[Paul Lake]

Below is my now-infamous deconstruction of Derrida. My friend Dana Gioia once read this to his dinner party guests.


Critics and Cannibals


Jeffrey Dahmer meets Jacques Derrida over a dining room table and they laugh over the coincidence that they share the same initials: J.D. Jacques is tied down and gagged but manages to chortle through the rag stuffed into his mouth. Jeffrey is sharpening a knife and eyeing Jacques's naked belly.
"The thing is," says Jeffrey, "we must realize that a man is nothing more than a bag of organs and bodily fluids: heart, lung, brain, spleen; blood, lymph, urine, bile. Our first task is to abolish the notion that it existed before this particular moment or to anyone other than me.
"We start here, then: A body on a table. Whatever the thing believes itself to be--brother, lover, father, son--is not to our purpose. There is only skin and blood, a pump at the center, a bellows of air, a labyrinth of excremental tunnels: a set of things we can disassemble and manipulate at our pleasure. Above all, we must ignore such special pleading as when, under critical analysis, it appears to say such things as 'stop doing this let me go whatever you do please please don't hurt me.'
"These seemingly significant expressions, when looked at closely, reduce to arrangements of sound--mere language, if you will, produced by air forced across strands of flesh and up the windpipe then given shape in the cavern of the mouth. I have deconstructed both the larynx and the brain and examined them in some detail and I assure you that neither is capable of transmitting anything like intention or meaning.
"You know this, of course, and have wasted no effort in trying to deflect me from my purpose, which, since you haven't already guessed, is to cut out your liver and eat it before your eyes.
"I will perform the operation with this kitchen knife, without benefit of anesthetic, and your reactions should provide some novel pleasures indeed. If you are still conscious after I extract your liver, like a floppy stillborn puppy from your side, I will chew it lovingly, savoring its many juices. Raw liver is a slippery sloppy thing, red and pungent with bitter bile, a swallow of oyster.
"But look at you: you already disappoint me. As if a word or trope could make one pale. I expected more: an amusing pun, perhaps; a bit of French drollery. For instance, a boring middle-aged man once told me that he expected a long life, as he was from a family of long-livers; yet upon cutting him open and examining the organ in question, I found it to be of no more than average size.
"Language is full of such pun-gent ironies, such nouvelle pleasures, no?--a phrase you might have noted earlier had you not been so frantically straining against your bonds.
"In any case, after you are stiff and cold, a corrupted corpus, I will anal-yze you further as I diddle your Derridean derriere. Then, after hacking you to pieces, I'll arrange your parts in ways hitherto unimagined: a heart on a dish; a kidney under a pillow; an arm wrapped and frozen beside a tin of summer strawberries.
"Art lies in subtle differences such as these.
"A month or two from now, your friends will say, `He was a man of many parts . . . with such an ear for language . . . and yet I see he lacked a certain presence . . . .'
"How fortunate that they can't see you now, sweating and straining against your ropes, as if you took me at my word, or had formed an image of me from reading the papers.
"We must guard against such logocentric views. If not, mon frere, I'll have many bones to pick with you over dinner."

[Wild Bill]

Paul, I appreciate this in my low-brow way because it tells me what I discerned only faintly in the discussion among you, nyctom and epigone on the "Loom" thread. It also shines a new light on the bad writing, especially my own, that I have encountered in the last year or so. Thanks for a valuable critical tool.

------------------
Bill

[Michael Cantor]

Paul -

It's delicious! I don't know who I admire more - you for writing it, or Dana for having the self-confidence to read it to dinner guests.

Michael Cantor

[epigone]

Paul,

I know that this is all meant in fun but I’m afraid I cannot help but see in it little but vicious sadism. It is not merely a fantasy of Derrida’s murder; it is a lurid description of torture, which invites the reader to exult in deadly violence. Such violence, we are to conclude, is poetic justice in this case, because apparently, Derrida is guilty of rejecting belief in human consciousness or suffering. The reader is to be delighted when the god of nihilist theory is confronted with genuine nihilism.

