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Thinking about literature thus seems directed to work eventually to elucidate a certain relation between literature and democracy: is it a metonymical relationship (where literature is linked to what gives rise to democracy), or a metaphorical relation (where literature’s performativity is at least analogous to that of acts of constitution), or a relation of identity of discursive regimes, or a relation of mutual entailment (you can’t have one without the other)?
The relationship as sketched here seems based on two interrelated factors—two factors which bring together the modern ideas or institutions of literature and democracy: first, a freedom which involves a special kind of responsibility, a hyper-responsibility, which includes a right to absolute nonresponse. The writer, like the citizen, must, Derrida writes, “sometimes demand a certain irresponsibility, at least as regards ideological powers … This duty of irresponsibility, of refusing to reply for one’s thought or writing to constituted powers, is perhaps the highest form of responsibility.”5 There are important questions to be pursued in this domain, apropos both literature and democracy and the freedom and responsibility they involve; but the wager is that these questions will more likely be elucidated if, as they are pursued, the cases of literature and democracy are kept in view together.
The second connecting factor in these passages is the performativity of literature and of the discursive regimes of politics, both of whose discourses work to bring into being the situations they purport to describe. Since appeal to the notion of performativity has become very widespread of late, as the success of Judith Butler’s brilliant Gender Trouble has led people in gender studies and queer theory to take up the notion, it is important to stress that performativity is the name of a problem rather than a solution, that it draws attention to the difficulty of determining what can be said to happen, under what conditions, and to the fact that the event is not something that is simply given. Once again, it is the conjunction of literature and politics through the notion of performativity that gives the complexity of the problem a chance of being elucidated.
But the idea of literature that emerges from such deconstruc-tive reflections on the relation of literature and democracy is not itself my subject, though I hope we may have the opportunity to pursue it. In discussions of the sort I have been quoting, Derrida distinguishes between literature—this modern institution, with its possibility of tout dire—and something else: poetry (or some times belles lettres). And so it is in this context, where literature is linked with democracy and described in terms of a certain hyper responsibility and a performativity of the word, that I want to ask about poetry, particularly the lyric. To put the problem most simply, if we can maintain “no democracy without literature,” it seems considerably harder to imagine claiming, “no democracy without poetry,” or vice versa. What, then, can we say of lyric? What is its relation to the freedom and the performativity that are crucial to the modern idea of literature?
Northrop Frye defines the lyric as utterance overheard, a notion Paul de Man partly takes up in calling it “the instance of represented voice.”6 In an essay on Théodore de Banville, Baudelaire writes of the lyric, “Constatons que l’hyperbole et l’apostrophe sont des formes du language qui lui sont non seulement des plus agréables mais aussi des plus nécessaires … ” [Note that hyperbole and apostrophe are the forms of language which are not only the most agreeable but also the most necessary to it].7 And it is in this tradition that de Man, Barbara Johnson, and I have argued that the fundamental tropes of lyric are apostrophe (the address to something that is not an empirical listener) and prosopopoeia (the giving of face and voice to and thus the animation of what would not otherwise be a living interlocutor).8 Both apostrophe and prosopopoeia work to create I-you relations and structures of specularity, which seem characteristic of the dramas projected by lyric. Whether we think of the address to apparently inanimate objects—”O Rose thou art Sick!” “O wild West Wind!” “Sois sage, o ma douleur!”—or the address to the beloved, apostrophes are not only endemic in lyric, they are the moments chosen for satirizing poetic discourse, as in, for example,
O Huncamunca, Huncamunca, O!
Thy pouting breasts, like kettledrums of brass,
Beat everlasting loud alarms of joy, . . .
For what’s too high for love, or what’s too low?
O Huncamunca, Huncamunca, O! ”9
Now apostrophes, whatever they are invoking, seem to end up posing, explicitly or implicitly, questions about the performative efficacy of poetic rhetoric itself. So as Baudelaire’s “Ciel Brouillé” concludes,
O femme dangereuse, O séduisants climats!
Adorerai-je aussi ta neige et vos frimas,
Et saurai-je tirer de l’implacable hiver
Des plaisirs plus aigus que la glace et le fer?
[O dangerous woman, o seductive climates!
Will I also adore your snow and ice,
And will I be able to draw from implacable winter
Pleasures that are sharper than ice and steel?]10
This is a question about the performativity of lyrical discourse: will it work? will it bring about the conditions it describes? To take a more familiar example, Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” insistently invokes and conjures the wind in the apparent hope that it will, in the end, be what the speaker demands:
Be thou, spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!11
In concluding, the speaker urges the wind to “Be through my lips to unawakened earth/The trumpet of a prophecy”—a prophecy which consists of the incantation of these verses asking the wind to bear, sustain, repeat, proliferate a poetic enunciation or performance whose content is this performance itself; namely, the articulation of the hope that the natural cycle of the seasons (“If winter comes, can spring be far behind!”) will, through the agency of the wind, animate the speaker’s voice. That is, the speaker urges the wind to “be through my lips the trumpet of a prophecy,” but there is here no other prophecy than this hopeful calling on the wind to advance the poetic voice.
When lyrics thematically pose the question of the performative power of lyric rhetoric, it is often in this form: will you be as I describe you when I invoke you? will you be what I say you are? And when they do appear to answer the question, it is often by finding some way of formulating the request so that it is by definition fulfilled if we hear it. If one takes such cases as exemplary of the performativity of lyric, then one would see lyric, in principle and often in practice as well, as a poetic naming that performatively creates what it names. So poems that invoke the heart—“O mon coeur, entend le chant des matelots” or “Be still, my heart”—create what we have come to call “the heart.”
This locating of lyric value in performativity is, perhaps, the contemporary deconstructive version of Heidegger’s poetic aletheia, poetry as the happening of truth at work. But there are lots of lyric examples
