Dickinson's Misery (20 page)

This is to say that if, as de Man wrote in an earlier essay on the formalist interpretation of the lyric, “poetry is the foreknowledge of criticism,” the reverse must also be true.
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Criticism that knows its object as poetry (as a “canonical and programmatic sonnet”) sustains that generic identification even (or perhaps especially) in its negation. Indeed, in the vehemence of his rejection of the term, de Man ends by reviving a more idealized sense of the lyric than most readers would have had at the start of his essay. “In the paraphernalia of literary terminology,” de Man concludes, “there is no term available to tell us what ‘Correspondances' might be. All we know is that it is, emphatically,
not
a lyric. Yet it, and it alone, contains, implies, produces, generates, permits (or whatever aberrant verbal metaphor one wishes to choose) the entire possibility of the lyric” (261–62). “It and it
alone
”? “The
entire
possibility of the lyric”? De Man's concluding declarations are so excessive that one is tempted to call them, indeed,
ob
sessive. The claim that “Obsession” embraces the lyric experience artfully repressed by “Correspondances” has shifted from the declarative assurance of the details of de Man's rhetorical reading into the affective register of a performative attachment to just what those statements deny—into an expressive attachment, that is, to the lyric.

This structure of highly emotionally inversed attraction and denial actually rather suggestively parallels Freud's structural description of obsession, in which “the symptoms acquire, in addition to their original meaning, a directly contrary one. This is a tribute to the power of ambivalence, which, for some unknown reason, plays such a large part in obsessional neuroses. In the crudest instance the symptom is diphasic: an action which carries out a certain injunction is immediately succeeded by another action which stops or undoes the first one even if it does not go quite
so far as to carry out its opposite.”
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Ambivalenz,
a word coined by Freud in his analysis of obsession, certainly characterizes de Man's “specular” coupling of Baudelaire's lyrics, as its power saturates the “aberrant verbal” qualifications which attend the “Yet …” syntax that undoes his reiterated injunction against the lyric. The strategy of taking away with one hand what has been given by the other is, of course, a typical feature of deconstructive reading—yet in this passage the usual order is reversed: de Man's essay ends by restoring (albeit ambivalently) “the entire possibility” it has worked to undo.
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By generating a string of approximations of what the lyric
would
be if it had not been so “emphatically” negated by the previous statement, de Man ends by pushing “the lyric” just outside the field of representation. Thus the pathos of his elegy for the subject with which the criticism that obsessed de Man was obsessed also makes of the lyric a subject for obsessional elegy, for in the last lines of his essay “the lyric” is no longer a proposition but a proper name.
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Still, as Freud would have it, the name that de Man gives to the extra-metaphoric, uncanny “possibility” of the postlyrical “does not go quite so far as to carry out its opposite”: what “the desired consciousness of eternity and of temporal harmony as voice and as song” (the “chambres d'éternel deuil où vibrent de vieux râles”) is opposed to at the end of the essay is, we recall, “the materiality of actual history” (262). Presumably, the former would be the property of “generic terms such as ‘lyric,'” while the latter would escape the “resistance and nostalgia” that de Man has associated with “the defensive motion of the understanding, the possibility of a future hermeneutics” (261). My point is that the hermeneutic practice of “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric” had already comprehended, despite itself, a contrary meaning of “
historical
modes of language power” (262). According to de Man's own (Nietzschean) logic, “language power” should read as an oxymoron, since the “unintelligible” force of extreme materiality is what the language closely read as lyric, in its “defensive” or purely aesthetic aspect, cannot admit. That is as far as de Man got, and it is a long way. But when de Man wrote, elegiacally, that lyric pathos cannot allow for “
historical
modes of language power,” modes he characterized as “nonanthropomorphic, non-elegiac, non-celebratory, non-lyrical, non-poetic” (262), he was not allowing that before modern lyric reading became a form of critical power, poetry itself may have been such a mode.

A
GAINST (
L
YRIC)
T
HEORY

Although I have attempted to show that de Man worked very much within the grain of the New Criticism in his adoption of the lyric as a
synecdoche for literature and in his construction of the lyric through the practice of close reading, in the profession of literary study built around the lyric, de Man came to stand for the incursion of European literary theory into American practical criticism.
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De Man personified that incursion, in part because his deeply subjective investment in the dismantling of the lyric made other critical readers uneasy. The reaction against de Man took many forms, and one form it took was to oppose a pragmatist approach based in Anglo-American analytic philosophy to de Man's basis in Continental philosophy. It also took the form of a reaction against the lyric. In the issue of
Critical Inquiry
for Summer 1982, Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels published an essay provocatively entitled “Against Theory,” which claimed to argue that “the whole enterprise of critical theory is misguided and should be abandoned.”
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Naturally, several professional critical theorists took up the challenge and responded—thus fulfilling, one assumes, Knapp and Michaels's intention. Despite, that is, the essay's stated aim to put an end to “the theoretical enterprise” (AT 30), its locus of publication and its polemical stance suggested that what Knapp and Michaels were actually out to do was, as W.J.T. Mitchell put it, to “out-theorize the theorists” (AT 9).

By pointing to a discrepancy between the implicit and explicit purposes of the piece—or between the essay's “intention” and its “meaning”—what I have just done is exactly what Knapp and Michaels argued should not be attempted, since “the clearest example of the tendency to generate theoretical problems by splitting apart terms that are in fact inseparable is the persistent debate over the relation between authorial intention and the meaning of texts” (AT 12). Against my consideration of such a tendency on the part of the theorist who was Knapp and Michaels's most prominent unnamed target, I want to consider briefly only one aspect of the argument in “Against Theory” (an argument that, as we shall see, Michaels repeated over twenty years later with explicit reference to Dickinson) that “the meaning of a text is simply identical to the author's intended meaning” (AT 12): namely, that the text central to this contention is a lyric poem.

