텍스트의 이면 : 문학의 토대에 대하여

The Underside of the Text : On the "Base" of Literary Studies

The text still matters for us not so much because of its putative pleasure or ecstasy as because of the need to keep literary studies balanced against the extremes of the post-structuralist notions of open textuality (currently articulated as the reciprocal fraternity of intertextuality) and of the older New-Critical postulation of the literary work of art as an organic whole. We emphasize the underside of the text?its negative, less wholesome, less seemly, and therefore, less openly acknowledged features-to place the text where it belongs, namely at the indispensable “base” of literary studies. The text may promise pleasure but it is often too cold, silent, and soundless, for its pale notation of lived experience teases as much as it soothes. The text brings suffering and pain, before it can be delight, for at the most basic level of material production, such as copying and copy-editing, as witness Swift's Stella or Melville's Bartleby, the text entails mentally demeaning repetitious labor that cannot be glazed with flattering theorizations of the act of writing and its end product. The text also kills, as St Paul warns and as Hardy's Jude illustrates: its severed body triggers and torments the desiring subject, for the text differentiates and discriminates, fortifying, if not creating, social barriers that bar and restrict human possibilities. Given such "underside" of the text, the text should neither supplant the place of the transcendental signifier(s) to become itself an "attractive fetish," nor should it be glossed over in different pre-programmed allegorizations. Precisely because the "letter killeth," the letter cannot be left alone but analyzed as a material physical force. The text should be put at the "base," not simply because there is nothing beyond the text, but because only then can we hope for redemption in the "spirit."