Language

In the 1970s it became almost routine in American criticism to analyze the style of a particular writer and then arrive at the conclusion that, when it came right down to it, the writer's work was really about language. Everything was "text," "discourse," "code." Critics were fond of talking about language, and they came to think that the poets they analyzed felt the same way. A perfect example is Paul de Man. Blindness and Insight, which came out in 1971, was a collection of essays that were meant to demonstrate that literary critics owe their greatest insights precisely to the areas where they are most "blind." I'm not sure this is what the book really proves, and I'm not sure de Man knew it was going to prove this when he originally wrote the various essays that are collected in it. If there is a theme in Blindness and Insight, however, it is that everything in a text always comes back to language and that language is indeterminate. "If we no longer take for granted that a literary text can be reduced to a finite meaning or set of meanings," he says in the foreword, "but see the act of reading as an endless process in which truth and falsehood are inextricably intertwined, then the prevailing schemes used in literary history . . . are no longer applicable (p. ix). And in an essay in the book called "Criticism and Crisis" we read this: "It is the distinctive privilege of language to be able to hide meaning behind a misleading sign, as when we hide rage or hatred behind a smile. But it is the distinctive curse of all language, as soon as any kind of interpersonal relation is involved, that it is forced to act this way. The simplest of wishes cannot express itself without hiding behind a screen of language that constitutes a world of intricate intersubjective relationships,

all of them potentially inauthentic" (p. 11). De Man sees his own lonely theory of language everywhere. It is in Rousseau's Essay on the Origin of Languages, in which, de Man thinks, "what stands under indictment is language itself" (p. 140). It is in Rilke's poetry, which de Man discusses in his later book Allegories of Reading (1979). In another passage he abruptly announces that a certain line of verse in Rilke "designates the impossibility for the language of poetry to appropriate anything, be it as consciousness, as object, or as a synthesis of both."^[4] It is there even in Oedipus. Everyone is familiar with the end of the Oedipus myth, and most people probably assume Oedipus's blinding himself had something to do with the guilt he learned of after performing the actions that made him guilty. But for de Man, incredibly, the meaning of Oedipus's blindness at Colonus is that he "has learned that it is not in his power to solve the enigma of language."^[5]

Many critics were not content just to write about language and say that the poets they wrote about were also writing about language. Critics are not linguists, and when they write about language, they usually write about a certain kind of language—not "ordinary" language, but the language we find in poems and other kinds of "literature." And so they have to try to account for the specific, distinctive qualities of that language, which means trying to account for the difference between poetic or literary texts and other forms of writing. In the past the issue has generally been formulated as a distinction between the language of poetry and the language of prose. No one seems to escape the belief that the difference lies somehow in language itself, that if you want to isolate what distinguishes a sonnet from a grocery list, you should look at the language, where you are sure to discover some essential, inherent quality. You are also likely to decide that the inherent quality is the way the language of the sonnet calls attention to itself as language. You then use a term like "poeticity" or "literarity" for that quality. Even de Man, with all his talk of the indeterminacy of language (language in general), is incapable of abandoning the ancient myth that poetic language (he calls it literary language) is inherently different from other kinds. The only difference between de Man's version and the older versions of this myth is that de Man has updated the terminology. In a passage from Blindness and Insight that he hoped would be safely ambiguous, he defines the quality of the literary by saying that it refers to "any text that implicitly or explicitly signifies its own rhetorical mode and prefigures its own misunderstanding as the correlative of its rhetorical nature; that is, of its 'rhetoricity.'" Then in a footnote to this passage he

attempts to clarify his statement: "The criterion of literary specificity does not depend on the greater or lesser discursiveness of the mode but on the degree of consistent 'rhetoricity' of the language" (pp. 136–37). "Rhetoric" is a key term for de Man, for reasons I don't need to go into here. Apart from the density of de Man's style and his use of the word rhetoricity, this passage is not substantially different from a great many other accounts of the specificity of poetic or literary language. In the area of language the specificity of poetic or literary language is the Eden to which modern criticism always returns. In Part I, I will show how modern critical attitudes toward language—like de Man's—were formed at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth.