Deconstruction Is/In America. Anselm Haverkamp

in inscribing themselves on the memory, with what de Man calls “the senseless power of positional language.”¹⁷

There would seem then to be two interpretations of the performativity of lyric. One sees poems as creating what they name or describe, in a work of truth—dichtung—and would stress in particular the crucial role of metaphor in poetic naming. It would be less comfortable when the tropes of lyric are apostrophe and prosopopoeia and might be sorely tempted to distinguish a true lyric performativity from the facile play of rhetoric. In 1977, in an article entitled “Apostrophe,” I tried to resist that temptation, while pursuing this option, by identifying apostrophe with the fundamental structure of lyric but at the same time with everything that is potentially most pretentious, mystificatory, and embarrassing in the lyric; and I sought to work out how these tropes could be said to make things happen—for example by thrusting their animate presuppositions on the reader or listener with the force of an event.¹⁸ Lamartine’s “Objects inanimés, avez vous done une âme?,”¹⁹ like the question “Have you stopped beating your wife?,” creates a structure from which a reader has trouble disengaging, except by ignoring the poem altogether. The problem, for me, was to find cases where one might argue convincingly that a poem made something happen. The “Ode to the West Wind” would be a case in point, because of the special self-reflexive character of its formulations. And I concluded with the example of Keats’s “This Living Hand,” which, I argued, dares readers to resist it but compels their acceptance of a presence the poem performatively produces.²⁰

      Against this account of poetic performativity, the second account of performativity would insist, rather, on the unverifiable and problematic nature of such events and link performativity rather to a performative iterability whose best instance is the lodging of singular formulations in memory. This second account might stress, as Derrida does in “Che cos’é la poesia?,” that the poem, vulnerable like the hedgehog rolled into a ball, makes you want to protect it, learn it by heart, in a “passion de la marque singuliére.” Here the oddity of the poem, its vulnerability to dismissal, is what calls to us, and one might speculate that criticism’s inclination to demonstrate the necessity, the inevitability of poetic combinations—why the poem needs just these words and no other—comes from the knowledge that it is the contingency, the accidents, the otherness of poetic phrases that creates their appeal.

      Now it may be that there can be no question of choosing between these accounts—between performativity as the happening of truth or the poem’s creation of what it describes, and the performativity of, shall we say, what manages to repeat, happens to lodge itself in mechanical memory as iterable inscription. There may be no question of choosing because the lyric might be precisely the name of the hope that iterable inscription will be the happening of truth—or, on the contrary, the name of the concealment of inscription and the play of the letter by a thematics of specularity and self-creation, or perhaps—one other possibility—the name of the oscillation between these perspectives.

      These possibilities, it seems to me, help to make sense of part of Paul de Man’s complicated and discontinuous account of lyric. De Man speaks of lyric (and other names for genres) as a defensive motion of understanding. This passage, from “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric,” needs to be quoted at length:

What we call the lyric, the instance of represented voice, conveniently spells out the rhetorical and thematic characteristics that make it the paradigm of a complementary relationship between grammar, trope, and theme. The set of characteristics includes the various structures and moments we encountered along the way [i.e., in the interpretation of Baudelaire’s “Obsession,” which de Man sees as translating the sonnet “Correspondances” into lyric intelligibility]: specular symmetry along an axis of assertion and negation (to which correspond the generic mirror images of the ode, as celebration, and the elegy, as mourning), the grammatical transformation of the declarative into the vocative modes of question, exclamation, address, hypothesis, etc., the tropological transformation of analogy into apostrophe, or the equivalent, more general transformation ... of trope into anthropomorphism. The lyric is not a genre, but one name among several to designate a defensive motion of under standing, the possibility of a future hermeneutics. From this point of view there is no significant difference between one generic term and another: all have the same apparently intentional and temporal function.²¹

Here the suggestion is that lyric, like other genres, is a “term of resistance and nostalgia,” the name we have for a particular way of convincing ourselves not only that language is meaningful and that it will give rise to an intuition or understanding, but that this will be an understanding of the world—an understanding to come.²² But in de Man’s essay there is something else that stands against the lyric thus conceived. Of Baudelaire’s “Correspondances,” he writes, “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.”²³ De Man’s phrase “it alone” warns us against distinguishing between two kinds of poetry, one of which is lyric and the other of which—like “Correspondances”—remains unnamed. “Correspondances” seems rather to be a textual singularity—he speaks of its “stutter”—that gets translated into lyric, into lyric intelligibility. “Correspondances” permits him to infer a materiality of language which cannot be isolated as such, as a “moment” or an origin, but which, by standing, as it were, “beneath” lyric (or whatever aberrant formulation one wishes to choose), enables us to identify the figurative structures and operations constitutive of the lyric.

      Today, as critical accounts appeal to a performativity which is increasingly seen as both the accomplishment and the justification of literature—the source of claims we might wish to make for it—it seems to me especially important that we consider, in particular cases, what performativity involves and what kinds of distinctions we need to make to talk about such forms as the lyric, which I think merit more sustained attention than they have so far received from or in deconstruction in America.

       Notes

      1. Jacques Derrida, “This Strange Institution Called Literature,” interview with Derek Attridge, in Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), p.37

2. Ibid.p.55.

3. Jacques Derrida, seminar on “Future Deconstructions,” University of California Jumanities Research Institue, Irvine, CA, May 1992.

4. Jacques Derrida, “Passions: ‘An Oblique Offering,’ ” Derrida: A Critical Reader, ed. David Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p.23.

5. Derrida, “This Strange Institution. . .,” p.38.

6. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), pp. 249–250; Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p.261.

7.