LITMIR.BIZ

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hold/, Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.”25 These lines are a perfect example of the “surrounded” yet “detached” self (the authentic inner identity of the “I”) is the organizing principle that provides meaning to the randomness of the outside world by attaching the “thread” somewhere.

      This return to the self does not happen in a vacuum, which is why I will explain it also as a fall. The shift inward is, historically, most often a reaction to the oppressiveness of the social/mythical order. This reaction is mainly that of the individuals who cannot gain acceptance in this order. Following their rebellion, these individuals are deemed inadequate and cannot aspire toward unfallenness, or innocence. To come to terms with themselves and still see themselves as redeemable for identity, these individuals tend to try either to revolutionize the social order (with the example of the French Revolution and the end of European feudalism), or to retreat from the social system into the space of their individual selves. Modernist dissatisfaction with traditional society and the turn toward the self as a locus of meaning provide very straightforward examples of such retreats or escapes. If we look at one of the most beloved modernist poems, T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” this withdrawal into the self appears as problematic, insofar as it is still a promise of meaning, not a fulfillment. The poet finds torment in the refusal of the outside world to speak to him: “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. / I do not think that they will sing to me.”26 In the search for meaning within himself, although he hopes for answers, Prufrock is left with questions. That is why he is not able to say, as he wishes he could say, “I am Lazarus, come back from the dead, / Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all,”27 which is where the second set of problems addressed by this book (as the second kind of fall) is located.

      In turn, the social structure from which the individual is alienated responds (as to any threat, if individualism is perceived as such), by forging an even harsher social order that refines earlier limits (as, for instance, socialism and communism striving to abolish private property). Social and cultural revolutions tend to be ambivalent, in the sense that they may be inclined to favor the individual (as the Enlightenment, Romanticism, or American Transcendentalism), but at the same time they try to offer a new, improved social order. This second order still fails to distance itself enough from the emphasis on social identity because, in offering a better way to organize society, it maintains to some degree the ideal of innocence and social perfection. A very obvious example is American individualism, structured as a new social order, and centered around the ideal of innocence. Literary texts that explore the “American Dream” as the ideal of individual fulfillment tend to point to the impossibility of that individual to succeed without getting entangled in the web of corrupting social forces, so that the struggle for self-identity can lead to tragedy, as portrayed, for instance, in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. In this modern tragedy, the individual who maintains the ideal of innocence as opposed to the corrupted nature of the world of success is crushed in his attempt to find a place where both innocence and success (personal fulfillment) can be reconciled.

      Innocence, then, is what remains at stake when corrupting elements threaten the system. The paradox of individuality is that it still remains a territory, a subjected identity, even in its most “free” self-perception, which is why freedom functions both as social binder and as individualizing force. On the other hand, the complete divorce from the social world, in the name of individual identity, shifts the stakes toward a different kind of fall. Dissatisfaction with the social system taken to an extreme (as a tendency in existentialist and modernist thought) tries to change the emphasis altogether, and to claim that the social order distracts from attaining identity, because identity is a personal issue. Authentic being is what has been lost and needs to be retrieved, and this is a personal struggle. Unsurprisingly, only the individual is assumed to know who he or she will become, identity-wise, on condition that all social distractions are eliminated. The problem is that identity still remains a stake, which renders others and even the self disposable. This makes individual identity perhaps as dangerous and as potentially violent as the collective one. In Chapter Three, Absalom, Absalom! is the example I use to illustrate how individual identity turns against others and against the self. In William Faulkner’s novel, Thomas Sutpen “falls,” or plunges, into a downward spiral that can only end in his death, since he has given himself no choice but to follow his identity toward destruction.

      The third mode of perceiving identity, which I call the fall from meaning, functions by denying that identity is a stake and trying to show that it is a social construct. Deconstructive criticism of the media, for instance, focuses on the fact that the objects and images that we deem necessary for our identity (such as a certain car, a certain body lotion, a certain body type that we try to attain) are not naturally part of us, but language has tricked us into believing that there is an identity to be desired, and that these objects help us achieve it. Both identity and its objects are constructs, illusions created by culture and language.

      This type of fall shakes the foundations of “meaning” (or truth) sustaining identity, deeming such concepts obsolete. This is, as critics of postmodernism pointed out, not new at all. The Platonic thesis/antithesis pattern of debate was already de-emphasizing meaning, not to mention the Sophists themselves. The one aspect of the critique leveled against postmodern thought that I happen to agree with is that, when it focuses on the negation of meaning and of identity (as in the case of several thinkers and writers), this creates a new problem, as the negation of these essential concepts reveals that the social and individual identities are a function of language and there is nothing outside of it. Derrida himself very carefully avoided this trap by making it clear that there is a danger in simplifying a complex world by reducing it to a set of binaries, which is why he continuously revised his own theories so they would not be easy to simplify.

      The temptation, when one exposes the constructed nature of language, is to feel as if something has been lost, once meaning is abandoned as a unifying concept. Let us suppose that identity and meaning (social or individual) are, in fact, constructed inside of language, and that there is no real behind these constructions: it is tempting to think that another meaning, another identity can be acquired in actuality, or “really” acquired (if traditional meaning is gone). The emphasis on identity and meaning as somehow “missing” creates the need for a new meaning and a new identity.

      Many critics may find Derrida frustrating, because he refuses to offer “new meaning” in the place of the one he apparently made disappear like a magician. To him, however, meaning is no longer the point. The questioning of identity itself is the point, instead of offering another identity. This is how postmodernism got itself into trouble (and with it, its theoretical counterparts, the misunderstood versions of poststructuralism and deconstruction): it did not always manage to make this point strongly enough: challenging and deconstructing meaning were advanced primarily to show how dangerous fixed meaning can be, not because there was another, better meaning out there waiting to replace it. It is then unavoidable that, in some variants of postmodern thought, loss of meaning brings about a desire to retrieve it.

      Postmodern thought often comes across as throwing the world into a non-centered space where everything is “contingent, ungrounded, diverse, unstable, indeterminate, a set of disunified cultures or interpretations.”28 This is, of course, Eagleton’s understanding and subsequent critique of postmodernism. When unified meaning is seen as lost, it becomes a stake all the more. Eagleton, Jameson, Satya Mohanty, Richard Rorty, and others have urged the world to return to law and authority, or some kind of center (whether a traditional center, or one more open and community-oriented), or new values or humanisms. It may be true that certain problems within the postmodern age have proven insurmountable: the apparent openness of a pluralistic society does not solve the issues of social inequality because it does not, in fact, include everybody in the space of power, but perpetuates the center-margin dichotomy, where “political correctness,” for instance, is the new (yet still white) master. A shift in the terms used to address a different race does not change the fact of racial oppression; the exclusion of violence from schoolbooks Скачать книгу