From Paul DeMan,
“Semiology and Rhetoric” (1973)
These remarks should indicate at
least the existence and the difficulty of the question, a difficulty which puts
its concise theoretical exposition beyond my powers. I must retreat therefore
into a pragmatic discourse and try to illustrate the tension between grammar
and rhetoric in a few specific textual examples. Let me begin by considering what is perhaps the most commonly known instance of an apparent
symbiosis between a grammatical and a rhetorical structure, the so-called
rhetorical question, in which the figure is conveyed directly by means of a
syntactical device. I take the first example from the sub-literature of
the mass media: asked by his wife whether he wants to have his bowling shoes laced
over or laced under, Archie Bunker answers with a question: "What's the
difference?" Being a reader of sublime simplicity, his wife replies by
patiently explaining the difference between lacing over and lacing under, whatever
this may be, but provokes only ire. "What's the difference" did not
ask for difference but means instead "I don't give a damn what the
difference is." The same grammatical pattern engenders two meanings that
are mutually exclusive: the literal meaning asks for the concept (difference)
whose existence is denied by the figurative meaning. As long as we are talking
about bowling shoes, the consequences are relatively trivial; Archie Bunker,
who is a great believer in the authority of origins (as long, of course, as
they are the right origins) muddles along in a world where literal and figurative
meanings get in each other's way, though not without discomforts. But suppose
that it is a de-bunker rather than a "Bunker," and a de-bunker
of the arche (or origin), an archie
Debunker such as Nietzsche or Jacques Derrida for instance, who asks the
question "What is the Difference" - and we cannot even tell from his
grammar whether he "really" wants to know "what" difference
is or is just telling us that we shouldn't even try to find out. Confronted
with the question of the difference between grammar and rhetoric, grammar
allows us to ask the question, but the sentence by means of which we ask it may
deny the very possibility of asking. For what is the use of asking, I ask, when
we cannot even authoritatively decide whether a question asks or doesn't ask?
The point is as follows. A
perfectly clear syntactical paradigm (the question) engenders a sentence that has
at least two meanings of which the one asserts and the other denies its own
illocutionary mode. It is not so that there are simply two meanings, one
literal and the other figural, and that we have to decide which one of these
meanings is the right one in this particular situation. The confusion can only
be cleared up by the intervention of an extra-textual intention, such as Archie
Bunker putting his wife straight; but the very anger he displays is indicative
of more than impatience; it reveals his despair when confronted with a
structure of linguistic meaning that he cannot control and that holds the
discouraging prospect of an infinity of similar future confusions, all of them
potentially catastrophic in their consequences. Nor is this intervention really
a part of the mini-text constituted by the figure which holds our attention
only as long as it remains suspended and unresolved. I follow the usage of
common speech in calling this semiological enigma
"rhetorical." The grammatical model of the question becomes
rhetorical not when we have, on the one hand, a literal meaning and on the other
hand a figural meaning, but when it is impossible to decide by grammatical or
other linguistic devices which of the two meanings (that can
be entirely contradictory) prevails. Rhetoric radically suspends logic and
opens up vertiginous possibilities of referential aberration. And although it
would perhaps be somewhat more remote from common usage, I would not hesitate to
equate the rhetorical, figural potentiality of language with literature itself.
I could point to a great number of antecedents to this equation of literature
with figure; the most recent reference would be to Monroe Beardsley's insistence
in his contribution to the Essays to honor William Wimsatt,
that literary language is characterized by being "distinctly above the
norm in ratio of implicit (or, I would say rhetorical) to explicit
meaning".
*** *** *** *** *** *** *** ***
The
deconstruction is not something we have added to the text; it constituted the
text in the first place. A literary text simultaneously asserts and denies the
authority of its own rhetorical mode; and, by reading the text as we did, we
were only trying to come closer to being as rigorous a reader as the author had
to be in order to write the sentence in the first place. Poetic writing is the most advanced and
refined mode of deconstruction; it may differ from critical or discursive
writing in the economy of its articulation, but it is not different in kind.