the rhetoric of AFFIRMATIVE RESISTANCE Holbein: The Ambassadors. (newly restored) The National Gallery. the rhetoric of Affirltlative Resistance Dissonant Identities from Carroll to Derrida Julian Wolfreys Palgrave Macmillan ISBN 978-0-333-69451-0 ISBN 978-1-349-25699-0 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-25699-0 THE RHETORIC OF AFFIRMATIVE RESISTANCE Copyright © 1997 by Julian Wolfreys All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address: SI. Martin's Press, Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 First published in the United States of America in 1997 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fuHy managed and sustained forest sources. ISBN 978-0-312-17330-2 (cIothbound) ISBN 978-0-312-17331-9 (paperbound) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wolfreys, Julian, 1958- The rhetoric of affirmative resistance : dissonant identities from Carroll to Derrida / Julian Wolfreys. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-312-17330-2 - ISBN 978-0-312-17331-9 (pbk.) I. Carroll, Lewis, 1832-1898-Criticism and interpretation. 2. Derrida, Jacques-Contributions in criticism. 3. Criticism. 4. Identity (Psychology) in literature. 5. Narration (Rhetoric) I. Title. PN81.W56 1997 828'.809-<1c21 96-50909 CIP To J.B. & R.R. Il Y a toujours quelque chose d' absent qui me tourmente Contents List of Abbreviations ix Preface and Acknowledgements x Affirmative Resistances: an Introduction, in passing 1 • an undecidable scene or, resisting postmodernism 1 • of sounds, sights and sites: reading other identities 8 • paradoxical identities and surfaces of reading 17 • enabling texts 21 1 Alice: an architecture of knowledges? or, identities in dispute 35 • the problem of the house 35 • the inexhaustible subject 45 • a dissonant dynamic or, anarchitecture's trembling 53 • identities in dispute 66 2 The writing on the wall or, making a spectacle of yourself: projection and The Yellow Wallpaper 70 3 'The nervous laughter of writing': Stephen Hero, onions, laughter and other lawless affirmations 86 4 Ulysses: memory's identities 105 • Stephen's other city 111 • 'L'etranger, l'etrangete du chez soi': Bloom's doubling/Dublin 118 • Molliloquy: 'this that and the other' 122 5 Meshes of the Afternoon: the dissonant identities of avant-garde film and problems of interpretation 133 vii viii Contents 6 Affirmative memories, resistant projections: Sylvie Germain's La Pleurante des rues de Prague 155 7 The place between: sending love and resisting identity or, between Jacques Derrida, Daniel Deronda, and Michel Deguy 194 • rehearsing the preliminaries 194 • absolute aphorisms 205 • between identities: sending, posting, writing 209 • copulative correspondence 214 Works Cited 225 Index 0/ Proper Names 233 List of Abbreviations AA Lewis Carroll. The Annotated Alice: Alice's Adventures in Won derland and Through the Looking Glass. Edited by Martin Gardner. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987. YW Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The Yellow Wallpaper. In Four Stories by American Women. Edited by Cynthia Griffin Wolff. New York: Penguin, 1990. SH James Joyce. Stephen Hero. Edited by Theodore Spencer, John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon. New York: New Directions, 1955 U James Joyce. Ulysses. Edited and revised by Hans Walter Gabler et al. London: The Bodley Head, 1986. Citations are by episode and line number. P Sylvie Germain. La Pleurante des rues de Prague. Paris: Gallimard, 1992. W Sylvie Germain. The Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague. Translated by Judith Landry. Sawtry, Cambs.: Dedalus, 1993. ix Preface and Acknowledgements To paraphrase Pierre Macherey, all the texts gathered here are related in that they belong to the age of what we call 'popular culture' (Macherey 1995, 7), whether they are immediately rec ognisable - determined or interpreted - as 'popular', or whether they can be comprehended as belonging to 'high culture'. Their gathering, seemingly heterogeneous as this is in its presentation, belongs in part, again in Macherey's words, to a 'study which elevates the disparate to the level of a principle' (Macherey 1995, 8). If the disparate is thus elevated, this is not so as to render what is disparate as a unified object, or to give it a homogene ous identity. And, furthermore, if the disparate is raised to the level of a principle, then this is not to say that the principle has behind it a programme already worked out or thought through, as a means of calming down the dissonance which is everywhere. Rather the disparate is celebrated for its own resistances - and its unceasing affirmations. Thanks are due to a number of people whose names will suffice, and who also know who and where (and what) they are; they have contributed in a number of ways, over a number of years, directly or indirectly, to greater or lesser extents: James Kincaid, Jessica Maynard, Burhan Tufail, Peggy Kamuf, Vince Cheng, Jenny Boume Taylor, Claire Jones, Virginia Mason Vaughan, Marcia Butzei, Geoff Ward, Mark Currie, Andrew Roberts, Marion Wynne Davies, Jane Goldman, Charmian Heame, John Nash, Alistair Davies, Jane Stabler, Moyra Haslett, John Abercrombie, Ken Newton, and of course those to whom this book is dedicated in friendship, gratitude and affirmative affection, and whose own dissonant identities, like those of the nameless others, are hidden everywhere in plain view throughout the surfaces of this book. Chapter 5 is a substantially revised version of an essay enti tled 'Meshes of the Afternoon: Hollywood, the A vant-Garde and Problems of Interpretation', first published in CineAction! (De cember 1987, 11; 38-42). The author would like to thank the Editorial Collective for permission to republish this material. x