The Economy of Babel or “Can I Buy a Vowel?”

What follows is the moderately revised text of a paper first delivered as the opening presentation for the conversation between writers and critics at “Literature, Culture, and Critique: a Callaloo Retreat” in New Orleans on March 6, 2008.

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I have been asked by Dr. Charles Rowell to talk very briefly about what brings us here today, to in a sense loosely frame this discussion of our differences as writers and critics or as Charles says, “what we are doing on each side.” My tendency here will be to oversimplify and maybe in that way produce strong reactions that get us talking.

To encapsulate this difference, I want to start with something that happened in a recent discussion of Half of A Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in a reading group organized by members of the English Department at Texas A&M.¹ Apart from the fact that as critics, we began with the allusion to Hegel in the novel (because it is hard to break some bad habits), one English professor described the complication of the very likeable protagonist’s character when he rapes a woman as Adichie having “broken” the contract with the reader. I and others saw the rape as a critique of depictions of subaltern violence as exteriorized with regard to historicity. In contrast, the only writer in the room said that that was all well and good but with the inclusion of the rape Adichie was making a choice as a writer to move the narrative forward and introduce details that layer or complicate its plot and characters. So it came down to rape as a vehicle of social and historical criticism or rape as a tool, equally valid positions, neither of which is irreconcilable. One proceeds from the assumption that the author no longer matters and the other from the assumption that the author always matters.

As is often the case, when present writers will say that they had not consciously done at least some of the symbolic work that critics assert they are doing. Critics on the other hand, are either giving appropriate or misreadings, as judged by other critics and not by the actual authors.

Our subject today then is not only our language or style of discourse, the aesthetics of content to paraphrase the performer and playwright Daniel Alexander Jones, but about this “intellectual division of labour” (Eagleton) that produces seemingly incommensurate forms (the critical/scholarly essay or book, for example, versus the short story, novel, poem, vignette, etc.), produces different strategies of reading as we saw with Adichie, different spaces of articulation (such as the annual conference of the Modern Language Association, a public reading at a coffee shop, or a reading sponsored by Cave Canem), different publication venues, and finally different forms of financial and social support.² Most scholarly journals such as PMLA do not print creative work. In its commitment to producing both scholarly and creative work, Callaloo of course is one of the exceptions, which the writer Nelly Rosario has referred to as “our very own Babel.”³

As I see it, a conversation of this nature is literally fraught with danger because behind it is an implicit assumption. There is not only the idea that we are doing something different, but that we must be doing something different with the possibility of language; that our roles as author and critic are coterminous with our discourses and with spheres of intelligibility and meaning. So much, however, happens in a middle or inner space.

When we approach Wilson Harris’s essays, for example, and fail to understand them, is it because he is deploying a complex critical language or because he is making the imagination do the work of criticism (critical poetics)? When we fail to understand Harris’s fiction and someone says, as they have, that “life is too short” to spend it reading Harris, is it because his poetics is infected with a will to critical language? When the critic’s language is obtuse, say Spivak or Butler, for example, is this the same as when the...