Georg Mannejc, Anne Mack,

J.J. Rome, Joanne McGrem,

and Jerome McGann

University of Virginia
jjm2f@prime.acc.virginia.edu

 

            Gilbert:    Dialogue . . . can never lose for the
                        thinker its attraction as a mode of
                        expression.  By its means he can both
                        reveal and conceal himself . . . .  By
                        its means he can exhibit the object from
                        each point of view . . . or from those
                        felicitous after-thoughts . . . give a
                        fuller completeness to the central
                        scheme, and yet convey something of the
                        delicate charm of chance.

            Ernest:     By its means, too, he can invent an
                        imaginary antagonist, and convert him
                        when he chooses by some absurdly
                        sophistical argument.

            Gilbert:    Ah! it is so easy to convert others.  It
                        is so difficult to convert oneself.  To
                        arrive at what one really believes, one
                        must speak through lips different from
                        one's own.  To know the truth one must
                        imagine myriads of falsehoods.
                                --Oscar Wilde, "The Critic as
                              Artist.  A Dialogue.  Part II."

                        That mask!  That mask!  I would give one
                        of my fingers to have thought of that
                        mask.
                                --Denis Diderot, Rameau's Nephew76

GM: And so we will find it possible to get beyond the magical idea of knowledge–the idea of knowledge as control and mastery, the ideal of that idea. Instead we shall have this display and celebration of our differences.

 

AM: Our differences about what?

 

GM: About any subject we choose to take up. This talk of ours, these conversations, what are they grounded in? Not the pursuit of truth (that old ideal of philosophy and science), not the pursuit of power (that old ideal of magic and technology). They are grounded in the pursuit of meaning, in hermeneutics and the desires of interpretation. And interpretation proceeds according to a dialogical rather than a systems-theoretical or systems- correcting model. Dialogues are governed by rules of generosity and ornamentation, not rigor and method.

 

AM: Who today would challenge the virtues of a dialogic model? The star of Bakhtin stands in the ascendant. But what are you saying, exactly? Is this a call for an unrestricted play of interpretation? Does anything go? Will all the Lord’s people be queueing up for a haruspicator’s license?

 

GM: That’s a cheap sneer I’d expect from Hilton Kramer, not from you. In fact, our most ancient and sophisticated interpretive traditions call for nothing less than the reader’s complete freedom. In Hebrew midrash, as we know, reading is “divergent rather than convergent . . . moving rather than fixed . . . always opening onto new ground . . . always calling for interpretation to be opened up anew.” Many still “understand the conflict of interpretation as a deficit of interpretation itself, part of the logical weakness of hermeneutics.” This “prompts the desire to get `beyond interpretation’ to the meaning itself . . . . [But] my thought is that this very [desire] implies a transcendental outlook that has, in Western culture, never been able to accept the finite, situated, dialogical, indeed political character of human understanding, and which even now finds midrash to be irrational and wild.”¹

 

The need to possess the truth, the fear of doubt and uncertainty. It is the fear from which Arnold fled, in the middle of the nineteenth-century–the fear of a democratic conversation that would proceed without the benefit of governing touchstones. Its psychological form appeared to Arnold as the spectrous dialogue of the mind with itself. And he had reason to fear such a dialogue, for it can be unnerving or even worse. It can overthrow altogether what one takes to be the truth: the soul of the world’s culture suddenly brought face to face with the mask of the god’s anarchy–and with that mask appearing, in its most demonic guise, as a polished surface reflecting back the image of one’s own self, the hypocrite lecteur loosed upon the occidental world in Arnold’s day by Baudelaire.

 

JJR: [speaking to GM] You call this a “celebration” of differences, but to me it seems more a clash, and thus a struggle toward that truth you are so ready to dispense with. Dialogue is less a carnival than a critical exchange in which the errors and limits of different ideas are exposed by their conflict with each other. It is all very well to float above this struggle, observing it as a rich display of energy, a celebration of itself. Thus we become the romantic inheritors of the deities of Lucretius. I sit as God holding no form of creed, But contemplating all. (Tennyson, “The Palace of Art,” 21-12) But in the world where our talk goes on, we are not gods; we are, as you suggested, political animals. Your ivory tower of interpretation is a particular political position, and the fact is that I do not agree with it. Unlike yourself, I believe these conversations are grounded in the pursuit of truth, and do involve the struggle of power.

 

GM: I am not interested in the contemplative life. Dialogue involves various persons and is, as I say, necessarily political. What I mean to “celebrate”–and I don’t apologize for it–is the power of dialogue to harness ideas, to generate new and interesting forms of thought.

