University of Virginia Library

III

Jacques Derrida's contribution to Deconstruction and Criticism (translated from the French by James Hulbert) is by far the longest (pp.

75-176) and occupies the center of the book through its content as well as its physical position. In it Derrida is characteristically playful, and the game he plays with the title of the piece makes any simple citation of its title inaccurate. The game is a productive one, however, leading directly to Derrida's central point—and also, in my view, illuminating a central flaw in his process of thought. The title as given in the table of contents is "LIVING ON · border lines". At first one might assume that the typographic design of this volume calls for subtitles to be placed in small capitals following a centered dot. But then one notices that the listing for the next essay, the only other one with what appears to be a subtitle, consists entirely of large capitals and has a colon between the two parts of the title. A distinction is being made, and it is made again, though less effectively, in the running titles of the two essays. The running title of the Derrida piece is "LIVING ON: Border Lines", in which the colon rather confuses the issue; but when one sees that the running title of the next essay has the same sized capitals following its colon, one recognizes that the designer is trying to reflect the differing status of the "subtitle" in the two cases. That the words "Border Lines" are not a conventional subtitle is apparent on the first page of the essay. At the head of the essay there is only the title "Living On"; near the foot of the page (above the seventh line up from the bottom) a rule runs across the page, and the text below that rule is headed "BORDER LINES." Those two words obviously form the title of a companion piece of writing that runs along the bottom of each page of text:[20] two related compositions are proceeding simultaneously.

One does not have to read far into the essay, or to know anything about Derrida's other writings,[21] to see what he is suggesting by this scheme. Since the essay concerns the breaking down of borders, limits, boundaries, he is providing the essay with an indistinct border, edging it with a layer of words, related to the essay but moving out from it—a border implying that borders are only links to something else, one border following another, moving ever outward until the whole world is encompassed. The device of a secondary essay running along the lower part of each page raises, however, some problematic questions. Is Derrida saying that his composition is a visual as well as a verbal work? Does he consider readers' constant awareness of a line across the page to be an integral part of what he is communicating? Is he creating for readers the visual experience of finding that, wherever on the page they are looking, there is text on the other side of the line as well? That is to say, if his essay were to be set in type anew for inclusion in another volume of essays, and if "Border Lines" were on this occasion printed as a block of text at the end of the main piece (in the way that footnotes in one edition

of a work sometimes become endnotes in another), would the meaning of the work be altered?[22] Would the work, indeed, have become a different work? If so, how much of the present arrangement is a part of the visual form of the work? Is it essential to have 27 or 28 lines of type above the division (except where there are inset quotations) and seven below, except on the last seven pages? Must the typeface remain the same? Can one have a visual work in which some of the visual features are not integral to the work?

I assume Derrida would be pleased that his piece gives rise to such questions. He would take them, I imagine, as evidence that his double composition stimulates thinking about the nature of verbal and visual art and illustrates, in this additional way, the indeterminacy of dividing lines. Perhaps it does, but only on a superficial level, for a more considered analysis of the visual aspect of the piece leads one to ask how carefully its implications have been thought through. The questions posed above are of course potentially fruitful, but here the reader raises them out of puzzlement rather than insight. The reader who has previously given thought to the nature of the medium of verbal works will begin to suspect, reading this piece, that the author's use of spatial metaphors springs more from confusion about that medium than from a constructive playfulness. Derrida says that "what used to be called a text" (p. 83) had limits that separated it from the rest of the world; but "in the last dozen or so years" these boundaries have been overrun, so that a "text"—"what I still call a 'text'" (p. 84)—is no longer to be differentiated from "everything that was to be set up in opposition to writing." The idea that verbal works shade into everything else—are parts of the world rather than statements about it—is worth exploring thoughtfully and carefully. But Derrida cannot do the concept justice because his approach to it is incoherent, as an examination of his metaphors of limits and edges will reveal.

This incoherence is manifested in the shifting signification of his references to the physical boundaries of works, for these boundaries are sometimes presented as analogical and sometimes as literal. When, for example, he speaks of "the referential realm outside the frame" (p. 83), he is appropriately using a conventional metaphor to describe what he considers an outmoded way of looking at a verbal work. And he is using this metaphor in the conventional way: the "frame" is the intangible boundary that defines the beginning and ending of a work and has nothing to do with any physical frame that may or may not be present on the pages of the book containing a text of the work. Similarly, when he refers to "all those boundaries that form the running border of what used to be called a text," the "border" he has in mind is clearly not a physical one. "Border" and "frame" are metaphorical, likening something abstract to

something concrete. When, in the same sentence, he mentions "margins," the word is particularly meaningful, because "margin" is the word, rather than "frame" or "border," generally used to refer to the physical boundaries of texts in books. It is still metaphorical: he is saying that just as pages of texts have margins, so verbal statements or works were formerly thought to have their edges also. The word "margins" is simply a particularly apt synonym for "boundaries" in this context.

