professional and cultural needs. They have no inflexible warrant over other peoples’ work or my own work in the future. I feel free to abandon these strategies myself; while I hope other people find them suggestive, I do not offer them as models to be imitated uncritically. The style and structure of the book, I would hope, match the provisional nature of its interpretive claims.
So I do not, in summary, see the facts assembled about numerous writers in the text and in the notes as neutral, innocent, or uninterpreted. A similar recognition informs my readings of poems and poets throughout the book. While I try to make persuasive claims about how we might read these poets and why we might value their work, my readings make no pretense to be permanent and decisive statements. From feminism, Marxism, and poststructuralism I have learned that criticism is an interested, politically implicated, strategically positioned, and historically specific activity. My readings are efforts to influence how we might read these poets now; I am not interested in the fantasy of commentary that pretends it may last for all time. From time to time I comment on how readings of particular poets have shifted to meet contemporary interests. To avoid being tiresomely repetitive, I decided not to repeat that argument continuously, so not all my analyses are framed in those terms. But the general claim, I hope, will remain implicit throughout: When I make a strong assertion about a poem, it is not a claim about the poem’s essential nature but rather an urgent claim on the interests and commitments of contemporary readers.
Some would argue that poststructuralism’s insistence on the undecidability of texts makes such strategically designed readings either impossible or fraudulent. And it is true that one current in poststructuralism is an ecstatic assertion that texts can mean anything, that texts are polymorphously inventive and perverse. But the claim that texts can mean anything does not necessarily imply that they can mean anything here and now. There are too many constraints on how we see texts and too many constraints on how we can imagine using them for an infinite range of meanings to be immediately available. This claim for unlimited potential meaning is often balanced within poststructuralism by a commitment to trying to understand the nature of the interpretive inducements and constraints in both our own and other periods. It is that strain within poststructuralism that I have adopted and tried to put to use. That sense of variable but positioned and multiply determined meaning to some degree opens up a potential to argue for interpretations that are designed for a contemporary audience and that are responsible to the current social environment. Indeed, if a text has no inherent, immutable meaning, then the struggle over what kinds of meanings will be important is all that is left. To say that poststructuralism denies that possibility is to collapse a series of positions disingenuously into a single spectacle of excess.
That is not to say, however, that my belief in the undecidability of texts and the ultimate impossibility of historical knowledge places no strain on a project of recovering forgotten texts. When recovering texts that have clearly been repressed or marginalized for political reasons or because of the culture’s history of racism and sexism, there is a strong desire not only to disseminate the texts again but also to come to understand the experience of their authors and even to imagine that disseminating these texts gives their authors a voice in the culture and an opportunity to communicate again. Thus, when people first began to recover slave narratives, they wanted to believe the texts were reliably representational, that they gave us secure access to the experiences of their authors and the communities of which they were a part. In this commendable desire to compensate for a century of cultural repression, the well-known unreliability of language’s mediations was forgotten. Forgotten too was the knowledge that authors often have purposes other than straightforward communication or representation when they write. And not so much forgotten as unthought was the still more knotty problem of our own historically determined interests and perspectives, interests that can never be fully cast aside. These are interests, moreover, that we cannot even expect entirely to recognize.
In the end we need to admit that we will never know for certain what it was like to live in an earlier period. Of course we need the kind of empathy that allows us to construct a simulacra of access, but the experience of gaining full access to another author’s consciousness is a fantasy. And the histories we devise are constructed in the service of our own needs, compulsions, plans, and interests. That is not to say, however, that the desire to make repressed and forgotten traditions visible again, or to give them special moral and ethical claims on the present, is illicit. But the process of recovery is as much a process of current cultural critique as it is one of restoration. And what we “recover” in many ways will never have existed before. Nor is it inappropriate to try to understand the dynamics of an earlier period. It is merely that we will never finally distinguish ourselves from them, and we will never have in hand a set of unmediated facts that are clearly of the past and not of the present.
In writing Repression and Recovery I confronted these issues as a problematic, as an arena of work rather than as a problem to be solved. A partly Marxist recognition of my own social and economic positioning and the necessarily historically determined nature of my own interests was frequently in tension with an older and admirably passionate Marxism that aimed straightforwardly to give voice to what our culture had repressed. A poststructuralist doubt about what can be known was in conflict with a desire to know and often with a sensation of having gained access to a past we had quite forgotten. Not infrequently I was dealing with letters and diaries and poems that were not only unpublished but unread. At times an unpublished, unheard tape or record of an author’s voice was available. As historians will agree, it is hard to imagine circumstances in which a sense of recovering the past would be much stronger. I did not try to resolve these conflicts but rather to play them off against one another. At times, indeed, my book is a record of self-correction and theoretical counterpointing, as these aims and recognitions reflect on one another. At other times, succumbing to a certain will to power, to a wish to persuade and provoke change, I write over the seams between doubt and certainty, in a prose of advocacy and conviction.
This tonal instability seems to me to reflect the mix of relativism and commitment appropriate to an informed and responsible engagement with history. Once we realize that history’s meaning is always open to dispute, the work of interpretation and persuasion becomes crucial, not irrelevant. The situation is exactly parallel with relativism’s impact on moral and ethical standards, a subject continually exploited by the political Right over the last decade. The New Right’s attacks on relativism have made calm, serious discussion of this important issue nearly impossible. When academics argue that the world exists but is in some ways unknowable—a position with a credible history dating back to Kant—conservatives counter that we are clowns who believe there is no external reality. When poststructuralists point out that we have no unmediated access to material reality—that all sensation is interpreted, mediated, organized, and made meaningful by language—conservatives shout again that we believe the world does not exist. When we warn that moral values are not transcendent and guaranteed—that they must be continually rearticulated, defended, and relearned in context—reactionary commentators wail that we have opened the door to barbarism.
If we concede that there are no universally guaranteed human values—that being human can mean anything at various times and places, as our century has repeatedly proven—then the work of winning consent to certain judgments about history and to certain standards of behavior becomes more, not less, urgent. History shows us that human beings are capable of anything. Knowing that does not empty values of meaning but rather grants them the only meaning they have ever had—contingent meaning that is open to negotiation, transformation, and dispute.
We cannot plausibly argue for transhistorical values but we can argue on behalf of the purchase particular values should have on our own time. That is actually the only power we have ever had in such matters. Conservative critics have claimed to the contrary that poststructuralism—and particularly its deconstructive incarnation—makes all moral argument empty. And indeed American deconstructive critics like Paul de Man were inclined to avoid larger moral issues. But Jacques Derrida, the founder of deconstruction, has for years regularly written cultural and political essays of clear moral urgency; he has written about apartheid, nuclear war, racism, and the politics of academia. Recognizing how