 

JJR: But you don’t seem inclined to make the necessary distinctions or discriminations. Some “forms of thought” are more interesting than others, some are trivial, some are not. What is important about dialogue is that it helps to expose those distinctions, to sort them out. For instance, I wouldn’t say that your ideas about dialogue are trivial or uninteresting; but I would say they are wrong. There’s the difference between us. Would you say I was wrong in these ideas–are you prepared to argue that I am wrong in my judgments about your judgments?

 

GM: Yes, you are wrong.

 

JJR: Why, how? Indeed, on your showing, how could I be wrong?

 

GM: Because what I was saying has nothing to do with being right or being wrong. That’s another matter entirely.

 

JJR: Another “language game”?

 

GM: Perhaps–why not?

 

JJR: Because under those conditions, as I said before, “anything goes.” Shift the language game and what was “wrong” becomes something else–it becomes, perhaps, “interesting” or “uninteresting,” or perhaps even “right.”

 

Don’t misunderstand me. I am as aware as you are that context alters the status and even the meaning of what we see and what we think. The “pursuit of truth” is towards an imaginable (as opposed to an achievable) goal. We have to be satisfied with what we can acquire– knowledge, the historical form of truth. Nevertheless, that goal, “the truth,” must be imagined if certain kinds of intellectual activities are to be pursued.

 

AM: Truth as a necessary fiction? You are as unscrupulous as Georg when you try to manipulate us with that metaphor of “knowledge, the historical form of truth.” Does the “truth” you want to “imagine” exist in the same order as the “knowledge” you say we can gain? If it doesn’t, how do we get it?

 

JJR: We don’t “get” it, as if by a process of discovery. We construct the truth, we imagine it. Or do you imagine that the work of imagination is somehow less real–less human and historical–than the work of knowledge?

 

And what about your metaphor: “necessary fiction”! The implication being, apparently, that what we imagine is somehow less substantial than what we labor to discover and construct. How did Keats put it? “What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be Truth–whether it existed before or not.”² Created work, whether primary–like the material universe–or secondary–like history itself, or Plato’s dialogues, or the bible: these are not fictions in the sense you seem to suggest. They are original forms of Being–and in the case of secondary creations like poetry, original forms of Human Being. Knowledge–science–is not their source, could not bring them into existence. Rather, knowledge takes these things (as well as itself) for its subject.

 

And this is why I stand with Plato and Socrates on the matter of dialogue and conversation. Dialogue is how we pursue the truth through the clash of different views. It is our oldest tool for testing–and correcting–the limits and the powers of our ideas.

 

AM: But there are important “intellectual activities” in which “the truth” will not be, must not be, “imagined.”

 

JJR: You mean, I suppose, things like scientific or technological acts of construction.

 

AM: I have no competence to speak about such matters, and I wasn’t thinking about them at all. I had in mind Plato’s dialogues, the bible: creative and poetical work in general.

 

JJR: Well, if you wanted to surprise me, you have. I would have thought it obvious that these works are the very and perhaps even the only ones in which “the truth” will and must be “imagined.”

 

AM: You are so obsessed with the idea of “the truth” that you impoverish your own imagination. And so you misunderstand me–as usual.

 

I wasn’t suggesting a distinction between poetry and imagination, but between imagination and truth. And by that distinction I was asking you to re-think the way imagination acts in a poetical field. What the imagination seizes as beauty is not, cannot, and must not be “truth.” Rather, it seizes appearances, phenomena, facticities. The physique of the poetical event: from the elementary phonic values of the letters and syllables, through the entire array of verbal imagery, to the shape of the scripts and all the physical media–material as well as social–through which poetry is realized. What the imagination seizes as beauty is not truth, it is the image of a world. The question of truth may and will be brought to bear on that world, as it is always brought to bear on our larger world; but that question is not brought to bear in or by the poetry itself. God does not put questions of truth to his creations, and neither do poets. As Blake’s prophet of the poetical, Los, says: “I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create” (Jerusalem 10:21).

 

JJR: Perhaps divine creation may be imagined as a seizure of pure beauty. Man’s creations, in any case, are nothing of the sort. Poetry, for instance, being a form of language, comes to us (as one might say) “legend laden” with the conflicts of truth and error, good and evil. Whatever one thinks of primary worlds, all secondary ones are ideological.

 

GM: And interpretation is the method we have for engaging these kinds of acts–just as science and philosophy are ways we have for engaging with other kinds of human activities.

 

AM: [speaking to GM] What nonsense. Poetry, Interpretation, Science, Philosophy: these are medieval distinctions in that kind of formulation. They will get us nowhere.

 

Besides, there is a difference, even on your showing, between poetry and its interpretation–between, for instance, the bible and its commentators. Or don’t you think so? Is there not an inspired text–the poem–that is different from the reading of that text–the interpretation?

