Self-Portrait in a Context Mirror: Pain and Quotation in the Conceptual Writing of Craig Dworkin

For over a decade, in books, articles, and edited collections, Dworkin has undertaken an extensive critical and poetic project which investigates the limits of representation in language. Dworkin’s dissertation, “Reading the Illegible,” includes an unusual table of contents that was later removed from the Northwestern University Press book version. The page is centrally indicative of Dworkin’s larger ongoing critical project, and of his call for a “radical formalism”:
 

Table of Contents
 
Introduction iii-xix
 
Chapter One 1-35
 
In which a great deal of drinking precedes a long sleepless night and our hero’s rather rude awakening among vandals, pirates, and a number of penguins.
 
Chapter Two 36-55
 
Wherein our hero becomes lost in the woods and narrowly survives a whole host of parasites only to discover that betrayal is the very precondition of love.
 
Chapter Three 56-93
 
In the course of which a great many secrets are revealed concerning things human and inhuman, and during which our hero, finding himself up against the wall, sees red.
 
Chapter Four 94-148
 
Wherein our hero’s wanderings are cut short when gambling debts are unexpectedly called in, and he returns home only to find all of the letters torn open and read (confirming the cogency of his paranoia).
 
Chapter Five 149-166
 
In which articles of history and autumn greet the dawn and we conclude by looking back on the future looking toward its past.
 
Appendices:
 
Notes 167-208
 
Bibliography 209-221 (ii)

At first glance, one might dismiss this table of contents as an academic joke that plays on the oxymoronic title of the work in question. Strictly speaking, it should be impossible to read the illegible, unless we redefine our criteria for legibility–which is what the dissertation asks us to do with regard to modernist and avant-garde texts that defy traditional literary critical methods. The table of contents, although legible, is inscrutable in its presentation of an evasive pseudo-biography. Consider some complicating factors in our reading of this (auto?) biography: Why should it be about “our hero”? To what extent is an academic dissertation a form that specifically precludes biography, and yet selectively encourages certain biographical paratexts like acknowledgements and dedications? A dissertation is framed by the protocols of an institution, in this case the University of California, Berkeley, and as such, a dissertation is a formal document confirming the attainment of a certain degree of learning. But there can be an uneasy relation between valid research and the merely personal interests of a given dissertant. Dworkin’s table of contents can be said to offer a reader more information than a more conventional contents page. Yet the biographical dimension of Dworkin’s contents page is deceptive: The protagonist of the table of contents is not in fact an “I,” but is instead referred to as “our hero.” This immediately begs the question: Who are we?–those who read dissertations?³ Perhaps the implication is that literary history is an elaborate form of hero worship.

 
I propose we read the contents page as a test case for the limits of literary and scholarly representation, as an instance of “conceptual writing,” a movement in which Dworkin is a leading avatar. Within the prescribed form of the academic dissertation, Dworkin’s contents page aspires as an initial gesture to make method (literary historical scholarship) conform more closely to subject matter (avant-garde writing). Like much of the art produced under the rubric of Conceptualism since the late 1960s, Dworkin’s writing exposes the institutional conditions that make art and literature possible, or in Dworkin’s terms, legible. Conceptual writing attempts to counter the excesses of a romantic “lyric ego” by reformulating our notions of the autobiographical and the personal. In his introduction to The UbuWeb: Anthology of Conceptual Writing, Dworkin asks, “what would a non-expressive poetry look like? A poetry of intellect rather than emotion? One in which the substitutions at the heart of metaphor and image were replaced by the direct presentation of language itself.” The “direct presentation of language itself” might be an impossible goal of conceptual writing–but self-reflexively pointing to the positionality of the writer might be a step toward the “direct presentation” of criticism itself. Perhaps the table of contents is asking: What would a more expressive criticism look like?
 
In his book, Reading the Illegible, Dworkin does not mention his dissertation’s table of contents, but he does discuss the restrictive parameters of the dissertation as a form, and suggests that an academic monograph has a different set of constraints, which are likewise antithetical to the spirit of his critical project. Dworkin claims that “this present work, written beyond the strictures of a graduate division, is nevertheless–and necessarily–at heart a betrayal of the very values for which it argues” (xvii-iii). If this claim sounds hyperbolic, consider what Dworkin claims the book’s overall argument to be:
 

In short, the basic thesis of this book is .
 

(xviii)

To paraphrase liberally, this “basic thesis” presents a complex conundrum for literary criticism: How does one produce secondary criticism that resists assigning reductive meanings to polyvalent primary texts whose meanings cannot easily be paraphrased or instrumentalized–texts whose meanings might literally be not just overdetermined, but overwritten? Dworkin’s answer is to make criticism play a part in preserving the complexity of the texts it analyzes, and to some extent, retroactively fashions and endorses. “I have written this book with a firm belief that even critical writing can be a productive experiment,” he maintains (Reading xix). In the introduction to Reading the Illegible, Dworkin describes his project as a “confession,” but he does so (as he does in “Dure”) by means of a quotation from Robert Smithson: “And so what follows is also a confession of sorts. ‘[Art] Critics are generally poets who have betrayed their art, and instead have tried to turn art into a matter of reasoned discourse, and, occasionally, when their ‘truth’ breaks down, they resort to a [poetic] quote'” (xviii). The irony would be that Dworkin–as a poet writing criticism resorting to quotation in order to bolster a “reasoned discourse”–is undertaking precisely the kind of betrayal about which Smithson complains in the quote to which Dworkin resorts. An added irony is that Smithson places “truth” in quotations, making “truth” a quotation within a quotation. If this is “a confession of sorts,” it takes a strange form: not a first-person utterance, but rather something like an interruption of the self undertaken by an absent authority. Smithson, in this context, could be an offstage “hero” haunting the book. A repressed expressivity would seem to be surfacing in order to make the case for a criticism more up to the task of responding to poetries which question the underlying conditions of literary expression altogether.

