Search for ‘Jonathan Mayhew’ (7 articles found)
Deconstruction as a way of analyzing texts
Deconstruction as a way of analyzing texts demanded an enormous technical precision, or prided itself on this precision, at least. The issues often involved very technical distinctions and the analysis of etymologies.
As I see it, there were two problems:
(1) Were the analyses all that precise in the first place? Take de Man’s famous distinction between grammar and rhetoric. What he meant by the “grammatical” reading of a rhetorical question was something like a literal, non-rhetorical meaning. But in what sense is this “grammatical”? How is the grammatical a synonym for the literal? (Don’t answer that question!) Doesn’t the rhetorical question have the same grammatical structure however it is interpreted? I don’t find it all that interesting to read Yeats’s rhetorical question, “How can we tell the dancer from the dance?” as though it were a real question: “Tell me, how can you tell the dancer from the dance?” If this is the most famous deconstruction of a poem, I want my money back.
(2) Insofar as the ideological tendency of deconstruction, at least in the US academy, was to encourage a kind of interpretive freedom, this appeal to freedom undermined the appeal of precision. Or else the vaunted precision of the interpretation ended up limiting interpretation to a binary choice. The idea was that the interpreter would be eternally caught in an aporia between two conflicting readings, but these two readings turned out to be very determinate.
If the text is anything you want it to be, however, then there seems little point in insisting on the precision of the method. In other words, the demand for technical precision conflicts with the appeal of hermeneutic anarchy.
People who liked deconstruction, I suspect, were seduced by the possibility of having it both ways, having the professional expertise of the close reader and the existential freedom of the textual anarchist.
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There’s a dialogue between Derrida and some critics (Anne McClintock and Rob Nixon, two graduate students at the time) in Critical Inquiry (Autumn 1985 and some subsequent material in Autumn 1986). He had said, basically “Let Apartheid be the last word.” His critics interpreted him as saying that Apartheid WAS the last word. He came back and pointed out that he hadn’t read the subjunctive right. It was “soit” and not “est,” so to speak. He denounced their rhetorical incompetence, and rightly so. But here there is no textual aporia: Derrida is correct and his critics are not.
If you had paid attention to the context and the modeof my text, you would not have fallen into the enormous blunder that led you to take a prescriptive utterance for a descriptive (theoretical and constative) one. You write for example (and I warned you that I was going to cite you often): “Because he views apartheid as a ‘unique appellation,’ Derrida has little to say about the politically persuasive function that successive racist lexicons have served in South Africa” (p. 141). But I never considered (or “viewed”) apartheid as a “unique appellation.” I wrote something altogether different, and it is even the first sentence of my text: “Apartheid-que cela reste le nom desormais, l’unique appellation au monde pour le dernier des racismes. Qu’il le demeure mais que vienne un jour . . . , “ which Peggy Kamuf translates in the most rigorous fashion: “APARTHEID-may that remain … May it thus remain, but may a day come… “ (p. 291). This translation is faithful because it respects (something you either could not or would not do) the grammatical, rhetorical, and pragmatic specificity of the utterance.
So Derrida could appeal to precision, to specificity, but he could not do so and at the same time advocate for interpretive anarchy. That was never his game anyway. Derrida was not some advocate of let-it-all-hang out interpretation.
The Barthes who painted water colors
Barthes has always been one of my favorite authors. He is really a writer, not just a theorist or critic. What I particularly like is that he is really a 19th century sensibility trying to deal with 20th century avant-garde, or maybe vice-versa. This tension can lead to very irritating moments in Barthes too, when he’s hammering home some arbitrary distinction he wants to make.
The way Barthes has dated (or not) is also interesting to me. You can go back and forth between “did people really ever believe this” to “this could have been written yesterday,” and back again. To simplify, the theoretical Barthes is dated, but the personal Barthes is not. The Barthes who believed semiology was scientific, and the one who used fountain pens and painted water colors.
