Criticism After Theory from Shakespeare to Virginia Woolf

Perry Meisel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032244259
• eBook ISBN: 9781000571110
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The argument of this book is a simple one: that criticism after theory is a single movement of thought defined by synthesis and continuity rather than by conflict and change. The most influential figures in criticism since Saussure—Bakhtin, Derrida, and Foucault—are wholly consistent with Saussure's foundational Course in General Linguistics (1916) no matter the traditions of complaint that have followed in Saussure's wake from Bakhtin forward. These complaints vitiate—despite themselves and often hilariously so—the misconceptions that have made cottage industries out of quarrels with Saussurean semiology that are based on notions of Saussure that are incorrect. The materialist criticism dominant today is actually dependent upon on the legacy of a presumably formalist structuralism rather than a step beyond it. New Historicism, postcolonialism, gender studies, environmental criticism, archive studies, even shared and surface reading are, like deconstruction, the by-products of Saussure's structuralism, not its foils. Saussure's sign is sensory and concrete. Language and materiality are not distinct but one and the same—history, society, the psychological subject, even the environment are systems of signs, material archives read and reread by futures that produce the past after the fact. Without Saussure, contemporary criticism would have no identifiable or effective source. The book begins with chapters on Saussure and Derrida, Bakhtin and Shakespeare, and Freud and Foucault followed by chapters on Victorian and American fiction, D.H. Lawrence and modern poetry, Virginia Woolf and Melanie Klein, and the historicist tropology of psychoanalysis. It concludes with a coda in life writing on the author's epileptic disability.

1 “The Word Within”: Egger, Saussure, Derrida

DOI: 10.4324/9781003278528-2

Egger and the Origins of “Interior Monologue”

The notion of the world as a text and the mind as a scroll or narrative may find its formal origin in Saussure, but it finds its origin for Saussure in a book published in Paris by the philosophical psychologist Victor Egger in 1881 entitled La parole intérieure. Because the book is still not translated into English, I propose to render its title and its principal idea as “the word within.” It furnished Saussure with a bevy of questions that vexed him for years until he solved them with the ideas that make up the posthumously published Course in General Linguistics in 1916. Chief among these questions, as John Joseph reminds us in his biography of Saussure (2012), is how Saussure endeavored to move beyond Egger’s belief that language, despite its fundamental role in shaping both the self and the culture that surrounds it, relied on preexisting ideas beyond language or, to use Lionel Trilling’s phrase, “beyond culture” (1955). This, as Haun Saussy and I describe it in our introduction to the Course, was solved by Saussure’s notion of the sign—a way of thinking that required only culture to produce value, both linguistic and social, without recourse to a belief in an extra-discursive realm to which language merely refers.

To explain this at length is the role of Jacques Derrida in the history of philosophy, as I will show later in this chapter, although it is less a philosophical narrative that allows one to begin to describe it than does a charming and seemingly minor moment in Richard Ellmann’s biography of James Joyce (1959). Its ramifications are decisive not only for Derrida’s understanding of Saussure, but for the practice of modern fiction and the key term with which one still today understands both the significance of modern fiction and the role that modern fiction plays in one’s sense of the world as a text or narrative.

When Joyce presented his mentor, Edouard Dujardin, with a copy of Ulysses in 1922, he inscribed it with a curious and unlikely notation whose importance goes unnoticed without a knowledge of Egger: “A Edouard Dujardin, annonciateur de la parole intérieure” (Ellmann, 1959, 534n). “La parole intérieure” has no other source as a term than the title of Egger’s book. It has, however, lost its specificity—even to the point of erasure—by Dujardin’s subsequent action. Clearly aware of where Joyce got the term, Dujardin went on to revise it with his own critical book in 1931, Le monologue intérieur. “Interior monologue,” of course, is the phrase we typically employ to describe the technique of modern fiction, whether Joyce’s own, or Faulkner’s, or Woolf’s. Along with William James’s “stream” of “consciousness” (1890, 1:239), “interior monologue” is how we characterize the capture in narrative of the free flow of the mind’s associations as the “atoms … fall,” to use Woolf’s phrase in “Modern Fiction” (1919, 2:107), from both within and without its privacy. In point of fact, if we substitute Egger’s term “the word within” for Dujardin’s “interior monologue,” we have a far sharper and more accurate way to describe modern fiction’s view of the mind’s experience and one more in line with Saussure’s own view of experience. Joyce thought of his own technique in Ulysses, as his inscription suggests, as an instance of “the word within,” whether in the mind of Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, or Molly Bloom. Like Freud’s patients, speaking to Freud at this same moment in time in his consulting room in Vienna, Joyce’s characters are defined, both for themselves and for those who overhear them (namely, the reader), by the scroll of language—by the word within—that makes up their thoughts and the feelings that accompany them. This, Dujardin’s later term obscures, even though Joyce believed, with perhaps too much generosity, that this was the technique he had learned from Dujardin’s Les lauriers sont coupés (1887), somewhat awkwardly, though traditionally, translated as The Bays Are Sere. Dujardin’s “interior monologue” and Egger’s “word within” do not function in the same way or by the same principles. Dujardin’s term, and his practice, funnel the flow of mental experience into a sealed chamber of consciousness, while Egger’s represents the mind as a multiple flow of languages and ideas from within and without, not simply “interior,” and by no means monological. Joyce’s use of Egger’s term provides a larger and fairer conceptual frame than Dujardin’s reduced one with which we struggle still today to describe the process of modern fiction. Despite Egger’s philosophical shortcomings compared to Saussure, the term “the word within” is a better way of conceptualizing the link between modern linguistic philosophy and modern fiction than either “interior monologue” or “stream” of “consciousness.” It also reveals more fully the origins of our contemporary notion of world and self as text and narrative. Egger’s term is the portal not simply to Saussure, but also to Derrida, and, surprisingly, to Bakhtin. I will take up the link to Bakhtin in the next chapter after my discussion of Derrida here.

