Poetry as Epitaph: Representation and Poetic Language by Karen Mills-Courts (review)

Book Reviews265 the practice can be reversed: literary texts can be a means of furthering our understanding of an imperfectly reconstructed historical model of the past. For both general reader and academic, Marwick's volume is a welcome addition to interdisciplinary studies. ROBERT F. SHEARD The Pennsylvania State University KAREN MILLS-COURTS. Poeiry as Epitaph: Representation and Poetic Language. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990. 326 p. This impressive study of"poetry as epitaph" proceeds from a dialogue ofsorts between Heidegger and Derrida on the contradiction implicit in the epitaph itself. The text of Mills-Courts' deconstructive sermon is taken from the fifth section of T. S. Eliot's "Little Gidding": "Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning, / Every poem an epitaph." Because language by its very nature involves words for what has been done, said, or thought (ifonly by a fraction of a split second), "we cannot think about language unless we also think absence, loss, death" (16). The "epitaphic gesture" itself paradoxically "marks presence if only by pointing to its absence" (33). Mills-Courts proceeds by drawing the line of battle between Heidegger and Derrida. Poetry is "privileged" by Heidegger, for whom language is "presentational" and "incarnative": "it incarnates truth as an active presence in the world." For Derrida, on the other hand, because "truth is only an effect of language and not its source," writing is always a re-presenting, nor is it "the representation of a presence that 'once was.' It is the representation of representation" (20). Such details will be familiar to those acquainted with the lingo of poststructuralism, but it is to her credit that Mills-Courts does carefully spell out the grounds of her approach in language that should be accessible to those not well versed in that jargon. Part ofher intent, Mills-Courts points out in the introductory chapter, "is to suggest that no choice between representational and incarnative language is genuinely possible" (10) so long as we must use language as our vehicle of expression, a paradox ofwhich, she later observes, Derrida is well aware. She suggests as a definition of poetry, "that which must function between the presentational and the representational workings oflanguage" (2). Mills-Courts moves between chapters on theoretical aspects of the subject, focusing on Heidegger or Derrida, and chapters pertaining to the poetry ofGeorge Herbert, William Wordsworth, and John Ashbery, all ofwhom, despite vast differences in style and themes, are concerned with the tension between the representational aspects of language and "their desire to present 'truth' as either the meaning of being or the being of meaning" (34). After a chapter reflecting on Shelley's "unsatisfied quest for an adequate language" (33), Mills-Courts offers the Book of Job as "a beginning point for the study ofthe search for the 'right word' that motivates every writer's work" (63): "The Book of Job metaphorizes the failure of human language to reveal and embody Truth" (67). Only God's "self-presencing" saves Job, but short 266Rocky Mountain Review of that, how is the poet/priest to be sure of his inspiration? In chapter 4, following a rather thin chapter that resumes the dialogue between Heidegger and Derrida, Mills-Courts examines that issue with respect to Herbert's writing, which "is epitaphic in that it is always an effort to inscribe God's presence" (103). In chapter 5, Mills-Courts argues for Derrida's term "auto-affection" in place of "autobiography": "Auto-affection is another name for the play of thought in which presence can never be fully incarnated, but can be evoked only by an endless series of representations which validate it as always/already an absence" (143). She traces the shift from autobiography (Augustine) to autoaffection (Wordsworth), a shift triggered by the "cartesian cry" ofsubjectivity: "I think, therefore, I am." Following her very perceptive survey, Mills-Courts examines Wordsworth's TAe Prelude in a chapter entitled, "Autobiography as 'Tender Fiction,' " proceeding from the premise that "Self-consciousness as auto-affection is the origin of poetry for Wordsworth" (171). Because Wordsworth "attempts to ground his thought in a self-presence that must be continuously created" (175), memory becomes "the key to selfas well...