of charm: “Charmant poignard, jaillis de ton étui.” Indeed, Heidegger emphatically moves to separate his true dichtung from frivolous play of the imagination—the sort of play that seems most at work in apostrophic lyrics, which animate all kinds of things in ways that frequently seem embarrassing.12 If one focuses on the performative functioning of a lyric conceived as fundamentally apostrophic and prosopopoeic, then it seems overweening to link these figures, which so often foreground a conspicuously bizarre or arbitrary figurality, to the happening of truth.
What happens through the performativity of lyric is exceedingly difficult to say, but whether or not lyric is the happening of truth it does seem to happen as singular concatenations of words—“Shivelights and shadowtackle in long lashes lace, lance, and pair”13—combinations difficult to reduce to theme or to infer from particular empirical situations. The happening of lyrics is linked to a strangeness or alterity which, if it works, may lodge itself in memory. If the lyric happens, it does so as a form of radical singularity whose value is linked to a certain memorable otherness. So, if the “Ode to the West Wind” has in any sense made the wind be come the spirit of the speaker—”Be thou me, impetuous one”—it is because this verbal connection has been inscribed in memories here and there, has proliferated in its iterability.
Educational tradition, from Plato to the present, has distinguished good memory from bad—the memory of understanding or assimilation (which is to be encouraged and which is what tests should test), from the memory of rote repetition or mere memorization. On the one hand there is what you have made your own and can recall, reformulate, and produce as knowledge because you have understood it; on the other, there is what you repeat without necessarily understanding, what remains lodged within mechanical memory (Gedächtnis) as a piece of otherness. Now if the novel is writing you assimilate—that is, when you remember novels you recall, in your own words, as we say, what happens, what they are about—lyrics, on the contrary, retain an irreducible otherness: to remember them at all is to remember at least some of their words; they ask as Derrida puts it in “Che cos’è la poesia?” to be learned by heart. “Le poétique, disons-le, serait ce que tu désires apprendre, mais de l’autre, grâce à l’autre et sous sa dictée, par coeur: imparare a memoria.” [“The poetic, let us say it, would be that which you desire to learn, but from the other, thanks to the other, and at his or her dictation, by heart: to learn by heart.”]14 This brief text of Derrida’s takes as the figure for the lyric not the phoenix nor the eagle but the modest, prickly yet pathetic hedgehog, l’hérisson. Neither héritier nor nourisson, l’hérisson is a creature which, as in Giraudoux’s Electre, “se fait écraser”—indeed, whose nature is to “se faire écraser sur les routes.”15 The poem is addressed to you—a generalized, fictional you which it posits, which it tries to create—but it can always miss its mark, can be ignored, even ridiculed. It exposes itself to being dismissed. So, while at one level, lyrics thematize the problem of whether they will make things happen and sometimes find ways of insuring that what they want to have happen does happen through the form of articulation of the desire, their performativity consists also in their success in creating the listeners/readers they attempt to address and in making themselves remembered.
On the question of the freedom and performativity of literature, Derrida writes:
it is an institution which consists in transgressing and transforming, thus in producing its constitutional law; or, to put it better, in producing discursive forms, “works,” and “events” in which the very possibility of a fundamental constitution is at least “fictionally” contested, threatened, deconstructed, presented in its very precariousness. Hence, while literature shares a certain power and a certain destiny with “jurisdiction,” with the juridico-political production of institutional foundations, the constitutions of states, fundamental legislation, and even the theological-juridical performatives which occur at the beginning of law, at a certain point it can only exceed them, interrogate them, “fictionalize” them: with nothing, or almost nothing, in view, of course, and by producing events whose “reality” or duration is never assured, but which by that very fact are more thought-provoking, if that still means something.16
Though we might not wish to claim for lyric the juridico-political productive power that literature is here said to share, lyric does partake in that excess of fictionalized foundational performatives, as it posits conditions in poetic events whose reality or duration is never assured and which may indeed seem to have “almost nothing” in view. Formal structures that pose a certain resistance to understanding, they may or may not succeed in inscribing themselves on the memory, with what de Man calls “the senseless power of positional language.”17
There would seem then to be two interpretations of the performativity of lyric. One sees poems as creating what they name or describe, in a work of truth—dichtung—and would stress in particular the crucial role of metaphor in poetic naming. It would be less comfortable when the tropes of lyric are apostrophe and prosopopoeia and might be sorely tempted to distinguish a true lyric performativity from the facile play of rhetoric. In 1977, in an article entitled “Apostrophe,” I tried to resist that temptation, while pursuing this option, by identifying apostrophe with the fundamental structure of lyric but at the same time with everything that is potentially most pretentious, mystificatory, and embarrassing in the lyric; and I sought to work out how these tropes could be said to make things happen—for example by thrusting their animate presuppositions on the reader or listener with the force of an event.18 Lamartine’s “Objects inanimés, avez vous done une âme?,”19 like the question “Have you stopped beating your wife?,” creates a structure from which a reader has trouble disengaging, except by ignoring the poem altogether. The problem, for me, was to find cases where one might argue convincingly that a poem made something happen. The “Ode to the West Wind” would be a case in point, because of the special self-reflexive character of its formulations. And I concluded with the example of Keats’s “This Living Hand,” which, I argued, dares readers to resist it but compels their acceptance of a presence the poem performatively produces.20
Against this account of poetic performativity, the second account of performativity would insist, rather, on the unverifiable and problematic nature of such events and link performativity rather to a performative iterability whose best instance is the lodging of singular formulations in memory. This second account might stress, as Derrida does in “Che cos’é la poesia?,” that the poem, vulnerable like the hedgehog rolled into a ball, makes you want to protect it, learn it by heart, in a “passion de la marque singuliére.” Here the oddity of the poem, its vulnerability to dismissal, is what calls to us, and one might speculate that criticism’s inclination to demonstrate the necessity, the inevitability of poetic combinations—why the poem needs just these words and no other—comes from the knowledge that it is the contingency, the accidents, the otherness of poetic phrases that creates their appeal.
Now it may be that there can be no question of choosing between these accounts—between performativity as the happening of truth or the poem’s creation of what it describes, and the performativity of, shall we say, what manages to repeat, happens to lodge itself in mechanical memory as iterable inscription. There may be no question of choosing because the lyric might be precisely the name of the hope that iterable inscription will be the happening of truth—or, on the contrary, the name of the concealment of inscription and the play of the letter by a thematics of specularity and self-creation, or