 
If a “non-expressive” poetry were possible, Dworkin’s recent book Parse might be about as close as one could get to the mark. Parse, its author tells us in a postscriptorial “Note,” is a “translation of Edwin A. Abbot’s [1874] How to Parse: An Attempt to Apply the Principles of Scholarship to English Grammar” (289).⁴ Rather than translating from one language to another, Dworkin translates every word into its part of speech and every mark of punctuation into its verbal form. Thus the opening:
 

ADVERB PREPOSITION OF THE
 
INFINITIVE ACTIVE INDEFINITE PRESENT
 
TENSE TRANSITIVE VERB INFINITIVE
 
MOOD OBJECT AND SUBJECT IMPLIED
 
USED AS A NOUN PERIOD Plural Noun
 
copulative conjunction Plural Noun preposition
 

(Parse 12)

This kind of writing poses a number of problems related to philosophy of language: How does one choose how to translate a word into its categorical description? Why isn’t “OF,” for instance, translated as “PREPOSITION”? Why shouldn’t a period be represented by its mark rather than by its word? Can one “write through” (in the John Cage sense) a book which itself attempts to schematize language? Is Parse simply a grammar book turned inside out, or is it an original poem? Dworkin offers a bodily metaphor for his undertaking, describing Parse as an attempt “to get inside the skeleton of language” (“Interview”). One message of this kind of writing, according to an interview with the author, is that “the most seemingly sterile procedural, coldly conceptual work shows people that you never get away from a writing subject’s embeddedness in history, which is to say you never get away from politics” (Dworkin, “Interview”). Another message is that the “writing subject” also never gets away from embodiment. To think of language as a body politic, or rather a body linguistic or a body poetic, is to recognize that the “writing subject” is marked at every turn by quotation. Parse would presume to be a complete translation, and yet the text is full of clinamen, as for instance in this passage:

adverb semicolon marks of quotation but in “I say his body, thrown on one side and frightfully mangled,” the meaning might be, either “when it was being thrown,” or “after it had thrown,” or “after it had been thrown,” and you cannot tell which is meant without carefully looking at the whole of the passage.
 
In other words, a Passive Participle, e.g. “shot,” may stand for “being shot,” or, “having been shot.”
 

(149)

One must indeed look carefully “at the whole of the passage.” The quotation marks allow Dworkin to depart from his method and introduce a “frightfully mangled” body? Why weren’t “I,” “say,” “his,” and “body” replaced by their appropriate parts of speech? Dworkin’s “translation” takes an expressive turn. With very little tinkering, he interjects a kind of verbal violence into Parse. Perhaps the book’s epigraph from Stendhal gives us a clue as to the source of this violence:

Le comte Altamira me racontait que, la veille de sa mort, Danton disait avec sa grosse voix: “C’est singulier, le verbe guillotiner ne peut pas se conjuguer dans tous ses temps, on peut bien dire: je serai guillotiné, tu seras guillotiné, mais on ne dit pas: J’ai été guillotiné.”
 

(9)⁵

The guillotine represents absolute death, but absolute death cannot be described by Danton, or by anyone else–especially after the fact. Grammar is a logical system for the organization of language, in which certain formations cannot be tolerated. To adapt Wittgenstein’s famous phrase, the limits of my language are the limits of my pain.

 
Parse is replete with slippages which suggest that the book is not a mechanistic exercise that would altogether deny referential meaning or creative agency. Once a set of procedures has been put in place, the book would seemingly translate itself, but this is not the case. The book plays upon a notion of self-translation: “[T]his newly parsed chapter has panoptically analyzed itself” (199). But this is (of course) an impossibility: this moment of self-analysis can only be produced by a deviation from the protocols of the translation, and a panopticon requires both a viewer and a viewed. Toward the end of Parse, Dworkin seems to push harder against something like a fourth wall of representation, suggesting that perhaps the text has begun to control him:
 

Preparatory Subject Already Intimating The Exhausted Author Be Exempted From The Task Of Further Arduous Labor model auxiliary of further exculpatory transitive verb of a hedging distance now so far slipped from the true subject that the alibied author cannot help but be excused for be being too enervated to carry out yet another full analysis of straw of adverbial vertebral catastrophic dromedarian failure preposition of the infinitive infinitive verb of half-heartedly wrist-flicked broad-brushed partial exposition em dash.
 