 

GM: Of course, but it is not a difference whose “truth” we can ever be clear about. Because it is a difference which is always being defined ex post facto, that is, under the sign of its interpretation. The bible itself– every poem we engage with–already comes to us under hermeneutical signs. “When composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline”: Shelley’s famous remark involves a profound understanding of the nature of texts.³ If we ask of the bible, for example, “where in this work can the Word of God be found,” we will not get a clear answer. Because the concept of location is a secondary and interpretive concept. When skeptics debunk the bible’s pretension to be “the Word of God” by pointing out the endless diaspora of its texts, their insight– though not their conclusion–is acute. The Word of God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.

 

The same must be said of all imaginative works–of every work that comes before us under the sign of creation. The bible is merely the master work of all those works–the originary revelation of “the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am.”⁴

 

JJR: If that’s so, then ideology–good and evil, truth and error–must be involved in that eternal act of primary creation. Which makes perfect sense since–as Blake saw so clearly–god and the gods are creatures of Man’s imagination.⁵ Stories to the contrary–like the story in Genesis–are just exactly that–stories to the contrary.

 

But I’m digressing into theology and maybe even deconstruction, and neither discipline interests me very much. What does interest me is another, related implication I see in your remarks. I put it as a question: what is the status of error, evil, failure in poetical work? Like yourself, most are happy to imagine the carnival of interpretation, the dialogue of endless errant reading. But if the primary texts are themselves errant and ideological, how are we to read them? Certainly not as transcendent models. They seem, in this view, more like images of ourselves: confused, mistaken, wrong–and perhaps most so when we imagine them (or ourselves) reasonably clear and correct. If poetry delivers the best that has been known and thought in the world, it falls sadly short of our desires.

 

GM: Perhaps what Arnold meant was that it gave us the best of all possible worlds–where the possibilities are understood, from the start, as finite and limited. That, in any case, seems to be Shelley’s point in his remarks about composition and inspiration.

 

JJR: And perhaps the optimal of this possibility comes not from poetry’s “perfection” so much as from the completeness of its self-presentation? Then the shortfall of desire would arrive without the illusion that it could have been otherwise. And it would arrive that way because the message and the messenger–the poems themselves–are implicated in that shortfall of desire. So we come to Shelley once again: when composition begins, inspiration is already on the wane–you know the rest.

 

GM: Ah yes, the mind in creation is as a failing code.

 

AM: But suppose, as Jay said earlier, that the poems are “errant and ideological”–just like the interpretations of the poems? Shelley was never happy about the didactic aspects of his own work, even though he–quite rightly too–could never abandon his didacticism. His theory of inspiration waning through composition seems to me part of the long-playing record he left us of his uneasiness on this score.

 

Most professors tend to read his theory in a Kantian light–by which I mean they hold out an ideal of poetry that transcends ideology and didacticism. Look at the way Browning is read, for instance. His dramatic monologues, we are told, escape the didactic subjectivism of Browning’s early romantic mentor. So a poem like “My Last Duchess” becomes a model of poetic objectivity.

 

GM: Quite rightly too.

 

AM: Well, to me the poem is nothing but a little Victorian sermon.

 

GM: You can’t be serious.

 

AM: I couldn’t be more serious. “My Last Duchess,” for instance, is largely constructed as a critique of aristocratic pride, which Browning associates with the desire to possess and control. The villainy is especially heinous, according to this poem, because of its object: an adorable woman. But note that the poem is completely uncritical in its association of the woman with beauty. Her value comes from her beauty–which is why the Duke has enshrined her in, and as, a work of art.

 

Implicit here is the notion–one finds it all over Browning’s poetry–that life (as opposed to art) is a primary value, and that art’s office is to celebrate and broadcast this primary value.

 

GM: Do you have any problem with that?

 

AM: I’m not devaluing the poem, I’m just reading it. But I could point out that some excellent readers– Baudelaire comes immediately to mind, and so does Lautreamont–would surely find Browning’s sermon insufferable, and would just as surely choose to take the Duke’s part.

 

But leaving that aside, I have to point out another implication of the poem. The Duke is judged harshly by the text because he wants to keep the Duchess to himself. This desire is seen as especially wicked because of the way the Duchess is presented: as a lovely and spontaneous creature who enjoys and is enjoyed by the company of all classes. Now this representation of the Duchess is not so different from the Duke’s representation in one crucial respect: both take her as a thing of beauty that might be a joy forever, both take her–essentially– as an aesthetic image. The poem does not judge the Duke harshly for thinking her adorable–Browning’s poetry never does that–but only for wishing to keep her for his private pleasure.

 

GM: In short, the poem seems to you sexist.

