Published Spring 2006
 
Why I Read
(on Barbara Johnson, Mother Tongues: Sexuality, Trials, Motherhood,
Translation [Harvard UP, 2003])
Who'd be a literary critic? The philosophers throw us out of the
republic with the poets and other swampy-minded womanish types;
but the poets don't really want to hang out with us, either ("your
writing is so dry"). No one ever confuses the literary critic with
a liberating god or an unacknowledged legislator of society, and
nobody is intimidated by our flashing eyes and untidy hair. Meet
a guy at a party and he goes all shy and awkward, thinking you're
about to correct his grammar and criticize him for watching television
instead of reading Great Books; go to another kind of party, and
a member of the Board of Trustees is worried that you are encouraging people to watch too much television by teaching "cultural studies"
instead of Shakespeare; and either way, fathers everywhere (from
millionaires to working-class) still want to know "what is my kid
ever going to do with that?" Social scientists call us unsystematic.
People no more politically efficacious than we are call us ivory-tower
elitists
and at the moment, I can't even fill out this "faculty
development" form which asks me to explain the "objectives and procedures"
of my work, because after a quarter-century of obsessive self-reflexivity
on the topic I don't know what my objectives and procedures are.
How can this have happened?
Barbara Johnson's newest book, Mother Tongues: Sexuality, Trials,
Motherhood, Translation (Harvard, 2003) doesn't explicitly undertake
to help me fill out my form, nor does she advance a grand plan to
save the world by reconfiguring the humanities (or vice versa).
There is no shortage of books and articles that do attempt those
tasks, in tones agonized, magisterial, and/or sly; the jeremiads
about the death of feminist criticism continue to proliferate, and
to be answered, and to be asked again. (Could the mania for "where
have we been, where are we going" in intellectual circles be unconnected
to the mania for assessment and the constant demands for targets,
plans, outcome goals, etc. that have totally transformed the academy
in the last few decades?) In contrast, Mother Tongues presents eight
semi-detached, almost occasional, readings of classic texts and
contexts (Baudelaire, Benjamin, Plath, de Man, Lowell, with side-glances
to Sappho, Plato, Mallarmé, Sexton, Kafka, Freud...) and is more like
a "novel in stories" than a solid commodity mono-object or a sustained
rant. But unlike the overviews, it makes the case for going on with
what we do.
As a critic, Johnson's voice is lyric rather than epic "rien
qui pèse et rien qui pose" and slender bridges loop in surprising
ways from one essay to another and also back to her previous work.
As a daughter of deconstruction (though far from a dutiful one),
she aims to disable patriarchal mystifications without simultaneously
disabling herself. Much of Mother Tongues seems written under the
sign of Walter Benjamin's joint commitment to aesthetics and integrity:
what can we learn from Benjamin about a critical method that will
hit the middle place between text and world and leave both free?
Johnson's basic method has always been to slip into a text and
read the pants off of it, and often to put two texts side-by-side
and let them read the pants off of each other, somehow leaving us
at the end with more rather than with less. Here, for instance,
she puts Baudelaire next to Plath—not the first couple you'd think
of—by starting from how critics have read and misread their relationships
with their mothers, with language, with money, with the possibilities
of human intimacy. (Can there possibly be anything new to see about
Sylvia Plath? Yes.) Deconstruction can, it is true, become a kind
of predictable "plug and chug" procedure at the end of which meaning
disappears up its own
navel, a way of despair about the possibility
of human communication that nonetheless keeps grinding and writing
after it has proven how useless those activities are. But it does
not have to be that. As she once said, it is important not "to confuse
undecidability with meaninglessness" (Wake of Deconstruction 90).
Long ago she wrote that "Literary criticism as such can perhaps
be called the art of rereading" (Critical Difference 4); the rereadings
in Mother Tongues sent me back happily to revisit and explore the
primary texts (a good sign, I feel), but I also found myself retracing
Johnson's own steps over the years. It's an instructive path.
Oddly enough, the shape of Johnson's early career was a bit like
Adrienne Rich's. Johnson's first English book, The Critical Difference (1980), technically brilliant and deeply erudite, was highly praised
by conventional authorities, but did not express a specifically
feminist (or for that matter, feminine) subject position, or did
so only in cryptic ways. I can remember copying out the opening
of a piece on Mallarmé's Nénuphar blanc:
If human beings were not divided into two biological sexes, there
would probably be no need for literature. And if literature could
truly say what the relations between the sexes are, we would doubtless
not need much of it, either.
But the virtuoso reading that followed somehow avoided naming the
manifest epistemological violence done to the woman in/by the poem.