Aesthetic Judgment and Its Suspension
The suspension of aesthetic judgment can be liberating. Not having to worry at every moment about “how good it is” is a foundational gesture in contemporary literary and cultural studies. The raw material for many kinds of investigation would simply not be available if it first had to pass an acid test of judgment. “First prove it’s good enough, belongs in the canon, and then we’ll admit that studying it is worthwhile, that it is a valuable subject for a dissertation.” With that sort of logic, obviously, we limit the field to things already accepted according to sometimes rather questionable canonical standards.
That being said, aesthetic judgment is never suspended for very long, nor should it be. Even scholars who think they are suspending judgment are really not doing so: they are temporarily bracketing it, or making a surreptitious claim that this text, too, is beautiful, if you look at it in a way. Saying that value is contingent, as Barbara H. Smith does in Contingencies of Value, does not get us very far either. Ok, we know that already, now let’s get back to the real work, which is arguing about value from our various contingently defined positions. John Guillory’s devastating critique of Smith in Cultural Capital, it seems to me, restores the aesthetic to its rightful place.
An aesthetic sense is like the nose of a hunting dog. When writing Apocryphal Lorca, I noticed that the obvious aesthetic flaws in homages to Lorca and translations of his work were often hints about other failures, intellectual, sentimental, and ethical. And, yes, an aesthetic failure is also an aesthetic failure in its own right.
A critic without a nose cannot be trusted.
The problem with Shakespearean authorship theories
Imagine an aristocrat, an enormously gifted polymath of the early 17th century. He produces two bodies of literary work: the first, under his own name, is stunningly and ineptly amateurish. The second, much more varied and extensive, exhibits great genius. The aristocrat, however, dissociates himself from this work, writing it under a pseudonym, the name of a barely literate actor and shareholder in a theatrical company. While hugely ambitious, the aristocrat is entirely egoless, allowing himself to be known as an utter mediocrity while giving credit to his work to another man. The worst part, from the point of view of someone with more ego, is not that he can never be recognized for his second body of work, but that he is stuck with inferior works in his own name. Upon the death of the actor, the leading literary lights of the day compose elegies about his (the actor’s) genius. The aristocrat is already in his grave.
I can imagine this as a short story by Henry James or Jorge Luis Borges. It is a thematically rich story and I am giving it to you to write, if you want, for no charge. I certainly won’t write it myself.
It’s true that I’m poking fun at Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship. The weak point in this theory, I believe, is the one I’ve identified here: the Kafkaeque or Borgesian unreality of the story. (I don’t believe others have remarked on this.) But this is the same aspect that makes the story so suggestive from a literary point of view.
Mayhew's novel idea
Here’s a novel idea: literary works are about exactly what they seem to be about. Wallace Stevens’s poetry is about the relation between the poetic imagination and reality. Ezra Pound’s work is about economics and his own particular view of history. Honor plays are about honor. Homer is about Homeric heroes and their code of behavior. Unamuno’s Abel Sanchez is about its announced and ostensible theme: envy. “Howl” is about how the best minds of his generation have been destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked. If I have read any poem or novel I know what it is about.
To the extent that you understand what the action of a narrative is, the plain sense of the words of a poem, you understand the literary work itself. Sure, you can talk about some themes that aren’t explicitly enumerated, but that’s simply a way of abstracting concepts from concrete situations. For example, in a play about two brothers fighting for succession to dynastic power, we could talk about the “theme of legitimacy.” The big abstract thematic words like power, alienation, love, death, envy, are never at too far a remove from what the play or poem is actually dealing with right on the surface. There’s difference between saying “It’s a play about a guy who can’t find a job” and “It’s an examination of the limitations of the American dream.” The latter sounds more sophisticated because it is more abstract.
