[Steven Schroeder]

Tom:

Neither you nor epi has done much to convince me that Derrida isn't getting a fair shake. Epi was at least trying on the other thread, but over here it's just complaining without much to back you up.

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

[epigone]

Originally posted by Steven Schroeder:
Your literalist interpretation of the "violent sadism" of what is obviously not meant to be taken literally also puzzles me.

Steve

I called Paul's piece "symbolic violence." I don't know what it would mean to take it literally. It's not as if I think it actually happened. My reading of the piece basically follows Robert Darnton's methodology in "The Great Cat Massacre" (and Darnton's essay is an attempt to deploy Clifford Geertz's anthropological method to a historical subject). The basic approach is, when confronted with something that is supposed to be funny, try to figure out why the thing is funny. You have read my sense of why this is supposed to be funny -- in short we are supposed to enjoy a description of Derrida getting a taste of his own medicine. Is there another way of reading it -- of getting the joke -- that I am missing? In other words, do you have an interpretation that is less "literalist"?

Originally posted by Steven Schroeder:
Neither you nor epi has done much to convince me that Derrida isn't getting a fair shake. Epi was at least trying on the other thread, but over here it's just complaining without much to back you up.

Steve

I had my say about why I think Paul gets Derrida wrong on the other thread. In short, he thinks Derrida believes in an absolute disconnect between words and things. Only language matters and there is no reality ("nothing outside the text"). I think Derrida's point is that there is no "outside-the-text": that is, the word/thing distinction is a typical binary opposition that needs to be deconstructed. There is no reality outside the text because reality is a text, subject to precisely the same sorts of interpretive tools we deploy in approaching literary texts. Derrida's position is not even all that radical. Plato and Kant had far more disorienting views of our world than Derrida. Because I believe that Paul makes a fundamental mistake with respect to Derrida's theory, I find his criticisms of Derrida equally misguided.

But my point on this thread is not that "Critics and Cannibals" is unfair to Derrida. NYCTom conceded your point that satires are not intended to be fair, and I agree. My point is that "Critics and Cannibals" is sadistic. Even if the story accurately portrayed Derrida's view of reality (and for the reasons stated above, I do not believe it does), I would still find it an invitation to exult in torture.

By making that point, I don't think I am "just complaining without much to back [me] up." I think I am engaging in critical commentary on a piece that I presume was posted with the intention of eliciting such commentary.

[Steven Schroeder]

Originally posted by epigone:
Is there another way of reading it -- of getting the joke -- that I am missing? In other words, do you have an interpretation that is less "literalist"?

Well, yes. My interpretation is that we're not supposed to take sadistic glee in someone getting dismembered. If, as you yourself say, it's symbolic violence, then there's no reason to act as though the thing we're amused by is the gruesome torture and murder of a person. I think the people who are amused laugh at the application (or I guess you would say misapplication) of Derrida's ideas to the situation. The context is what is funny, not the mayhem.

Steve

[Chris Childers]

Well, I haven't read Derrida, and I haven't been around in Academia long enough to see the effect that all of this "newfangled theory" is having on our appreciation of literature. I must say, though, that I found this piece much more disturbing than funny, which was not my reaction to Gulliver's Travels. Would the intellectuals Swift was satirizing have been amused at some of the action in that book? It strikes me as plausible, even if they denied the aptness of the analogy. Could postmodern critics possibly be amused by this piece? Far less likely, to my mind. But maybe I have a poor sense of humor.

I guess, too, in regards to the larger argument on this thread and the other, that I come with a built-in and possibly naive prejudice on behalf of esteemed authors. Though I haven't read Derrida, I find it hard to believe that his thought is as simple-minded as I've seen it represented here; most great writers see all of the issue they deal with and are pushed in the direction they are not by whim but by their perception of some over-riding necessity; again, I don't know what it might be in Derrida's case, except that I doubt he's as irresponsible as he's being made out to be. So when I get around to reading him, I will approach him as I do everyone else: looking for what he has to teach me rather than what I can criticize him for. And that's the way I read all the "Great Books," which Tom distrusts so much, not to criticize, but to appreciate them. Criticism is far easier to do, in my opinion, especially if we take old authors on our terms rather than their own, and I think one stretches oneself and learns more when one does the latter.

Chris

[edeverett]

Well, I didn't have any problem with the graphicness of the description, though I'd concede it wasn't necessary to the basic point made, just to the fun, the 'play' of the language, so to speak. In fact, having read 'of Grammatology' and a Reader to Derrida's work, I would say that he is making a fairly crude point in excruciatingly drawn out fashion, with malice aforethought against Literature with a capital 'L'- rather like Dahmer actually.

I don't think he's done much damage to Literature that wasn't already implicit in Modernism, with Beckett, Joyce and Eliot, yes, Eliot (IMHO), in the vanguard, but then, society doesn't end because of a mass murderer, so the analogy's a good 'un. As to the particularities and what they might mean, and whether they hold true, no-one has yet ventured to guess.

And, by the way, remember that this is a performance piece!
Mmm Mmm- I'm sitting at Michael's table. What's first on the menu?

[This message has been edited by edeverett (edited September 22, 2003).]

[Paul Lake]

Satire's unfair--and sometimes violent. Gulliver's Travels is full of violence. In fact, an essay in the New Republic discussed how prescient the book is in anticipating the modern concern of genocide. The Houynhnms wanted to wipe out the Yahoos and ended by castrating them to wipe out the race. The Yahoos throw feces at Gulliver, and one female Yahoo tries to sexually molest him. Gulliver leaves Houynhnm-land in a boat made partly of Yahoo (Human!) fat and uses the skin of young Yahoos--that is, of children--to make his sails. The whole work is full of violence, and the target of all the satire is the human species.

Of course, Swift is sometimes accused of misanthropy. but I wouldn't change one word in the book or weaken its critique of the human animal.

[Rhina P. Espaillat]

Of course you wouldn't want to change a word of Swift. Or of Mark Twain, either, although some of his language, especially in "Huckleberry Finn," has been objected to on the gounds that it's the language of prejudice and cruelty. But it's not, because its purpose is entirely different, and purpose should alter the hearer's/reader's judgment of what is said. The surgeon's scalpel is not the same as the killer's shiv, although they both cut through flesh.

[epigone]

I wouldn't want to change a word of Swift, nor of Twain, but I wouldn't write that way today.

It is one thing to be prescient of genocide; it is wholly another matter to joke about it after it has occurred.

Nobody on this thread has argued that satire has to be fair and can never make use of violent images.

epigone

[Clive Watkins]

A lively critique of the serious issues touched on here can be found in a book by the English philosopher and thinker, Raymond Tallis, which bears the punning title Not Saussure: A Critique of Post-Saussurean Literary Theory (Language, Discourse, Society) (London, 1987). This began life as series of essays in <u>Poetry Nation Review</u>, one of our literary “heavies”. Interestingly, in his “spare” time, Dr Tallis was a Senior Consultant Geriatrician in Manchester. I believe he is now retired.

Clive Watkins