Seemingly one could discuss "sexual difference" without drawing
any sort of feminist conclusion. Johnson's association with deconstruction
was further consolidated when her translation of Derrida's Disseminations appeared in the following year.
Then, with World of Difference (1987) came a moment of self-criticism
and rebirth, from a position of acquired confidence and professional
strength. (The equivalent step for Rich was Snapshots of A Daughter-in-Law,
though this was of course much earlier.) Answering the question,
"Is the Yale School a male school," Johnson identified a "pattern
of female effacement," and ended with a witty self-critique:
I have chosen to focus on The Critical Difference by Barbara Johnson.
What happens when one raises Mary Jacobus's question: "Is there
a woman in this text?" The answer is rather surprising. For no book
produced by the Yale school seems to have excluded women as effectively
as The Critical Difference (39).
World of Difference addressed that, mainly by shifting its canon.
"While The Critical Difference seemed to say 'Here is a text; let
me read it' the present volume adds 'Why am I reading this text
...'" (3). Zora Neale Hurston and Mary Shelley joined Mallarmé and
Poe, and issues like abortion and identity were foregrounded. But
this is a gentler conversion story than Rich's. Johnson also says,
in "Gender and the Yale School," "I must be careful not to bite
off more of the hand that feeds me than I can chew," and the deconstructive
method does not change much when turned to a feminist purpose. For
instance, "Rigorous Unreliability" uses de Man's theory against
itself to identify one of his own blind spots about gender (in his
reading of Rousseau).
Deconstruction, or possibly common sense, seems also to have enabled
Johnson herself to avoid the blind spot of identity politics; she
maintained an acute sense of the impossibility of assigning an "inside"
and an "outside" to textuality:
...to "include" or "claim an identity they taught me to despise" is by no means a simple operation. If identities are lost through
acts of experience, they are also acquired thereby, and the restoration
of what has been denied cannot be accomplished through simple affirmation
(4).
Working through identity politics seems to lead back to undecidability,
but with a questioning of purpose linked to awareness of audience.
So what happens in Act Three, and Act Four? What has happened to
that once-quarrelsome couple, feminism and "theory," now that both
have more than reached middle age?
From the vantage point of 2005, "theory" (whether understood narrowly
as referring to deconstruction, or more broadly) now seems neither
especially suspect nor especially sexy. The "theory war" is over.
Feminism, too, has lost the tang of risk: it's no longer dangerous
to one's career prospects to say that Virginia Woolf liked women
or that H.D. wrote good long poems. And yet we are not saved; we
do not agree what work is good, what wasted; we defend ourselves,
endlessly; we wring our hands. In particular, continuing border
skirmishes about "difficulty" may be carrying on the theory war
by other means.
The second chapter of Mother Tongues, called "l'Esthetique du Mal,"
began life as a contribution to Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing
in the Public Arena. That volume in turn began life as a response
to the Bad Writing Contest sponsored by Philosophy and Literature,
which Judith Butler "won." Edited by Jonathan Culler, it engages
the best energies of some extremely smart people, most of whom end
up defending, if not difficulty, at least complexity, while giving
more or less quarter along the way to those who have asked for more
light.
At first, it looks like Barbara Johnson's approach was simply not
to do the assignment. Rather than leap into "where are we going,
where have we been" mode, she talks about Anne Sexton and "bad taste,"
about "le mal" in Baudelaire as a historical and gendered category:
...the rise of the bourgeoisie in France was particularly gender-divided:
women stood for virtue, men for badness of every sort. So much so
that Baudelaire could exemplify his badness through lesbianism,
but could disqualify women completely as readers of his book (28).
And, while moral panic and textual opacity are often associated
(especially by those who are panicking), they can be distinguished
analytically, she says. "Something of Baudelaire's badness is lost,
I think, when it is translated by Mallarmè into obscurity alone"
(28). Along the way she also replies to the criticisms directly
("The real mystery is why 'I don't understand it' should condemn
the author rather than the reader" [30]), and her response to mudslinging
about "political correctness" is characteristically aphoristic:
What has been called "political correctness" is something I would
prefer to call "double consciousness"—the knowledge that one is
viewed, not just viewing.
She also enacts the claim that complex readings are valuable by
doing some. "Actually taking seriously the works being read has
to become transformative eventually"(38).
