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travagant refusal to face the problems of the relationship ofliterature
to reality. He does not see the view that thereby the study of
literature is deprived of all social and human meaning and reduced
to a playful theory of language, an impoverishment literary studies
would pay for bitterly.
The Ear of the Other. Otobiography, Transference, Translation
(Schocken Books, 1985) is the translation of the discussions held at
the University of Montreal in 1979 between Derrida and a number
of colleagues in Montreal. It is astonishingly lucid in defiance of
Derrida's own statement that lucidity is the proof of shallowness.
Derridajokes again about his name, which is now supposed to mean
"derriere de la rideau." He is surprised about the success of the term
"deconstruction." "I love," he says, "everything that I deconstruct in
my own manner," but at other moments in the discussion, he seems
to retreat from deconstruction almost completely as a doctrine.
Some interest is in the defense of Nietzsche's early reflections on
education, which have been exploited by friends and foes, because
Nietzsche speaks about "Fuhrer," "obedience," "subordination,"
"discipline," and "subjection." Much of the book is given to the com–
mentators who finally are so loquacious that the whole thing trails off
into irrelevant, totally marginal and sometimes very obvious reflec–
tions on translation and autobiography.
In quite different books,
Motivesfor Fiction
(Harvard University
Press, 1984) by Robert Alter and
Habitations of the Word
(Simon and
Schuster, 1985), essays by William H. Gass, the topic of representa–
tion and the war for reality is discussed very differently, but with the
same conclusion. Mr. Gass's essay is a virtuoso display of concrete
imagery listing "mind, matter and metaphor" as the instruments in
the war to reach reality. The novel is, he argues, the most successful
genre. In Robert Alter's
Motives for Fiction,
another recent collection
of miscellaneous essays ranging through several literatures with ease
and confidence, "Mimesis and the Motives of Fiction" argues against
the view that novels are just "signs to be interpreted." He says "it is
just not true that a lover's intimate caress is every bit as semiotic as a
traffic light or even an image in a sonnet of Baudelaire." He considers
this the linguistic fallacy and is rightly shocked by a friend saying that
"your assessment of novels is based on
experience
and we have demon–
strated that there is no such thing." "We run into the danger of being
directed by the theorists to read in a way that real readers on land or
sea have never read." Mr. Alter, however, is very acutely aware of
fiction which can be called self-reflective, the devices of fiction which
