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.

**(

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.

Ten most Influential Books (Literary Criticism)

I've been working on a list of books that have influenced me in literary criticsm. This is not a list of all books that have influenced me generally, just the ones in the genre of literary criticism and theory. This is in roughly chronological order of when I was influenced.

1 X.J. Kennedy. An Introduction to Poetry.

I didn't know this was a college textbook when I started reading it when I was about 12-years old. I know the book has gone through many revisions and editions, but the one I am interested in is, I believe, the 1971 edition. I studied this book until it fell apart, for three or four years. I still remember parts of it: a comparison between several different translations of a sonnet by Baudelaire... This book taught me the essence of what I still know. today. It made me a professor.

2. The ABC of Reading.

I loved Pound's idea that you could just study poetry by paying close attention to it, in its auditory, visual, and purely linguistic aspects. It taught me to listen.

3. Perloff. The Poetics of Indeterminacy.

This is the book I wanted to have written about the time I was graduating from college. It was published in 1981, the year I graduated and began graduate school. It helped establish a new view of the canon and a critical model of crispness and clarity. Rimbaud to Cage indeed.

4. Burke. A Rhetoric of Motives.

I used Kenneth Burke quite a bit in a formative stage of my career. He seemed the perfect bridge between rhetoric as formalism and rhetoric as action.

5. Barthes. Critical Essays.

I really went to school with Barthes. I wasn't interested in structuralism as method as much as in the growth of a critic's mind.

6. Borges. Otras inquiiciones.

I went to school with Borges too. One of the true greats of literary theory. The idea that Kafka could create his own precursors, for example...

7. Morton Feldman. Give my Regards to Eighth Street

Not a work of literary criticism per se, but a deep source of analogies for literature.

8. Lorca. Conferencias.

The work of a creative artist reflecting on poetry, with insights that are wholly unique.

9. Ricardo Gullón. Una poética para Antonio Machado.

I love the concept of writing a poetics for Machado. Not an interpretation of Machado's poetry, but a way of extracting an implicit poetics from Machado's poetry, subsequently dedicated to Machado.

10. Julián Jiménez Heffernan. Los papeles rotos.

What this book taught me was that there was something like the Spanish equivalent of me: someone who knew both traditions and was truly bi-poetic. It's also great to have the example of someone who has exactly my interests but is way smarter than me.

Such list-making is always a bit arbitrary. I'm sure that on another day I would come up with a slightly different list.

Now I have to start writing as though the praise offered me were accurate. Starting next week.

***

Imagine a composer with severe back pain. She writes a symphony of a certain complexity. Now if a biographer wrote an essay explaining the symphony as the expression of the pain, we might be a bit skeptical. Biographical interprerations like this seem remarkably impoverished: the biographer says "Aha! I've discovered the secret behind the work," but the back pain itself is as banal in and of itself as anyone else's. The complexity of the work is out of proportion to the reductiveness of the explanation. What is more interesting, anyway, the symphony or the back ache?

Now substitute the "emotional pain of having been spurned by a lover" for the "back pain." Is the explanation any better? If the music sounds like "spurned by lover" music anyway, the biographical explantion is otiose. It's a nice romantic back-story for the program notes, but who really cares?

Now substitute an elaborate psychoanalytic acount of the poor composer's childhood. The essential poverty of the explanation remains, but somehow the intellectual respectability quotient seems to rise, because now there is a richer metalanguage in which to dress up the cause. Still, the composer's childhood is like any one else's, pretty much, with the inevitable variations. The music is stunning and unique in a way that the explanation is not.

Put another way, even unique and interesting people often produce banal, derivative works of art. If the life is more interesting than the work, then the reductiveness is moving in the opposite, and wrong direction.

On the other hand, many people care more about the back ache then the symphony, the romantic back-story than the work of art itself.

All aspects of language are relational in the same way that aspect in verbal tense is. (As David S. suggests to me in an email this morning.) Taking Jakobson's six dimensions of communication as a model, there is the relation of the speaker to all the other five dimensions, the relation of the addressee to the speaker and all the other linguistic functions. The poetic function is not just the focus on the "message" in its phonological dimension, but the self-conscious attention to all six communicative functions.

For example, the channel of communication, the "phatic" dimension in RJ's jargon (gotta love that word!), might seem like one of the least promising from a poetic point of view. But who more than poets are attuned to to the "grain de la voix" or the quality of paper a text is printed on? Even the pneumatique at the bank's drive-up window is charged with poetic resonance.

Attention to code, to the language as code, is a given. Lyric poetry focuses intense interest on the addressee, so that's a given as well. And lyric subjectivity, the definition of the speaker's self, is in fact the main subject matter of modern and contemporary poetry.

Where poetry seems the nakedest if not the thinnest is in context, or the "referential" function in Jakobson's terms. That is, poetry doesn't seem to be about anything. "Subject-matter" is minimal, in relation to the other five elements. This is because attention is diverted to the other five elements with great intensity, so that all aspects of communication are intensified, but at the expense of what normal people call "communication."

***

Despite this, I'm interested in a poem's "referential field," that is, in what gets mentioned and what is left out. For example, imagine a novel in which none of the characters are depicted as eating anything. Don Quixote has great troubles because he wants to live within a referential field, defined by certain chivalric romance novels, in which certain bodily functions are never mentioned. It bothers me in Henry James novels when the narrator wants to present a certain character as highly intelligent or sensitive, but never puts in an idea or observation of the character.

What would a theory of poetic reference look like? One way to look at it would be to compile a lexicon for a given poet. The lexicon would basically describe a referential circumference--not only the nouns but also the verbs and adjectives, even the prepositions and adverbs. Really what would be interesting is the limitation of the lexicon, that is, the words that do not appear. A large number of words would hold less interest, because there would be no exclusions: the referential horizon would be too large to be meaningful.

So maybe poetry does in fact focus attention on referentiality, but in a peculiar way, through a pattern of exclusions.