Trying On: The American Education

The Uses of Obscurity: The Fiction of Early Modernism (1981)

From what I’ve read, Allon White (longtime pal of Peter Stallybrass–they read Bakhtin and Rabelais together in a white house one summer, and that’s all you need to know. Well, there are other parts to the story, all wonderful and fascinating, but one must save something as remainder. The North American inland oceans didn’t do that–and now look where we’ve found ourselves!) has brilliantly arranged a variety of hermeneutic styles to address an old favorite problem of literary modernism: obscurity; ie., my new housepet–the difficulty of the text.

White’s area of focus is the early modern–in the sense of fin-de-siècle modernism. He reads, if I remember correctly, James, Conrad, and Meredith. All are, he argues, variously intractable. Here, he seems to be referring to what the critics of the time said, and reception sense: although White finds these guys difficult, it’s clearly (well–there’s another word that’s off-limits from now on) adventuresome enough for him to develop a way to hold them all in a bear-hug at arms’ length… ever respectful of difference.

Methods! White’s methods are particularly exciting–he likes folks like Husserl, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein, and seems to pull his formation of the ‘problem’ and possibilities of literary obscurity directly from the debates over private language and the grounds of public meaning in continental language philosophy. Here are some things that White likes–which I find funny, or compelling (even when I haven’t tried very hard; I promise to try harder in the future to-come):

1. the demise of realism
2. symptomatic reading
3. the “smell of treachery” (attendant to the demise of realism)
4. double treachery (modification of 3; cf. 1)
5. the “dark motive of a statement’s utterance”
6. the “Faustian price” of a hermeneutics of suspicion
7. Eagleton-bashing/ anti- ideology critique
8. secrecy
9. vulnerability of the author to the public gaze
10. obscurity as purity; virginity; privacy

Lovely quotes, please print them onto posters:

The single most arduous task of the present work has been the attempt to preserve the insight of symptomatic reading without reducing and degrading the specific value of the literary text. It is insufficient for a critic simply to penetrate the phenomenal form of a work in order to reveal its psychological and ideological generative matrix. This is a crucial aspect of critical labor, but it is what Hegel would call ‘a one-sided abstraction.’ It falls prey to the old idealist notion that the ‘form of appearance’ (in this case, the literary work itself) is an inessential husk to be discarded once we penetrate beneath it (7). 

What seems to be a part of the ‘code of the real’ in a single work may well become a ’symptom’ when seen repeated in different works… (4). 

Moreover, White seems cripplingly fair–he’s quite alright with the symptomatic readers, and places symptomatic nicely in its ‘necessary’ place alongside the emergence of sneaky late realism/early modernism, without the demeaning pat and repressed anger of many cultural materialists. (I suppose, though, situating a sort of ’situational reading’ historically is among the nastier little brother tricks in a critic’s book.) But White’s okay. Really. He even starts out with a cute comment about not wanting to “succumb to a myth of origins.” And this, in the 1980s! All in all, seems like a pretty nice guy. I am excited for the rest of the book.