the book is dead, long live the book! - the new york times

23/01/15 23:56THE BOOK IS DEAD, LONG LIVE THE BOOK! - The New York Times

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September 13, 1987

THE BOOK IS DEAD, LONG LIVE THE BOOK!By JOHN STURROCK; John Sturrock is the author of ''Structuralism & Since: From Levi-Strauss to Derrida.''

GLAS By Jacques Derrida. Translated by John P. Leavey Jr. and Richard Rand. 262 pp. Lincoln:University of Nebraska Press. $50. GLASSARY By John P. Leavey Jr. Essay by Gregory L. Ulmer.Foreword by Jacques Derrida. 320 pp. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. $50. JACQUESDERRIDA is a teacher of philosophy in Paris, and for some years he wrote only the sort of booksthat a French philosophy professor of inordinate brilliance might be expected to write - difficultbooks to say the least, but conventionally philosophical so far as the language they were written inwent. They advanced a radical thesis about language, however: when we use it we cannot expect itto mean only what we want it to mean, because it has a semantic life of its own, and its meaningsescape from us. There can be no such thing as a mastery of language. Worse, language is soundsand forms before it is concepts, and when we write or speak sounds and forms will come into ourminds uninvited because one word can but lead to others. So, it is as much to the resources of thelanguage as to our own proud genius that we owe ''our'' concepts. All of which is the blackest heresyfor a philospher, of course, because rational thought is in peril if the thinker cannot be seen asbeing in full command of his utterances. Irresponsible views such as Mr. Derrida's are better left topoets, who may positively welcome such voluptuous surrender to the surfaces of language.

In ''Glas'' Mr. Derrida finally throws in his lot with the poets and stops pretending he has languageunder control. Or pretends to stop pretending, for this is a very ambiguous enterprise, and Mr.Derrida is too cunning and witty a thinker to wish to be thought quite sincere. But ''Glas'' isphilosophy no longer; as a piece of writing it has no known genre. It will disgust orthodoxphilosophers with its fantastic wordplay, yet seem barbarously abstract to innocent literarypersons. In the best avant-garde tradition, it is a work that courts unpopularity, to be idolized by afew and despaired of by the many.

We are not allowed to call ''Glas'' a book either, because Mr. Derrida would have it that, as a literarycategory, the book is dead; the egregious ''Glas'' is something more futuristic, a text. The text doesnot pretend to the coherence, rationality or authoritativeness of the book, but rather collaboratesjoyously with the anarchy of language and starts semantic hares running in all directions. ''Glas''goes on a joy ride into the great unconscious of language in an orgy of ''dissemination,'' or theuninhibited scattering of meanings; what Mr. Derrida sardonically calls ''the police forces oflanguage'' are overrun. This is a text that sometimes makes sense, but often does not. It is too denseand too mobile in its ideas to be readable - readability is for books. Many who enter into it



benevolently or even hopefully at page one will soon curse its waywardness and leave off; as for thehapless reviewer, for whom perseverance is a duty, he cannot at the end say what ''Glas'' is about,because it is about all too much. He must take refuge first in offering a typographical description ofthe text.

Inside, ''Glas'' is not as other books are; there are echoes in the format of what was once calledconcrete poetry. Each page contains two slender columns of prose, set in different sizes of type,with a narrow corridor of white space down the middle. Let into these columns at the side areinterpolations, in bold type, some of them short, some long. These are like footnotes insofar as theyrelate to matters raised on the page in question, but they are unlike footnotes in that they do notrelate to any particular word or sentence. Mr. Derrida's side notes float free and can be read atwhatever point you fancy.

