In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

JOSEPH RIDDEL The Anomalies of Literary (Post) Modernism No one is a poet unless he has felt the temptation to destroy language or create another one, unless he has experienced the fascination of nonmeaning and the no less terrifying fascination of a meaning that is inexpressible. —Octavio Paz Criticism must attack the form, never the content of your language. —Lautréamont ODERNiSM is a word of great currency, almost literally a figure „of exchange. But the word itself is hardly definite for being so in vogue, so significant. So obviously figurai and in circulation. It is not, quite clearly, quite clear or transparent; nor is it a proper name for either some historical period or some identifiable or unique style. At the same time an historical and an ahistorical category, it refers (a term of equal indeterminacy) to the equivocal and irreducible relation between the two—that is, to what is often today called "desire" or the lack that ties any mediation to a dreamed-of immediacy, the temporal or sensuous to the transcendental or supersensuous, act to idea, and perhaps even literature to philosophy. Modernism is another name for some moment of transition, or for the unnameable and uncanny, an This essay appeared first in a special issue ofJournal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics (9.1-2, 1986) on Deconstruction, and is reprinted with the permission of its Guest Editor, Suresh Raval. Arizona Quarterly Volume 44 Number 3, Autumn 1988 Copyright © 1988 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 004-1610 American Modernism apparently stable term for an instability, which is the teason we are always affixing premonitory signs to it, posting it, as it were, or bracketing it as an historical deviation, at once discontinuous with and supplementary to the "tradition," in a way that makes the exception prove the rule. It is not a "word," category, or designation which stands alone, nor outside of some historical moment, but it does designate a practice rather than a lapidary or complete form or style. Whatever the modern is, it is an inscription which erases itself, or signifies its own undoing or overcoming. It must, therefore, inscribe the "postmodern" as surely as it displaces, by reinscription, the tradition. Modernism, in brief, and this includes any excess named postmodern which necessarily inhabits it, belongs to criticism, even when it is the name of art or literature. It has become a kind of "basic word" or concept, in Heidegger's sense of a name that repeatedly undergoes changes of meaning.1 Strangely, one of its functions is to name that which produces such changes, hence undoes old categories. Modernism names its own anomaly.2 Modernism thus "understood," as a critical term for criticism, therefore harbors, to repeat, the very crisis it is presumed to reflect and represent, yet repress or overcome. I need not rehearse at this point the familiar debates about it which center upon Mallarmé's essay, "Crisis in Poetry," or the recent attempts to rewrite this as our "Crisis in Criticism ." I will, however, note provisionally Julia Kristeva's observation that a modern scholar of language once claimed that the two most eminent linguists in France were Mallarmé and Artaud, that is, modern poets whose practice detached and highlighted the problematics of the very language they employed self-critically. The implication, that the poets were there before us, before scholarship and criticism, also suggests that the poetic is originally critical, and that it addresses primarily itself. But never directly. And that is the problem, or problematic : for in this address of itself, the language of modernism does not so much achieve self-reflexivity as expose the idealization of selfreflexivity . It submits itself to critical practice. We hear, today, the inflated and hyperbolic claims that the critical is creative or that criticism is poetic, and the equally self-righteous counterclaims of an academic establishment which regales against "theoretical" critics for writing badly while claiming that criticism is poetic. The debate, however, turns on the acceptance of a division and hierarchy of categories, the privileging of the poetic over the critical, creative immediacy over 82Joseph Riddel reflective circumspection, even the imaginative over the discursive: in short, the production and maintenance ofan old...

pdf

Share