I said on your other thread that I write as a recovering post-structuralist. Seriously, I write as someone who has read a great deal of post-structuralist theory and has concluded that some of it is convincing, some of it is not, and much of it is incomprehensible to me. There are elements of Derridean criticism that are quite intelligent and which I find useful in my approach to criticism, broadly defined. And there is a lot in him that I don’t find useful or intelligible.

What I find troubling in your approach to Derrida is that you do not seem to have given him the fair hearing that you demand that he (and other post-modern critics) give to literature. You would rather just disembowel him. And I have to say, post-modern theory has a lot to say, much of which I find quite plausible, about what might motivate the symbolic violence of your fantasy about the death of Jacques Derrida, a man with a family, friends, students, teaching responsibilities, scholarly ambitions, numerous publications, an ego, a heart, a brain, a liver, and pain receptors.

epigone

[This message has been edited by epigone (edited September 20, 2003).]

[nyctom]

A big thank you epi. I did find what you wrote perceptive. Like epi, I have read a great deal of post-structural theory and much of it is inpenetrable (to me, at least) or downright silly, but there is much I have found illuminating and useful. I'm glad I read what I have of it.

As I said earlier, it is damnably easy to poke fun at any literary theory if you want to badly enough. I'm not sure, however, if such mockery is anything more than preaching to the choir.

In my two years on here, I have often thought how strange some die-hard metrical fans are: they want people to love metrical poetry, yet they act as if someone were trying to bludgeon them if they are even remotely exposed to any kind of poetry that doesn't follow in the metrical tradition. And here we have a parallel case with literary theory. A case of "do as I say, not as I do"? Perhaps.

[Steven Schroeder]

Whether it's fair to Derrida and postmodernism or not (and I tend to think twisting their own ideas against them is a valid approach), I'm sure both of you realize that virtually all parody and satire is (A) unfair to the subject it's making fun of and (B) preaching to the choir to some extent, especially if you're a contrarian non-choir member. That's just the way it is.

------------------
Steve Schroeder
A Creative Resume

[This message has been edited by Steven Schroeder (edited September 20, 2003).]

[epigone]

Originally posted by Steven Schroeder:
Whether it's fair to Derrida and postmodernism or not (and I tend to think twisting their own ideas against them is a valid approach), I'm sure both of you realize that virtually all parody and satire is (A) unfair to the subject it's making fun of and (B) preaching to the choir to some extent, especially if you're a contrarian non-choir member. That's just the way it is.

My point was that Paul is unfair to postmodern criticism in his essay on postmodern criticism; not in this piece. I bring that point up on this thread because Paul objected to the notion that works of literature should be subjected to what I termed "withering critique." I agreed in part. I have no problem with withering critique, so long as it is preceded by a profound understanding and appreciation of the work criticized.

Even when preaching to the choir, one ought to understand the subject-matter of one's satire, and understanding requires that one, at least in the first instance, give that subject-matter a fair hearing.

epigone

[Steven Schroeder]

Your literalist interpretation of the "violent sadism" of what is obviously not meant to be taken literally also puzzles me.

Steve

[nyctom]

Of course satire is "unfair," if you put it that way. And yes, of course most arguments involve at least a measure of preaching to the choir. But that doesn't mean I have to sing along. What epi was pointing out, and what I agreed with, is this:

What I find troubling in your approach to Derrida is that you do not seem to have given him the fair hearing that you demand that he (and other post-modern critics) give to literature. You would rather just disembowel him.

There are quite a few proselytizers for tradition on this site, whether it be of literary criticism or poetic forms or political viewpoints. Ok, that's the nature of debate, which always includes proselytizing on some level. But there is often a rigid adherence to a single point of view, with vehement--and yes, satirical--attacks on anything that differs from that particular viewpoint.

Or, to put it another way, it's hard to give anything a fair hearing when you are determined to stick your fingers in your ears, even before the choir starts singing.

[Curtis Gale Weeks]

What I find most troubling about this piece, is not what it says or does not say about Derrida, but how the author allies with Dahmer to make a point. Sorry, Paul. Maybe it should be recast w/ Hannibal Lector--who kept intruding all the way through, anyway. After all, Lector's more of the intellectual than (I presume) Dahmer was; and, he didn't have real victims.

The satire isn't coming through so much as the disdain--for the reality of either D.