As Joseph notes, Egger’s notion of the mind as a scroll of signification—the source of Saussure’s similar contention—leaves one problem unsolved: How the passage from the sensoriness of language to the presumable abstraction of an idea occurs. This is an old problem in associationist philosophy, one particularly familiar in Hume (see Meisel, 2007, 109–10). For Egger, these two dimensions of signification were separate. This assumption forced him, as I suggested earlier, into a Platonic belief—the belief that language, tangible, historical, transitory, must refer to something fixed and stable outside of language. This mistake, as Joseph never fails to emphasize, allowed Saussure his grand solution. What language refers to is not outside of language. It is simply outside of the present moment. It is a past sensation—a memory. The missing factor was time. Language’s referential capacity is based on its capacity to recall—on the imperative to do so. Its apparatus is retrospective; its logic is revisionary. Language matches a present, not with an empirical correspondence or with an abstract and timeless realm of ideas to which it corresponds. It matches its signifying to what it remembers—to what has met its perceptual requirements before. It is what Umberto Eco calls a type/token ratio—the signifier requires a semantic inventory that matches a token to a type it recognizes from the past (1976). It is revision without the need to revise, except to confirm that a match has been made. It is what Gilles Deleuze calls repetition with a difference (1968). Repetition with a difference is a match that says a repetition has occurred and a consistency in the scroll of signification successfully accomplished by ironic virtue of the break in consistency—the fact of repetition—that secures it.

Saussure and Derrida

It is no wonder that revisiting Saussure’s source in Egger is a good prelude to revisiting Derrida’s meditation on speech and writing in Saussure (1967, 27–73). It has, as we shall see, a new but familiar ring. Let me begin by introducing the wider vexations that attend our endless preoccupation with deconstruction as both a mythology and a real critical method. Chief among the misconceptions that inhibit seeing how continuous criticism after theory has become is our perplexed and perplexing view of deconstruction. It is, paradoxically, both sloppy and too narrow. It is, of course, neither, despite these contradictory complaints.

On the one hand, we regard deconstruction as a means of vitiating a belief in essences, leading in turn to the most striking and liberating feature of criticism today: the monumental knowledge that once-transcendental categories like race and gender are no more than social constructs. Gender is a social construct propped upon the anatomical given of sex—one set of genitals rather than another. Race is a social construct propped upon the evolutionary given of skin color—shades of pigmentation that are witness to different geographical locales and responses to the environment in the genetic history of individuals superadded to which is the very much later history of intercourse among different populations as the result of slavery and, in less severe instances, of migration. What Freud says of gender is parallel to what we may say about race—both are the social and psychological consequence of an anatomical difference that in and of itself bespeaks nothing more than a biological given with no metaphysical meaning of an ontological kind. This has opened the door to a new horizon for study that includes postcoloniality in both world and regional cultures and an explosion in what the umbrella term “queer studies” includes in our new understanding of gender, sexuality, and alternative lifestyles, including disability.

