Artigo Revisado por pares

Deconstruction and the Transcultural Uncanny

2018; Penn State University Press; Volume: 55; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/complitstudies.55.4.0906

ISSN

1528-4212

Autores

Nicholas Royle,

Tópico(s)

Wittgensteinian philosophy and applications

Resumo

The focus of Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller's ambitious, distinctive, and highly engaging book Thinking Literature across Continents1 is nothing less than the world (the meaning of “the world” and what is happening to it, above all from the perspective of people involved in education, whether teaching or being taught), together with that seemingly familiar yet peculiar, elusive thing called literature. There are many differences between what Ghosh and Miller say and indeed how they say it. In chapters of alternating authorship they explore their shared as well as diverging, sometimes conflicting concerns. Miller writes from the United States, but with an informed awareness of how literature and literary theory are taught and studied “across continents”: much of his contribution to this book complements or overlaps with material published in his An Innocent Abroad: Lectures in China.2 Ghosh writes “across continents” from India, with an expansive sensitivity to European and American literature, literary theory and philosophy, as well as a passionate interest in elaborating the significance and value of “the Sanskrit, Hindi, and Bengali notion of literature as Sahitya.”3 Ghosh is concerned with what he calls “(in)fusion” theory and its efficacy for the study of “world literature”; Miller is skeptical about such a globalizing impulse and is more driven to affirm and demonstrate the significance and value of reading a specific literary text, whether this be a poem by Yeats or a novel by Anthony Trollope. As Miller summarizes: “all the theoretical knowledge in the world is of little help in the actual business of reading a given poem in its uniqueness and in its resistance to oversimplifying theoretical presuppositions.”4Thinking Literature across Continents is in various respects impelled by a sense that, in Jacques Derrida's words, literature is “the most interesting thing in the world, maybe more interesting than the world … [W]hat is heralded and refused under the name of literature cannot be identified with any other discourse. It will never be scientific, philosophical, conversational.”5 At the same time, both Ghosh and Miller are palpably challenged by the fact that this interestingness counts for very little in the current context of political incompetence and social injustice, climate change, and the advances and seductions of teletechnology. As Miller writes: We do not have time today, it might well be argued, to worry about whether literature any longer matters. Who cares? How can we justify taking time to care about something so trivial, something that matters so little, when we have such big problems?6 Or as Ghosh opens his chapter on trying to unfold and explore “the story of a poem”: The story begins on a note of anxiety, not particularly on a crest, for one cannot deny the career of the poem as having hit an undulation in our times, when speed is the cult of living and upright alertness is preferred over sensitivity.7 While neither author is to be deterred—and this persistent, irrepressible fascination with the nature of poetry, drama, and fiction is perhaps the most admirable thing about their book—there is nonetheless a constant awareness of how much has to be negotiated or set aside, even in the most apparently straightforward business of reading. Repeatedly we encounter signs of something like a disjunction between “speed” and “upright alertness,” on the one hand, and “sensitivity” or “close reading” on the other. Thinking Literature across Continents is thus preoccupied with the kind of opposition between “hyper” and “deep attention” described by N. Katherine Hayles—an opposition she sees as “a generational shift in cognitive styles that poses challenges to education at all levels, including colleges and universities”.8 As Claire Colebrook and Jami Weinstein describe it: Years of reading and culture, as well as the required leisure and safety of civilization, allowed humans to develop deep attention, exemplified by the sustained close reading of novels and the articulation of complex philosophical arguments. Now, not only is the brain supplemented by the memories and skills of computers, but it has also reverted to the hyperattention (or fleeting and multi-task-oriented modes of captivation) that would once have served highly threatened hunter-gatherers.9 As is perhaps inevitable with a book that purports to deal with so much—from Aristotle to Tagore, from Buddhist philosophy to Facebook, from the Bhagavad Gita to Apple iPads—it is difficult to respond to Thinking Literature across Continents without considering what has been left out or seems insufficiently addressed. The book is largely organized around rich and intriguing readings of Shakespeare, Milton, Scott, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Melville, Trollope, Arnold, Nietzsche, Yeats, Proust, Kafka, Frost, Stevens, and Beckett. These are not by any means the only writers discussed, but such a traditional inventory might reasonably prompt a reader to ask: Where are the women writers? Where is the ethnic and cultural diversity? Is there not more to be said about the hegemony of the “Anglo-American” language? Does literature effectively conclude with Beckett? How does twenty-first century literature (of which there is little evidence in this book) engage with and perhaps invite a different “thinking” of what Ghosh and Miller are talking about? In particular how might it illuminate the aforementioned questions of political incompetence, social injustice, climate change, and teletechnology, along with a critical understanding of issues of anthropocentrism, nonhuman animals, species extinction, and the “posthuman”?And then, overarching all of these queries, how do Ghosh and Miller construe and develop the sense of “thinking” itself? This title-word promises something quite different from “writing” or “figuring” or “teaching” literature across continents. The authors' discussion of what is meant by “thinking” is varied, provoking but diffuse. Miller writes at length about the “matter” of literature, including the strangeness of “thinking” as “telepathy” in the world of narrative fiction10, and Ghosh examines forms of thinking associated with Chinese and Sanskrit poetics that are unfamiliar, refreshing, and welcome to an “Anglo-American” academic readership; but the book does not really elucidate the “thinking” foregrounded in its title. We are a fair way off here from what Bill Readings evoked as the “university of Thought.”11 There is no specific engagement with Heidegger's question, What is Called Thinking?,12 or with later elaborations of this question in the writings of Derrida. There is occasional acknowledgment of Freud and notions of the unconscious13 but no sustained attention to the relevance of psychoanalysis for thinking about thinking. Nor do Ghosh and Miller attempt to distinguish what they are doing from contemporary theorists concerned with literature from the perspective of cognitive science. A more extended critical focus on the urgency and challenges of “thinking” as such might have enabled a sharper appreciation of how much the “big problems”14 of our time call for “deep attention” as well as “hyperattention.”