But the fact is and perhaps Johnson, like other commentators,
would agree I just can't make myself believe that "difficulty"
is really the issue. Many of the contributions to the "Difficult"
book left me wanting to say, not "this is too hard," but "this is
too meta." For example, Robyn Wiegman's piece, called "Feminism's
Broken English," argues for the value of post-structuralist, discourse-based
approaches to gender against those who, like Lynne Segal, would
call for a re-emphasis on social science methods as affirming a
greater connection to "real world" (non-academic) "concrete political
struggles." I agree with Wiegman's position, at least in part; and
her article is not especially challenging to read. But it is rendered
utterly arid by an absence of examples, by a failure to engage with
texts except glancingly. Those she does cite are other overviews
of overviews of what the discipline might or might not be doing
in the absence of any sense of critical practice operating in
the article itself, one has a feeling of hopelessness, that all
that is going on is turf-battles, institutional gatekeeping, careers.
But what if it's not a question of style or vocabulary so much
as of tone? There is a kind of demanding article that says, "no
entry without Hegel" (fair enough) and there is another kind that
reads more simply "fuck off, pipsqueak." Perhaps this is why Gayatri
Spivak makes so many readers angry, in spite of the undeniable value
of her work. How to account for my feeling that the purpose or intention
of a critical text is sometimes to put me in the wrong, almost before
I have begun to read it? If this feeling has its origin in me, it
is my private embarrassment, and I ought to set about solving it
as quietly as possible. But if the feeling originates with the text,
the question becomes murkier: did I, then, feel I had the right
to expect something different, something more gracious perhaps?
And if so, why? If the writer is too busy to tell me what "telepoeisis"
means, well, there are other ways I can figure it out. But it would
only have taken her a minute, and it took me a whole day.
Maybe this is about teaching. De Man famously wrote in his defense
of difficulty, "The Resistance to Theory," that "it is better to
fail at teaching what should not be taught than to succeed in teaching
what is not true" (4). There are teachers who open doors (by many
accounts, de Man himself was one of them) and teachers who slam
them: and the same is true of texts. Anger breeds anger, as Woolf
showed; contempt breeds contempt—of which the Bad Writing Contest
itself was a prime and cynical example, it must be said. I don't
always agree with Johnson's readings, but I always hear her writing
as trying to teach me something, to show me something in a text
I hadn't seen and then send me back into the library, where I can
find out more and decide for myself.
Johnson's essay also manages to avoid the tone of injured vanity
that runs through about half of the collection, from people who
ought to be beyond being hurt as they are certainly beyond being
harmed. Perhaps the discipline's conventions set up what Foucault
calls the need to claim the "speaker's benefit," and what Johnson
herself, in one of her best essays, nails as "muteness envy." Or
it may really be sadder.
In Mother Tongues Johnson returns to a position she describes as
embarrassingly close to "art for art's sake." Close-reading, careful
attention to complexity, acquaintance with ideas that cannot be
summarized in a soundbyte: none of this can be assumed to make anyone
free. But what discourse can? Johnson has put this most bluntly
in an interview. "Terry Eagleton says things like, 'Undecidability
won't tell us what to do about the boat people.' But just saying
that won't, either" (Wake of Deconstruction 84). She words it more
carefully in Mother Tongues:
While you are parsing a sentence, analyzing a metaphor, or smiling
over a meaning entirely produced by the magic of rhyme, you are
not paying attention to what is going on in the world. The question
I would like to ask is whether not paying attention to it automatically
keeps you there.
It is a grandiose fantasy of omnipotence to fear
that by forgetting reality, a person might damage reality. (3)
In other words, "the distance between theory and practice is always
greater in practice than it is in theory." Faced with this, we could
remember that Auden's "poetry makes nothing happen" was less a descriptive
statement about the world than a prolegomena for his own future
post-political work, expressing his desire not to make anything
that could be used as propaganda; or Benjamin's search, as Gerhard
Richter describes it, for a style that would make his writing be
"unusable" by the Nazis. Johnson suggests that Paul de Man might
have had his fill of politically engaged criticism as a result of
his engagement with it during the war.
But does the question of politically engaged criticism include
feminist criticism, and if so, how?
Mother Tongues opens with an obscenity trial, with the reminder
that Madame Bovary and Les Fleurs du Mal were prosecuted for obscenity
in the same year. Johnson suggests that Pinard, who served as prosecutor
both times, was an unusually astute literary critic: Baudelaire's
rather lame, though probably sincere, "defense" that the "mal" was
there only to be criticized in the interest of social hygiene, is
less convincing (especially to a deconstructionist) than Pinard's
insistence that the harmful trace of what was revealed, even if
then cancelled, would have lingering effects. So good reading leads
to bad (that is, anti-Poet) law.
