II
Paul de Man's essay "Shelley Disfigured," which follows Bloom's
essay in Deconstruction and Criticism (pp. 39-73), exhibits
the
same blurring of the essential distinction between texts of documents and
texts of works. The first endnote might make one think otherwise, for in it
de Man identifies the scholarly edition that is the source of his quotations
and refers to another piece of textual scholarship.[13] But that note is attached to the
second
sentence of the essay, and the opening sentence has already revealed de
Man's confusion: "Like several of the English romantics' major works
The Triumph of Life, Shelley's last poem, is, as is well
known,
a fragment that has been unearthed, edited, reconstructed
and much discussed." Up to the word "poem" the sentence is fairly clear:
it refers to "major works" and identifies "The Triumph of Life" as a
"poem"—that is, a "work" (though whether he wishes us to
understand
that he considers it a "major work" is not clear).
[14] He then states that the poem is a
"fragment"—a word that does not necessarily pose a problem, since
a
work
can be regarded (by its author or by others) as
unfinished.
When, however, he says that the fragment has been "unearthed" and
"edited" and "reconstructed," the sentence becomes incoherent. Though
"unearthed" is a figurative term here and does not literally refer to
removing from the earth, it does surely imply the uncovering, the
discovery, of a pre-existing tangible object—a manuscript on which
a text
has been inscribed. Given the medium of verbal works, one cannot
"unearth" such a work but only a physical document containing a text
purporting to be the text of a particular
work. Thus the "fragment" that has been unearthed is a document, not a
"poem"; the meaning of "fragment" required to go with "unearthed" is
different from the meaning required by the earlier part of the sentence (in
which "Shelley's last poem"
is "a fragment"). The next verb,
"edited," makes sense if the reader will excuse a slight imprecision, for
what has been edited is not literally the document (or "fragment") but the
text of the document. The third verb, "reconstructed," is a different matter,
however, since the goal of the editorial reconstruction referred to is
presumably some version of the work (not the text of some lost fragmentary
document)—and therefore the required meaning of "fragment" has
swung
back to "work" or "poem." That the reader must continue to switch the
meaning of "fragment" as the sentence progresses is a sure indication that
the writer of the sentence had not carefully considered the relation of
literary works to the documents that attempt to
transmit them.
In the remainder of the first section of his essay, de Man continues
to use the archeological metaphor, speaking of " 'digging in the grounds for
the new foundations' "—that is, using "history as a way to new
beginnings" (p. 40). But the confusion of the opening sentence undercuts
everything else: are the foundations provided by history to be thought of as
the texts that survive in documents or as the works that can be derived from
those documents? The latter may subsume the former, but the question is
nevertheless a central one, for what it really asks is where in the process
we conceive individual judgment as entering. De Man's bias is evident
when he says that our "curiosity about antecedents has produced admirable
philological results," allowing for "the establishment of texts whose
unreliability is at least controlled by more reliable means," but that "the
questions which triggered all this industry remain more than ever in
suspense: What is the meaning of The
Triumph of
Life, of Shelley and of romanticism?" To call the philological
work (that is, the scholarly editing, the "establishment" of a text)
"admirable" but nevertheless mere "industry" that does not touch on the
main issue of "meaning" is to suggest that textual scholarship and literary
criticism are strictly separate and that the former—somehow
scientific or
objective—produces the materials for the latter, which engages in
assessment and discrimination. There seems to be no recognition here that
even the editor who wishes simply to transcribe the text of a document, to
"establish" what in fact is in the document, must try to understand the
context of each word and continually makes judgments that reflect one
understanding or another of what message is being conveyed. The editor
who does not claim to be transcribing a documentary text but who instead
aims at reconstructing from it the text intended by its author is clearly
making still more judgments. The two goals are distinctly
different, but both rely on critical judgment. If textual criticism is thus truly
"criticism," literary criticism cannot simply accept its conclusions but must
examine them as part of the process of reading.
[15] Attempting to understand the
"meaning"—in the narrowest and the broadest senses—of a
communication from the past cannot be divorced from a questioning of the
words that are thought to make up that communication.
