Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2002
Subject: Craig Dworkin
talk
>Did any New York listserv
folk attend Craig Dworkin's talk "against meaning" last night?
If you did, please report. He's a smart cookie and I'd like to get a
gist of what he's "for."
Tom Thompson
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To: T.T. From: J.J.
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I found Craig Dworkin's
"Against Meaning" lecture at the White Box gallery very upsetting.
(I was extremely eager
to go: I rarely leave the house at night anymore, but I vividly remember
his Barnard conference lecture on Lyn Hejinian and paranoia.
He shared a panel with Charles Altieri back then at Barnard.
Dworkin's talk included references to the asylum-institutionalized "madman"
who composed much of the Oxford English Dictionary. Dworkin's scheme
had to do with the paranoid underpinnings of language and the paranoid
processes of seeking out and finding meaning.)
At White Box, he wasn't
using the word "paranoid" anymore.
The audience of perhaps
less than three dozen, crammed together in tightly squeezed chair in
the midst of any otherwise expansive gallery, included much of the Manhattan
illuminati: Charles Bernstein, Bruce Andrews, Ulla
Dydo, Claudia Rankine, Kenny Goldsmith .
. .
Dworkin passed out xeroxed hand-outs. His hair was moussed into standing.
Partially from my notes:
He began with George
Oppen's Discreete Series, from which he drew a model for
his "applied paragrammatics," a reading strategy which he
defined as "willing to sacrifice its reference", "a grammar
of reading".
A "discrete series"
is a mathematical term for a series where every term is empirically
justified, rather than being derived from preceding propositions. That
is, as opposed to an arithmetic progression (the Fibonacci: 1,2,3,5,8,13...),
he gave the subway stops on an East Side train. He said, à la
Oppen, that it is the very fact of a poem's acceptability as a mechanism
that is the proof of meaning.
He proceeded through trailing
verbatim dictionary definitions which Oppen had followed in the structuring
of his poem: the OED as an organizing structure. (His research included
that a new printing of the OED had been a New Year's Day front page
story.)
The multiple definitions
for a single word as they appear in a dictionary are a discrete series,
vs. an inductive "paragogic chain"--- by following a logic
from signifier to signifier: glass > grass > crass > class,
a "bitter romance" of associations.
He spent a good deal of
time discussing the word "rim" in Oppen (with "a straight
face").
He next moved on to Saussure's
notorious hypogrammes: "multiple, uncontrollable and unhierarchical
meanings"; DeMan spoke of the "terror" of the
letter.
Riffaterre's book,
The Semiotics of Poetry: When a gap opens up between a word and
a text, the motivating anxiety is a single unwritten word. Texts have
an unwritten core, a "matrix". Grammatical disruptions become
a clue to the presence of a matrix.
He gave examples.
From Apollinaire's
poem, "Monday in Christine Street":
"Trois becs de gaz
allumés
La patronne est poitrinaire"
("Three gas burners
lit / The proprietress is consumptive"). Dworkin found Apollinaire's
name in the line-endings,
"a-" "-pa-"
"-lu-" "naire", or such.
(Saussure's hypogrammes,
--- or "la folie de Saussure" [the madness of Saussure]---
was his similar, decades-long notebooks, where he traced the names of
Greek gods in Latin literature --- repeat: Greek gods in Latin
poetry, Aphrodite, etc.)
Not wanting it to seem
that the Dworkin method of reading was applicable only to the avant-garde,
he turned to Robert Frost's old chestnut, "Mending Wall".
(In excerpt:
"the frozen ground-swell
. . .
. . . The gaps I mean,
. . .
. . . 'Good fences make good neighbors.'
. . . I was like to give offense.
. . . I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly").
Dworkin found the same
Semiotics of Poetry dynamic ("it warps itself around a missing
core"). (Saussure's term "hypogramme" was taken from
the Greek for signature.)
"(F)rozen ground-swell"
is a synonym for rime frost; "rime" is a homonym for "rhyme";
"frost" was a term for "literary failure" that Frost
would have been fighting against. "The gaps" mean the gaps
of Riffaterre lacunae; for "elves", read "selves".
"fences"/"offence" was a Russian "zdvig"
or "shift".
Dworkin's third example,
p. 258 from an edition of Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano:
"Yvonne's father made his way . . . earnest candid eyes . . . synthetic
hemp".
This prose hid a Dworkin
matrix for the name--- Ernest Hemingway, Lowry's literary father
(known as "Papa Hemingway", with "Papa" appearing
on a preceding
page):
earnest hemp way.
These repeated examples
were his self-admitted defense against accusations of a "readerly
hat trick" or "hermeneutical prestidigitation".
He said he found "recourse
to soft psychology not satisfying either" (Lowry, writing around
a bullfight, thinks of Hemingway), but acknowledged "the degree
to which readers are more comfortable with corroborative" evidence.
He said he found these
hypograms "factually, incontroveribly there"; that it was
not chance and permutations.
In Elizabeth Bishop's "The Moose", which is about an
animal (C.D. cited critical commentary as to grandiose literary themes),
he said the poem is about--- orthodonture.
He lined up words: "PINK
glancing", "beat-up ENAMEL", "BLEACHED, ridged as
clamshells", "BRUSHING the dented flank", "waits,
PATIENT", and BRACES" to refer to unmentioned teeth.
Bishop at the time was
going to the dentist twice a week. (---Bathos?)
(My notes do not record
Dworkin commenting on the French word for tooth, "dent", and
Bishop's "dented".)