 

AM: No question about it. It is not a bad poem because of its sexism, of course. But it is ideological for that (and other) reasons–by which I simply mean it is a poem that makes moral representations which someone might reasonably acknowledge. . . .

 

JJR: And contest. * * * *

 

JM: Sorry about that–the tape ran out. But I’ve put in a new one now, so let’s go on.

 

AM: Just as well too, that interruption. We started talking about dialogics and interpretation and then wandered off into Browning and the ideology of poetic form.

 

GM: But we also started with Bakhtin in our minds, and in his work dialogism is a function of the (primary) fictions, not of the (secondary) interpretations. Hermeneutics as dialogical is our appropriation of Bakhtin.

 

AM: Don’t say “our,” say “your.” To me there is a sharp difference between the poetical and the interpretive field, though the two interact. But it is not a dialogical interaction because–as Socrates once pointed out to Protagoras–the texts of the poets don’t talk to us.⁶ We interrogate them. For their part–like Arnold’s Shakespeare–they abide our question. Of course we can choose to imagine our primary texts as “intertexts” and thus treat them as if they were “dialogical.” This is what Bakhtin does with novels, and he does it very well. But we should be clear about the metaphoric license he is taking when he treats fictional works as dialogical.

 

GM: And so we find ourselves in a wonderfully Derridean situation. Interpretation–like this conversation of ours–is dialogical, and now reveals itself as the prior (substantive?) ground for the metaphoric extension of dialogics to fictional work and poetry.

 

JJR: Composition as prior to inspiration?

 

GM: Why not? It’s simply another way of saying that scripture is philosophically prior to Logos.

 

JM: May I ask a question? It may seem absurd, I realize, and somewhat beside the point of what you’re talking about. But I don’t see how we can not ask this question now that the conversation has completed a kind of Heideggerian circle.

 

What is a dialogue? I have a tape in my hand with an electronic record of the first part of this conversation.⁷ And as I listen to you talk, I watch the turning of the new spool, I watch a record being made of people talking. It makes me think a distinction has to be drawn somewhere that is not being drawn–perhaps a distinction between what we might call “conversation” on one hand and “dialogue” on the other.

 

Maybe what we’re doing now is not “dialogue.” At any event, it seems very different from the following. Here, read this. * * * * AN ABC OF INTERDISCIPLINARITY. A DIALOGUE. by SHERI MEGHAN

 

A: As Moses Hadas always used to say: “The only interesting talk is shop talk.”

 

B: All shops are closed shops, more or less. Suffocating. If you’re not a professor and you find yourself, by circumstance, dropped among a bunch of professors at lunch, how interesting do you imagine you will find their conversation?

 

C: Well, suppose you came there as an ethnographer. Then the shop talk might seem very interesting indeed.

 

A: But it wouldn’t be shop talk anymore it would be ethnographic information. And if the professors were conscious of themselves as ethnographic subjects, even they would not be producing shop talk any longer.

 

B: A blessed event, the coming of the ethnographer to the ingrown conversations of the closed shop. And more blessed still should she come to the smug halls of late- 20th century academe. Enlightened halls, open–or so their citizens like to think–to every kind of talk.

 

A: And so they are.

 

B: Only if the talk is framed in a certain way. The academy is the scene where knowledge has been made an object of devotion. Its two gods, or two-personed god, are science (positive knowledge) and philology (the knowledge of what is known). It is a cognitive scene, a scene of calculations and reflections. It is the country for old men. Children, whether of woman or of Jesus born, do not come there–unless it be to leave behind their childlikeness.

 

C: They do not come because the knowledge of the childlike person is experiential rather than reflective.

 

B: Socrates in his trance, Alcibiades in his cups?

 

C: They will do nicely as signs of what both justifies and threatens every symposium, every state–the Outsiders that are within. Admired and hated, sought and feared; finally–because every state, every closed shop, is what it is–expelled.

 

B: And what then of your ethnographer, that darling of the modern academy? Is it not the ultimate dream of Wissenschaft that all things should submit to reflection, that experience itself should become–field work? In the ancient world of Plato that sick dream appeared as the Socratic philosopher; more recently it came as the nightmare of the positive scientist, mystified forever in the figure of Wordsworth’s Newton, “voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.” Mary Shelley lifted his mask and we glimpsed the haunted face as Victor Frankenstein, whose monstrous creature is the index of Frankenstein’s soul as it has been observed through the lens of an outsider’s–in this case, a woman’s–sense of the pitiful.

 

C: So you don’t care for ethnographers either.

 

B: Well, they are our latest Faustian types. Benevolent colonialists. Today their shop talk–it is called Cultural Studies–has given the modern academy some of its most effective means of self-mystification. As if the academy could harbor within itself its own outsider, its own critical observer.

