Doublespeak

In Don DeLillo's debut novel, Americana, the narrator and central character, David Bell, makes a long home movie that consists essentially of interviews with would-be actors playing Bell's family members—his father, mother, and sister—reading or reciting texts that Bell has scripted for them. It's a way for Bell (and maybe DeLillo) to speak of himself by way of texts, actors, and film that he will try to control but that are already beyond him, a way for him to write an autobiography, a fairly old idea, through the relatively new technology of a 16mm camera. The question "Who speaks?" is thus already front and center in this novel of 1971, and the moral seems to be that the center is always displaced, the answer to the question never assured.

But Bell imagines that this little cinematic exercise would be just the beginning of a more ambitious project: "What I'm shooting now is just a small segment of what will eventually include more general matter—funerals, traffic jams, furniture, real events, women, doors, windows. Auto-fiction. Actors, people playing themselves, lines of poetry. When I'm done I'd like to put the whole thing in a freezer and then run it uncut thirty years from now."³⁰ There they are, those thirty years that Qui Parle is trying to account for between its inception and today, its first issue and this anniversary issue. And the question it is asking to mark and celebrate the occasion is none other than the journal's own name, but in the form of a question: "Who speaks?" Qui Parle is today asking, thirty years on, "Qui parle?"—and it is asking this question through the contributions of those who have at some point spoken for, in, or on behalf of Qui Parle, those who have been published in its pages. Qui Parle is thus speaking to itself, it might be said, posing a question that is self-referring and self-responding. Like Bell, it is writing its own autobiography through the contributions of others. Yet another self-serving and self-satisfied academic enterprise.

Yet if there is one thing readers of this journal will have learned over the last thirty years, it is that the question "Who speaks?" is never simple, that it can, in truth, never be definitively answered or settled, since every new context, every new reading or writing, requires that the question be asked anew: "Who speaks?"; "Who speaks to whom and of what?" What we have learned is that if answers to such questions must be given, and responsibility taken each time for those answers, critical honesty and lucidity also require us to acknowledge that no answer is ever simply and naturally given, once and for all, outside all reading and interpretation. The laws of repetition or iteration would have taught us that the self "who speaks" is never anything, naturally or originally, without these projected or doubled selves, these forms of doublespeak.

"Who speaks?"—that is indeed the question, and while one may think that this perpetually renewed question condemns one to mere fiction or fantasy divorced from all real life, the opposite is really the case: this question, along with the techniques we have learned for asking and responding to it (literary analysis, critical theory, psychoanalysis, deconstruction), are the only ways we have of assuring that the circle of every "who speaks" does not close in the phantasm of some interior monologue in which one "speaks" before all language. It is this question, then, and this difference between origin and reception, speaker and listener, between the film and its screening, as it were, that opens every "who speaks," everyone who speaks, to language, history, and the world. Qui Parle has been one of the sites where we have learned this for over thirty years. The question mark will have been there from the very beginning, even if it took this anniversary issue to draw it out. Qui Parle will have been asking for three decades now the question "Qui parle?"—and it will have provided all kinds of answers, teaching or reminding us each...