On the other hand, we misconceive deconstruction in ways that lead us to believe it to be no more than a hollow formalism divorced from the world. One can trace this to the fundamental misconception of Saussure I noted in the Introduction, even in the most generous of attempts to move beyond his presumable formalism as early as the work of Louise Rosenblatt or, later on, in the work of John Guillory (for a summary, see Gere, 2019). Too often we forget that deconstruction, proceeding inevitably from Saussure, is what grants us the very freedoms it provides under its first profile. This suspicion leads, first and foremost, to a resistance to deconstruction under the name of New Historicism, and, second, to the assumption that such a formalism divorces us from equally material pursuits such as environmentalism and human rights. One does not even need to point out Bakhtin’s continuity with Saussure to prove this, although I will return to Bakhtin in the next chapter to square this circle, as it were, in order to resolve fully how and why formalism and historicism need not be regarded as distinct but, rather, as interdependent. This I will also take up from within a reading of Saussure with which this chapter will conclude.

Derrida’s turn in the later phase in his career toward a concern with justice is an unnecessary atonement for his presumable formalism and a guilty acknowledgment, however wrongheaded, that deconstruction, though delimited by the linguistic determinations that it reveals, leads to a chaos of the signifier unless the play of the signifier is curtailed. Here, as David Mikics points out (2009), Derrida sells his own materialism short, as he sells Saussure’s materialism short in the notorious lament regarding speech and writing in Of Grammatology. This I will take up now.

That the play of the signifier is precisely the guarantee of a just world somehow escapes notice. Let me try to show how the two actually go hand in hand. I will begin by revisiting the notion, erroneous, says Derrida, that writing is, in Saussure’s view, the transcription of speech. Derrida’s frequently misconstrued observation regarding Saussure has two practical consequences that exceed it. The first is simple. The text of Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics is notoriously unreliable because it is assembled from the notes of his students. But whether or not Saussure’s pronouncement is accurate is not the point. It is, given the circumstances that give us the text of the Course, neither here nor there. Saussure’s contention must be assessed in relation to the bulk of his pronouncements throughout the lectures, particularly in relation to the rest of his characterization of the status of the signifier in speech and writing alike. What is important is that the signifier is called, in a paradoxical formulation, a “sound-image”—”une image acoustique.” So synesthetic a figure of speech well accords with the most logical conclusion one can draw to solve the apparent difficulty of believing, as Derrida seems to do, that Saussure, in a single moment of palpable stupidity (1916, 23ff), regards writing as the mere record of talking. Talking, conceived of as a sound-image, is also a form of writing. One does not require Derrida’s broadside assault upon Saussure to reach this conclusion, although one does need Derrida’s opportunism to see that Saussure’s view of language is not as naive as his pronouncement might lead us to believe. It should also be stressed—one can never stress this enough—that Derrida concludes that Saussure is logocentric based on this single error. It should be stressed most of all that Derrida does so in order to explain the correct philosophical conclusions that everything else in Saussure, particularly his notion of the signifier as a sound-image, leads us to realize. Deconstruction is the elaboration of the epistemology to which structural linguistics leads: that neither speech nor writing is primary in language because each is a supplementation of the practical functioning of the other. Writing is the transcription of speech only to the extent that speech is the vocalization of writing. Each is a mirror of the other, or, to use Saussure’s figure of speech, two sides of the same sheet of paper.

Melisma

Hence the collapse of the metaphor of the mirror of mimesis—its classical meaning, particularly in the nineteenth-century novel—in favor of a notion of the mirror as a figure to describe the relation, not between language and the world, but between speech and writing. The collapse of the difference between speech and writing is what we are left with in a new conception of language as a whole: the momentous collaboration of the two in the structure we call double articulation. Speech is writing, as Derrida concludes, only to the extent—one more step is necessary—that writing is speech.

Writing is not a transcription of speech. Rather, speech is, in an equally material way, the vocalization of writing—writing, as it were, by any other name. What Saussure calls the sound-image is articulated in a second medium that supplements the first. The sound-image is the sound of an image, not the image of a sound. It is mimetic—an imitation of the image—only to the extent that it is melismatic. Only, that is, to the extent that it is musical. Voice or speech intones what is written. It is cantorial or, to be Barthesian about it, singerly. In this way, the word without becomes the word within. Melisma is the way a singer transforms a lyric, whether verbal or scat, into a sound. The sound-image is a performative imperative. One sings it.

Melisma is the solution to the problem of the relation, or non-relation, of speech to writing. Speech has an active role in the way language is a recursive process or procedure. One sings one’s future, however off-key, by remixing the texts of the past. The present creates a new past for what is to come. Language is chiasmatic because the sign is synesthetic. Voice sings writing—writing is any prior signifying that voice copies or repeats. The relation is still, amusingly, one of priority, but only in time, not in type or substance. The difference between voice and writing is not one of presence and absence in a phenomenal sense, but of parole and langue in a structural one. What sings—what copies or repeats—is of a piece with what is sung. Writing is prior song, or, mutatis mutandis, song is later writing.