(216)

The paragraph is framed by what seem like procedural translations of punctuation or parts of speech–“Preparatory Subject” and “em dash”–and yet the passage can only be read as a confessional deviation from the project of translation. After several hundred pages of parts of speech, the inattentive reader (or skimmer) would likely pass over this description of the author’s exhaustion. Pain might be too strong a word for the authorial exhaustion described here; nonetheless, we have an “alibied author” who seems to have been betrayed by the enervating project he has undertaken. The project itself has perhaps been betrayed by the “alibied author” who has had to emerge from his “hedging distance.” Dworkin’s metaphors for language are again bodily: “an adverbial vertebral catastrophic dromedarian failure” seems to indicate that the camel’s back of language has been broken. The attempt to translate has resulted in a subjective catachresis in the carrying across of meaning.

 
Parse has recently been described by Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman as “an example of neo-constructivist sobjectivity” (39). By their neologism “sobjectivity,” Place and Fitterman mean to suggest that “Objectivity is old-fashioned, subjectivity idem” and that “The Sobject exists in a perpetual substantive eclipse: more s/object by turns and degrees” (38). Place and Fitterman’s discussion bears the influence of Lyn Hejinian in particular, who writes in My Life: “Both subjectivity and objectivity are outdated filling systems” (141). Dworkin preserves the filing system of How to Parse, but he empties it of its original content, removing Abbott’s original filling. Place, Fitterman, and Hejinian all describe an embodied subject that both fills spaces and files memories, merging form and content, and yet this “sobject” remains discontented. For Place and Fitterman, “The Sobject is the properly melancholic contemporary entity” (38). The term “sobject” cleverly both highlights and elides subject/object relations, and as such is well suited to describing Parse–although “sobject” is perhaps too flippant a term to describe the more directly self-referential “Dure.”
 
Another of Dworkin’s poems, “Legion,” draws upon the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory of 1942, and in so doing, I suggest, presents a critique of institutionalized measures of pain. The text of the poem is derived from the true/false questions of the test. “Legion” begins:
 

Once in a while I think of things too bad to talk about. Bad words, often terrible words, come into my mind and I cannot get rid of them. I am bothered by acid stomach several times a week. I am likely not to speak to people until they speak to me. Often I cross the street in order not to meet someone else. I am often sorry because I am so cross and grouchy.
 

(Strand 46)

The poem goes on in this manner for fourteen pages. In its proceduralism, the poem presents a paradox. It is entirely a found text, and yet it is almost entirely a found text of personal statements, none of which can be specifically attributed to the first-person feelings of Dworkin-as-author. The title of “Legion” also suggests a critique of a singular “I.” Dworkin’s “Legion (II)” responds to the argument of “Legion.” In a brief note, Dworkin tells the story of the poem’s origin:

“Legion (II)” is a response to my poem, which formerly appeared on this site [UbuWeb]. That original poem was composed by rearranging and recontextualizing the true/false questions of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory as if they were declarative confessional statements from a lyric subject–part of a poetic monologue rather than a forensic instrument. Although the 1942 Inventory has been widely discredited and is no longer published, distributed or supported, the corporation that licenses the exam feels that “Legion” violates copyright. On the contrary, “Legion” is almost certainly a “fair use” of its source text … however, it has been removed from this site as a courtesy.
 

(“Legion (II)”)

In place of the original “Legion” on UbuWeb, Dworkin published “Legion (II),” which consists of the answers to the “original” questions. The corresponding opening to the follow-up begins: “True. True, yes: buoy, aureole, eutrapalia. No. Probably not. No” (“Legion (II)” 3). While the original Legion advertises itself as being “composed by rearranging and recontextualizing,” “Legion (II)” is not composed of quotations, but (seemingly) of the author’s literal responses to the questions posed by the Personal Inventory. Which poem can we say is more original, “Legion (I)” or “(II)”? Or more personal? Or more sincere? Arguably the project of “Legion” places in doubt what we mean by “declarative confessional statements” (“Legion (II)”).

If Parse and “Legion” obliquely, but perhaps centrally, address the unrepresentability of pain, “Dure” goes further to represent the relation of the pain of others to the author’s own pain. “Dure,” like John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” is a self-portrait within a self-portrait. Whereas Ashbery chooses to reflect upon a well-known Parmigianino portrait, Dworkin chooses a Dürer portrait that is not only obscure, but lost. Like Klee’s Angelus Novus (owned by Walter Benjamin and made famous in “Theses on the Philosophy of History”), the Dürer portrait was lost in the Second World War, and can now only be viewed as a grainy black and white photograph (see Fig. 1 below).⁶ The picture itself is, in a sense, a subject of traumatic experience. It cannot say for itself, “J’ai été perdu.” More importantly for Dworkin’s purposes, the back story of the picture has been lost. The intended audience (a physician?) of the portrait will never be known, nor will it ever be known what the figure in the portrait is pointing at (the spleen?).
 

 

 

Click for larger view

Fig. 1.

Albrecht Dürer, “Self-Portrait” ca. 1519.

