the "old Realism" and it requires "a revision" of the idea
of the authorial self (pp. 55-56). How or what can a man prophesy if
human reality and the human self are no longer central - or even
identifiable?
Hassan does not spell out the revisions he predicts nor their
potential effect on the possibility of a "vast noesis." I find myself
illustrating what he means by trying to connect him with Michel Foucault
or Edward Said. Significantly, Said's Beginnings goes to Vico, the source -
along with Freud - of current interest in divination. Beginnings argues
that The New Science "suggests terms for comprehending a very modern
polemic. . . . What Vico . . . hints at . . . is that language effectively
displaces human presence, just as history is engendered only by the burial
(removal, displacement) of immediacy."3 Thus in Vico Said finds the
dispersion, adjacency, and complementarity which he thinks characterize
modern or postmodern discourse. Vico encourages "nonlinear
development, a logic giving rise to the sort of multileveled coherence of
dispersion we find in Freud's text, in the texts of modern writers, or in
Foucault's archeological investigations."4
Hassan's method and his model of consciousness seem
comparable with this. It would seem probable for him to oppose, as Said
does, "appeal to the absolute, profound, or transcendent Origin" of any
phenomenon. And "paracriticisms" suggest by their form that meaning is,
as Said puts it, "an instance of the surface," not dependent upon
originality but upon repetition. "What is repeated," Said explains
(paraphrasing Gilles Deleuze), "is not the One but the many, not the same
but the different, not the necessary but the aleatory."5 If Hassan pressed
the implicit logic of Paracriticisms, he too would say this.
I will try to explain why Hassan may not want to work out the
logic of his position. When Said draws out Vico's inherent modern
polemic, he takes his encouragement from Vico's characterization of
strictly "human" nature. In The New Science Vico's human nature follows
historically two previous natures: the divine or poetic, and the heroic.
Divination and prophecy create and characterize these first two stages;
dispersion, adjacency, and complementarity do not. The latter characterize
- as Said sees it - Vico's method and his description, from a strictly
human point of view, of the first two phases.
Vico's divine or poetic nature insists on the One, the same, the
necessary. The vehicle of this insistence is imagination, at once sublime
and corporeal. It prophesies and institutes a human order which overcomes
the terrors of nature and of death. The Vichian poet-prophet fills the
world's void with absolute presence and absolute knowledge; he banishes
contingency in thought and in religious and civic order. And he creates
thought and order by his imagination's "severe" gnosis.

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 Said implies the sharpest distinction between this poetic way of
knowing which Vico describes, and Vico's proto-modernist way of
knowing and describing it. Like Said's version of Vico, we look with stoic
and rational coolness on fear and hope, on Origins, on absolutes of any
sort, on what Geoffrey Hartman calls "the whole dizzying metaphysical
desire for presence or absence" and "the eternizing character of desire."6
What Hassan holds on to, in an unexamined way, is a hope
for the return of Vico's primary poetic nature. Apparently he is even
attempting to embody it. Vico too considers the imagination as a
telelogical organ, and he identifies it with poetic wisdom. He points out
that imagination is not an intellectual power, but a bodily process which
"perturbs to excess." And Vico argues that imagination's first poems were
mute acts of ritualized silence. Clearly, Hassan's "paracriticisms" want to
renew Vico's first stage of the imagination's life.
I believe there is a significance worth attention in Hassan's
stubborn desire to be a Vichian poet-interpreter, even if this desire
contradicts the possibilities of mere - or postmodern - human nature. No
doubt Said has rightly grasped Vico's sobriety. Although Vico argues that
the blindness of divine poetics is providentially creative, like Said, Vico
stands on the near and reasonably human side of sublimities and of alleged
Origins. But have we finished with the prophetic endeavor and its
metaphysical desire as much as Said - and our current habits of mind -
make us think we have?
Sympathy with Hassan's ambition to be prophetic must make
here a further appeal to Harold Bloom. Like Vico and the writer of
Beginnings, Bloom stands on the rationally analytic side of sublimity. But
he shows us how the continuing life of even the most modern or
postmodern poetry is the continuing life of Vico's first state of humanity,
not of its third.
It is possible that we remain as terrified of death and of the
darkness of the future as Vico's first men are terrified of thunder. Bloom's
poets compound this terror with their awe of their predecessors, whom
they imagine to be gods. As they struggle with and against their fears the
strong poets rescue themselves and us from the fear of death and from the
sense that the passing of time is nothing more than our ruin. In relation to
common sense, this struggle and its successes are an illusion. The strong
poet asserts the fulfillment of "eternizing" ambitions; he turns his back on
absence and death. We take pleasure in this, Bloom understands, because
in spite of our philosophy and our experience, we desire illusion, and
persist in it. A Vichian poetic divination is the vehicle of the persistence.
If Hassan had been clearly self-analytic about his own prophetic
intention, Paracriticisms would have been a far better book. It may not
have been at all as "postmodern" as it hopes to be. Hassan might have had
to argue the continuing importance of a primary Vichian gnosis, in terms
that would lead us back to humanization, to absolute centers and

