Peter Brooks RESPONSE to ELENA RUSSO

Peter Brooks

RESPONSE TO ELENA RUSSO

aking off from Elena Russo’s title, I think I might call these remarks: T“Morning in Baltimore, followed by High Noon in New Haven (then perhaps: Tea Time in Berkeley, followed, possibly, by Nightfall in Irvine.)” The point I would like to start with is that it wasn’t predictable: here was a country—the US—that traditionally had no use for metaphysics, a country better known for producing pragmatism and legal realism as philosophical stances, for instance, that suddenly succumbed to a Francophiliac mania for abstruse thought largely issuing from a tradition of European phenomenol- ogy very little known in the US and expressed in a taxingly opaque idiom. As Elena suggested, to the cultural right, it eventually became clearly an invasion of mind-snatchers, and deconstruction was actually referred to in journalism that I read at the time as a moral menace to youth. The starting point was indeed—Elena chose it well—the conference on the “Languages of Criticism in the Sciences of Man” held at Johns Hopkins in October of 1966, though I would also like to note that that same year there was the pioneering “Structuralism” issue of Yale French Studies edited by the late Jacques Ehrmann, which I think was also part of the frst discussion of the new phenomenon. Elena mentioned the various maîtres à penser who were at the conference, but of course it was most of all the paper presented by a young, hitherto unknown philosopher, Jacques Derrida, who the following year would publish both De la grammatologie and L’Écriture et la Différance, that captivated the professors and graduate students who were in attendance. The paper, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” remains a major text of reference in the movement from structuralism to poststructuralism. This is the point I wish to stress: here we have one of the keys to the very peculiar implementation and development of French theory on American soil: the coming of poststructuralism virtually without there ever having been a structuralism preceding it. Elena mentioned language as an object of thought and analysis to many of the participants, but I want to say parenthetically that this by no means excluded such other disciplines as psychoanalysis, but rather simply “lingui- fed” them, you might say. But I thought at the time—in the early 1970s, when these ideas were coming into the curriculum and into the courses I taught— that the next step might be toward a general semiotics, beyond language to a

The Romanic Review Volume 101 Numbers 1–2 © The Trustees of Columbia University

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general theory of sign systems as a whole. I am thinking here, for instance, of the Roland Barthes of Éléments de sémiologie and Système de la mode, and of the Umberto Eco of A Theory of Semiotics. But that didn’t turn out to be the case. On the contrary, the frst tentative germination of structuralism was (to change the metaphor) defected almost at once into the poststructuralist mode, and literary structuralism of the semiotic variety never really put down deep roots in American soil, though the example of Barthes, Todorov, and Genette did nourish the development of a distinctively American narratology, which continues to fourish to this day in the work, for instance, of Gerald Prince. So I think what we got is poststructuralism without structuralism, and I’ve always regretted that. Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play” essay really was all about a de-centering of the structuralism that most Americans had never heard of in the frst place. And of course, American philosophical soil was not a very rich medium for this kind of transplantation. The new work didn’t generally arrive, in fact, in philosophy departments at all, but in literature departments: French departments, comparative literature departments, and then, much later, Eng- lish departments. Literary poststructuralism does enter an existing context, one that I think was most powerfully defned by New Criticism: a kind of formalism not wholly unlike the proto-structuralism of the Russian formalists and the Prague lin- guistic circle, for instance, but largely innocent of theory and largely devoted to interpretation, which was something of a bête noire in high structuralism. New Critical close reading at its most insistent and probing eschewed any- thing not provided by the text under study itself, and it promoted a kind of skeptical neutralism of interpretation, of metaphors and other fgural language, for instance, but it could, at times, be subversive of received interpretation and conventional understanding of what authors were taken to mean. Though its tone and manner were wholly different from Parisian discourse, close reading could teach some of the same radical textualities practiced by someone like Barthes. (I refer you here to Paul de Man’s short and still very pertinent essay in TLS called “The Return to Philology,” which argues pre- cisely the radical effect of the textual reading fostered by New Criticism at its best.) So I think it’s not surprising that the deconstructive reading of the type practiced by Derrida (and already in the United States by de Man) could be grafted, so to speak, onto New Critical close reading almost seamlessly. The aims of the two kinds of reading are, of course, very different; traditionally, the New Critical seeks to demonstrate the wholeness of the form as a complex structure and texture, whereas the deconstructive takes us to the aporias of the text, the radically fgural nature of language, its incapacity ever to coincide with the world that it wishes to name. But if you’re adept at the New Critical kind of reading, it’s not hard to learn the deconstructive variety, and I think