De Man's handling of this point is unfortunately just what the reader
would expect on the basis of the opening sentence. He actually touches on
a much more illuminating line of inquiry when he asks (p. 41), "Is the
status of a text [like] the status of a statue?"[16] If he had pursued this question, he
might
have extricated himself from his confusion, for he would have recognized
that the medium of literature, unlike that of sculpture, is not tangible and
that no tangible rendering of a piece of verbal communication can be the
work itself. Each one is, if you will, an unearthed fragment—or, at
least,
possibly a fragment, because the wholeness of each document is a matter
of conjecture, to say nothing of the wholeness of the work represented by
its text. Instead of developing this line, however, de Man brushes it aside:
"But there are more economic ways to approach this text [that is, the work
called "The Triumph of Life"] and to question the
possibility of establishing a relationship to Shelley and to romanticism in
general." The economy of his route proves illusory in the end, for the path
never again comes as close to a vista that would display the relation of
language—the medium of literary art—to the documents that
give it
physical form.
The functioning of language and reading do form the primary concern
of the essay; and one must feel regretful in reading it to recognize how de
Man's failure to distinguish works from texts not only weakens his
argument but robs him of insights that would have reinforced the
general direction his thought was already taking. "The Triumph of Life,"
rendered fragmentary by Shelley's death, provides him with a "mutilated
textual model" exposing "the wound of a fracture that lies hidden in all
texts" (p. 67). Our understanding of this wound is obscured, however, by
his equating versions of works with the texts that survive in documents.
This confusion is revealed early in the essay when, in introducing his
discussion of the changing role of Rousseau in the poem, he speaks of the
"unearthed fragments of this fragment, the discarded earlier versions" (p.
41). Versions of works are works as they stood at particular moments, and
version thus exist only in the medium being employed, which in this case
is language. One therefore cannot assume that the text of any document,
even one in the author's hand, is a faithful representation of a given
moment in the evolution of a work, for it may contain not only slips of the
pen but also words and phrases already
superseded in the author's mind but mechanically copied from a previous
document and not altered before the new document was laid aside. To say
that the "last available text" of "The Triumph of Life" was "frozen into
place by Shelley's accidental death" (pp. 42-43) is true only if one takes
"text" to mean "documentary text"—though there would in that case
be
little point in making the statement, since every documentary text is "frozen
into place" by its placement in a physical object, whether or not the person
who placed it there has died. But if "text" in this sentence means "text of
a work" or "text of a version," as in de Man's usage it is likely to mean,
the sentence cannot be true: Shelley's death cannot stop the speculation
about what the text of "The Triumph of Life," or some version of it (such
as the "last available" one), consists of—speculation that would have
been
as relevant while Shelley was alive as it is now that he is dead. The text of
the work, or of
versions of it, is never frozen because it is always the product of our
critical judgment.
Over and over again de Man speaks of the power of words, words
that "cannot be isolated from the deeds they perform" (p. 49), sometimes
expressing himself with eloquence:
And to read is to understand, to question, to know, to forget, to
erase, to deface, to repeat—that is to say, the endless prosopopoeia
by
which the dead are made to have a face and a voice which tells the allegory
of their demise and allows us to apostrophize them in our turn. No degree
of knowledge can ever stop this madness, for it is the madness of words.
(p. 68)
This emphasis on words underscores the necessity of questioning the
makeup of whatever sequence of words we are examining; what is left
unsaid here is how difficult—in the end how impossible—it is
to
determine what words we ought to be examining. De Man says, "In
Shelley's absence,
the task of thus reinscribing the disfiguration now devolves entirely on the
reader" (p. 67), but his statement does not go far enough: Shelley's absence
is irrelevant, and what devolves on each serious reader includes the
determination of the text to be read. At the end we are told, "Reading as
disfiguration, to the very extent that it resists historicism, turns out to be
historically more reliable than the products of historical archeology" (p.
