<< The Macbeth Murder Mystery | Front Page | Novels, Novellas, Novelettes? >>
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Thought Is A Labyrinth: Rousseau, Starobinski, Kenner, Barthes, Freud
The generative contradiction in Jean Starobinski’s study of Jean-Jacques Rousseau involves the antagonism between transparency and obstruction. It was not merely that Rousseau wanted the one, and found himself impeded by the other. Rather, his desire for transparency created his world dialectically, in terms of obstruction, and he was left with the task of appropriating that fallen condition in order to overcome it. His solution was to use obstruction for his own ends, in order to accomplish the transition from the personal to the universal, from the unity and honesty of his own self to the successful achievement of communication between persons and the beginnings of a new Utopia. This methodology makes him an early prophet of the kind of self-fashioning that would predominate in the Anglo-American and Continental modernisms of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Just as, in my essay on performed selves, I suggested that the theater of death is a means of sustaining life, here the deliberately fragmentary or self-undermining “systems” of modernist literature confronted readers with the problem of authorship; that is, with the author fashioned in the form of a riddle. Hugh Kenner ends his great study, The Pound Era, with the solemn pronouncement that “Thought is a labyrinth” (561). What is true of thought, here is also true of its thinker.
In order to understand Rousseau’s self-fashioning, we have first to understand the nature of his social critique, and his dissatisfaction with the literary culture of his time. Starobinski writes,
If men, and above all princes, want to overcome alienation, then, indeed, it can be overcome and a true community reestablished. The essence of evil lies not in knowledge or art (or technology) but in social disintegration. Under current conditions it is simply the case that the arts and sciences favor and indeed accelerate such disintegration. But there is no reason why the arts and sciences cannot be made to serve better ends. (32)
These two things will be inextricably linked for him: the revival of society through the re-establishment of communication, as Karl Marx will later write, from “man to man,” and the re-invention of the arts. Furthermore, Rousseau has to confront the difficulty in achieving communication and community – the difficulty interposed by the consciousness of the other person. Starobinski describes Rousseau’s frustrated efforts to communicate in drily humorous sentences:
Thus error lies in other people’s perceptions. Although Jean-Jacques is completely open, he remains completely unknown. Although his life is an open book, others act as though he were dissembling. Although he thinks he has laid his soul bare, the truth about him remains hidden, as though he were wearing a disguise or a mask. (181-182)
Thus, ironically, transparency will have “to be created, as if inner clarity alone were not enough” (182). The means for doing this will turn out to be not the continuous performance of openness and virtue, but rather Rousseau’s enormous and apparently chaotic description of his own faults. In order to be honest, he will accuse himself of lying; in order to be transparent, he will describe his actions and motivations in terms of ambiguity and spurious transferences (from which Jacques Derrida will derive the logic of the “supplement”). In order to achieve universal communication, he will be entirely personal, a method that makes the Confessions the foundation for his earlier works of utopian imagination:
His system may have been mistaken, but he painted himself from life. Were his speculations wrong a thousand times over, he never abandoned his truth. And he still defends that “sad and great system” because his soul is authentically present in it. His first books were confessions before the fact, mirrors of the self, whose true meaning can now be interpreted in the light of the Confessions. (275)
What has Rousseau done here? He has shifted the ground of authenticity. In his early writings, including The Social Contract and The Discourse on Inequality, naturalness was a content associated with certain more virtuous practices which might be re-discovered as an antidote to modernity. By the time of the Confessions, naturalness has become “authenticity,” and represents a formal process that can never be completed, because its nature is expression. Rousseau is “continually just beginning to be himself” (199). This is where the reader assumes such crucial importance. Starobinski writes,
Rousseau never doubts for a moment that his life does constitute a unity, despite the contradictions and discontinuities that he himself points out. But he does believe that….the details of his life will “go over” more easily than the assertion, “I am innocent.”….Rousseau thus ascribes to his readers the task of making a unity of multiplicity. (189)
For a modernist, it is natural to hear in this project of Rousseau’s the anachronistic echoes of The Cantos and Finnegans Wake, among others. The endless work of the family of characters in James Joyce’s Wake is to reconstruct a unity (the slain Father HCE) from a multiplicity of cast-offs and fragments; this is also the primary theme of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. Ezra Pound had an almost maddeningly contradictory method for writing the Cantos: they are a series of fragments that are supposed to come together as a magnum opus, a final work that, like Rousseau’s expressions of himself, can never come to an end.