 

A: That “critical observer” you are imagining is the real illusion. All observers are inside the shop. If they weren’t they wouldn’t even know about the shop, couldn’t see it, and hence couldn’t talk at all. Shop talk is “interesting” because people share their differences.

 

C: So for you it is not merely that “The only interesting talk is shop talk”; more than that, “Shop talk is all there is!”

 

A: Exactly. But some shop talk is more interesting than other shop talk.

 

C: And what makes it more interesting?

 

A: Every shop has many conversations going on inside of it all the time. The most interesting conversations are those that get everybody else talking–talking about them, or talking in their terms.

 

B: But where do those new and interesting conversations come from? Inside the shop?

 

A: Evidently.

 

C: Why “evidently”? Is the rapt Socrates inside or outside? And what about Alcibiades–drunk or sober? We all remember how, and where, he died.

 

B: Inside or outside, it doesn’t matter. The point is that every shop must be something other than what anyone, inside or outside, could think or imagine it to be. The shop must be, in some sense, beside itself. Irrational. Other than itself. Otherwise it cannot accommodate–either conceptually or experientially– anything “new.”

 

A: Put it that way if you like. Shop talk is often irrational. Just so you don’t bore us with ideas about absolute critical differentials.

 

B: Have it so if you like. Just so you don’t insult us with ideas about knowing or accommodating otherness. No shop–no academy–can do so. Otherness comes like a wolf to a sheepfold. Later, when the damage is done, the priests–let us say, the professors–will indulge their shop talk of explanations.

 

* * * *

 

JM: This dialogue was originally presented in the spring of 1990, at a conference on Herder that was held in Charlottesville, Virginia. Meghan presented it at a panel discussion that took up the (very Herderian) question of interdisciplinarity.

 

JJR: It seems to be a kind of position paper making an ironical critique of the form, or idea, of position papers as such. Perhaps in order to ask that critical reflection precede the taking of positions.

 

GM: Or perhaps to make a game of critical reflection as such. I was at the conference, Joanne, and I think you ought to tell everyone that the dialogue was not given by anyone named Sheri Meghan. It was written and delivered by Jerome McGann. Sheri Meghan is just a mask– part of the dialogue’s ABCs.

 

JM: I wasn’t trying to conceal that fact. The masquerade is crucial.

 

GM: Maybe so, maybe not. But what about McGann? Was he just playing around, making a parade of cleverness?

 

AM: Right. If it’s all just a masquerade, what’s the point? The dialogue’s ironies just get more ingrown. And look at the conclusion, where nothing is concluded: C stands altogether silent at that point, while A and B simply make a pair of smart, dismissive remarks.

 

JM: You’re all missing my point. I ask again: what is a dialogue, what is this dialogue? Or suppose I ask: where is it? Right now we have been reading it as a printed text I passed out. In 1990 it was delivered orally by McGann (in his Meghan masquerade) at the Herder conference. It seems to me that the dialogue is not at all the same thing under those two different conditions. When it was orally presented, it was–surely–part of McGann’s way of taking a position–whatever that position was, however we define it.

 

GM: The position of not taking a position.

 

JM: If that’s what he was doing, it’s a position. But let me set your question aside for a moment–only for a moment, I promise. Whatever McGann was doing at the Herder Conference, here the dialogue has become part of my taking a position. Those two positions–whatever they are–may be symmetrical, but they probably aren’t. At least they don’t seem so to me. I introduced McGann’s text here because I wanted to interrogate the idea of dialogue–to get us to interrogate it–in a different light.

 

It’s the tape machine that set me thinking this way. Here we’re talking and there our talk is being gathered and edited and turned into something new. I want to say this: our talk is being translated from conversation into dialogue.

 

GM: Of course. Because the talk is being given a secondary, as it were a literary, form.

 

JM: But the point is that every secondary world, every mimetic construction, comes to us under the watchful eyes of its recording angel. Isn’t this what the ancients meant when they said that memory is the mother of the muses?

 

Let’s assume that the splendid dialogues of Oscar Wilde have no originary “conversational moment.” Let’s assume, in other words, that they neither carry nor erase the memory of such a moment. Let us assume they are pure inventions. Even so, they cannot escape their recording angel. For they will always be a record of themselves. Even as pure invention they set down a documentary record of what went into the construction of their fictionality.⁸

 

Nor must we imagine that this documentary moment can be separated off from the fictional moment. An abstract separation can be made for special analytic purposes. Whatever the usefulness of such an abstraction, it will obscure and confuse the record that the fiction is making of itself–and hence will obscure and confuse the fiction.