Melisma as the performance of language by speech has a scholarly counterpart in the more literal assessment of the relation between sound and writing by A.J. Carruthers in Stave Sightings (2017), a study in what he calls “notational poetics” as an actual project in literature from Virgil to Pound and to the long poem of the twentieth-first century. Focusing on the graphic use of staves and similar musical notations in verse, Carruthers examines versions of the relation between sound and language well in accord with a notion of language as a melismatic enterprise when it is read or when it is spoken. His examples include not only poems (see Hollander, 1975; Stewart, 1990), but also instructive moments in the history of the novel from Sterne to Duras, and even to the analytic session. Bruce Fink usefully debunks the myth of language as non-musical in his study of Lacan (2004), a myth whose limitations Carruthers likewise moves beyond in order to explain both the formal sinuosity of poetic texts in new ways and to move into a politics of form through such a formalist attentiveness by showing how the surprises that await readers of poems through their sonic effects rupture traditional notions of nation, class, and race in the process. More recent attempts to reassess the relation between voice and writing through media ecology can nonetheless remain unhelpful. Scott A. Trudell’s wish to import an “intermedia” perspective on Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing (2020) reinscribes the opposition between the oral and the written that it is designed to overcome. Though his argument seeks to show the media of song and poetry to be “mutually constitutive” (2020, 375), they remain two rather than one, leaving the interdependence of sound and writing where it has traditionally been—on the horizon of what Derrida calls the logocentric enclosure without deconstructing the difference between the two. “Writing sound,” as Trudell puts it (2020, 371), is a supererogatory critical trope. Sound and writing do not exist as subject and object. Saying so once again prioritizes sound as the prelinguistic quiddity that writing belatedly copies.

My contention here is both more narrow and more simply theoretical. Regarding melisma as a way of articulating the relation of speech to language in Saussure solves the problem Derrida finds in Saussure by turning it on its head. This is, I think, Derrida’s own unconscious intention, a deeply ironic way of bringing his point home. Even the pitch value of phonemes has not been fully studied, a value conceivable only in the relation of phonemes to other phonemes, whether in the production of words, phrases, or sentences. It goes without saying that such value is by definition relative—pitch is relative depending on the reader, that is to say, the speaker or singer. Phonemic differences situate phonemes by pitch in relation to one another in the reader’s mind or in reading aloud or in talking or singing. This is an enterprise of high strategy in poems and of overlooked importance in everyday speech. Here the immanence of melody in given linguistic clusters renders writing a score, as it were, with determined intervals as a word unfolds, making the eye a composer and the glottis in speech or the ear in writing an instrument. Maury Yeston’s The Stratification of Musical Rhythm (1976), one of the few texts available on the subject, and one written by a lyricist as well as a musicologist, suggests this to be the case in both practice and principle. Hence poems become, in point of empirical fact, songs, and without requiring logocentric assumptions to be understood as such. The implications for the music of poetic texts are obvious and surprising. The self-evident implications for dialect render the relation between speech and writing in ordinary life an explicit parliament of fowls, to use the punning title of Chaucer’s poem. Indeed, the fluid punning of Middle English, already one of its great technical resources, becomes a paradigm for the tradition of the immanent melodicism of writing that stretches in English from Chaucer to Bob Dylan. Dylan’s singularity joins the melodicism of the phoneme and the melisma of the relation of voice to writing—and of speech to language—in a way that renders seamless, if not identical, these twin features of the signifier when it is conceived of, as Saussure does, as an acoustic image. Saussure’s image of the sign as two sides of the same sheet of paper seems more appropriate than ever under these circumstances.

The social implications of Saussure’s conception of the sign as an acoustic image are numerous. Melisma is not only how children learn to speak, but als...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Durability of the Linguistic Metaphor
• 1 “The Word Within”: Egger, Saussure, Derrida
• 2 Bakhtin, Shakespeare, and the Novel
• 3 Deferred Action from Freud to Foucault
• 4 Form and History from Dickens to Woolf
• 5 Henry James and the Body English
• 6 Sinclair Lewis and the American Language
• 7 Black and Tan: DuBois, Faulkner, and The Joy Luck Club
• 8 D.H. Lawrence: The Poem As Environment
• 9 Mrs. Woolf, Mrs. Klein
• 10 The Feudal Unconscious: Capitalism and the Family Romance
• Coda: The Challenge of Temporal Lobe Epilepsy
• Works Cited
• Index