Turning to the Cantos, particularly via a literary figure taken from the past, raises the question of what kinds of predecessors Pound specifically claimed as his own – in other words, what sort of experience of readership prepared him for the work of creating a readerly puzzle of fragments. For Hugh Kenner, among the most important influences for Pound is—like the relation between the Confessions and The Social Contract -- the intertextual relation between Sappho and Homer. Homer represented for Pound the classical (and masculinist) ideal of purity and integral wholeness; Sappho was a woman writer whose highly personal voice was tattered by history. The doomed effort of reconstructing her writings, and the leaps of imagination required in order to reconstruct her as an author, appealed to a young Pound looking for ways to fuse the personal lament of the elegy with elegies for authors and cultures. Kenner writes,
[Pound] was building with precious fragments, conserved by memory as the letters on parchments were conserved by chance: conserved for imaginations quickened by transience to scrutinize and irradiate. When he used Sappho’s fragment on Atthis in 1916 it was as a means of writing elegiac poems, the elegy being the poetic genre his time gave him, a gift that corresponded to one of the moods of youth in that decade. When she returned to him in 1945, as it were anonymously, so that later he did not know that it was she and not Homer who had brought him a magical word, she re-enacted a rite celebrated by symons and Yeats, assuming the guise of eternal Aphrodite who…comes in mean vestments…or in a scrap of parchment. (71-72)
In a sense, when Sappho returns to Pound in 1945, he has completed the essential work of readership. He has liberated her from her scraps of overwritten parchment—so reminiscent of the scarred and bloody book of history as imagined by Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus – such that she has become indistinguishable from the corporate integrity of Homer.
This shift from the author to the reader is described memorably by Roland Barthes in “The Death of the Author,” an essay which has perhaps done more than it should to elide what Kenner calls the “self-interfering” (170) knot of authorship. The reality of the “death” Barthes describes is no more or less a textual strategy than the references to authorial “genius” that define Pound’s modernism for Bob Perelman, in The Trouble With Genius. Furthermore, in the same collection ( Image-Music-Text) where “The Death of the Author” appears, we find “The Grain of the Voice,” a study of two classically-trained singers who epitomize between them the struggle we saw take place within Rousseau. Barthes compares Panzera with Fischer-Dieskau, and finds that Fischer-Dieskau is precisely that already-constituted unity which leaves one cold and which repeats the ideology of the general culture, of what is mediocre. When Barthes describes what he loves about Panzera, we find that the unity of the author (Panzera, here “over-writing” the classical songs by performing them) is broken into the self-interfering grain or roughness of a multiplicity: “the tongue, the glottis, the teeth, the mucous membranes, the nose…the letters” (183), even to the the pronunciation of the rolled r.
In other words, one is left with precisely that sort of jumble of disunities that Rousseau presented to his readers, in the full confidence that they would be capable of reconstructing his innate unity in the same fashion as Pound was able to construct a Homer out of Sappho. But there is another maze opened up by these advances. The knot of authorship, the rough terrain over which the breath must travel to become a full-grained voice, reminds us inevitably of the knot of the individual neurosis, through which the forces of a whole social universe are continually passing, and the ragged scars of trauma. Irving Howe, describing Lawrence of Arabia, borrowed from Andre Malraux and wrote that Lawrence wanted to leave a “scar” on the world. Jean-Paul Sartre, considering the life of Gustave Flaubert, wrote that through Madame Bovary Flaubert was able to make his “subjective neurosis” into an objective vision of truth, because all of bourgeois France was neurotic in the same fashion. In his story of the hysteric ‘Dora,’ Sigmund Freud writes, “A knowledge of the paths does not render less necessary a knowledge of the forces which travel along them” (32). And, in fact, throughout A Case of Hysteria we find that the forces of gender inequality, sexual repression and harrassment, and social etiquette serve to produce the complex of a single hysteria, but implicate two whole families, and by extension the whole society. Freud writes of the psychologist producing the roman a clef of hysteria that “his duties towards science ultimately mean nothing else than his duties towards the many other patients who are suffering of will some day suffer from the same disorder” (8, italics mine).
