Deconstruction Is/In America. Anselm Haverkamp

loud alarms of joy, . . .

      For what’s too high for love, or what’s too low?

O Huncamunca, Huncamunca, O! ”⁹

      Now apostrophes, whatever they are invoking, seem to end up posing, explicitly or implicitly, questions about the performative efficacy of poetic rhetoric itself. So as Baudelaire’s “Ciel Brouillé” concludes,

      O femme dangereuse, O séduisants climats!

      Adorerai-je aussi ta neige et vos frimas,

      Et saurai-je tirer de l’implacable hiver

      Des plaisirs plus aigus que la glace et le fer?

      [O dangerous woman, o seductive climates!

      Will I also adore your snow and ice,

      And will I be able to draw from implacable winter

Pleasures that are sharper than ice and steel?]¹⁰

      This is a question about the performativity of lyrical discourse: will it work? will it bring about the conditions it describes? To take a more familiar example, Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” insistently invokes and conjures the wind in the apparent hope that it will, in the end, be what the speaker demands:

      Be thou, spirit fierce,

My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!¹¹

      In concluding, the speaker urges the wind to “Be through my lips to unawakened earth/The trumpet of a prophecy”—a prophecy which consists of the incantation of these verses asking the wind to bear, sustain, repeat, proliferate a poetic enunciation or performance whose content is this performance itself; namely, the articulation of the hope that the natural cycle of the seasons (“If winter comes, can spring be far behind!”) will, through the agency of the wind, animate the speaker’s voice. That is, the speaker urges the wind to “be through my lips the trumpet of a prophecy,” but there is here no other prophecy than this hopeful calling on the wind to advance the poetic voice.

      When lyrics thematically pose the question of the performative power of lyric rhetoric, it is often in this form: will you be as I describe you when I invoke you? will you be what I say you are? And when they do appear to answer the question, it is often by finding some way of formulating the request so that it is by definition fulfilled if we hear it. If one takes such cases as exemplary of the performativity of lyric, then one would see lyric, in principle and often in practice as well, as a poetic naming that performatively creates what it names. So poems that invoke the heart—“O mon coeur, entend le chant des matelots” or “Be still, my heart”—create what we have come to call “the heart.”

This locating of lyric value in performativity is, perhaps, the contemporary deconstructive version of Heidegger’s poetic aletheia, poetry as the happening of truth at work. But there are lots of lyric examples which make one uncomfortable with such a claim, where the operations of apostrophe and prosopopoeia create not the heart but speaking birds, animated sofas, or daggers full of charm: “Charmant poignard, jaillis de ton étui.” Indeed, Heidegger emphatically moves to separate his true dichtung from frivolous play of the imagination—the sort of play that seems most at work in apostrophic lyrics, which animate all kinds of things in ways that frequently seem embarrassing.¹² If one focuses on the performative functioning of a lyric conceived as fundamentally apostrophic and prosopopoeic, then it seems overweening to link these figures, which so often foreground a conspicuously bizarre or arbitrary figurality, to the happening of truth.

What happens through the performativity of lyric is exceedingly difficult to say, but whether or not lyric is the happening of truth it does seem to happen as singular concatenations of words—“Shivelights and shadowtackle in long lashes lace, lance, and pair”¹³—combinations difficult to reduce to theme or to infer from particular empirical situations. The happening of lyrics is linked to a strangeness or alterity which, if it works, may lodge itself in memory. If the lyric happens, it does so as a form of radical singularity whose value is linked to a certain memorable otherness. So, if the “Ode to the West Wind” has in any sense made the wind be come the spirit of the speaker—”Be thou me, impetuous one”—it is because this verbal connection has been inscribed in memories here and there, has proliferated in its iterability.

Educational tradition, from Plato to the present, has distinguished good memory from bad—the memory of understanding or assimilation (which is to be encouraged and which is what tests should test), from the memory of rote repetition or mere memorization. On the one hand there is what you have made your own and can recall, reformulate, and produce as knowledge because you have understood it; on the other, there is what you repeat without necessarily understanding, what remains lodged within mechanical memory (Gedächtnis) as a piece of otherness. Now if the novel is writing you assimilate—that is, when you remember novels you recall, in your own words, as we say, what happens, what they are about—lyrics, on the contrary, retain an irreducible otherness: to remember them at all is to remember at least some of their words; they ask as Derrida puts it in “Che cos’è la poesia?” to be learned by heart. “Le poétique, disons-le, serait ce que tu désires apprendre, mais de l’autre, grâce à l’autre et sous sa dictée, par coeur: imparare a memoria.” [“The poetic, let us say it, would be that which you desire to learn, but from the other, thanks to the other, and at his or her dictation, by heart: to learn by heart.”]¹⁴ This brief text of Derrida’s takes as the figure for the lyric not the phoenix nor the eagle but the modest, prickly yet pathetic hedgehog, l’hérisson. Neither héritier nor nourisson, l’hérisson is a creature which, as in Giraudoux’s Electre, “se fait écraser”—indeed, whose nature is to “se faire écraser sur les routes.”¹⁵ The poem is addressed to you—a generalized, fictional you which it posits, which it tries to create—but it can always miss its mark, can be ignored, even ridiculed. It exposes itself to being dismissed. So, while at one level, lyrics thematize the problem of whether they will make things happen and sometimes find ways of insuring that what they want to have happen does happen through the form of articulation of the desire, their performativity consists also in their success in creating the listeners/readers they attempt to address and in making themselves remembered.

      On the question of the freedom and performativity of literature, Derrida writes:

it is an institution which consists in transgressing and transforming, thus in producing its constitutional law; or, to put it better, in producing discursive forms, “works,” and “events” in which the very possibility of a fundamental constitution is at least “fictionally” contested, threatened, deconstructed, presented in its very precariousness. Hence, while literature shares a certain power and a certain destiny with “jurisdiction,” with the juridico-political production of institutional foundations, the constitutions of states, fundamental legislation, and even the theological-juridical performatives which occur at the beginning of law, at a certain point it can only exceed them, interrogate them, “fictionalize” them: with nothing, or almost nothing, in view, of course, and by producing events whose “reality” or duration is never assured, but which by that very fact are more thought-provoking, if that still means something.¹⁶

Though we might not wish to claim for lyric the juridico-political productive power that literature is here said to share, lyric does partake in that excess of fictionalized foundational performatives, as it posits conditions in poetic events whose reality or duration is