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PARTISAN REVIEW
trivial or highly significant. It may mean everything or nothing. As a
text it is merel y a " trace," a detached remnant of something which may
be irrecoverable. From this exquisite miniaturization, however, Der–
rida leaps without warning to the largest generality: the possibility that
" the totality of Nietzsche's text, in some monstrous way, might well be
of the type 'I have forgotten my umbrella,'" for this illusory "totality"
is itself no more than a larger trace or remnant of what may also be
irrecoverable. And the same may be true of Derrida's own "cryptic and
parodic" text, which he suggests may be no more than ajoke, a parody
of his own ideas, and so on.
Derrida's aim, which he achieves beautifully, is to open up a
vertigo of interpretation which forswears interpretation-by excess of
interpretation to prove its very futility-to place a time bomb in the
analytical baggage of all practical criticism. It's a brilliant perfor–
mance, a feat of prestidigitation, but to agree with him we must
abandon the plain evidence that a good deal more can be gleaned from
Nietzsche's books, and even from Derrida.'s, than from the phrase " I
have forgotten my umbrella" (though, as Derrida would say, the latter
can be more important when it starts to rain). What really damages
deconstructionist criticism is not the questions it raises about the status
of texts and the possibilities of interpretation but rather its remoteness
from texts, its use of them as interchangeable occasions for a theoretical
trajectory which always returns
to
the same points of origin, the same
indeterminacy and happy multiplicity. For Nietzsche and his umbrella
we could substitute Rousseau and his ribbon, or any other text, and the
point would be the same. What wouldn' t change is the use of texts as
opportunities for self-display, the abdication of responsibility which
Steven Marcus aptly describes as a "cheerful nihilism." For the New
Critical text as object we have simply exchanged the deconstructionist
critic as subject. Skeptical of interpretation, the critic remains faithful
to the sound of his voice, the invitation texts offer to his own
resourceful cleverness.
Eugene Goodheart
Morris Dickstein 's paper expresses the ambivalence toward
the new New Criticism, which has characterized the spirit of the
conference. Virtually everyone has spoken of the temptations of
structuralist and deconstructionist understandings of literature. At the