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indeed many American graduate students, in particular, quickly did so. The result was a plethora of essays offering persuasive deconstructive readings of texts of all sorts, where all that seemed to be lacking was any sense of the point of the enterprise. There seemed to be nothing at stake. The stakes to Derrida, of course, were enormous: the metaphysical tradition of Western thought was up for a radical critique. For de Man, too, the issues were of great import, concerning the very nature of literature and its language. In the work of many of the disciples, on the other hand, I felt that deconstruction had become simply one more academic exercise. So I think there was a sense of shrinkage of the enterprise in its American incarnation, which had to do with its exclusively literary defnition in the academy. Deconstruction and French theory in general took up their abode in the feld where little in fact seemed at stake, at least in the view of an extra- academic public. And yet, there is this paradox, which I think is important: it was also because of this literary habitat that French theory came to grow, and could continue to fourish in its extra-hexagonal interpretation. Depart- ments of literary study became the laboratories of the new during the 1970s and the 1980s. I mean this very seriously. Other felds began to look to literature departments for new methods and paradigms: historians, art historians, architects, interpretative sociologists, musicologists, even law professors began to feel that something was going on in literary study that was worth paying attention to, and students, who are often, of course, the cross-fertilizing agents of academic change, brought from one feld to another barbarous ideas that had to be dealt with. And in the larger cultural context, of course, one result, as Elena mentioned, was the culture wars of the 1980s and beyond (I think they still resonate, though thankfully less loudly today). When William Bennett, ex cathedra as chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, issued his mani- festo, To Reclaim a Legacy, in 1984, he preached a restoration of what he called “intellectual authority.” If the culture wars were not exclusively about theory, French or otherwise, theory nonetheless was at the storm’s center, since it appeared to have subverted the claim that the humanities were the place of unchanging values, a kind of high table of the best that could be thought and said in the world. The humanities, and particularly literary studies, had no need of theory, which was distracting students from the great books, accord- ing to Bennett and others. Shakespeare had been supplanted in the curriculum by Derrida. The National Association of Scholars (which I assume still exists though one doesn’t hear much about it anymore) was founded around this time to “save” literature from the theorists. To the contrary, I would say: the coming of theory actually rescued the study of literature at a time when it was threatened with sclerosis and irrelevance. In particular, I think one could almost prove that it brought students back to

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literary studies with a sense that there was something exciting going on. It was a something that might, in the long run, turn out to be unsubstantiable, and perhaps unusable, but then most literary undergraduates weren’t plan- ning on building a career on how they had read either Milton or Foucault. It opened the possibility of a trans-disciplinary kind of knowing that I still think characterized the energy of the best undergraduates of the day and made a number of them feel that getting their readings of diffcult texts right was of real importance. So I think, fnally, and here I want to end, whatever the sins or excesses or naïvetés of theory in the American university, it was nonetheless infnitely preferable as a point of reference, and what you might call a state of being, than what appears to have happened in France in the decades since the 1970s, which seems to me a kind of fatigued return to something resem- bling the nineteenth-century Sorbonne, with endless reiterations of critiques génétiques that feed the publishers’ lists and provide fodder for what is often trivial critical work. I think the American situation is, on the whole, rather more exciting.

Princeton University

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