When is a Dialogue?

Sahitya, Literature, as epithets, descriptors, concepts: are these two synonymous? (I don't want to bring in a third term, ilakkiyam from Tamizh to complicate matters further). I do not think so, except by way of a sleight of mind known as translation. Are they linguistic siblings, consanguine, cognate, relationally obligated filially or through affiliation? Perhaps. At any rate, on the basis of the thoughtfully and trans-regionally co-authored volume by Ranjan Ghosh and Hillis Miller, we are obligated to think about these two seemingly self-evident categories or dimensions differentially but coevally in the spirit of what I would call an "a-centric relational critique." I assume here that for my readers critique implies appreciation as well, or what Sanskrit scholars would term "fellow-hearted-ness," sahridayavta. I must also add that in this instance, my fellow-hearted-ness is obligated to be "double-hearted," interpellated and begotten as I am by both the so-called West and the so-called East and therefore enjoined ethically (a category crucial both to Ghosh and to Miller) to articulate a perennial but shifting bridge between "the places where I think" and "the places where I live" (Walter Mignolo's resonant phrases) without in any way fixing or reifying either set of coordinates.

This brief response will have two axes of intervention, the epistemological and the existential, and my intention will be to examine how these two categories "tangle together," to avail of Ranajit Guha's memorable phrasing, by way of literature and literary experience. What form of "worldliness," and of course I am acknowledging Edward Said here with much gratitude, is articulated when Ghosh and Miller come together in creative and productive solidarity even as they avow with elaborate candor the differences in "where they come from?" and what they do as literary theorists or critics. What kind of critics are they, with Ghosh by and large privileging "the text," and Miller "method?" Which one of them, by virtue of his own self statements, is a professional critic, and which one the general lover of literature? Is literature, for each of them, a constructed professional category, or is it a non-denominational, non-specialist wavelength or bandwidth as natural as breathing, living? Further more, is Ghosh an Eastern/Indian/Sanskritic critic, and Miller a western/American/English critic? I bring up this issue of the genealogy of the critic only to briefly make the point that the relationship of criticism to literature is not universally the same. Whereas in the so—called Western tradition, it is customary to think of criticism not just as close reading, exegesis, or explication de texte, but also as deconstruction, the "dangerous supplement," ideology critique, symptomatic reading, in the so-called East, criticism as appreciative, interpretive commentary tends to be incremental, supportive in solidarity, and symbiotic with the original literary text. (In what follows, Professor Ghosh should feel free to reprimand and correct my dilettanteish remarks). Bhashyas, sutras, anubandhas, vyayakhyas etc. tend to celebrate and ecstatically unpack the plenitude of literature and its transcendent mode of knowing. In other words, critics function as impassioned Gnostics of literature. Is Miller a literary Gnostic, or is he a professional linguistic/rhetorical/figural reader of the text who is obligated to suspend and bracket every form of a priori belief before he plunges into his text? Is his professional "method" neutral: pure methodological immanence that is wary of the transcendence effect of the "signified?"

Miller, interestingly distances himself from the school known as "deconstruction," and opts to recognize himself as an analyst of rhetoric and language, prioritizing the immanent rhetoricity of the text. He is not a Gnostic of the transcendent text and its logocentric self substantiation as Meaning and Truth. Miller right away acknowledges the reality that Ghosh's intentions with literature are very different from his own. Are we then to understand this difference as antagonistic, mutually exclusive, incommensurable, merely adjacent as in a juxtaposed spatiality? Is it a split frame situation, or do the two frames leak into each other with fundamental consequences for each frame? Is it enough for Miller, the agnostic to...