 

 
“Dure” consists of 28 interconnected paragraph sections from which it is difficult to quote selectively. Each section is peppered with quotations which are cited in the “Sources” apparatus that follows the body of the text. As I am centrally interested in the poem’s structure and in its documentary apparatus, it is best to quote in full both the first section and the notes that correspond to it:
 

“–sb¹ 1. A crag, [now] obs.” A fragment (of course); a cinder (of slag). Or “shy, afraid.” This ender day. Rendered as: do to, admit them, to dare. Curative, tackle, tined. This remains, and bears, in India ink, under watercolor wash, over stains on unlaid paper: Do der gelb fleck ist und mit dem finger drawff dewt do ist mir we. Why write this? “Where the yellow spot is and where I am pointing with my finger, that is where it hurts.” Dead letter, tour, a dearth. Unsigned, accessioned with a circle stamped shield and key to the Bremen Kunstverein, the drawing has not been seen since the end of the second world war. As if it were the emblem of another legend: ubi manus, ibi dolor.
 

(Strand 75)

This passage presents a considerable array of critical puzzles. But before addressing those problems, here are the corresponding “Sources”:

“Crag” and “shy, afraid.” The Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, prepared by J.A. Simpson and E.S.C. Weiner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), Volume XIV, 584. On fear as the subject of self portraiture, see Jacques Derrida, Mémoires d’aveugle: l’autoportrait et autres ruines (Paris: Éditions de la Rèunion des musèes nationaux, 1990), Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Micahel [sic] Naas as Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1993): 70.
 
“Do der gelb fleck [where the yellow spot]….” Albrecht Dürer, drawing, 11.8 x 10.8 cm, 1519 [?]. Catalogued as Winkler 482. Formerly Kunsthalle Bremen.
 
Ubi manus ibi dolor. Inscription on bronze table-fountain statue of Venus, anonymous sculptor, 1520s. Formerly Nürnberg, now Museo Nazional, Florence. Compare with the proverbs ubi amor, ibi dolor, and ubi dolor, ibi digitus.
 

(Strand 103)

While these notes provide crucial information about the poem’s sources, they are far from conventional scholarly notes, and they may pose as many questions as they solve. To go back to the beginning: What does an obsolete meaning of the word “crag” have to do with this Dürer self-portrait? “Crag” is only one letter shy of the author’s first name: is he thus alerting us to his own shyness as a way of opening on to the scene of writing? Is the author himself a “fragment”? But why “[a] fragment (of course)”? This phrase is supposedly derived from the OED; consulting the OED, however, raises more questions. “Crag” did once have the variant spelling “Craig.” But among the many definitions of the noun form–including the expected “[a] steep of precipitous rock” as well as the perhaps not so expected “neck” or “lean scraggy person”–there is no “A fragment,” much less “A fragment (of course).” If that weren’t enough, the formulation “[now] obs.” would seem to be something of a redundancy or pleonasm, which I cannot find in the OED. Nor can I find a link between “a cinder (of slag)” and the word “crag.” And how can “shy, afraid” be conflated into a single definition? “This ender day,” which follows these fanciful dictionary definitions, at least can be traced to a source, John Gower’s Confessio Amantis from 1390. But “This ender day” is not in quotations.

 
Dworkin in fact reveals the source of most of his quotations: page 584 of volume XIV of the OED, on which we find the word “scar.” Dworkin conceals his meaning (or the source of his meaning) in plain sight. Like the Dürer portrait, the poem points to a scar whose origin has been obscured. In the poem’s first few lines, the reader is confronted with a range of overdetermined textual possibilities. Definition and etymology only seem to complicate matters. Is the subject of the poem its author’s scar or the scar of the Dürer self-portrait? It is (of course) both and neither. Consider the title of the poem (for which a note would be most helpful!): the OED records “dure” as an archaic noun meaning “hard” and as an archaic verb meaning “1. intr. To last, continue in existence. arch. 2. To persist, ‘hold out’ in action; to continue in a certain state, condition, or place. Obs. 3. To continue or extend onward in space. Obs. 4. trans. To sustain, undergo, bear (pain, opposition, etc); to endure. Obs.” Perhaps we are getting closer to the subject, or at least the titular subject, of the poem: this is a poem about the hardness of locating, enduring, and communicating pain.
 
The poem, moreover, “undertakes to represent itself” (17) in Foucault’s terms–the poem is the scar, at the same time that the poem acknowledges that it can never represent Dürer’s or the poet’s “actual” scar. Like Velazquez’s Las Meninas, “Dure” is an exploration of a subject that recedes from view. The poem can thus be read as a disavowal of itself. Foucault maintains that Las Meninas presents “an essential void” of the subject who has disappeared along with the canons of classical representation (18). Dworkin, I think, has a slightly different end in mind: something like a return of the subject through history and lived experience. This return of the subject can be read as a response to the postwar avant-garde’s most severe prohibitions on “the lyrical ego”–but this return of the subject can be interpreted in other ways as well: as a response to the high modernist use (and abuse) of quotation; as a new hybrid poetic mode; or (as I am primarily reading the poem here) as an investigation of conditions for the articulation of pain. Dworkin gets to the crux of the problem when he interjects “Why write this?” between the German and English renderings of the text of the self-portrait (Strand 75). The italicized this is a kind of tear in the referential system through which the author points his finger.
 
