I’ve realised lately that I’m nowhere near where I’d hoped to be. I think that this is a delayed reaction to my birthday.
This last semester at university has been a complete waste of time. Not simply in the active sense that I didn’t get anything from the course but because until recently I had the momentum to pursue certain thoughts and ideas, and now, deadened and dulled by such tedious and preliminary ideas that were presented this semester I’ve lost any sense of direction.
I had wanted to continue reading Derrida. I wanted to pursue his notion of transcending logocentrism, understand the reasoning behind his specific elevation of Ezra Pound and Stéphane Mallarmé. I wanted to read Hegel and Proust and continue taking notes on Zizek.
Instead, I’ve found myself having to read Trainspotting and being encouraged to do close reading in some imbecilic reversal.
Last weekend I re-read some essays in The Necessary Jungle by David Brooks. There are some essays that tend toward Rimbaud’s call for a “systematic and deliberate derangement of the senses” a kind of demand for a remaking of language. Of course, as Paul de Man suggests in Blindness and Insight (I think that the specific essay is called ‘Literary History’), it is impossible to be entirely ‘new’.
Jameson (and also Patricia Waugh) argue that there is a postmodern tendency toward works that retain a sensibility that can be recognised by readers while offering only a small degree of what might be considered avant-garde. This way the work is accessible while offering something of the ‘new’.
What Brooks suggests, using the terms centrifugal and centripetal (centrifugal being the ‘new’; works that fly from the centre), is that for a book to be accepted and published it must retain sufficient centripetal influences. The danger is that for most people reading and understanding a novel tends toward identifying the elements within the novel that are already present within themselves. The new, centrifugal ideas are smothered by the centripetal in the readers’ attempt to make sense of the text.
I’m off to the library to read Paul de Man’s Allegories of reading: figural language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. I may or may not return.