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PARTISAN REVIEW
plain.
If
the author's intentions don't count (and how could they,
since he doesn't exist), the text enters the academic equivalent of the
public domain. It belongs not to the writer, but to everyone, and so
the logic that labels plagiarism a vice is called into question. This,
too, may be cast in the terms of a political allegory. The author, con–
trolling the means of literary production, is the fat-cat capitalist.
Readers who rebel against his authority (a pun that clinches the
case) are the heroic proletariat, appropriating the language factory.
My pals and I were, I must confess, pleased with this quicky at–
tempt of ours to interpret deconstruction. Only at the MLA, we
realized, could such a discussion occur-we had certainly caught the
spirit of the place. We were gladdened, what's more, by the
knowledge that few proponents of the stuff could risk calling us
wrong (if, that is, they really do play by their own rules). For surely
they must want and expect
their
discourse to be treated no differently
from anyone else's? Then off in our separate ways we went, seeking
either glory or a nice knock-down argument-or at least a real live
author, corne back from the dead, corne back to tell us all.
There were, as there always are, poetry and fiction readings
galore. I missed the session at which John Ashbery received the
Commonwealth Award for Distinguished Service in Literature-in
part because of a simultaneous commitment and in part because the
announcement neglected to identify Ashbery by name. "This year's
recipient is an American poet, who will accept the award in
person," the invitation read, and somehow one didn't expect that it
would be Ashbery who mounted the podium. Allen Ginsberg's
reading, a day later, was by contrast properly publicized and
allowed the lucky listener to rehearse all his ambivalences, his en–
thusiasms as well as his doubts, about Ginsberg the poet and
Ginsberg the countercultural guru. The poet began by reading
"Howl" with as much passion and conviction as though he'd writ–
ten it last week and not thirty years ago. It was a powerful perfor–
mance, and it dramatized, when set in the context of his more recent
work, what a falling off there has been since "Howl" and "Kad–
dish"-and how Ginsberg goes astray when he shuns the emotional
source of those poems in favor of political or mystical pro–
nouncements: when his truth, if you like, gives way to propaganda.
But when Ginsberg proceeded to read the title poem of his
latest volume,
White Shroud,
the listener realized that it would be
foolish to write him off. In this poem, perhaps his best in over a
decade, Ginsberg taps his truest poetic impulse, the impulse behind