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presences. He might have seen a desire for the latter significantly persistent
in Joyce and Beckett. How much richer Hassan's thin essays on these
writers in Paracriticisms might have been if he had pursued their
traditional - their primitive - prophetic aspects.
Something even in Beckett insistently desires a power of sublime
divination and a fulness and presence of the Word. The Unnamable
exclaims, "You must go on, I must go on, you must say words, as long as
there are any, until they find me, until they say me."7 It is arguable that
this desire to say and be said, to represent and be represented is a will to
overcome dispersion, adjacency, and complementarity. It is a will for a
definitive consciousness, not for a limitlessly expansive one. It
symptomizes more than a consent to a free play of decenterings and
diffusions, or to what Hassan calls "the absolute absence of the Absolute"
(p. 69).
The Unnamable's postmodern common sense, its anonymity and
its methodology, are at war with its desire for self-origination and
self-centering presence. Hassan's postmodernism is, I think, at war with his
prophetic impulse, which seeks to deny the "dehumanization" of his own
favored ideology. What if our belief in the primacy of deferment and
difference, of contingency and repetition is a blind, hiding us from the yet
vital life of Vico's prophetic giants? "The tropes of literature," Geoffrey
Hartman writes in The Fate of Reading, "or similar kinds of imaginative
substitution, could as easily be said to pursue that 'presence' which
'identifies' all creatures, as to defer it.",,8
Hartman immediately qualifies himself: "Perhaps it does not
matter which, since both pursuit and deferment are endless." It is a
qualification very likely characteristic of postmodernism. It is the sort of
qualification Paracriticisms pursues. But insofar as Hassan also pursues
definitive prophecy, he keeps alive something he leaves insufficiently
examined, in himself and in his specimen texts. The will for a power of
divination needs perhaps a re-constitutive construction. This could very
well in turn stimulate a renewal of theorizing about mimesis. Vico
understands the inevitable link between a theory of prophecy and a theory
of imitation or representation (see his par. 215). Since Hassan scarcely
begins to theorize about his ambition to prophesy, not surprisingly he does
not theorize about the representationism of Joyce's works, or of Beckett's
or of science fiction.
Without analytic self-reflexiveness on these matters,
Paracriticisms' prophetic ambition remains only its most intriguingly
confusing element. If prophecy and writing are no longer related and if
prophecy itself is no longer credible (as human centrality and privileged
origins may be no longer related or credible), the fact is worth more clear
understanding. A definition of postmodernism would be better served by
NEW LIGHT here.
Yale University

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NOTES
1 A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), ch. 2,
passim.

2 A Map of Misreading, p. 70.

3 Beginnings (New York: Basic Books, 1975), p. 373.

4 Beginnings, p. 373.

5 Beginnings, pp. 377 f.

6 "Monsieur Texte: On Jacques Derrida, His Glas," The Georgia Review, 29

(Winter 1975), 776, 787.

7 Three Novels (New York: Grove Press, 1958), p. 414.

8 The Fate of Reading (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 97.

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