it seems to me, help to make sense of part of Paul de Man’s complicated and discontinuous account of lyric. De Man speaks of lyric (and other names for genres) as a defensive motion of understanding. This passage, from “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric,” needs to be quoted at length:
What we call the lyric, the instance of represented voice, conveniently spells out the rhetorical and thematic characteristics that make it the paradigm of a complementary relationship between grammar, trope, and theme. The set of characteristics includes the various structures and moments we encountered along the way [i.e., in the interpretation of Baudelaire’s “Obsession,” which de Man sees as translating the sonnet “Correspondances” into lyric intelligibility]: specular symmetry along an axis of assertion and negation (to which correspond the generic mirror images of the ode, as celebration, and the elegy, as mourning), the grammatical transformation of the declarative into the vocative modes of question, exclamation, address, hypothesis, etc., the tropological transformation of analogy into apostrophe, or the equivalent, more general transformation ... of trope into anthropomorphism. The lyric is not a genre, but one name among several to designate a defensive motion of under standing, the possibility of a future hermeneutics. From this point of view there is no significant difference between one generic term and another: all have the same apparently intentional and temporal function.21
Here the suggestion is that lyric, like other genres, is a “term of resistance and nostalgia,” the name we have for a particular way of convincing ourselves not only that language is meaningful and that it will give rise to an intuition or understanding, but that this will be an understanding of the world—an understanding to come.22 But in de Man’s essay there is something else that stands against the lyric thus conceived. Of Baudelaire’s “Correspondances,” he writes, “All we know is that it is, emphatically, not a lyric. Yet it, and it alone, contains, implies, produces, generates, permits (or whatever aberrant verbal metaphor one wishes to choose), the entire possibility of the lyric.”23 De Man’s phrase “it alone” warns us against distinguishing between two kinds of poetry, one of which is lyric and the other of which—like “Correspondances”—remains unnamed. “Correspondances” seems rather to be a textual singularity—he speaks of its “stutter”—that gets translated into lyric, into lyric intelligibility. “Correspondances” permits him to infer a materiality of language which cannot be isolated as such, as a “moment” or an origin, but which, by standing, as it were, “beneath” lyric (or whatever aberrant formulation one wishes to choose), enables us to identify the figurative structures and operations constitutive of the lyric.
Today, as critical accounts appeal to a performativity which is increasingly seen as both the accomplishment and the justification of literature—the source of claims we might wish to make for it—it seems to me especially important that we consider, in particular cases, what performativity involves and what kinds of distinctions we need to make to talk about such forms as the lyric, which I think merit more sustained attention than they have so far received from or in deconstruction in America.
Notes
1. Jacques Derrida, “This Strange Institution Called Literature,” interview with Derek Attridge, in Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), p.37
2. Ibid.p.55.
3. Jacques Derrida, seminar on “Future Deconstructions,” University of California Jumanities Research Institue, Irvine, CA, May 1992.
4. Jacques Derrida, “Passions: ‘An Oblique Offering,’ ” Derrida: A Critical Reader, ed. David Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p.23.
5. Derrida, “This Strange Institution. . .,” p.38.
6. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), pp. 249–250; Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p.261.
7. Charles Baudelaire, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1976) II. 164.
8. Paul de Man, “Hypogram and Inscription,” in The Resistance to Theory ( Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), and The Rhetoric of Romanticism, particularly “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric,” but also “Wordsworth and the Victorians.” Barbara Johnson, “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion” in A World of Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). Jonathan Culler, “Apostrophe,” in The Pursuit of Signs (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981); and “Reading Lyric,” Yale French Studies 69 (1985), pp. 98–108.
9. Henry Fielding, “The Tragedy of Tragedy, or The Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great,” Works (London, 1821), vol. 1, p.472.
10. Baudelaire, Oeuvres, I, 49.
11. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Complete Poetical Works (London: Oxford University Press, 1943), p.577
12. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Poetry Language, Thought (New York: Harper, 1971), p.72. For apostrophe and embarrassment, see Culler, “Apostrophe.”
13. Gerard Manley Hopkins, “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection,” Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p.l05.
14. Jacques Derrida, “Che cos’ è la poesia?” Points de suspension (Paris: Galilee, 1992), p.304.
15. Jean Giraudoux, Electre (Paris: Grasset, 1937), pp. 33–37.
16. Derrida, “This Strange Institution. . .,” p.72.
17. Paul de Man, “Shelley Disfigured,” The Rhetoric of Romanticism, p.117.
18. Culler, “Apostrophe,” The Pursuit of Signs, first published in Diacritics 7:4 (Winter 1977)
19. Alphonse de Lamartine, Oeuvres poétiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), p.392.
20. Culler, “Apostrophe,” pp.153–154.