While the debate that ensued in and around Knapp and Michaels's essay was based entirely on this one small text, neither the authors nor their critics appeared to think that the genre of their example made much of a difference. Yet just as the critical situation of “Against Theory” cast its goal of abolishing its own situation in an ironic aspect, so the situational definition of the lyric may have decided “the persistent debate over the relation between authorial intention and the meaning of texts” in advance. While on one hand Knapp and Michaels argued that “once it is seen that the meaning of a text is simply identical to an author's intended meaning, the project of meaning in intention becomes incoherent,” on the other they
supported that claim with an instance of the literary genre traditionally devoted to begging the question of first-person coherence. What their essay did not say about the specific structure of lyric reference spoke volumes about the importance that structure held (and still holds) for both the “pragmatic” and the “theoretical” extremes of literary study. Knapp and Michaels's silence on the theory of the genre that served as a condition for their practice suggests, among other things, that whatever the relation between textual meaning and authorial intention may be taken to be, there are no “generic” intentions, or intentions uninfluenced by the conventions of genre. While de Man's theory idealized a pure and practically impossible historical practice removed from the fiction of genre, Knapp and Michaels's practice paradoxically ended by idealizing the very theoretical potential of the genre they adopted to render theory impractical.

That potential became immediately (and excessively) obvious in the anecdote Knapp and Michaels offered as empirical proof that “the moment of imagining intentionless meaning constitutes the theoretical moment itself”:

Suppose you're walking along a beach and you come upon a curious sequence of squiggles in the sand. You step back a few paces and notice that they spell out the following words:

This would seem to be a good case of intentionless meaning: you recognize the writing as writing, you understand what the words mean, you may even identify them as constituting a rhymed poetic stanza—and all this without knowing anything about the author and indeed without needing to connect the words to any notion of an author at all. You can do all these things without thinking of anyone's intention. But now suppose that, as you stand gazing at this pattern in the sand, a wave washes up and recedes, leaving in its wake (written below what you now realize was only the first stanza) the following words:

According to Knapp and Michaels, the arrival of the second stanza of “the wave poem” makes clear “that what had seemed to be an example of
intentionless language was either not intentionless or not language” (AT 16). Why should this be the case? Although they do not say so, the authors seem to assume that the two stanzas together call for an explanation because “you” will recognize them now as
a poem.
Though continuing to call the lyric “the wave poem” rather than “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal,” they even assume that “you” may recognize it as a poem by Wordsworth: “You will now, we suspect, feel compelled to explain what you have just seen. Are these marks mere accidents, produced by the mechanical operation of the waves on the sand (through some subtle and unprecedented process of erosion, percolation, etc.)? Or is the sea alive and striving to express its pantheistic faith? Or has Wordsworth, since his death, become a sort of genius of the shore who inhabits the waves and periodically inscribes on the sand his elegiac sentiments?” (AT 16). The alternative speculations offered above are meant to be mutually exclusive: either the poem has been written by the sea or Wordsworth's ghost or it is the effect of a nonintentional natural process. In the latter case, the marks would not constitute a “poem” at all but would be “accidental likenesses of language.” The intent of the anecdote was to make this latter alternative unimaginable, as indeed it is: “you” already knew that this is a poem by Wordsworth, a poem about the loss and potential recuperation of human agency and, since you were reading this hypothetical narrative in the pages of
Critical Inquiry
and not on a beach, you might have also known, as Knapp and Michaels concede in a note (AT 15n5), that the same short lyric had been employed by E. D. Hirsch, P. D. Juhl, J. Hillis Miller, and M. H. Abrams in essays on the question of authorial intention.
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In fact, from the first line of the poem, the rest of the argument would have seemed more amusing than relevant to you, not only because its citation indicates a receding series of critical citations but because knowledge of the poem's authorship has never decided much about its interpretation.

The ruse in which Knapp and Michaels left the question of authorship open until “you notice, rising out of the sea some distance from the shore, a small submarine, out of which clamber a half dozen figures in white lab coats” (AT 17), made possible a deus ex machina of empiricism that was never suspended in the first place. This “new evidence of an author” emerging from the submarine and shouting “‘It worked! It worked! Let's go down and try it again'” was, of course, a better allegory for the strategy of the essay than for any possible reading of the poem. If, as Knapp and Michaels conclude, “the question of authorship is and always was an empirical question; it has now received a new empirical answer,” we might concede the point only in the sense that the old empirical answer—that “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal” was a lyric written by Wordsworth in 1799 in
Germany—had to be forgotten in order to make us believe that we were remembering that this “theoretical moment” had been a set-up.

The fallacy of the anecdote established in order to prove the fallacy of “doing theory” drew much immediate fire from critics on both sides of the “intentionalist” debate, and it is not my purpose to recount the details of that debate here. I sketch its outlines merely in order to notice that this particular discourse “for” and “against” the “theoretical enterprise” depended upon certain unstated assumptions about lyric reading which it therefore ended by exemplifying. In one of the most pointed responses to Knapp and Michaels, Jonathan Crewe found their style characterized by a “maneuver in which the authors disqualify a distinction only to appropriate its effects,” a maneuver Crewe felicitously labeled “smash and grab, or S. & G. for short” (AT 59). The “wave poem” was, according to Crewe, a signal instance of S. & G., since “the wave poem does not
resemble
a poem by Wordsworth but is actually identical to one. What the authors have, whether they like it or not, is a wave
poem
that happens not to lend itself to pragmatic interpretation” (AT 61–62).
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