Idling the Engine: Linguistic Skepticism in and around Cortazar, Kafka, and Joyce

304 Pages·2006·1.24 MB·English

by  E. Joseph Sharkey

IIddlliinngg tthhee EEnnggiinnee

E. Joseph Sharkey
Linguistic Skepticism in and around Cortázar, Kafka, and Joyce
Idling the Engine
The Catholic University of America Press
Washington, D.C.
Copyright © 2006
The Catholic University of America Press
All rights reserved
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standards for Information Science—Permanence of Paper for Printed Li-
brary materials, ansi z39.48-1984.
∞
The first part of chapter two is a revision of “A Gadamerian Interpretation of the
Conclusion of Rayuela’s ‘First Book,’” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos,
vol.25, no.2 (2001): 307–26. Reprinted with permission. The second part of chap-
ter two is a revision of “Rayuela’s Confused Hermeneutics,” Hispanic Review, vol.69,
no.4 (Autumn 2001):423–42. © 2001 by the Trustees of the University of Pennsylva-
nia. Reprinted by permission of the University of Pennsylvania Press. The first part
of chapter three is a revision of “Wittgensteinian Skepticism in The Castle: Inside and
Outside the Language-Game at Once,” Journal of the Kafka Society of America, vol. 21,
no.1–2 (June-December 1997):55–65. Reprinted with permission.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sharkey, E. Joseph, 1968–
Idling the engine : linguistic skepticism in and around Cortázar, Kafka,
and Joyce / by E. Joseph Sharkey.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn-13: 978-0-8132-1441-2 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn-10: 0-8132-1441-6 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Cortázar, Julio—
Criticism and interpretation. 3. Kafka, Franz, 1883–1924—Criticism and
interpretation. 4. Joyce, James, 1882–1941—Criticism and interpretation.
I. Title.
pn3503.s483 2006
809.3'04—dc22
2005011467
Contents
Preface / vii
Acknowledgments / xiii
Abbreviations / xv
1. Introduction: Paradise Lost as an Allegory of Finitude / 1
The Skeptical Threat in Paradise Lost / 4
Paradise Lost in Light of Gadamer and Wittgenstein: Idling the Engine / 21
Conclusion / 40
2. Skeptical Self-Contradiction in Hopscotch: Knowing, Being,
Reading, Writing / 42
The Self-Contradiction of Cortázar’s “Active Spectator”:
How to Know? How to Be? / 44
The Confused Hermeneutics of Hopscotch: How to Read? How to Write? / 77
Conclusion / 114
3. Kafka, Wittgenstein, and the Limits of Language / 118
Wittgensteinian Skepticism in The Castle: Inside and
Outside the Language-Game at Once / 124
“On Parables”: The Value of Already Knowing That the
Incomprehensible Is Incomprehensible / 156
Conclusion / 189
vi Contents
4. The Skeptic and the Hermeneut in Joyce / 191
Stephen’s Rejection of Finitude / 197
Bloom’s Finite Existence and Hermeneutical Aesthetic, Bloomitas / 226
Conclusion: Joyce’s Choices / 251
5. Conclusion: Joyce’s Teacup / 254
Works Cited / 261
Index / 269
Preface
A thorough distrust of language has long been a kind of prerequisite
for the advanced study of literature. Deconstruction is no longer fashion-
able, but that is partly because it has gone establishment, or at least secured
tenure. Thus if the wave has crested and broken, it has also washed up on
the shore and sunk into the earth: a vague belief that language is inad-
equate and self-undermining is taken for granted so generally today that
it is rarely advanced in argument; it has simply become part of academic
culture. As the generation of graduate students who immersed themselves
in popular skeptical theories have become the new teachers of college un-
dergraduates, this distrust has sometimes crept its way into even the most
introductory courses on literature, and not only incidentally but often as a
matter of pedagogical principle.
When I was a graduate student, I once attended a tutorial meeting for
teaching assistants, who taught only introductory classes, at which a facul-
ty member in our program advised, “It’s almost to the point now that you
can’t read a book at all without having a theory first.” I hope the remark
was not meant to be as sincere as it seemed. I regret not asking the speaker
what we teaching assistants were supposed to do with the freshmen, or the
nonmajors, or the majors who had not yet immersed themselves in a the-
ory by means of which they could begin to read their first book. This way
of looking at things reminds me of a comic strip I saw somewhere in which
a teacher attempts to teach her class to recite the alphabet. She is only to B
vii
viii Preface
when a student asks, “Why?” The caption as I recall it was “A deconstruc-
tionist in kindergarten.”
Despite their silliness, the remark and the comic strip are serious inso-
far as they lay bare the confusion on which this now axiomatic distrust of
literature and language is based: that no knowledge over thirty, least of all