Immediately following the dubious citations from the OED, Dworkin’s first reference is to Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind, from which he has not in fact quoted. Memoirs nonetheless contains striking parallels to “Dure,” and one can describe “Dure” as haunted by specters of Derrida (although the poem was published prior to Derrida’s death). Memoirs begins with a mock self-interview, the opening line of which is: “Do you believe this?” There is no italicization to this, but the parallel to “Dure” is clear. The mock interviewer or analyst of Memoirs probes further, and it is revealed that what he [Derrida] most “fear[s] is the monocular vision of things” (1). Derrida equates self-portraiture with blindness, and dialogue with sight–suggesting that we cannot see ourselves other than for a fleeting instant, and that in this we see our own ruin, as well as the ruin of all that we know. Only through loving the other can we overcome “the monocular vision of things”:
 

Ruin is the self-portrait, this face looked at in the face as the memory of itself, what remains or returns as a specter from the moment one first looks at oneself and a figuration is eclipsed. The figure, the face, then sees its visibility being eaten away; it loses its integrity without disintegrating. . . .
 
Whence the love of ruins. And the fact that the scopic pulsion, voyeurism itself, is always on the lookout for the originary ruin. A narcissistic melancholy, a memory–in mourning–of love itself. How to love anything other than the possibility of ruin?
 

(Derrida 68)

The fearful moment is one of gazing upon ourselves narcissistically. But it is also, in Freudian terms, a moment in which we might shift from the limitlessness of melancholy toward a more manageable state of mourning. Derrida describes the self-portrait as the very image of

mourning and melancholy, the specter of the instant [stigme] and of the stylus, whose very point would like to touch the blind point of the gaze that looks itself in the eyes and is not far from sinking into those eyes, right up to the point of losing its sight through an excess of lucidity. An Augenblick without duration, “during” which, however, the draftsman feigns to stare at the center of the blind spot. Even if nothing happens, if no event takes place, the signatory blinds himself to the rest of the world.
 

(69)

It is here that Derrida and Dworkin seem most closely to cross paths. One might even go so far as to suggest that this moment “without duration, ‘during'” which the artist purports to represent himself, is the subject of Dworkin’s reflection on pain. (That Derrida places “during” in scare quotes would seem to heighten the appropriative resonance.) “The blind spot” which Derrida evokes is eerily similar to the “yellow spot” pointed at by the figure in the self-portrait. The object of “Dure” then would be to create an index of pain–to make us literally feel (through the index finger) and see (through language) the absent pain of the blind subject who presumably cannot sign his own name -which in Derridean terms would suggest that the blind self-portraitist cannot be fixed as a proper name within a system of signification. The self-portraitist’s pain cannot, so to speak, dure in the sense of remaining lastingly present to himself or to a viewer. The self-portraitist cannot en-dure this unrepresentability of pain; like Milton’s semi-autobiographical Samson, he is self-blinded.

 
Throughout “Dure,” Dworkin intersperses strictly factual paraphrase with densely gnomic poetic utterances, as in the second section:
 

The assumption is that Dürer drew it for a consultation with a foreign physician: the page examined, and passed, through the post. Aphetic, fr. Port. “A mark or trace indicating a point of attachment, of some structure that has been rem—.” Oval, ascher, chalk, a nerre. Embers, as cendres, rose, and caught her eyes. “All under the influence of the verb. Meaning a letting go, and via the home.
 

(Strand 76)

Beginning straightforwardly, this section seems to disintegrate. Once again, the source notes refer us to the OED, and again the definition quoted proves elusive. Dworkin seems to define “Aphetic,” but the OED defines it as “Pertaining to, or resulting from, aphesis,” which is “The gradual and unintentional loss of a short unaccented vowel at the beginning of a word; as in squire for esquire.” Etymologically, “aphetic” does not derive from Portuguese but from the Greek apheta, “the giver of life in a nativity.” When we consult page 584 of the OED we find as another definition of scar: “A mark or trace indicating the point of attachment of some structure that has been removed.” For this reader at least, “rem–“immediately calls to mind “remembered.” Removed, indeed. Rather than word preceding definition, in “Dure” definition seems to precede word. If Dworkin’s raiding of the dictionary is a characteristically Oulipian procedure, it should be noted that Dworkin’s constraints are less programmatic, and that he seems ready to relinquish constraints in order to convey indirect meaning–or perhaps to mirror meaning. As an example of this mirroring of meaning: According to the OED, there was in fact an aphetic version of “scar,” “escara,” which was used in Spanish and Portuguese. Aphesis is also uncannily close to its opposite, “apocope,” in meaning–apocope being the “cutting off or omission of the last letter or syllable of a word.” The word “escara” is aphectically amputated to become “scar”; likewise the proper name “Dürer” is apocopically amputated to become “Dure.” Dworkin’s rendering elides much of this information in a performative erasure. The descriptive act becomes figured not only as reductive, but as amputating and violent.

 
The exact cause of the wound or “lapse” which causes the scar of “Dure” is never revealed, although critics have suggested the sources both of Dürer’s and Dworkin’s scars. Marjorie Perloff suggests that the closest we get to “the poet’s own ‘scar,’ finally com[ing] out into the open” (268) is in Section 22 (which, like so much of the poem, is difficult to quote selectively):
 

“Writing is a strange shadow whose sole purpose is to mark the destruction of the body that once stood between its light and its earth.” Skiagraphy, touch-type, and method. A run of his finger feels nothing now that the surface has smoothed, but can still make out the thin ellipse floating on his forearm like a shadow under shallow skin, and can trace its curve, left from the time she pushed him into the stove, and know that this is his proof: whatever else, she felt that strongly, she really did care this much that once. He who forgets that love lasts will not recognize its fist. Carp, suspended, mottle and kern. The entire text is an attempt to ask: “how can something be the shadow of a fact which does not exist?” The problem is not finding a solution, but simply posing the proper question. “Don’t you know then, what I mean, when I say the stove is in pain?”
 