Writers do not write in secret code. The meaning of their works is not concealed beneath the surface. If it were, then would they expect nobody to understand them until some clever dude cracks to code 300 years later? That doesn’t seem very plausible. Usually, the meaning of the text is in plain sight. The clever dude with his esoteric theory is always wrong, because nobody encodes a message that deep into the text. That’s just not the way literature works because it just wouldn’t be viable that way.
Allegorical works Pilgrim’s Progress like Dante’s Commedia point us directly in the direction of their allegory. There’s no mystery to what they are about.
Metaphors in poetry are very conventional. Life is a road. A human being is a tree. The night is something negative, something to be surpassed. Morning is hope. The sun is a powerful source of heat and life. 90% of poetic metaphors are of this type.
All this being said, many people are terrible readers. I would suggest that they are terrible because they are looking for a secret code and forget to look at what the text is saying on its face. This is especially true of difficult texts. If you understand a difficult text on its face, what the words are actually saying, you won’t even need to find an esoteric meaning. If there is an esoteric system, it will be available, more or less, in the writer’s complete works, as in the case of William Blake.
My entire profession, nevertheless, exists because things are not quite as simple as I’ve laid out here. They are a little more complicated and nuanced, and this little bit has made all the difference.
Borges and Local Color
What’s odd about Borges’s Personal Anthology is how boring it is relative to his collected works. Borges explains in a preface that he’s left out stories that were “superficial exercises in local color” (or something like that); what remain are bland and repetitive statements of certain metaphysical positions — about infinity and idealism and such — that obviously meant a great deal to Borges but are trite as philosophy. A good example of the sort of thing Borges seems to have liked in later life is “The Other Tiger“; for all I know it’s a good poem in Spanish but in translation one finds it drab and obvious. A good example of the sort of thing he did not like is “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.”
I wonder if this is due in part to Borges (mistakenly) comparing himself to Kafka. Jonathan Mayhew has a delightful post likening the Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare to a story by Borges or James or Kafka. I would be much more specific: such a story would have been at home among Borges’s Ficciones but has very little to do with Kafka. I am not sure, either, that a reader who knew Borges exclusively through the Personal Anthology would have perceived the accuracy of this comparison, as none of the “notes on imaginary books” are in it. It seems to me quite inaccurate to bracket Kafka with Borges at all. Kafka’s novels can be understood in textbook modernist terms, as being rather like Macbeth — successful attempts to find objective correlatives for a certain set of feelings, a certain sense the isolated mind has of its relation to the world. This will not work with Borges as the stories aren’t mood-driven. A Kafkaesque situation is a nightmare; a Borgesian situation is an artifact.
The Borges stories I like best (other than the enjoyable but silly stuff in A Universal History of Iniquity) are the notes on imaginary books and two later stories, “The South” and “Averroes’ Search,” which come off for reasons that might be fortuitous. The general problem with writing “philosophical” literature, as Eliot remarks, is that the philosophy has to be realized — fleshed out, peopled, colonized — for the enterprise to work. (One should make an exception for purely frivolous uses, like the Hitchhiker’s Guide.) A lot of Borges stories, like “The Circular Ruins,” are bad b’se insufficiently real. In later work like “The Aleph,” concreteness coexists uncomfortably with philosophical notions, but the philosophy comes off as an exotic and unjustified plot device. But in Tlon, “Pierre Menard” etc., idealism finds an odd but satisfying local habitation in names. Like Swinburne’s poems (insert more Eliot here) these stories seem to indicate that there are other worlds than the physical one that are rich and irregular enough to “inhabit” or “realize” ideas in: the world of words and literature, in particular. I wonder, though, if the truth isn’t simpler: these stories depend for effect largely on the ability of language to refract ordinary objects, say the moon, “into something rich and strange” — all literature does, I think — and lose their charm when there aren’t any objects to be looked at. I’ve expressed vaguely similar sentiments about Stevens in the past, the good bits of his poems are the half-distinct, dazzling images seen out of the corner of the eye, while he’s going on about something or other. This is probably a somewhat heretical opinion.
