The Cast of Characters and What's Not Here

The cast of characters: the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé (1842—1898) and his disciple Paul Valéry (1871–1945); the Czech-born Austro-German poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926); the Russian symbolist poet Andrei Bely (1880–1934); and the Russian avant-garde poet Velimir Khlebnikov (1885–1922). There are others, too. Roman Jakobson (1896–1982), probably the most renowned linguist of the century, figures as an important historical link between the early twentieth century and more recent literary criticism and theory in Western Europe and the United States, though he is not a poet. Writers and thinkers of an earlier era put in an appearance, including philosophers, linguists, and theologians. Two names come up more often than others: Mallarmé and Bely. They had nothing to do with each other, and Bely has remained a relatively obscure figure both in his native country and outside. To show Bely's "influence" on succeeding generations of literary critics would be tricky, especially because almost no one has acknowledged

any sort of intellectual debt to him. But in chapter 6, when I come to talk about the pivotal role Jakobson played in exporting theology from Russia to the West, I will show that Bely did play a role of the sort that can be characterized as "having an influence."

Mallarmé's "influence" is another story, at least according to some observers. In a taped conversation with English critic Stephen Heath in 1970, Roland Barthes said that "in France there is a certain way in which since Mallarmé everything is repetition. Since Mallarmé there have been no new mutatory texts in French literature [texts, that is, that produce lasting changes in history]. We in France have invented nothing since Mallarmé, and it is very fortunate too when it is Mallarmé we repeat!"^[12] Barthes uses the word literature, but it is clear from the context (he mentions Marx as the author of a mutatory text) that he is speaking of a historical process that embraces more than just "literary" texts. Barthes is speaking at a time when French imperial control of American humanities departments had almost reached its height (with Barthes and others like him as colonial viceroys in absentia), so to say that everything in France since Mallarmé is a repetition of Mallarmé is effectively to say that everything in American criticism since the late 1960s is a repetition of Mallarmé. In fact, all we need to do is show that Mallarmé was a shaping force in the thought of Derrida, as a number of writers have done, and we will already have shown his importance for modern American criticism.^[13]

This book is not an influence study in the simple sense of the term influence . I have not set out to show that the poets I discuss from the early modern era directly "caused" the critics of more recent times. Something like this happened in certain cases, it is true. For example, Mallarmé's ideas on language had an impact on later thinkers, and it is part of the reason those thinkers use Mallarmé as an example of theories they propose as their own. There are connections and exportations, but no individual figure I talk about can be identified as personally and directly responsible for a whole range of things that happened later.

That's not really the purpose of my book, anyway. Rather, it is to show that the same basic set of assumptions and beliefs that have informed recent criticism in the United States, and that have thus helped to shape the way we teach and read in higher education, were already there in the early modern era. Bely is a dominating figure because, more than almost anyone else, he combines the issues of modernism in one consciousness. Did he "give" us modern criticism all by himself? I doubt

it. Instead, he represented a style of thinking of an entire era that has been passed on to succeeding generations in a way that probably can't be scientifically described.

Since I was not attempting to establish a complete list of the "sources" of modern literary criticism, I did not feel compelled to speak of every figure that might be relevant to a subject like this. I thought it would be much better to choose a limited number of figures that were truly representative and to focus on them—again and again. With the notable exception of Rilke, whom I mention at the end of the book, they are mostly French and Russian. Naturally, my selective method means that certain persons—in fact, a great many—are not here at all.

I said that my four themes overlap. This overlapping has the effect of making my book into something like the relational structures I'll be talking about in Part III since members of the cast return at various moments in contexts that are sometimes only slightly different from the ones in which they previously appeared. Different scenes thus evoke other scenes and subvert the narrative progression of my "text." And, of course, like the path from Eden, the end brings us back to the beginning.