(Dworkin, Strand 100)

The first quotation is from Paul Mann’s Masocriticism, the last two from Wittgenstein. The joke is that the poet-critic is poking at his own wound, in what can only be taken as a masocritical gesture. The poet’s finger feels nothing, but his memory recalls being pushed into a stove, presumably by a lover. Is this a “declarative confessional statement”? Throughout the poem, Dworkin intersperses extracts from philosophers and literary critics with extracts from medical texts, offering few explicit transitions. The effect of this is to conflate multiple specialized discourses. Skiagraphy, for instance, can refer either to shadow-painting or to radiography. In operating on the body of language, the critic is like a surgeon. In operating on his own writing, the critic is like a surgeon operating on himself. As in the other sections of the sequence, Dworkin includes triadic (sometimes quadratic) sentences without active verbs. “Skiagraphy” precedes “touch-typing”–the activity in which the writer must presumably engage to write this. The multiple frames of reference–medical, art historical, philosophical–seem always to point back to the author. But this is perhaps a trick of perspective: the only “I” in this passage is in quotations. Perloff notes that “Dworkin’s language game oddly becomes most personal when it interweaves the Dürer materials with the ‘impersonal’ propositions of Wittgenstein on pain” (267). When Dworkin ends the passage with a passage from Wittgenstein, he ingeniously inverts cause and effect in the scarring process. “Don’t you know then, what I mean, when I say the stove is in pain?” (Philosophical 350) asks Wittgenstein, granting agency and feeling to an inanimate (and in this context presumably painful) object. Conventional subject-object relations are reversed in this formulation to the degree that, although we assume it is Dworkin speaking and enduring the painful memory, we don’t in fact know who is speaking for whom when Wittgenstein says “the stove is in pain.” The suggestion is that we are best able to identify with something or someone when the gaze is reversed, enabling us not only to see the stove’s pain, but also Wittgenstein’s pain–and by extension Dworkin’s (and our own) pain. Although Dworkin figures the quotation (or the citation) as a painful mark on the body, he sees a healing, suturing aspect to the quotation as well: “With healing he’ll worry the tissues in a morose delectation, the fingertip testing its sensation, and that lack, with an unreciprocated pressure: the nerves failing to complete their narcissistic circuit, so back and fore to get at figuring this fascination of a flesh that is no longer ours” (78). The patient-self cultivates his pain, which can only be felt through indirect means. The pain caused by the pointing finger is a pleasure of narcissism, as well as a pleasure of detachment. “Dure” can be said to attempt to overcome the classic double bind of melancholy, wherein the melancholic begins to enjoy his own suffering.

 
In trying to find a way to point selectively to pain in a world of sensory overload–or in a pain-full world, so to speak–“Dure” ends up doubling back on itself, and acknowledging the “bittersweetness” of separation from a lover.⁷ Characteristically, Dworkin points in many directions, as when he introduces a Kandinsky title and integrates it into the associative rhythms of his own prose:
 

Point and Line to Plane. The scar, in essence, is simply the deformation of any particular breaking the surface of its abstraction. I am; we are; to love. A mar on the undifferentiated expanse of language, writing is the scar left from its abrasion with the world (with use, with us, without). From paint to point to pain. A ridge of bristled locks impinged upon the singed and cotton stock. But if a scar is always a citation, are citations, themselves, always scars?
 

(86)

If the point is the specific place of the wound, then perhaps the plane is the more generalized axis of the representative afterlife of the pain symbolized by the scar. Learned citation might be the form of therapy appropriate to the scholar, as for instance in the compulsive citationality of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. Burton’s famous claim–“I write of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy” (20)–resonates well with conceptual writing’s concern with meta-writing and with performativity. The Anatomy is also instructive in that, like “Dure,” it borrows unapologetically from multiple discourses–medical, philosophical, psychological, and literary. Yet despite the pervasive citationalism of “Dure,” no proper names–other than Dürer–are ever mentioned in the body of the poem. This, I suggest, pre-emptively undoes one of the scarring aspects of quotation–namely that every quotation that is attached to a proper name is paleonymic, and carries with it something like a transaction record in terms of the circulation of cultural capital.⁸ Dworkin seems to note the importance of this omission of proper names in the poem’s conclusion, when he quotes Charles Sanders Peirce in the context of a discussion of Augustine’s Confessions:

“A proper name without signification, a pointing finger, is a degenerate index.” The taste of this pear lingered, on the edge of ferment. This sees me, or merely fits. O fado, of ado, adieu. “The last, construed as sing.” And this, in its seizure: apprehensive, rested, blue. “I marked this place with my finger or by some other sign and closed the book.” This is who we are (this), and (this) this is what we do to one another: by chance, by the hour, by ourselves.
 