69). This statement would have carried more weight if it had grown out of
the paradox of textual historicism: if one is interested in the text of a work
as intended at a particular time by one or more of its producers, one will
come nearer the goal through a critical reconstruction, based on surviving
evidence and one's knowledge and judgment, than through the acceptance
of any of the texts that happen to have survived in written or printed
documents. This insight is not unique to textual studies, of course: it
reflects a basic point of
view about how we come to know, or think we know, the past. De Man
was clearly attuned to this view, even if he did not think there is a past to
know; but he does not, in this essay, reveal any understanding of its
application to the establishment of texts. Since the essay is concerned with
texts and works, with verbal productions from the past, that weakness is
fatal.
It may be worth turning for a moment to an essay not in
Deconstruction and Criticism, for de Man's naïve
conception of editorial "archeology" shows up in extreme form in his essay
on "Heidegger's Exegeses of Hölderlin" originally published in French
in 1955 and republished in English in 1983 (in an enlarged edition of
Blindness and Insight).[17]
Because de Man was content to allow this early piece to be included, with
no additional commentary, in a late book, one is perhaps justified in
concluding that it may represent his view of textual scholarship throughout
his career.[18] He begins the essay with
a discussion of editorial matters because the reader, he believes, "must bear
in mind the special circumstances of the editing and elucidation of
Hölderlin's works" (p. 247). If the astonishing statement he makes
soon thereafter were true, the circumstances would be special indeed:
"More so than
for everyone else, the reliability of his text is all important" (p. 248).[19] The 1906 Hellingrath edition of
Hölderlin, the one Heidegger used, has been superseded, de Man
points out, by the Beissner edition, and de Man's praise of the new edition
fully reveals the thoughtlessness of his approach to textual criticism:
It is one of the great achievements of modern scientific philology. By
drawing upon the most proven methods (detailed study of the sources and
of historical and biographical references, internal comparative references,
syntactic explanations, study of formal metrics, etc.) as well as upon some
modern technical processes (study of paper and writing with the aid, I am
told, of slides
of enlargements of the manuscript) Beissner has produced the irreproachable
critical edition, something that, in the case of Hölderlin, was at once
necessary and most difficult to achieve. (p. 248)
If "critical editing" is "scientific," employing "proven methods" and
"technical processes," then why is the result "difficult to achieve"? Perhaps
the quantity of data makes the task time-consuming, but that is surely not
the kind of difficulty de Man has in mind. The difficulty arises because the
techniques listed as examples of "proven methods" and of "modern
technical processes" all require judgment: decisions are called for at every
turn. What emerges from such a critical process can be "irreproachable"
only in the sense that it follows from a responsible way of proceeding. In
the same sense a critical essay could be "irreproachable," but it would not
necessarily be "correct" or earn universal agreement. De Man's comments
show that he does not take seriously the word "critical" in "critical edition"
and imagines that editors can provide objectively established texts for
literary critics to exercise their judgment on.
Indeed, he praises Beissner for claiming as much. But he immediately
sees a drawback to this "prudent philological modesty": Beissner is "forced
to leave unresolved a number of issues, including some at the level of the
text establishment." So the establishment of texts does, after all, require
judgment. Is it not possible, therefore, that some people will disagree with
Beissner about which cruxes fall into the resolvable, and which into the
unresolvable, categories? Can the literary critic ever afford to be uncritical
in accepting the results of a textual investigation? De Man asserts that
Heidegger decided textual questions "in the name of the internal logic of his
own commentary" (p. 248), and he concludes: "it cannot be denied that the
exegete capable of providing a coherent and responsible interpretation has
the right, indeed the obligation, to decide according to the conclusions of
his interpretation. . . . Everything rests, then, on the intrinsic value of the
interpretation" (p. 249). Of course it does—for critical editors as
well as
"critics"—as long as the interpretation does not contradict any "facts"
that
can be agreed on. Editors, like everyone else interested in the past, try to
establish a framework of facts not subject to interpretation (though they
have exercised judgment in arriving at it) and then supplement it with
interpretation. The boundary line between fact and interpretation is forever
indistinct. In his naïveté about scholarly editing, de Man was
not
distinguishable from large numbers of his professorial colleagues.
