Barbara Johnson analyzes critical reception of Melville’s Fist by linking together an idea of language to the set up of the main characters. Billy is designed to be the innocent, good man while Claggart is the untrustworthy, questionable man. Now, most people who read this story would assume that a mutiny or murder would be committed by the man who’s described in a negative light from the very beginning, but the author turns that on its head and makes the wrong doer of the story be the ‘good man’. The discrepancy between the characters’ personalities and their doings in the plot confuse literary critics because of the large shade of gray it casts on the point or construct of the book.

The first approach I found very intriguing was Johnson’s interest into the meaning of the story itself. She first looks at it as “read as the retelling of the story of Christ” (page 2261). Can it really be considered that deep? In my own personal analysis, I could see how perhaps Billy and Claggart’s switch could represent the fall of Judas, the angel suddenly betrays the qualities of goodness he has and is ultimately punished for it. This approach made me wonder what others in the class may think of such an analysis.

Johnson then brings us to the linguistic element of the story. By questioning human nature in correlation with the actual acts of humans, she brings us to the theory of Saussure’s signifier and signified. Instead of the communication being verbal, it becomes physical in this story. Being becomes the signified and the actions or doings become the signifier. By using this view, she questions human nature with human actions. The entire plot runs on the characters actions, and she even mentions how one character only acknowledges and has a verbal communication to the other only once. The actions in relation to the character and how those play against others becomes the linguistic function of the story.

The character becomes the signified, or the concept or material of the signifier, the material or sound, image, written word, or in this case- an action. This partially confused me, since I expected the signified and the signifier to have a relation. Could her theory be challenged by the same problem most critics presented: the character acts out of character? If the signified, the character, acts out of character, or the signifier, doesn’t this exclude the possibility of this linguistic principle being used? Or does it get a pass because it is in response to what the signified/character feels?

In Semiology and Rhetoric, Paul de Man brings up a comical instance of rhetoric with Archie Bunker talks to his wife Edith. After Edith asks Archie his preference on how he would like his shoes to be laced over or under Archie replies “Whats the difference?”. (1370) PdM explains that this statement can either be literally asking what the difference is or the statement being there is no difference. For the show to get a few laughs Edith goes on to explain the difference and Archie becomes enraged. I believe that this moment shows not that Edith is misunderstood but it is Archie that is. This might sound a bit crazy but if you look deeper into this conversation we can see that the anger Archie expresses is valid. The couple if not mistaken were married for years and after all that time would someone be so dimwitted enough to actually reply to there spouse with an answer to that kind of question? I don’t believe they would. But when Edith does reply she so shows how much she does not understand Archie. When Archie gets upset he isn’t upset about the situation but upset that after all that time his wife doesn’t understand him. “The very anger he displays is indicative of more impatience; it reveals his despair when confronted with a structure of linguistic meaning that he can not control and that holds the discouraging prospect of an infinity of similar future confusions. (1371) I believe PdM brings to light the anger that Archie feels in regard to the structure of language and his unique use of it to be understood. Instead of being able to use language in a creative way we are restricted to the rules and guidelines set by it and rhetoric is this cog in the machine that disrupts these rules.

PdM says “Confronted with the question of the difference between grammar and rhetoric, grammar allows us to ask the question, but the sentence by means of which we ask it may deny the very possibility of asking. For what is the use of asking, I ask, when we cannot even authoritatively decide whether a question asks or doesn’t ask.”(1371) This shows the failure of grammar rules because it can’t clearly distinguish  the context in which the statement is being made. Let say instead of a television show where you can hear tone and facial expressions and we turn this interaction into dialog. In a book we don’t know the tone of voice the character has. We also do not know the character’s true intent. We can’t know if Archie is asking a question or making a statement through a question. The point I’m trying to make is that it wouldn’t be funny if we were reading this interaction because we would not understand the joke therefore we the reader would be the one who misunderstood. I also wanted to bring up that sarcasm also falls into this category of not fitting into the linguistic system. If we don’t know a person it is hard to distinguish if they are being serious or joking. This is especially apparent in text where we don’t have any facial expression or tone of voice to guide us to a choice.

No, it’s not a man with three buttocks.  It’s three things you need to know for our class.  To wit:

1. Our third blog post is due tomorrow.  As always refer back to my post on best blogging practices to guide your writing.
2. Speaking of blogging, if you submitted a post #2, you should have received a link to a Google Doc with comments as of Monday at noon.  If you did, and you haven’t, check in via email and I’ll resend.
3. A student asked an excellent question re: de Man over the weekend, so I thought I would (anonymously) share the questions and response on the blog in case others had similar questions:

The student had argued in class, re: de Man’s argument, “that [for de Man] grammar cannot be used to decipher meaning.” S/he felt that I didn’t really respond and, moreover, explained that “grammar, or the syntax, cannot be used to decipher which context the sentence is meant.. therefore rhetoric ‘works against’ grammar.. making it in a sense paradoxical.”  Then the student said, “I am wondering why you did not say anything in response to my comment. Am I misunderstanding what happened in class? Also, can’t la langue/parole be comparative to grammar/rhetoric?”

Here’s my response:

Hi [name witheld],

Great question, and sorry I got distracted from your line of questioning here, but the reanimated roach kind of got me out of my game there.

I think it’s not quite right to say that “grammar cannot be used to decipher meaning” as a general principle.  PdM’s point is that critical approaches that subsume all of signification under “grammar” (by which he means something like “the systematic producing of meaning via structured differences”) fail in the end, since they don’t account for the strange feature of language that he calls “rhetoric.”  Rhetoric in his sense is much more extensive than the “rhetorical question” or “the stuff that makes a political speech effective.”  By “rhetoric,” he means the subtle signals that tell us to read a given expression differently than is grammar would otherwise dictate.  Crucially, this signal is absent from the “grammar” itself: thus Edith has no way of knowing whether Archie is sincere or ironic except via some kind of extragrammatical “tone.”

Thus with literature: literary writing is full of such “rhetoric” (unlike, say, lab reports or news articles, which are relentlessly “grammatical”).  So we readers are often suspended between interpretive choices in which “grammar” says one thing but “rhetoric” another, with no definitive way to decide.  This propensity to create such “forks in the road” is for de Man what the “poetic” mode is for Jakobson: for de Man, “literature” is not a mode of communication in which the “message” calls attention to itself, but a mode in which “rhetoric” haunts “grammar” and creates “aporias” or interpretive gaps.

So grammar can be used to decipher meaning in all kinds of texts, but often not in “literary” texts, which feature a dynamic tug of war between “grammar” and “rhetoric” in which neither side wins.  Or both.

And grammar/rhetoric is not the same as la langue/la parole.  In the latter, “langue” names a structure and “parole” a set of moves/gestures/utterances enabled by that structure.  For grammar/rhetoric, I would say it’s more like a “haunting” relationship like I said before, in which “grammar” is the clear, structured, reasonable pattern and “rhetoric” is the thing that passes through grammar and deranges it but can’t quite be seen or touched itself.

I hope this helps everyone else review a bit of de Man before we do so more systematically tomorrow.  With no roaches, I hope.