(Strand 102)

Perhaps a quotation out of context is also a degenerate index if it becomes impossible to tell who was originally pointing at what. By referring to Augustine, Dworkin suggests that there is an element of chance in our linguistic appropriations. As soon as Augustine converts, he picks up Paul’s Epistles in order to perform a variation on the practice of Sortes Vergilianae–except that whereas a pagan Roman would have put down his finger randomly in the Aeneid, Augustine randomly places his finger on a passage from Paul fervently condemning the sins of the flesh. Even with a foreknowledge of his eventual salvation, the (involuntary) memory of the famous (voluntary) peach-theft will never leave him. Augustine’s finger has apparently touched upon an invisible textual scar.

In closing “Dure” with this instance of aleatory intertextuality, Dworkin brings to bear still more receding perspectives and voices, and alludes to Augustine’s position as (arguably) the writer of the first autobiography. In this context, the reference cannot help but also bring to mind John Ashbery’s poem “Sortes Vergilianae.” “Dure” seems to be haunted not only by Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind, but also by Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.” Like “Dure,” “Self-Portrait” is quotational in ways that undermine a traditional notion of a lyric ego or of a formal verse line:
 

Sydney Freedberg in his
Parmigianino says of it: “Realism in this portrait
No longer produces an objective truth, but a bizarria . . . .
However its distortion does not create
A feeling of disharmony . . . . The forms retain
A strong measure of ideal beauty,” because
Fed by our dreams, so inconsequential until one day
We notice the hole they left.
 

(73)

Ashbery’s verse, in comparison with Dworkin’s prose, is laconic and dreamy in its fluid interweaving of scholarly background material. Ashbery marks an absence, a hole in the pattern of meaning. A sense of an Ashberyan “you,” or an Ashberyan “we,” is missing from “Dure”–or perhaps the “we” of Ashbery’s “we notice the hole they left” has been replaced by a kind of lost thisness. “This is who we are (this), and (this) this is what we do to one another: by chance, by the hour, by ourselves.” The this is doubled, or rather tripled or quadrupled, in this one sentence. But there is no plural form of this. Dworkin is interested in the problem of how “we” can even describe objects, much less relate to other subject positions. “This is who we are (this)” is nearly tautological, except that the second “this” is in parentheses (in much the same manner that “Why write this” is italicized).

 
Dworkin suggests that every this is marked–or scarred. We can only get at shadow thises marked by quotations or by italics. In the end, Dworkin comes to see the second-order articulation problem of thisness as not only a hurtful condition, but also as a condition which must be recognized in order to effect a healing process. Section 20 is among the sequence’s most direct:
 

Proof of an irreconcilable event, the drawing may itself be a scar. Or is it merely emblematic of the fact that pain cannot be shown, but that the showing of pain can be shown? I can’t, in any meaningful sense, express my pain, but I can show you myself in the act of making that expression-however empty it may ultimately be. To point without the I makes a bridge. Empathetic deixis cedes to a rigid linguistic proxemics. ‘If, in saying I, I point to my own body, I model the use of the word “I” on that of the demonstrative. But in I have pain, “I” is not a demonstrative pronoun.’ The drawing was, perhaps, a philosophical grammar.
 

(96)

If the drawing is a scar, then “Dure” itself is a scar within a scar–and yet Dworkin casts doubt on this doubling and tripling of remove from actual experience. There may be no stable, unitary “I” to speak of: “to point without the I” would seem to be the best way to communicate pain. And yet this too is an unsatisfactory formulation. The lexicon of words for pain, like the lexicon of words for beauty, is limited. As important as articulating pain is an articulation of the conditions for articulating pain. The redoubling of language, or the quotation of the quotation, leaves behind a scar that is both the trace of an injury and the trace of a healing process. Perhaps an “empathetic deixis” is possible, although not easy. One could do far worse than the sentiments found in the get-well card’s programmatic expression of sympathetic identification. “A philosophical grammar” here, far from being cold and clinical, constitutes a kind of bridge between Is–for which, like this, there is no plural form. When Dworkin asks chiastically–“But if a scar is always a citation, are citations, themselves, always scars?”–his true/false answer has to be “false.” The citation is scarred, and carries with it a history of domination, exclusion, and violence–but the citation is not always scarring. Persons who cite complicate their own “I” every time they acknowledge an other. The citation also reconciles an “I” with a community. If these sound like platitudes, I would counter that “Dure” forces us to recognize that such platitudes are part of the difficulty of finding adequate forms of “empathetic deixis.”

 
Quotation is often framed pejoratively as a diminution of subjectivity, or as a violent repudiation of originality. “Dure” complicates this view. Thomas Keenan explains quotation in terms that borrow from Marx’s phantasmagoric descriptions of capitalism:
 

The quotation itself functions as a monster or a ghost, an uncanny visitor accumulated from another text. And it depends on a structural condition of words–they can be reproduced, mindlessly and mechanically reproduced-which acts as if they were nothing but commodities: to be accumulated, moved and removed to and from contexts, delayed and relayed between texts only to be grafted or inserted into some other text, transferred like (als) property or the mechanical limb (a forearm, let’s say; after all, forewarned is forearmed) on a monster.
 