In passing, he also cited
Zukofsky, where three or four mentions of "law" are
closely accompanied by "tessera", he said, but without Z.
ever using the word "mosaic" (Mosaic law = the Law of Moses)!
The Q-&-A was not quite sympathetic: the first questioner accused
him of not "opening onto paths that might lead us away from meaning"
("Against Meaning") but rather back to classic modernist grids,
an aligning, congruences. Another questioner seemed argumentative in
talking about an "architectonic self".
I was quite bothered. My
question accused his project of reenacting what Geoffrey Hartman's
1981 Saving the Text had already done with the Romanticists (Wordsworth:
word's worth; etc.), which Hartman called "the spectral name."
Dworkin (with the exception
of Bishop's teeth) was in all cases "re-discovering" embedded
in the text what was already conspicuously written at the top of the
text: the author's name.
This differed greatly from
Saussure's hypogramme matrices, which found the names of gods like "Apollo"
(Saussure's Apollo had been Dworkin's springboard into Apollinaire)
or "Aphrodite", --- which, importantly, were not individual
author's lemon ink autographs but suprapersonal. Saussure, in
search for an explanation for these disturbing archaic forces inscribed
across so many writers' texts, even conjectured whether there might
have been some cultic or religious explanation.
Dworkin, instead,
at exactly our contemporary
turning-pint where reading and criticism have moved beyond the fantasy
of (writing packaged one-for-one to) the discrete unit of a self-sufficient
author, broader territorities (wilderness) of language as common possession,
and a-subjective propulsions that are the agency for writing,
was re-bundling or "re-authoring"
these texts back under the souscription of the individual author,
neat bundles.
Bishop's teeth: biographical
reductivism.
What would be interesting
would be finding Louis Zukofsky's name in Lowry, or Hemingway's in Frost,
I suggested.
Dworkin demonstrated no corrective familiarity with statistics and randomness,
or their anomalies. He had fallen into a statistical rabbit-hole. (You'd
be amazed how many time the same doubles will come up in a row.)
Definitely, the name is
a narcissistic imago, and we develop fetishistic attachments to its
letters. But Dworkin was going from general principles to a sort of
"Find-a-Word" puzzle, where the solution --- surprise! ---
in x out of y cases was a game of nominal, diagonal acrostics.
He responded by saying
that he thought it might have something to do with the numinous or nebulous
status of personal names as words, which he does not understand.
---I can't see how it moves "our" mission forward to go retrograde
(moving from a self of societal construction to a metaphysics of "confidential,
to the point of secrecy," as he said about Oppen). He's re-instating
the self-enclosed, autonomous figure of the writer as the prime deciphering
key to the text, where the "punch line" solution will be finding
at the end what you started off with at the beginning.
His insistence on the "objectivity"
of his findings and truth was jettisoning the whole rich ground of indeterminacy,
and ambiguity, and The Absurd (that which can be neither true nor false).
---To say nothing of the spuriousness of his methodology.
The Lowry Hemingway was
a single confabulation ("objective" or not) on p. 258 of a
400 pp. novel.
A "proof" strung
out of four, maybe five tenuous examples, one of them (the Zukofsky)
undocumented yields a whole paragrammatics. Between one example and
the next, however, there was considerable slippage, with name
only putatively unifying tellingly different cases:
Frost's name was hidden
in synonyms, but was his own
name in his own text;
Apollinaire's name was
his own name in his own text,
but appeared as splintered syllables, unlike Frost's
rebus;
Lowry's Hemingway was
made up of splintered syllables,
but was somebody else's name, not the author's;
"Moses" in
Zukofsky involved neither the author's name
nor that of a living or real person nor syllables: it
depended on a Latin-to-English translation.
Bishop's had nothing
to do with names or any
"unwritten word" at all, per se (a body part,
instead); etc.
Dworkin's schizo-analysis was conducted without even passing reference
to the possibility of a rhetorical trope of paronomasia. Writers writing
without any sense of pun.
In resuscitating, after The Death of the Author, these authors
this way, and stressing "objectivity", Dworkin absolved himself
of the uncomfortable position of being a reader with responsibility
for his own idiosyncratic dyslexias: instead, the return of the invisible,
Archmidean critic.
I think he lost ground by backing away from his previous "paranoia"
model (which was anti-subjective). By moving on instead to a hunt for
neutral alphabetic solutions, punch-lines, he has, in a sense, deepened
his previous project further by joining into the affectlessness of paranoia's
clues.
Paranoia is, literally
(etymologically), beside feelings, that is, always a little to
the left or right of emotions. Paranoia is more concerned with cracking
the FBI's cryptography than with what it feels like to be so
consumed and monomaniacal.
He said that the very fact
that Frost and Bishop scholars become upset with him makes him think
he's on to something. Others' emotive frustration is not an academically
recognized barometer for confirming a hypothesis.
We were left with handfuls
of alphabet blocks, Scrabble solitaire played with books. Even were
they delivered less objectionably, those details could have been bridges
into empathic deepening with the source texts, instead of "A-ha!"
eureka at yet another ghost writer's signature: Bishop's toothache becomes
a sort of joke, in its mundanity, rather than an opportunity to connect
with the force of personal, physical pain (toothache, after all, being
even Wittgenstein's preferred metaphor for investigations into
the language of pain and private sensations); Zukofsky's unwritten (oral?)
"Mosaic law" was not a segue into
glimpsing the proud, idealized self-identification that he, as a Jew,
self-aggrandized with the sainted law-giver; ...
Dworkin must be right: I'm as bothered as the Frost scholars.
(And from Princeton,
no less!)