The Language of Inquiry

La Faustienne

La Faustienne The first version of “La Faustienne” was presented as a talk at Temple University , Philadelphia, in March 1994. The subsequent revisions (and, I believe, improvements) are much indebted to Barrett Watten, who was of great help as I was preparing the essay for publication (it appeared in Poetics Journal 10: “Knowledge” in 1998). I had not yet read Marina Warner’s From the Beast to the Blonde when I wrote “La Faustienne,” but Warner’s wonderful book came out at around the time I was doing so, and I read it several months later.1 Though she only briefly mentions The Arabian Nights and doesn’t speak of the Faust stories at all, her study of the fairy tale is remarkably germane to the issues those works raise, and particularly to the relationship between narrative and knowledge. Warner’s particular interest is in women’s knowledge, knowledge of the body, procreative and mortal, and through it of birth and death, and knowledge of the civility that must exist to sustain life between those two poles. My own interest, as I discovered while writing this essay, was very similar . When I was first invited by Rachel Blau DuPlessis to present a lecture at 232 Temple University, I had thought I would concentrate entirely on the Faust myth and thus return to my interest in Enlightenment science and the epistemological quandaries it raises. But very soon I found myself at an impasse, realizing that those quandaries had become politicized in my mind. “The Enlightenment ” of which I speak in “Strangeness,” therefore, here becomes “the so-called Enlightenment,” and, though I was (and still am) willing to acknowledge a certain heroic quality to the Faust figure, it is so compromised that it seems to be an ultimately irrelevant heroism—misbegotten and probably contemptible. Instead, it was Scheherazade’s knowledge (or perhaps I should say “Scheherazadian” knowledge—knowledge with creative and redemptive power) that I found myself wanting to celebrate. Having written myself into something like a rejection of the Faustian ideal, I had been casting about for a figure to represent an alternative (“La Faustienne”) when, quite coincidentally, I came across a copy of Sir Richard Burton’s unexpurgated translation of The Arabian Nights (or The Book of the Thousand Nights and A Night, as he calls it) in a used book store; I bought it immediately, and as I began reading that night I very soon realized that I had found La Faustienne. 1 In a very general way, this essay is about the relationship between knowledge and the literary imagination—a relationship in which knowledge may be the object of literary effort (the writer seeks knowledge) or it may be the subject of its activity (the writer is knowledge). More particularly, I’m going to talk about two model knowers, one who knows by acquiring knowledge and the other by making it. It is in the context of these two figures or tropes that I want to implicate some of the issues which both La Faustienne / 233 poetry and persons are currently confronting. These are literary tropes but the knowledge I’m speaking of is not exclusively literary knowledge. Current literary interest in knowledge (and its implicit questions with regard to both literary devices [details] and literary method [address from and to the world]) finds itself in what social theory might call a liminal period—at a threshold or, to enlarge the metaphorical landscape, along a border. The question of boundaries, of possible shifts or displacements along them, and the question of what is being bounded (or unbounded) are preeminent ones. If we are indeed in a liminal period, then the border is not out there somewhere at the edge of the frame but rather it is here, at zero degree, where the x and y coordinates meet. It is a site of encounter, a point of transition. The marginal is all around. The transgressivity, sometimes overt, sometimes implicit, that motivates certain strategies in much current work, is meaningful only in liminal situations. Whether or not the future looks back on this as a liminal period , it certainly feels to us now as if the world is changing—so much so that it’s banal to say so. The global political configuration is in flux; notions of social, cultural, and personal identity are open to debate (dramatized in certain U.S. institutions, for example, under...