In the Place of Language: Literature and the Architecture of the Referent

Preface: Marked Change: A Brief Account

preface  Marked Change: A Brief Account no one who reads it will be more surprised than I that this book, which began as a study of what building is doing in pivotal works by Goethe, turned, step by step, into a theory of the referent. A skeletal chronology of its origin may serve the purpose of explaining not the surprising conclusion to which this study comes—the very purpose which the progress of the book ends up serving—but why that end was so thoroughly unexpected. For several years I had understood that analyses of certain ‘‘mature ’’ works by Goethe, those that composed a renewal and turningpoint in his literary writing, and whose conception was, by his own appraisal, the most far-reaching, would be as difficult to complete as they were essential to the completion of what was, during those years, a book-in-progress. That book-in-progress, which grew to include studies of several other authors as I continued to teach, and write on, Goethe, had itself started out as part of another book, a footnote to whose planned introduction developed into a book. The last and least foreseeable of these three works, on Descartes, was published some years ago; the first two, substantively written, and, in parts, published, before the present study of Goethe was completed , will now be published in their entirety after it.1 1. From the odd chronology outlined here derives the necessity—awkward for this author—of referencing some of those separately published studies at different junctures in the argument of the present work. These references to previous publications may sometimes convey the unsettling sense of a progress in regress, and it is indeed the case that briefly noting the arguments of these related studies, rather than restating them in their entirety, was a kind of mental shorthand required for the present study to progress. Still, references xi xii ‡ marked change: a brief account This convoluted history, confusing to read in brief, was more densely disorienting to experience at length. Regarding it in retrospect does not explain or dispel that disorientation but may at least help to indicate its basis. What now appears evident is that, even as I worked with it, my conception of the object of study to which I was first drawn, never straightforward to start with, changed, and this despite the fact that the object in question, while manifesting itself differently in diverse discursive contexts, remained the same. That conceptual change took place accumulatively and gradually, which is to say, long before I knew it, or recognized it as such. Completed , individual analyses of works seemed to cohere and make sense, and yet, in each instance, with, and even within, each group of works analyzed, the specific object of analysis seemed both increasingly important to the discourse of the texts investigated and increasingly different from itself, a development which, by any logical measure, made no sense, or at least defied coherent, conceptual, or theoretical description. My continuing work on Goethe, rather than completing or countermanding this change, pushed it, as the expression goes, ‘‘over the edge,’’ or, to use the conventional hermeneutic figure, off the everreceding horizon that always accompanies and delimits the understanding of historical phenomena in the present. For Goethe’s were literary texts in which the verbal manifestations of a certain nonverbal occurrence, a kind of discursive recourse appearing at once necessary and extraneous to discourse, were most conspicuously selfevident —composed and located right on the surface, so to speak, of the stories they told—yet what the unmistakable clarity of their presentation brought me to was a kind of wall, a sense of ignorance, or at least bafflement, as to ‘‘what’’ they were, i.e., why they were, and what they were doing, in plain cognitive sight. to these previous analyses may serve not only to indicate their direct contribution to the development of the present work, opening the angle of its own analytic movement to wider compass, but also to suggest the substantial change that contribution has already effected upon those studies themselves, altering the course of their own integration into the larger works of which they are a part. marked change: a brief account ‡ xiii Thus my study of Goethe wrenched the original problem or question my work had addressed back to its own beginning. That original problem arose with my perception of a kind...