Reading ''Glas,'' in fact, is a scandalously random experience, for, quite apart from when to turnaside to these insets, there is the larger question of how to read the two main columns of print. Theleft-hand column is a commentary or exposition or, in Mr. Derrida's own description, a ''violentdecipherment'' of the philosophy of Hegel, the right-hand column a similar maltreatment of theworks of the French novelist and playwright Jean Genet. On the left, Hegel's all-embracingdialectics of absolute knowledge, dazzlingly glossed by Mr. Derrida, and on the right, the seditious,homoerotic fantasies of the jailbird-turned-writer Genet, forced for once to keep respectablecompany. Those who want Hegel but not Genet may read exclusively down the left-hand columns;those who want Genet sans Hegel must travel on the right. Or you can enter into the spirit of thething and read both, hoping to discover what these two weirdly different figures are doing face toface like this. The two columns resonate off one another, we are told; they are two sounding bellswith but a single clapper -the ricocheting reader. ''Glas'' is so made as to impose a certain vagrancyon the eyes and attention of whoever reads it and to break us of our nasty linear habits.

If knowing what order to read it in is already a problem, making sense of it is another, and moreintractable, one. It helps to have read something of Hegel and Genet first, because there is, by Mr.Derrida's own avowal, an element of ''decipherment'' in all this. Why ''violent'' however? Because heonly ''reads'' other thinkers or writers in this fashion in order partially to expropriate them of theirwritings. This is done not so that he can usurp what they have written by making them a part of hisown text - or so he would claim -but to demonstrate the limits of an author's authority over hiswritings and the secret paths by which meanings circulate in them by virtue of the ungovernablelatencies of words. Thus in ''Glas,'' it is the turn of Hegel and Genet to join the hit list of writerswhom Mr. Derrida has already ''dispossessed'' - a good joke in Genet's case, for he is an authorfamous for having been a convicted thief early in his life.

NATURALLY, the pitiless law which says that no writer owns what he writes is one by which Mr.Derrida himself must be seen to abide.

Hence ''Glas,'' an exuberantly clever, punning text, is as much ours as his, since what we get out ofit may not be at all what he put into it. Even Mr. Derrida is at the mercy of language - only he



knows himself to be so, whereas Hegel and Genet believed otherwise. When this book first cameout in France 13 years ago, Mr. Derrida was accused of being little better than a punster, crazilyadrift amidst the sound effects of language. In the preface he has written for ''Glassary,'' by which''Glas'' in translation comes attended, he defends himself against that charge on the grounds that heis not making puns, but discovering and analyzing them, following them up to see where they maylead semantically. That is a fair defense. ''Glas'' is not a case of the philosopher copping outaltogether, because there is hard, instructive thought here, even if to extract it can seem a tedioustask.

''Glas'' was not meant to be translated; indeed, it was a book so written as to be untranslatable. Yetnow here it is, in an ingenious English translation, and supported by a ''Glassary,'' which is forthose many readers who would find ''Glas'' on its own quite beyond them. But ''Glas'' in English isnot the same text as ''Glas'' in French; the title is the same but the words have changed, and Englishwords cannot be played with to exactly the same effects as French words. Who is to say whether themeanings given off - or ''disseminated'' - in the translation match those disseminated by theoriginal? We have no third language, somewhere between French and English, against which to testthem to see whether they are identical. Thus ''Glas'' in English mocks, among so many otherstandard literary ideas, the notion that translation achieves a semantic identity from one languageto another.

Jacques Derrida is a philosopher from whom many of us have learned what we judge to beimportant and seductive truths about the nature of language, and it would be good to go onlearning from him. But pedagogy seems now to bore him and few except devotees with time ontheir hands will learn much from the contortions and excesses of ''Glas.'' Nor is ''Glassary'' the mosthelpful of accessories. It contains lists of textual allusions in ''Glas,'' along with key words, as wellas an opaque essay by one of the two translators, John P. Leavey Jr., which is more imitative thanexplanatory of Mr. Derrida's writing. But it contains also a sensible and enlightening generalaccount of Mr. Derrida's thought by Gregory L. Ulmer, which bears on ''Glas'' without exactlyclarifying it. ''Glas'' itself, I fear, asks too much of one's patience and intelligence; our defenseagainst a text declaring itself to be unreadable may be to call its author's bluff and simply leave itunread.

Drawing; detail of a page from ''Glas''

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the book is dead, long live the book! - the new york times

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