yours.
What does it mean to take as one’s model for language (or even just for writing) epitaphs, as Wordsworth’s “Essay” does? (That move compares with the stories in Rousseau’s Second Discourse and Essai sur l’origine des langues, which alternately award priority to passion and to need.) Surely it means an attempt to realize, to phenomenalize, the ontology we too readily “think” (or receive the idea) is implicit i.e., present, in language or in writing, which to “be” language has to be able to mean something when you or I are no longer “there.”
Regenerating a description of this possibility or “predicament” that would not have the illusory ease and familiarity of that description takes more care than I could manage; one goes back to Limited Inc. (1988) and “Sign and Symbol.” So just say that there is no one time at which anything “takes place.” Wordsworth’s move could be seen as an attempt to translate this possibility—this “predicament”—into aesthetic and generic terms and thereby naturalize and undo or alleviate it. An apologia for language, modulating into a threat—that’s how the Essays on Epitaphs, at a certain pace, read. Wordsworth’s Essay would give a face to the enigma of how the meaning gets to the words. And no answers are excluded, including “from things.” To say “from things” doesn’t necessarily put you in empiricism or positivism, especially, in “our” traditions, if the things in question are trees, rocks, or can be called “she” or “elle” (or “T”).
“It is to be remembered,” the “Essay” reads, “that to raise a monument is a sober and a reflective act; that the inscription which it bears is intended to be permanent, and for universal perusal.” And also:
an epitaph is not a proud writing shut up for the studious: it is exposed to all—to the wise and the most ignorant; ... it is concerning all, and for all ... for this reason, the thoughts and feelings expressed should be permanent also—liberated from that weakness and anguish of sorrow which is in nature transitory, and which with instinctive decency retires from notice. … The very form and substance of the monument which has received the inscription, and the appearance of the letters, testifying with what a slow and laborious hand they must have been engraven, might seem to reproach the author who had given way upon this occasion to transports of mind, or to quick turns of conflicting passion; though the same might constitute the life and beauty of a funeral oration or an elegiac poem.3
In a proper epitaph—and the epitaph is the model for literature and for history, for Wordsworth’s text—the medium dictates to the message-sender, and “turns” of thought and feeling come into being only because of the materialization, the immobilization, that fixes them to a grave.
What peculiar power the text ascribes to writing with the qualities that—sometime before and after this text—were identified with literature, great literature: universality, universal readability, permanence. And at the same time, what a soft sell! “Have feelings that are universal and permanent,” says the house of language, “—because gravestones are.” The evidence suggests that Wordsworth was alarmed by and not skilled in the making of advertisements, and in this text too perhaps that shows. What peculiar power this passage in Wordsworth’s “Essay” ascribes to a kind of writing: the power to determine what sort of feelings the writer should have: hegemonic power. And not from Gramsci’s jail did “hegemony” appear more insidious or more important. But is such power, read—Is such power, when designated, explained, as it is in Wordsworth’s text—or even when exercised (say this passage is “merely an exercise”); is such power, through such a text, being established, or being unraveled? There isn’t an answer, but outcomes that change as one listens for them by silently deciding and redeciding how to segment the text’s semantic and syntactic structures. “‘In’ Wordsworth’s text,” we have to concede, then, is a no-place; in what time we read those words, what time we see those words, is crucial. How much time do you have; what time do you take it to be. This seems to me a way to describe the practical difficulty of trying to practice ideology critiques and or deconstructions.
It’s something Jacques Derrida said, I think. It could also be under his aegis that one would move from a rhetorical analysis of the Wordsworth passage to a meditation upon politics and grief, starting off from the text’s oracular and circular definition of “liberation,” of being “liberated from that weakness and anguish of sorrow which is in nature transitory, and which with instinctive decency retires from notice.” The circular or suspended judgment implied by the restrictive clause—“which is in nature transitory”— empties out and mitigates the brutality as well as the rigor that could inhere in that next phrase, “instinctive decency.” (And nevertheless, whether or not they can spot restrictive clauses, and whether or not it’s “there” “in the original,” writing students tend to get the message: “the thoughts and feelings expressed should not be those that anyone with any decency instinctively suppresses.” The sheer laboriousness of language that signifies through its syntax—not just the reading teacher—inhibits, stills.) In “other” cultures, including Greek (modern and ancient), anguish of sorrow does not “with instinctive decency retire from notice” but makes itself heard in laments—women’s laments in particular.4 They are en route, no doubt, to silence, or to writing. Or at least Wordsworth’s language could have the effect, the power, of making us believe that the kind of mourning and the kind of day and the kind of literature his lines evoke has all the prestige, power, and inevitability of death.
Wordsworth’s lines have the signal virtue, I’d argue, of noting that connection; of noting that a certain kind of writing, the kind we value, the “permanent” kind, takes its authority from a certain—very particular and peculiar—way of handling death: handling it via the word “grave” and the idea of monuments and of inscriptions. And in this the Wordsworth passage marks a line of thought recently taken up in Derrida’s reflections on death, particularly at the point at which they move between Being and Time and its countering in texts of Levinas that suggest that not one’s ownmost, my own death, but the other’s death, has priority among our conditions of existence. Where is mourning addressed, how is grief redressed, in Sein und Zeit, was more than a passing question, in Derrida’s conférence for the second Derrida symposium at Cérisy. How might one go between Wordsworth, Derrida, and de Man on mourning, and Heidegger on “mood?” I’m not competent to pursue or really even pose these questions, so I will return to the connection of death and literature again in another way.
I want to go on with an important idea in the “Autobiography as De-facement” passage, that an epitaph, that literature, does not “leave us in quiet” (to quote Wordsworth again) but repositions text and reader and pushes you to the ground. (Albeit “marble.” Keats, in “The Fall,” anyway (“life to Milton would be death to me”), knew that even on a marble stair one could moulder away.) De Man’s reading of Walter Benjamin’s essay on “translation” generates another lurid figure of writing or reading. It is some sentences that come back at me like the inscribed letters of a badly written epitaph, a permanent reproach—first because these lines have already been written about repeatedly, and second because they reproach one for the failure and the wish to understand the reproach they make and the threat they bespeak. The reproach and the threat are understood, I should say, in Neil Hertz’s essay “Lurid Figures.” But here they are again. The lines are of Paul de Man, from the 1983 Messenger Lecture at Cornell University entitled “ ‘Conclusions’: Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator’,” and the antecedent of the “they” that is the subject of these lines is “translations.” A previous sentence links translation with other “activities” that are “intralinguistic,” namely “critical philosophy, literary theory, history.” “They are all intralinguistic,” writes de Man, “they relate to what in the original belongs to language, and not to meaning as an extralinguistic correlate susceptible of paraphrase and imitation.” Then this:
They disarticulate, they undo the original, they reveal that the original was always