-
‘‘At the Far End of This Ongoing Enterprise...'’
- Fordham University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
‘‘At the Far End of This Ongoing Enterprise . . .’’ Sara Guyer The master is destined, then, not to smooth out the field of relations but to upset it, not to facilitate the paths of knowledge, but above all to render them not only more difficult, but truly impracticable. —Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation Paul de Man’s brief introduction to the 1979 issue of Studies in Romanticism devoted to ‘‘The Rhetoric of Romanticism’’ might be understood as his most explicit treatment of the question of legacy. The introduction is a strange and often contradictory text in which de Man provides an historico-fictional account of his own ‘‘generation’’—understood synchronically and diachronically, both as a group of individuals and as an act of genesis. At the same time, by editing a volume of work by his students, de Man here introduces a new ‘‘generation,’’ one that already in 1979 is understood to be his issue. De Man initially intended this special issue on ‘‘The Rhetoric of Romanticism ’’—which shares its title (in advance) with his own posthumous collection of essays on Wordsworth, Kleist, Shelley, Hölderlin, and Yeats—to be an outlet for work emerging from his 1977–78 NEH seminar. Yet, the issue’s final table of contents includes only two essays—Stephen J. Spector’s ‘‘Thomas de Quincey: Self-Effacing Autobiographer’’ and William Ray’s ‘‘Suspended in the Mirror: Language and the Self in Kleist’s ‘Über das Marionettentheater’’’—that originated in the NEH seminar.1 The remaining essays—by Cynthia Chase, Barbara Johnson, Timothy Bahti, and E. S. Burt—grew out of de Man’s regular graduate courses at Yale. In some obvious sense, then, de Man’s introduction responds to the 77 78 Sara Guyer question of the relation between the work introduced and his instruction of its authors. In other words, the essay responds to the implicit question —phrased in the idiom of Kleist’s ‘‘Marionettentheater,’’ the occasion of de Man’s most sustained discussion of pedagogy—of whether or not, in pulling a few strings to gather these essays and get them published, he also ‘‘pulls their strings.’’2 At the same time, the introduction raises other questions—about the relation between scholarship and pedagogy more generally, about literary history, inheritance, and freedom. Do de Man’s voice and authority alone give these essays their motion and their force? Are these essays, like an automaton, moved by an external generator, rather than by their own spontaneous or automotive energy? And, if so, is this external generation also the source of their extraordinary elegance? Is it the authoritative teacher himself who allows for their ‘‘light touch,’’ that is, for the very grace that he will claim distinguishes their work from his and exposes the ‘‘awkward’’ and ‘‘lopsided’’ efforts of his generation, the very grace that he goes so far as to suggest also means his death?3 What is de Man’s relation to his students’ virtuosic displays of rigorous reading, that is, what is his relation to this putative legacy? What is his relation to it as legacy, and what, if anything, does de Man’s introduction have to do with this legacy’s production—or for that matter, its foreclosure? From the outset, David Wagenknecht, the editor of Studies in Romanticism , questioned the essays’ capacity to stand on their own. On April 10, 1978, upon having read Timothy Bahti’s ‘‘Figures of Interpretation, The Interpretation of Figures: A Reading of Wordsworth’s ‘Dream of the Arab,’’’ Wagenknecht wrote to de Man to say that the essay could appear in the journal only if de Man took responsibility for it and for the issue as a whole: Was it Huckleberry Finn who said of Pilgrim’s Progress the statement was interesting but tough? In my case I have to confess the toughness finally overcame my interest: my erasures in the margins reflect an original annoyance which I found more difficult to overcome than to erase. The style, which simultaneously maximizes fussiness and vagueness—verbal operatives tend to be so abstract that almost anything can be related to, equilibrated with, adequated to anything else—caused me at last to mourn for Wordsworth. But I made up my mind to be more manly, to overcome prejudice, and to press on. Having done so, my attitude remained fundamentally the same.4 Wagenknecht confesses here that despite his best efforts at engagement, Bahti’s essay left his energies ‘‘overcome.’’ Yet beyond his distress with...