“Thinking literature”: the phrase resonates in compelling ways. Can we think literature? Would this be separable from something like thinking madness? Conversely, what might it mean to suggest that literature thinks, that there is a kind of thinking in literature that, perhaps, at once plays with and resists the terms of hyper and deep attention? Ghosh and Miller's book would be stronger in pedagogical terms, I believe, if it were to unpack the “thinking” of its title more explicitly and more fully.All of this is also to suggest that Thinking Literature across Continents is more original and thought-provoking than it seems to realize and thus to introduce the figure of irony—especially that de Manian form of “open” irony that entails “the systematic undoing of understanding.”15 This book is a “twofer” or “two for one,”16 to pick up the term Miller uses to describe the narrative structure of Trollope's Framley Parsonage. It is Ghosh and Miller or even just “Ghosh Miller” (GM). As Ghosh puts it in the Epilogue: “The chapters were not just intended to follow each other but coexist. Our voices were individual and collaborative; our consciousnesses were singularly articulated and participatory,”17 It is funny how, as it were, GM crops up. It is rather as if Ghosh and Miller were striving to be (in Freud's marvelous phrase for Macbeth and Lady Macbeth) “two disunited parts of a single psychical individuality.”18 In ways at once knowing and unknowing, their book explores the logic of duplicity and the double. In irreducibly ironic fashion, the uncanny (literary irony, the irony of literature par excellence) emerges as a governing figure of the book. Ghosh in particular argues for the importance of the “transcultural uncanny,”19 and Miller is too refined a “canny critic” for a thinking of the uncanny ever to be far away. But in other respects the uncanny seems to lurk—unseen as much as seen, disorienting as much as organizing. No one is master of a twofer.In his great essay on “The Uncanny” Freud observes: “we ourselves speak a language that is foreign.”20 It is a remark that is inexhaustibly illuminating for thinking not only about the nature of literature (all great works of literature are composed in a kind of foreign language) but also literary criticism and theory. I kept thinking about this as I read Ghosh and Miller's book. It came to mind at the start, where Miller announces: “I am not a deconstructionist. Let me repeat that once more: I am not a deconstructionist.”21 This confession is at once a bit comical—even perhaps to the point of recalling a certain denial in Bill Clinton mode—and deadly serious. Of course, in a sense, no one in their right mind would think of calling Miller a deconstructionist. They would be guided by Derrida's penetrating critique of “deconstructionism” and -isms and -ists of all sorts, in the wittily titled essay “Some Statements and Truisms about Neo-Logisms, Newisms, Postisms and other Small Seismisms”22; or they would remember Martin McQuillan's pithy summation that “deconstructionism” (or “deconstructionist”) is simply “a word used by idiots.”23 They might more accurately speak of a “deconstructive thinker,” but this is not what Miller is getting at. He is talking, with characteristically canny reasonableness, about the strange fate of the word “deconstruction” (and its cognates) in what we call the English language. It is all about the fact that, as he puts it, the erroneous understanding of deconstruction, promulgated by the mass media and by many academics … is almost impossible to correct, however carefully, patiently, and circumstantially, with many citations, you explain its wrongness … The almost universally believed, mistaken conception of so-called deconstruction as a reading method is a spectacular example of a deeply rooted ideological distortion.24 There are signs, indeed, of this distortion showing up in Miller's other half, for instance when Ghosh declares: “Deconstructionists would see a text as withdrawing from the reader every time he wants to conquer it with an irrefutable sovereignty of meaning.”25 I think Miller is right: the word “deconstruction” has acquired a sort of uncanny toxicity that makes it more or less pointless to use. But what gets thrown out with the bath water? Elsewhere he demonstrates a sharp awareness of the uncanny logic of autoimmunity, whereby a country (or a culture) can destroy itself in the process of seeking to protect itself. Thus the United States currently (and for some time now) appears to be “hell-bent on autoimmune self-destruction.”26 Overall, Miller is left with the argument that “Learning how to read literature rhetorically is primary training in how to spot … lies and distortions [in politics, news media, advertising, and elsewhere].”27I would like to conclude with a couple of remarks about this. First, there is perhaps unwarranted bleakness and narrowness in the vision or “audacity of hope”28 implied here. What seems to go missing from Miller's account, as it seeks to clear itself of the “deconstruction” bug, is a sense of the power and vitality of Derrida's work in terms of its commitment to a “new enlightenment,” the worldwide extension of human rights, and a “democracy to come” (as articulated in Specters of Marx29 and many other texts). This in turn assumes an ironic inflection beside Ghosh's own concluding sense that “Our transactional listening to each other has, hopefully, opened literature as a democratic community.”30 Second, the toxic state of language identified by Miller by his opening performative (“I am not a deconstructionist”) is also, it seems to me, a call to arms, a call to invent new kinds of vocabulary, new forms, styles and voices, new translations, transplants, new foreign fronts and affronts, as it were, in the world of writing and teaching. The Ghosh Miller “twofer” is more of an example of this than it perhaps is able to recognize.

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