But there's a further irony Johnson doesn't discuss. There is a
kind of feminist criticism which is not all that far from the genre
of the indictment or arraignment "lui faire son procès" — and
in fact feminists critics are described as, excoriated as, the unacknowledged
or "self-appointed" legislators of the world, for always putting
texts and people on trial. Andrea Dworkin's death brings back the
question: were we too much like that or not enough? Whether Dworkin's
work had a positive impact on feminism is debatable. But I strongly
suspect that the fear of being Andrea Dworkin, the fear of being
seen as "an Andrea Dworkin," has had a negative effect on the relevance
and clarity of feminist literary and cultural criticism. "You don't
want to get yourself known as a troublemaker, as somewhat who's
difficult" in a rather different application of that term. "You'll
never get anywhere if you don't stop saying these things," as a
former department chair once observed to yours truly.
He was probably right. But where was the anywhere we wished to
get? Because early feminist work is another counterexample (along
with fascism) to the statement that literary criticism makes nothing
happen. Kate Millett's first book, Sexual Politics, was actually
a dissertation, but women who would never in a million years have
read Mimesis read it. The same was true of Rich's On Lies, Secrets
and Silence, and (on a smaller scale) Carolyn Heilbrun's Writing
a Woman's Life. These books and others like them changed their readers
forever, in ways that changed the world.
It's not that I don't see why some of my students and even a few
of my colleagues find the intrusion of feminist criticisms into
other parts of life kind of a "buzzkill." Still, it seems important
to maintain the right and the ability to act as whistleblowers in
the culture industry, spies in the house of the fathers. Being insiders
ought to help with this, not hinder. World of Difference was an
important moment, as was Alice Jardine's Gynesis (which might be
crudely summarized, "what do you mean 'Woman,' French man?"). One
might call this the revenge of the referent. 1970s and 1980s-style
feminist criticism had two basic gestures: asking that new voices
be included and valued, and pointing out things (usually power relations)
that were already there and had not been noticed. Both gestures
reformulated issues of representationality. (And notice that both
could be done equally well on either side of the "theory/not theory"
divide.)
The problem is, what do you say after that? How to continue, how
to move on from a political form of criticism once the problems
(theoretical or political) it was designed to address have been
solved. This is particularly tricky when (as with feminism) the
problems have in fact largely not been solved. Forms of woman-hating
have evolved that are resistant to the antibiotics developed on
an earlier generation, as Susan Fraiman shows very cogently in Cool
Men and the Second Sex.
From the beginning, Barbara Johnson has tackled misogyny obliquely
rather than head-on. There are advantages to not being in the place
where the enemy thinks you are "oh, her again, we know what she's
going to say." By the time the emphatic thumb of authority comes
down, one is already elsewhere.
* * *
If feminist self-representation is in a quandary, lesbian representation
is even more so. Even to speak of lesbian feminist criticism in
the age of queer might seem anachronistic; and Barbara Johnson is
not usually "packaged" as a "lesbian critic" anyhow. But what might
we see if we looked?
"Lesbian Spectacles" appeared in an anthology called Media Spectacles (it's also in The Feminist Difference). Here Johnson describes her
"intention to push myself to try something I had never done before;
to read explicitly as a lesbian." Johnson discovers that her "inner
lesbometer" finds Passing less erotic than Sula, The Accused more
erotic than Thelma and Louise, and ends by asking whether this means
her unconscious, or perhaps the Unconscious generally, has a kind
of a paradoxical structure. "The project of making my own erotic
unconscious participate in my reading process, far from guaranteeing
some sort of radical or liberating breakthrough, brings me face
to face with the political incorrectness of my own fantasy life"
(163). It's a very elegant essay, and I think the sting of it is
that reading by means of straightforward identity politics doesn't
particularly add much, though now we know a bit more about Barbara
Johnson: it isn't that she is hiding anything, but that she finds
other ways of reading ultimately more satisfying.
I wonder though whether one has to identify "lesbian reading" only
with the unconscious, and with individual desire. For instance,
"lesbian" might denote not a fixed essence nor a specific set of
conscious/ unconscious "experiences" but an epistemological position,
a take on the world, a different set of investments, a different
angle. Johnson seems to implicitly recognize this in Mother Tongues,
where "the lesbian question" arises first because of prohibitions:
the prosecution of Les Fleurs du Mal and its "vindication" by a
further trial in 1949 on the grounds that it was art, not life.
So in 1949, Baudelaire was rehabilitated. But lesbianism was thereby
doubly condemned. If it was real, it was awful; if it was symbolic,
it wasn't real
The possibility that real lesbianism could be idealized
would have to wait another twenty years. And when it did become
thinkable, it would not take Baudelaire with it. (11)
Johnson also raises the lesbian question within the woman question.