Thus, the modernist creation of the labyrinth is not merely a plea for readership, through the effort to be intriguing and indigestible. It also implicates the reader in larger social forces of alienation and oppression that, from Rousseau to the present day, have compelled the endless mediation of texts. By implicating his audience in the construction of the text, the author does more than confess; he obtains the confession of his readers, as his final communicative act.
Comments
Very interesting. A more substantial comment here from me sometime over the weekend, when I’ve time (something about the different valences of the various ‘personal’ discourses you’re talking about, and maybe eliding together a little, here). But, in haste, a couple of niggly questions.
“Ezra Pound had an almost maddeningly contradictory method for writing the Cantos: they are a series of fragments that are supposed to come together as a magnum opus...“
Are they supposed to ‘come together’? In what sense?
“[Rousseau] obtains the confession of his readers, as his final communicative act."
Why ‘final’? I don’t understand the last bit there.
Adam,
Thanks for the comment! As far as I know (i.e. from reading Kenner, Perelman, and others), Pound saw the Cantos as similar to the Aeneid and the works of Homer. They were about great men, and they were epic and mythic at least by way of reference. Of course, we can and should talk about the ways that Pound deliberately undermined these archetypes. The best way I can fix on Pound’s peculiar method is to describe it as a deliberately failed epic, rather than simply a series of related lyrics.
Rousseau’s Confessions are “final,” not in the sense that he never wrote again, but rather because the confessional form subsumed his whole canon, and became the (symbolic) moment of his “death” at the hands of his readers.
Interesting! What strikes me in particular is the way the body creeps into this post in the second half. You compare Sappho’s fragments to “the scarred and bloody book of history,” and then in “The Grain of the Voice,” which I haven’t read in a couple years, the crucial point seems to be that the “better” singer (in the sense of “more moving to Barthes, personally,” which may rig the game in its very particularity) is the one who is more able to use his own material body as an instrument-- the one who is more faithful to his own particular embodiedness than to the traditions of performance.
The leap you make in the second-to-last paragraph from the “knot of authorship” identified with the bodily ("the rough terrain over which the breath must travel in order to become a full-grained voice") and “individual neurosis, through which the forces of a whole social universe are passing” troubled me at first. Was the leap just a metaphorical one, I wondered? Did you just mean to say prettily that we are throats, singing the lament of the social universe? But no, I think the body is deeply implicated in this whole problem. Individual neurosis is the result of an embodied encounter with the immaterial, in the form of social codes & interactions. It is the problem that arises when the material & immaterial aspects of the self get too far out of synch. But they will always be out of synch. The author or the singer who adheres to convention & thus is easily interpretable stays too close to the world of ideas, and fails to convey the tragic, beautiful incoherence of embodied experience.
uncomplicatedly,
I’m deeply sympathetic to your reading of the body into this post. Reading your comment, I thought of ways that it might have been more embodied; for example, the “death” of the author should not be left as an abstraction, when it is so clearly physically inspired.
Your comment ends on a beautiful, lyrical note. It is in tension with itself. Taking minor exception, you write:
Did you just mean to say prettily that we are throats, singing the lament of the social universe? But no, I think the body is deeply implicated in this whole problem.
The body can and should be restored to discussions of texts, but not as a source of wholeness or truth greater than text and sociality. In other words, if the problem with using “throats” as a metonymy for the human is that it fragments the body—that is the fate of the body anyhow, and of course Barthes is not only talking about throats. So there’s a tension between talking about the body as a whole, and as a key to the “whole problem,” and talking about the effects (even the promise) of incoherence.
Dora is not neurotic because her body, and her social reality, are too far apart. She’s neurotic because she can’t reconcile the male right to a mistress, the male right to a monogamous marriage, and the expectation of female propriety. These are all conventions—instinct with desire, but never purely bodily. The desire of Freud’s text (well, not its only desire, but its most respectable one) is not to make her sexually liberated, but to prevent her from being multiply suborned.