This progression of thought is shattered in the next sentence, however, when he describes the new meaning of "text" as "no longer a finished corpus of writing, some content enclosed in a book or its margins, but a differential network, a fabric of traces referring endlessly to something other than itself, to other differential traces" (p. 84). To speak of the "content" of a work being bounded by the physical dimensions of a book is not to engage in a productive analogy but to mix the two levels of the metaphor. In rejecting the notion of "some content enclosed in a book or its margins," Derrida is rejecting something that does not exist. To be sure, there are people who think of verbal works (and works in other media) as separate, in one way or another, from the rest of life; but one cannot effectively refute their position by claiming that what they see as separate is "content enclosed in a book or its margins." Perhaps some confused thinkers do fail to distinguish between verbal works, which are intangible, and the particular texts of those works conveyed to us in physical objects; but Derrida cannot possibly mount a successful argument for the boundary-less nature of verbal works if he shares with some of those he hopes of convert a misunderstanding of the relation between texts and works.

The point that I believe Derrida wishes to make could be more coherently expressed as follows: "Just as books, being physical objects, have edges that mark the limits of the space they occupy, so, in the view of some people, do verbal works (of which the texts in books are evidences) have boundaries that set them off from other experience; but, as against this view, some recent thinkers have come to believe that verbal works are part of an endlessly interconnecting and all-encompassing network." Put in this way, the statement rises above the confusion of those who equate works with physical texts; indeed, it corrects their error in the process of making the more inclusive distinction between those who see verbal works as having boundaries (however they arrived at their position) and those who do not. The physical metaphor can thus enhance the argument; but Derrida's handling of it undermines the argument by revealing a conceptual flaw at the base of it.

Once this problem has manifested itself, we see that it pervades the essay. The next sentence provides another particularly telling instance.

Derrida says that "the text overruns all the limits assigned to it so far" and defines those limits as "everything that was to be set up in opposition to writing (speech, life, the world, the real, history, and what not, every field of reference—to body or mind, conscious or unconscious, politics, economics, and so forth)." The appearance of the word "writing" here is unfortunate. Derrida is using "writing" to mean "the kind of work normally conveyed in written form," not "the physical presentation of words," although the latter is what is suggested by the juxtaposition with "speech." But surely he would classify as "writing" a lecture delivered without notes: it would be a formal verbal composition, not conversational everyday "speech." His concern, in other words, is not with the texts that appear in particular documents but with the works they reflect; he is not claiming that the conventional view contrasts "life, the world, the real, history, and what not" with printed pieces of paper but with the contents of verbal works. Yet the blemish of using the words "writing" and "speech" is more than a temporarily misleading infelicity; it is an index of his failure to recognize the distinction between texts and works. As Derrida knows, our language will betray us in the end.

A few lines later he points out that what the new approach does is "to transform the world into a library." Again, the physical metaphor reveals more than Derrida imagines, for it brings into the open a shortcoming of his own. The world is of course a "library" in that it is full of physical objects that we can "read": all artifacts can be examined for clues to their own production history and to their role in the lives of their former owners. When read in this way, books can provide information (as analytical bibliographers have shown) about the workings of printing shops and the habits of compositors, proofreaders, and press editors; and books, through their paper, typography, and format, further tell something of the social status of the authors and genres represented. But Derrida is not thinking of reading books in this way; what he means by a library is clearly a collection of works, not recognizing that what a library in fact contains is the material out of which we can attempt to reconstruct works. A library—like the world—contains physical objects; and the inked letterforms that one finds within the special objects in libraries constitute documentary texts, each of which is an attempt to report the text of a work. How successful each book text is in reflecting a work is a matter for investigation and informed judgment. Libraries do not contain authors' works in the same way that museums contain artists' works, since visual artists' works are tangible and can be contained within a physical space, whereas verbal artists' works are not tangible and can be represented physically only by instructions (the accuracy of which must always be questioned) for their reconstitution. If Derrida believes

that breaking down the barriers between verbal works and the rest of life makes the whole world a library, he is using a metaphor that undercuts what he wishes to say.

The problems so evident in this key passage reverberate throughout the long essay. Even when Derrida talks about variant versions of Maurice Blanchot's L'arrêt de mort (as on pp. 101-102), he concerns himself only with the meaning of "version," with the relation of versions to works, and is not led into the inextricable question of the relation of words on the page to the works they attempt to transmit.[23] One feels that he is approaching the distinction between texts and works when he cites Blanchot's statement that the "'narrative voice'" utters a work from "'the placeless place where the work is silent'" (p. 104), but he does not seize this obvious opportunity. And in the "Border Lines" he focuses on translation: "the problems that I wished to formalize above all have an irreducible relationship to the enigma, or in other words the récit, of translation" (p. 89). Pondering what translation can be thought to accomplish would naturally provide a way of embarking on a consideration of the nature of verbal works; but instead of moving from such works to their texts, Derrida moves in the opposite direction, from works to the thought lying behind them. The idea of "content" that "does not touch the borders of language" (p. 95) takes us away from the concept of work, for a work, as distinguished from thought, is tied to a medium (which can be visual, aural, verbal, and so on). Just how a body of thought, or content, is related to individual expressions of it in different media is a philosophical question worth exploring; but to do so profitably one must understand the peculiarities of the various media. If language is to be one of the media considered, there is no way to avoid dealing with the status of physical texts as intermediaries, as messengers that may at any point give us incorrect information. Derrida's essay is a richly textured meditation, remarkable in its convolutions; but what is more remarkable still is that a piece so full of word-play, so full of twists and turns and bypaths in its exploration of the nature of works, could fail to find its way to a confrontation with the ultimate indeterminacy of the texts (not just the meanings) of verbal works.