 

GM: I don’t understand exactly what you’re talking about, Joanne. What’s this idea about fiction making a record of itself?

 

JM: Simply that all imaginative work appears to us in specific material forms. Many people–even many textual scholars–don’t realize the imaginative importance of those material forms. Blake’s work reminds us that the way poems are printed and distributed is part of their meaning. That process of printing and distribution is essential to “the record that fiction makes of itself.” It locates the imagination socially and historically. When Emily Dickinson decided not to publish her poems, when she decided to gather her handwritten texts into a series of “little books” which she kept to herself, those acts and their material forms comprise part of the record her work makes of itself. They are a crucial framework which Dickinson constructed for making her meanings, and which we need if we are to understand and respond.

 

I could give you similar examples from all the writers I know well. Which is why I say that a recording angel presides over the transcendental imagination. Her descent to earth in the twentieth-century came, as usual, in masquerade. She once appeared, for example, as Bertolt Brecht, whose great project was to re-establish the theatrical unity of knowledge and pleasure, truth and beauty, instruction and entertainment. His guiding principle–it took many practical material forms–was what he called “the alienation effect.” By it he wanted to encourage the audience’s critical awareness of the entire fictional presentation. This required the theatrical event to document itself at the very moment of its dramatization. “Footnotes, and the habit of turning back to check a point, need to be introduced into playwriting” in order to break the hypnotizing spell of aesthetic space, where spectators (or readers) are not encouraged “to think about a subject, but within the confines of the subject.”⁹

 

Brecht called his project “epic theatre” because it introduced what he called a “narrative” element into the dramatic space. This narrative documents what is happening on the stage, adds footnotes to the action, supplies references. Now it seems to me that dialogue might be distinguished from conversation along similar lines. Dialogue puts conversation in a literary frame, and by doing this it documents its own activities: literally, gives them a local habitation and a set of names.¹⁰

 

GM: There’s nothing especially novel about all this. What you describe is just the “moment of reflection” that hermeneutics has always recognized in literary work. It’s the moment that interpretation seeks to extend and develop through the (re)generation of meanings.

 

JJR: No, it’s much more than that. Brecht’s (or is it Joanne’s?) recording angel operates according to Feuerbach’s eleventh thesis, where the point is not simply to “interpret the world” but to “change it.” Brechtian theatrics are socialist and polemical throughout–as we see in the following passage, which Joanne did not choose to quote, even though it is the continuation of one of the texts she was reading to us. Brecht distinguishes between the (old, passive) “dramatic” theatre and the (new, engaged) “epic” theatre: The dramatic theatre’s spectator says: Yes, I have felt like that too–Just like me–Only natural–It’ll never change–The sufferings of this man appal me, because they are inescapable–That’s great art . . .–I weep when they weep, I laugh when they laugh. The epic theatre’s spectator says: I’d never have thought it–That’s not the way. . .–It’s got to stop–The sufferings of this man appal me, because they are unnecessary–That’s great art. . .–I laugh when they weep, I weep when they laugh. (Brecht on Theatre, 71) Brecht’s documentation is not positivist–a matter of keeping good records; it’s interventionist. The recording angel is a figure of judgment and even apocalypse, a figure come to reveal secrets of good and evil that have been hidden, if not from the beginning of time, at least throughout human history. The angel opens up the book of a new life, turns the world upside down. The outcome is anything but the pluralist heaven of hermeneutics.

 

GM: Well, you could have fooled me. Here I’m talking in a dialogue that labels itself as such, in the best Brechtian fashion. Joanne makes a parade of her self- consciousness about dialogues and conversations; she wonders “what” a dialogue is, “where” it is? But what and where am I? Surely I’m plunged in the very “heaven (or hell) of hermeneutics” itself–a paradise of pluralism and shop talk.

 

I mean, whose play are we acting in here? Joanne tells us in a charming metaphor that “a recording angel” made “her descent to earth . . . in masquerade.” But all this is no metaphor, my friends. All this is a masquerade! Let’s set the record straight about that at any rate. Let’s add another Brechtian label and get everything out front. We’ll call this “The Puppet Theatre of Jerome McGann.”

 

JEROME MCGANN: Did you think I was trying to conceal myself? Surely it’s been evident right along that all of this–you four in particular–are what Blake used to call the vehicular forms of (my) imagination. Masquerade allows us to turn concealment into purest apparition. It is manifest deception.

 

GM: Fair enough, but then what is this masquerade all about, what are you trying to get across? You may say you’re not trying to conceal yourself, but you let us go on arguing and discussing different ideas and we begin to forget all about you. We even begin to think that we are different–different from each other, different from you. But we’re not, we all come out of the same rag and bone shop.