(104-105)

In such a formulation, quotations are like commodities that embody false cultural values. Quotations are near-meaningless manufactured statements that in the aggregate constitute a Frankensteinian body of severed meaning. In this account of the quotation, the ghost haunting textual production might in fact be creativity. All quotes potentially become scare quotes. The Leviathan of language seems to tolerate no new quotations–or at least no new quotations that are not in the interests of monster-capital’s continuing growth. Keenan is not alone in formulating the quotation as monstrous and violent. In her discussion of “Dure,” Perloff quotes Antoine Compagnon’s study La Seconde main, in which Compagnon argues: “When I cite, I excise, I mutilate, I extract. . . . The chosen fragment converts itself into a text, no longer a bit of text, a part of a sentence or of discourse, but a chosen bit, an amputated limb, not yet as a transplant, but already an organ, cut off and placed in reserve” (qtd. in Perloff 264). Like Keenan, Compagnon sees quotation primarily as a lack rather than as a supplement. Quotation can also be understood–as it has so often been for literary writers before the twentieth century–as a central component of any authoritative text (as in Burton). A pretentious practice perhaps, but not necessarily a severing or a theft–dead authors, after all, can hardly preserve their own body parts.

 
A particularly strong influence (though she is quoted only once) on “Dure” is Lyn Hejinian. In an essay on Hejinian, Dworkin describes “the largely citational mode” of My Life as a quiltwork, suggesting that the poem “emphasizes its citationality by incorporating apparently quoted material without quotation marks and, conversely (so quoted, coded), framing some phrases in marks of quotation without apparent significance and without citing a speaker or source” (“Penelope” 62). Rather than a violent severing of tradition, the quotations of My Life are constitutive fragments of a new feminist subjectivity, grounded in quiltmaking as an autobiographical process. Whereas My Life, for the most part, unweaves its own paleonymy by erasing its quotations’ sources, “Dure” reweaves its quotations into its source apparatus. Perhaps to cite as well as to quote is to come closer to revealing a source code. “So quoted, coded” (137) Dworkin quotes Hejinian parenthetically without quotation marks. Like many works considered under the rubric of Language writing in the 1970s and 80s, My Life is replete with détourned clichés, fragments of speech, and appropriated phrases–few of which are cited. Another example in this mode is Bob Perelman’s 1978 “An Autobiography,” a poem constructed entirely of uncited quotations. Later scholarly works by LANGUAGE writers often follow standard academic protocols for citation–but LANGUAGE poetry in its earlier phases typically does not cite sources, at least not in the exhaustive manner of “Dure.” Dworkin has written extensively about Susan Howe, whose hybrid combination of literary scholarship and personal reflection in works such as My Emily Dickinson and The Birth-mark is also relevant to his work.
 
What if the “I” is always a misquotation borrowed from a collectively-authored work-in-progress? If academic literary criticism effaces the “I” in its reliance on citation, Dworkin re-introduces the “I” by means of communications that contain their own critique. To re-appropriate Wittgenstein again, perhaps the limits of my language are the limits of my I. The “I” in itself (or the I-in-itself) is necessarily appropriated from a cultural grammar. If there is no privileged position outside of the system of cultural production from which to stage a disinterested critique, then literature, in order to construct a viable politics of resistance, must come to terms with itself as a system that preserves privileged forms of cultural authority. The quotation is analogous to the cell form of literary production. Like the commodity, it is the smallest recognizable unit in a system of proprietary exchange. A quotation “appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” (Marx 163). I is not only an other–it is many others who participate in a system of recognizable protocols for expression.
 
My first epigraph embodies the notion that quotations take on a life of their own in Dworkin’s writing: “Quotation marks ticked through the body of the text like sutures arched in stitches that will scar” (“Dure” 79). Note the twists and turns of this sentence: as well as scarring, the quotation marks “tick”; they “suture”; they “stitch.” The scar may never heal, but it also may hurt less over time the better its causes and effects are understood. Perhaps the most famous instance in twentieth-century literature of quotations taking on a life of their own is in Walter Benjamin’s One-Way Street, a work that helps define Benjamin’s own heavily quotational style: “Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out, armed, and relieve the idle stroller of his conviction” (481). The “idle stroller” to whom Benjamin refers sounds much a like a flâneur. In Benjamin’s elaborate conceit, the reader is a lazy passerby confronted by too much textual information–too many advertisements and too many books. Rather than being scarred by the quotation, the strolling reader is relieved of a presumably false conviction. Similarly, Giorgio Agamben suggests that the quotation is not merely passive but able to take on an agency of its own: “the word enclosed within quotation marks is only waiting its moment of revenge. . . . He who puts a word in quotation marks can no longer rid himself of it: suspended in mid-air in its signifying élan, the word becomes unsubstitutable” (103-4). As Benjamin and Agamben show, it is possible for tradition to work against tradition, and for the quotation not only to be the bearer of violence, but also for the quotation to resist–and to articulate–suffering, even if that suffering is represented secondhand.
 
“But what sort of doctor would diagnose a sketch?” Dworkin asks in medias res, hypothesizing that the Dürer portrait may have been sent by mail to a distant doctor (Strand 84). “What sort of a doctor,” indeed, Dr. Dworkin? Perhaps a doctor who is not a medical doctor, but rather a scholar and a poet–a doctor who, when in doubt, “resorts to a quote.”