Why is woman a terrifying creature, is a lesbian more or less terrifying
than (for example) a mother, and is the lesbian terrifying because
she is too much, or not enough, of a woman? Johnson uses the term
"lesbian" rather than queer, except in her very interesting discussion
of Sylvia Plath. And there, she attempts to discern what the word
meant to Plath by deploying traditional philological and historical
methods, that is, looking at all the places where it occurs and
understanding them in context; doing the same for Woolf, whose diaries
Plath was reading
Johnson does not pretend to have finished finding
out what it might mean or include by doing so, but she has rendered
simplistic bad readings impossible.
Perhaps what Johnson says elsewhere about deconstruction, that
it is important not to confuse undecidability with meaninglessness,
is true of lesbian identity as well? I think she has pulled off
the big trick, which is to give some specific concreteness to lesbian
representation without trapping it inside an airless identity politics
where very little new can be said. Instead, she shows that just
as translation means coming to terms with the foreignness of all
languages, sex is a means of coming to terms with the separateness
of the other (what Mallarmé in his lesbian poem called "ce mal d'être
deux"); fundamentally the gender of the other person is less relevant
than one might, in the flush of youth, have thought. That's the
good news. The bad news is that if what one is hoping for is to
be perfectly heard, perfectly understood (and isn't that what every
writer or lover is hoping for) one is by definition always already
out of luck.
* * *
But here I am, months later, still sitting in front of an un-filled-out-form
Why is it so hard to say what "method" is? Perhaps it has something
do to with the fact that the two biggest methodological sins in
our calendar the "heresy of paraphrase" and the intentional fallacy
are not only unavoidable, but are actually also the basic methodological
tools without which we cannot operate, without which our practice
is utterly paralyzed. Once feminism is added to the picture, here's
one more: the injunction not to speak in the place of the other,
not to speak for other people: crucial to avoid, but precisely what
literary critics, like translators, do. Cultural studies adds a
taboo on questions of "taste," which again no one can hope to avoid
for long. Do we name these things taboo because we are inevitably
tempted by them? No wonder we always end up in bad faith, feeling
guilty, wanting to be scientists or poets or anything but what we
are.
And no wonder the students are confused.
Gayatri Spivak, too, has called for a return to close reading as
a way of moving toward forms of multiculturalism that would not
simply be tourism, forms of Area Studies that would not further
"develop" post-war cultural colonialism once sponsored by the CIA.
What she calls for detailed, specific, respectful, patient attention
to texts she does not often herself do: but it doesn't necessarily
mean she's wrong. There is a kind of methodological honor that is
not consequentialist, a kind of belief in empiricism—"look at the
page" that doesn't ask "what good or ill will this or that interpretation
of what x means do the world," or "how should I read this poem to
advance my career," but that says, "let's see what it can mean."
Almost a deliberate refusal to justify means by ends which, as I
said above, one can read as principled or as cowardly.
Have I done justice to Mother Tongues by telling you fairly what
is in it? Has Johnson done justice to de Man, de Man to Benjamin,
Benjamin to Baudelaire? What do we mean by "justice" when we say
this, why do we use these legal words? It is not method, though,
that is guilty or innocent. Procedural justice is a step toward
justice, but cannot guarantee justice if the evidence is corrupted,
if the starting points are wrong. Justice the good reading is
the goal at which we aim. Surely no one could claim that it describes
the condition in which we live. Perhaps that's why literary criticism
is still, after all, necessary.
* * *
Works Cited
Benjamin, Walter. "Theses on the Concept of History." Selected
Writings. Ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Trans. Harry
Zohn. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2003.
Culler, Johnson and Kevin Lamb, eds. Just Being Difficult? Academic
Writing in the Public Arena. Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 2003.
De Man, Paul. The Resistance to Theory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota
P, 1986.
Fraiman, Susan. Cool Men and the Second Sex. New York: Columbia
UP, 2003.
Garber, Marjorie, Jann Matlock and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, ed. Media
Spectacles. London and New York: Routledge, 1993.
Johnson, Barbara. The Critical Difference. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
UP, 1980.
---. "Lesbian Spectacles." The Feminist Difference. Cambridge:
Harvard UP, 1998.
---. The Wake of Deconstruction. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1994.
---. World of Difference. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987.
Richter, Gerhard. Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography.
Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2000.
Sapiro, Gisèle. La guerre des ecrivains 1940-1953. Paris: Fayard,
1999. |
