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is a way to be sexually penetrated by still remaining virgin. " The
whole later interpretation of the poem is a tissue of sheer fantasy of
farfetched analogies and metaphors with not a grain of evidence in
the text to substantiate them, though Miller, in the question and an–
swer period, grants that a poem has a "coercive effect on any reader
and any reading" and that "I can't make George Eliot's
Middlemarch
or Stevens's 'On the Rock' mean anything that I want it to mean ."
Abrams, in the following essay, "Construing and Deconstructing,"
comes to a mildly-phrased conclusion: "I can't say I've learned any–
thing I consider valid about the meaning of Wordsworth's poem."
Abrams examines deconstruction dispassionately apart from the dis–
cussion of the Wordsworth to conclude that "deconstructive readings
may become a display of modish terminology, which never engages
with anything recognizable as a work of literature." Abrams, in his
usual conciliatory way, makes many concessions to the ingenuity
and learning of the deconstructionists. Finally, however, he alludes
to their fatal flaw : "Literature has survived over the millennia by be–
ing read as a presentation of human character and matters of human
interest, delight and concern.
It
is far from obvious that the values in
such a reading can for long be replaced by the value , however ap–
pealing in its initial novelty, of reading literature as the tropological
vehicle for a set of conundrums without solutions." Particularly the
absurdity of denying any relation ofliterature to reality and thus any
human and social meaning seems to me so obvious that the appeal of
deconstruction becomes simply incomprehensible.
The posthumous collection of de Man's essays,
The Rhetoric of
Romanticism
(Columbia University Press, 1984), ("romanticism" us–
ed very loosely to include Yeats), prints some of de Man's earliest
essays (1962 seems the first) and a large part of his 1960 Harvard
dissertation on Yeats.
It
also contains two hitherto unpublished
essays, "Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric" and one on
Kleist's strange dialogue on the puppet theater. The earlier writings
are straightforward close readings, very much in the wake of the
New Criticism, which he studied under Reuben Brower at Harvard .
Still there are some anticipations of his later, deeply skeptical view of
the power of language, even in the first essay "Intentional Structure
of the Romantic Image ." For example, his comment, "The word is
always a free presence to the mind, the means by which the per–
manence of natural entities can be put into question and thus
negated, time and again, in the endlessly widening spiral of the
dialectic," sounds almost like Derrida.
