STATE OF CRITICISM
27
focused on a painting by Van Gogh commonly thought to be the
depiction of a pair of shoes . In that lecture, Derrida placed somewhat
special emphasis on the role of a voice that kept interrupting the flow
of his own more formal discourse as it spun out the terms of philoso–
phical debate. This voice, which Derrida enacted in a slight falsetto,
was, he explained, that of a woman, who kept breaking into the
measured order of the exposition with questions that were slightly
hysterical, very exasperated, and above all
short.
"What pair?" she kept
insisting; and "Who said they were a
pair
of shoes? " Now this voice,
which he cast as a woman's, was of course Derrida's own; and it
functioned to telegraph in a charged and somewhat disguised way the
central argument which for other reasons must proceed at a more
professorial pace. But aside from its rather terroristic reductiveness, this
voice functioned to open and theatricalize the space of Derrida's
writing, alerting us to the dramatic interplay of levels and styles and
speakers that had formerly been the prerogative of literature but not of
critical or philosophical discourse.
The fact of this arrogation of certain terms and ruses of literature
leads me to the other lecture I have in mind, the one by Roland Barthes
entitled "Longtemps je me suis couche de bonne heure" where, by
analogizing his own career to that of Proust's, Barthes more explicitly
pointed to an intention
to
blur the distinction between literature and
criticism. Indeed much of Barthes's most rece.nt work-I am thinking
of
The Pleasure of the Text, A Lover's Discourse,
and
Roland Barthes
by
Roland Barthes-simply
cannot be called criticism, but it cannot,
for that matter, be called not-criticism either. Rather criticism finds
itself caught in a dramatic web of many voices, citations, asides,
divigations. And what is created, as in the case in much of Derrida, is a
kind of paraliterature. Since Barthes's and Derrida's projects are
extremely different, it is perhaps only in this matter of inaugurating a
paraliterary genre that their work can be juxtaposed. The paraliterary
space is the space of debate, quotation, partisanship, betrayai, reconcili–
ation; but it is not the space of unity, coherence, or resolution that we
think of as constituting the work of literature. For towards that notion
of the literary work, both Barthes and Derrida have a deep enmity. So
what is left is drama without the Play, voices without the Author, and
criticism without the Argument. And it is no wonder that this coun–
try's critical establishment-outside the university, that is-remains
unaffected by this work, simply cannot use it. Because the paraliterary
cannot be a model for either the judgment of or the systematic
unpacking of the meanings of a work of art, which criticism's task is
thought to be.
