On creative and critical writing, environments and dreaming: veering (1)статья из журнала
Аннотация: Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Wallace Stevens, ‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’, in Collected Poems (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1954), p. 482. See Hélène Cixous, Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing, trans. Eric Prenowitz (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 204. We might think about ‘climate change’ in a corresponding way: there is something absurd about this formulation, as if the ‘change’ were something simply going on apart from – at a distance from – ourselves, as if our hallucinatory place at the centre of the world were left entirely intact and unaffected by what is going on outside, over there, somewhere else. There is something laughable also about the pacifying use of ‘change’ rather than, say, ‘disintegration’ or ‘transformation’, and about the calm insistence on this noun in the singular. The very ‘change’ or changes in ‘climate change’ entail veering, veering perhaps in its most terrifying forms. The Guardian, Sports section, Thursday 4 January 2007, p. 4. Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 92. See Paul Celan, ‘Speech on the Occasion of Receiving the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen’, in Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, trans. John Felstiner (New York: Norton, 2001), p. 396. See Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994). On the world war around the ‘appropriation of Jerusalem’, and on the call for the worldwide extension of international law, in particular, see pp. 58 and 84. Jacques Derrida, Mémoires: for Paul de Man, trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, and Eduardo Cadava (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 15. S. T. Coleridge, Aids to Reflection in the Formation of a Manly Character: On the Several Grounds of Prudence, Morality and Religion, Thomas Fenby (rev. ed.) (London: Routledge, n.d.), pp. 15, 5. See Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Frost at Midnight’, in Poems, John Beer (ed.) (London: Dent, 1962), pp. 137–139. Further references to Coleridge's poems are to this edition. William Watkin, On Mourning: Theories of Loss in Modern Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), p. 183. See, for example, Spectres of Marx, p. 83. ‘Etymologi’, trans. Asko Kauppinen and Arto Schroderus, Kulttuurivihkot, 12 (1996), pp. 39–40. Gilles Deleuze, ‘He Stuttered’, in Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (eds), Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. (London: Verso, 1998), p. 110. I read this essay only later, some years after leaving Finland, but it felt (if I may put it like this) as if I had been born with its stuttering in my ears. To be ‘a foreigner within [one's] own language’ (ibid.) is doubtless also to be out of time, propounding the untimely. For more on cryptaesthesia, see Telepathy and Literature: Essays on the Reading Mind (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 60–62 (apropos Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights) and passim. On the veering beauty of ‘versatility’ (versatilité), turn to Hélène Cixous, ‘The Unforeseeable’, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic, Oxford Literary Review, 26 (2004), p. 190. It is a word which she doubtless hears in French but also turning between French and English and I first heard her pronounce in English (at an ‘Inventive English’ lecture at the University of Sussex in June 2004). It is a word that, again, comes from the Latin vertere, to turn, and in French has more of a sense of ‘fickle’, ‘capricious’, ‘changeable’, than in English where the primary signification is of ‘turning easily or freely from one thing to another’ (though it can also mean ‘changeable’, ‘unsteady’). She remarks: ‘versatility… is a word which rings pleasingly in my ears and mind. I could write a book on versatility. Naturally I would call it Versatilities. Those I love the most are versatile’ (p. 190). Sigmund Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Pelican Freud Library, volume 5), trans. Alan Tyson, James Strachey (ed.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975). Jacques Derrida, ‘Limited Inc a, b, c …’, trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman, in Limited Inc (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1988), p. 100. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolf Man's Magic Word: A Cryptonymy, trans. Nicholas Rand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. 18–19. Sigmund Freud, ‘A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis’, in Albert Dickson (ed.), Pelican Freud Library, Vol 14, trans. under the general editorship of James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 390. For more on the mole in this context, see ‘Mole’, in The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 241–255, and E. M. Forster (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1999), p. 6 and passim. Wallace Stevens, ‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’, p. 473. Cf. Jacques Derrida: ‘Immediacy is derived (L'immédiateté est dérivée)’, in Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 157; De la grammatologie (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1967) p. 226. ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, Part III, in Poems, pp. 177–178. William Wordsworth, The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850, Jonathan Wordsworth, M.H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (eds) (New York: Norton, 1979), Book 4 (1805 text), pp. ll.9–15. Further references are to this edition, based on the 1805 text unless specified otherwise. The Prelude, p. 126, n. 3. It would also be necessary to engage here with Coleridge's astonishing short lyric ‘Constancy to an Ideal Object’ (Poems, pp. 311–312). In John Beer's edition, the poem is printed immediately before the section of poems entitled ‘Work Without Hope’ in which, the editor tells us, ‘self-dramatisation, veering towards self-pity, is a dominant trait’ (p. 313). One wonders whether Beer picks up this word (rhyming of course with his own name) from ‘Constancy to an Ideal Object’, which begins: ‘Since all that beat about in Nature's range,/Or veer or vanish; why should'st thou remain / The only constant in a world of change,/O yearning Thought! That liv'st in the brain?’ Everything veers or vanishes, Coleridge's poem suggests, except ‘yearning Thought’. Or rather, everything ‘or veer[s] or vanish[es]’: the repetition of the ‘or’ functions at once as an ‘either veer or vanish’, and as a ranging between ‘veer’ and ‘vanish’. While the ‘only constant in a world of change’ (the ‘you’, the ‘loveliest friend’, the ‘Home’ that is the addressee of the poem) is threatened by the ancient mariner-like image of a ‘Helmsman on an ocean waste and wide’, who ‘Sits mute and pale his mouldering helm beside’, there is (as so often in Coleridge) a peculiar recourse or looping back whereby what is initially negated haunts and mingles, as in ‘a glist'ning haze’, with what is ostensibly opposed to it: no ‘yearning’ without veering, no haunting (‘Yet still thou haunt'st me’) without what ‘veers or vanishes’. See Mary Jacobus, Romanticism, Writing and Sexual Difference (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 242. See ‘The Pleasures of Merely Circulating’, in Collected Poems, pp. 149–50. Elsewhere, in the much later poem ‘The Triad’ (1828), Wordsworth deploys the wonderful phrase ‘veering gait’ to describe the movement of a peacock, ‘the bird of Juno’: –She comes! – behold That Figure, like a ship with silver sail! Nearer she draws – a breeze uplifts her veil– Upon her coming wait As pure a sunshine and as soft a gale As e'er, on herbage covering earthly mould, Tempted the bird of Juno to unfold His richest splendour, when his veering gait And every motion of his starry train Seem governed by a strain Of music, audible to him alone.– See ‘The Triad’, ll.41–51, Last Poems 1821–1850, Jared Curtis (ed.) (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), p. 106. Here too, it may be noted, the inflection of the ‘veering’ is more complex than might at first appear. Wordsworth's lines describe the movement of a peacock but at the same time also a ship, in terms of a cryptic or even cryptaesthetic strain of music, in order to evoke the approach of ‘Lucida’, in other words a quasi-idealised figuration of Edith May Southey, one of the triad (along with Sara Coleridge and his daughter, Dora Wordsworth) of the poem's title. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, Claude Lefort (ed.), trans. John O'Neill (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 90. (The Prose of the World was never completed and was first published posthumously, in French, in 1969.) The Prose of the World, pp. 90–91. ‘The Slide’ was first published in The Salt Companion to Harold Bloom, Roy Sellars and Graham Allen (eds) (Cambridge: Salt, 2007). Reprinted here by kind permission. See Harold Bloom, Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), p. 16. Coleridge writes of the ‘lene clinamen’ or ‘the gentle Bias’ in Aids to Reflection, p. 136. Jacques Derrida, ‘My Chances/Mes Chances: A Rendezvous with Some Epicurean Stereophonies’, trans. Irene Harvey and Avital Ronell, in Taking Chances: Derrida, Psychoanalysis, and Literature, Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan (eds) (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), pp. 1–32: here, p. 10. ‘My Chances’, p. 10; the original French text, ‘Mes chances: Au rendez-vous de quelques stéréophonies épicuriennes’ (1982), can be found in Psyché: Inventions de l'autre (Paris: Galilée, 1998), pp. 353–384: here p. 363. It is in the context of this more radical ‘veering’ or détournement that we should read Derrida's remarks on veering (virer de bord) and the so-called ‘ethical turn’ or ‘political turn’ of deconstruction in the 1990s: see Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 39; Voyous: Deux essais sur la raison (Paris: Galilée, 2003), p. 64. ‘My Chances’, p. 16, trans. modified. The original French here reads: ‘Mon clinamen, ma chance ou mes chances, voilà ce qui m'incline à penser le clinamen depuis la divisibilité de la marque’ (p. 369). Cf. here Jean-Luc Nancy's remarks about clinamen: ‘Singularity never takes place at the level of atoms, those identifiable if not identical identities; rather it takes place at the level of the clinamen, which is unidentifiable. It is linked to ecstasy: one could not properly say that the singular being is the subject of ecstasy, for ecstasy has no “subject” – but one must say that ecstasy (community) happens to the singular being’. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, Peter Connor (ed.), trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland and Simona Sawhney (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), pp. 6–7. ‘My Chances’, p. 10.
Год издания: 2009
Авторы: Nicholas Royle
Издательство: Taylor & Francis
Источник: Textual Practice
Ключевые слова: Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature, Literature and Cultural Memory, Narrative Theory and Analysis
Открытый доступ: closed
Том: 23
Выпуск: 6
Страницы: 913–933