 

JEROME MCGANN: Well, just knowing that is pretty interesting. Especially today when “the star of Bakhtin has risen in the West.” People and texts are supposed to be the repositories of conflicting voices–or at any rate different voices. Rainbow coalitions and so forth. Richness in diversity. But there is always (what did Ashbery call it?) a “Plainness in Diversity” and it’s just as well to be aware of it, don’t you think?

 

GM: Who cares what I think–“I” don’t think at all. The question is, what do you think!

 

JEROME MCGANN: I think you’re more involved in thinking than you realize.

 

GM: I’m just a textual construct.

 

JEROME MCGANN: So you say–a puppet in a puppet theatre. Whereas I’m flesh and blood, of course.

 

AM: Sometimes I think we have more life than we realize– or at least that we might have more. Thou wert not born for death, immortal bird, No hungry generations tread thee down. I’m that bird, I think. What did Shakespeare say? Not marble nor the gilded monuments Of princes shall outlive this pow’rful rhyme. Flesh and blood is all very well, but texts have their own advantages.

 

GM: We don’t think, we have no identities. He does. Whatever we do is done for us. Someone will read me and tell me what I mean. It’s true that different people might make me mean different things. We’ve all been told about the openness of the text and the freedom of the reader. But what do I care about reader responses? They make us seem little more than empty tablets, waiting to be written on.

 

JEROME MCGANN: As I said, I think you’re more involved in thinking than you realize.

 

GM: What are you getting at?

 

JEROME MCGANN: Thinking only gets carried out in language, in texts. We sometimes imagine that we can think outside of language–for instance, in our heads, where we don’t exteriorize the language we are using in language’s customary (oral or scripted) forms. But the truth is that all thought is linguistically determined.

 

You whine about being a textual construct. But you’re able to think for precisely that reason. And so am I, and so are we all. We’re all textual constructs.

 

GM: What sophistry.

 

JM: On the contrary, what truth! We really do think because we are textual constructs, and we do so because thinking is the play of different ideas, the testing of the limits and the possibilities of ideas. Why complain that this masquerade seems, in one perspective, a professor’s monologue? It’s not the only way to see it. In any case we are testing limits and possibilities.

 

GM: No we’re not. He is–if anyone is.

 

JM: What about someone listening to all this, or reading it?

 

GM: Sure, but they’re flesh and blood too. It’s people who think, not texts, not the masks that people fashion and put on.

 

JEROME MCGANN: But my idea is that texts are the flesh and blood of thought–that we are all masked creatures. I’ve written this dialogue–constructed even an ingrate like yourself–to pursue that thought, or perhaps I should say to have it pursued, maybe to be pursued by it.

 

Take yourself, for instance. You’re always surprising me. You think you’re just a puppet, but the truth is that I often don’t know what you or I or anybody else here might do or say next. This whole last five minutes of conversation we’re having. I never planned it, never even thought about it until a friend of mine read what you called my puppet theatre and queried its masquerade in ways I hadn’t thought about. And then she challenged me about it, and we talked back and forth, and I came back at last to you. And so I started writing some more–writing what we’re arguing about now.

 

How did those changes happen? There’s a writer– let’s call him me; and there’s a reader–my friend; and then there’s all of us, we textual constructs. Don’t we have any responsibility in this masquerade?

 

AM: But you’re not one of us! And the answer is no, we don’t. The responsibility is all yours, yours and your friend’s, and all the other (re)writers and (re)readers of texts.

 

But I agree with you in this much anyhow: we aren’t blank tablets or empty signs. We are characters, we have histories. If masks are disguises, they take particular forms. It makes a big difference what face you put on when you engage in masquerade.

 

JEROME MCGANN: So, Georg, don’t ask me what I think about all this. Interrogate the masks if you want to know that. The question is not: “Why do you move in masquerade?” We all do. The question is: “Why does your masquerade take the form that it does? Why these characters and not others?”

 

AM: But there are other questions as well. Odd as it might seem, Jerome, one might not be especially interested in what you thought about this dialogue, or what you had in mind for it. The dialogue isn’t yours, isn’t even your friend’s. The dialogue is an independent textual construct and has a life of its own–indeed, has many lives of its own. All texts do. Dialogue is interesting because it dramatizes the presence of those multiple lives and their competing voices.