linguistic knowledge, is to be trusted outright, because everything is sus-
pect until a justification can be provided for it. Born in part of noble im-
pulses (e.g., to combat conscious or unconscious prejudice) and in part of
others, this distrust tends to push doubt to nonsensical extremes: the stan-
dards required for certainty are not only unnecessary but unreasonable or
even impossible; thus when “justification” is called for, it is “absolute justi-
fication” that is really meant, this in a world without absolutes.
The philosophies of language of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Ludwig
Wittgenstein are often taken to serve this skeptical, subversive cause by ex-
posing language as unjustified and therefore untrustworthy. I will use them
to argue the opposite, that such extreme distrust betrays an unreasonable,
even puerile, rejection of the finitude of human being and understanding.
Gadamer teaches us that language is not an encumbrance to understand-
ing but our means of understanding, one so interwoven with our being
that it is hardly a distinct thing. He teaches moreover that language does
not so much put us at the mercy of our unconscious prejudices as it pro-
vides us with a way, perhaps the only way, to bring these prejudices to our
attention and under our scrutiny. Wittgenstein teaches us that our every-
day language is quite successful as it is, and that the shortcomings we seem
to see when we contrast it with an ideal language of our own imagination
usually only express a misunderstanding of language as we have it, and, I
would add, a misunderstanding of the finite nature of human being. Lan-
guage is a form of understanding given to us without absolute justifica-
tion; the question is merely whether or not we will insist that we need it in
spite of our successful everyday use of language.1
1. See Charles Altieri, Act and Quality: A Theory of Literary Meaning and Humanistic
Understanding (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981), 40: “It may well be the
case that we have no absolutely secure grounds for truth, but the more important question
is whether we need these grounds for coherent discourse, even on the self-reflective levels
within which philosophical analysis takes place.”
Preface ix
The same can be said of our everyday reading of texts, which I would
insist is theory-free. Our ability to manufacture a theory to match our
reading practice does not uncover a theory in what we already do. It only
appends a theory, and one inevitably less complex than the practice; the
reading we already do is more sophisticated than the most sophisticated
theory we can adduce to account for it in hindsight.
The argument that this skepticism about language is willfully blind has
already been made sufficiently.2 It tends in any case only to convince the
convinced, as is generally the case with arguments that ought to be un-
necessary in the first place. My goal in this study is not to contend directly
with formal accounts of skeptical literary theories; that would leave the lit-
erature so far behind that even winning would be losing. I intend rath-
er to examine the consequences of this skepticism as it shows up in and
around the work of three twentieth-century novelists, each of whom was
well aware of the crisis of language and the threat it was perceived to hold
for literary endeavors such as theirs. Almost as important as the consider-
ation of the novels themselves will be a consideration of their interpreta-
tion by critics, many of whom, surely, were once teachers of introductory
courses in literature.
This book takes as its fundamental and I hope unobjectionable prem-
ise that we human beings are finite, and, more particularly, that our being
precedes our knowing. Another way of expressing this truth is that the on-
tological limitations of humans frustrate certain of their epistemological
wishes. Among these frustrations are the familiar ones that we are born
into the world without our consent and not on our own terms; that we
cannot know the future until it arrives as the present or, rather, until it has
departed as the past; that we are so thoroughly embedded in the self that
we can never examine it in the way we would examine an object; and that
2. Eugene Goodheart’s The Skeptic Disposition: Deconstruction, Ideology, and Other Mat-
ters (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984) is thoughtful and subtle in its critique.
John M. Ellis’s Against Deconstruction (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989) is re-
freshingly unsubtle. Altieri’s less combative essay, “Wittgenstein on Consciousness and Lan-
guage: A Challenge to Derridean Literary Theory,” Modern Language Notes 91 (1976): 1397–
1423, is the best application of Wittgenstein’s late philosophy I have read. Altieri launches his
book, Act and Quality, with an extension of this article.