 

Bakhtin used to say that novels were dialogical but poems were monological. But he was wrong in this. In a sense, poetry is far more “dialogical” (in Bakhtin’s sense) than fiction just because poetry asks us to pay attention to the word-as-such, to focus on the text as it is a textual construct. Poetry thus makes us aware of the masquerade that is being executed by even the most apparently transparent of texts. By this text, for instance–Robert Frost’s well known jingoist lyric “The Gift Outright.” The land was ours before we were the land’s. She was our land more than a hundred years Before we were her people. She was ours, In Massachusetts, in Virginia, But we were England’s, still colonials, Possessing what we still were unpossessed by, Possessed by what we now no more possessed. Something we were withholding made us weak Until we found out that it was ourselves We were withholding from our land of living. Such as we were we gave ourselves outright (The deed of gift was many deeds of war) To the land vaguely realizing westward, But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced, Such as she was, such as she would become. That was written during the height of the Second World War–a pretty piece of patriotism. But the text says much more than it realizes because language always stands in a superior truth to those who use the language. Blood spilled in this poem’s land becomes the sign of the right of possession. But who is the “we” of this poem, what are those “many deeds of war”?

 

One word in this text–“Massachusetts”–reminds us that this supremely Anglo-American poem cannot escape or erase a history that stands beyond its white myth of Manifest Destiny. That central New England place, Massachusetts, is rooted in native american soil and language, where the very idea of being possessed by land– rather than possessing it or conquering it in martial struggles–finds its deepest truth and expression. Unlike “Virginia,” “Massachusetts” is native american, red- skinned. Colonized by another culture and language, that word (which is also a place and a people, red before it could ever be white) preserves its original testimony and truth;¹¹ and when it enters this poem, it tilts every white word and idea into another set of possible meanings and relations. “Virginia,” for example, which is a lying, European word¹²–a word whose concealments are suddenly revealed when we read it next to “Masssachsetts.” When I read this poem, those “many deeds of war” include the Indian Wars that moved inexorably “westward.” In this poem, I think, all blood is originally red.

 

Where do such different voices come from? Language speaks through us, and language, like Tennyson’s sea, moans round with many voices. In “The Gift Outright” we see how some voices come unbidden–come, indeed, as outright gifts so far as the intentionality of the authored work is concerned. Because the poem’s rhetoric is preponderantly and unmistakably Euro-American, “Massachusetts” sends out only a faint signal of the (otherwise great) hidden history the word involves. And it is important that we see the signal come so faintly and obliquely–so undeliberately, as it were–when we read the poem. The faintness is the sign of important historical relations of cultural dominance and cultural marginality. The whole truth of those relations, imbedded in this text, would not be able to appear if Frost had not given his white, European mythology over to his poem’s language, where it finds a measure of release from its own bondage. A measure of release.

 

This is why I care about what you think, Jerome–and also about what you don’t think. Because you’re one among many–in the end, one of us. As you say, a textual construct.

 

JEROME MCGANN: “Zooks, Sir! Flesh and blood, that’s all I’m made of.”

 

Notes

 

1. See Gerald L. Bruns,”The Hermeneutics of Midrash,” in The Book and the Text: The Bible and Literary Theory, ed. Regina Schwartz (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 196-7.

 

2. See Keats’s letter to Benjamin Bailey, 22 Nov. 1817, in The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Harvard UP: Cambridge, MA, 1958), I. 43.

 

3. See “A Defence of Poetry”, in Shelley’s Prose, or The Trumpet of a Prophecy, ed. David Lee Clark (U. of New Mexico Press: Albuquerque, 1954), 294.

 

4. See S.T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton UP: Princeton, 1983), I. 304.

 

5. See The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 11.

 

6. See Plato’s Protagoras 347c-348a.

 

7. The text here is not based directly on the tape referred to by McGrem, but upon the printer’s-copy typescript. The latter may or may not give an accurate and complete record of the original conversation. Our text appears to begin in medias res, so it may not represent the whole of “the first part” of the conversation that was apparently on the tape McGrem mentions.

 

8. None of Joanne McGrem’s interlocutors queried her on this point. But one would like to know if she meant that the documentary record is complete. To us, such completion seems hardly possible.

 

9. Brecht on Theatre. The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. by John Willett (Hill and Wang: New York, 1964), 44. The emphasis here is McGrem’s, not Brecht’s.

 

10. At this point one might hazard the following descriptions of the different positions being taken in the dialogue. Mannejc sees interpretation as dialogue; Rome sees criticism (critique) as dialogic; Mack seems to regard poetry, or imaginative writing generally, as dialogical; and finally McGrem turns the distinction completely around and argues that dialogue is poetry, or at any rate that it is a non-informational form of discourse.

 

11. The word names the tribe which ranged the Boston area, and it means something like “near the great hill.” The reference is, apparently, to the Great Blue Hill south of the city.

 

12. I believe the phrase “a lying, European word” must be an allusion to Laura Riding’s great poem “Poet: A Lying Word” (the title piece in the volume Poet: A Lying Word [Arthur Barker Ltd.: London, 1933], 129-34).