Out of the Fold: Difference in American Literary History

Abstract

THOMAS MICHAEL ALLEN Out of the Fold: Difference in American Literary History iARBARA Johnson's second book, A World of Difference '(1988), is dedicated (in part) to the memory of Paul de Man. Following the discovery by a Belgian graduate student ofde Man's wartime writings for the fascist newspaper Le Soir, Johnson added a preface to the book in which she discusses the controversy over de Man. She recounts that her initial impulse, upon learning of the scandalous writings , was to change the names of her dogs, "Nietzschie" [sic] and "Wagner ." Johnson goes on to reflect that this reaction itself followed the logic of Nazism: the urge to expunge the dirty Other. The preface, supplementary to the original text, thus forms an ideal introduction to Johnson's essays in A Wbr!d of Difference, whose stated purpose is to illustrate that deconstructionism can be a politically engaged critical practice. De Man turns out to be both different from Johnson and different from what he, himself,1 was formerly, and these differences are both part of a political understanding of identity. The preface introduces the tension between difference between and difference within that is central both to poststructuralist understandings of language and to the politics of identity with which American literary criticism has historically been concerned. Significantly, Johnson makes use of Edgar Allan Poe's purloined letter to imagine the sudden reappearance of de Man's wartime writings: "Although de Man had referred to his Le Soir articles in several contexts in the course of his life (in a letter to the chairman of Harvard's Arizona Quarterly Volume 55, Number 3, Autumn 1999 Copyright © 1999 by Arizona Board of Regents issN 0004- 1610 136Thomas Michael Allen Society ofFellows, in a conversation with Harold Bloom), they had remained , like the purloined letter, exposed but invisible, open but unread , until the relentless process of archival devotion delivered them from sufferance" (World xii). Johnson had herself performed an extended reading of "The Purloined Letter" as a narrative of difference in the concluding chapter her first book, The Critical Difference (1980). Later, in 1994, she would again deploy the purloined letter as a figure of difference, this time in the context of the return of a "throwaway scribble " to another academic as a "quotation, my property, defamiliarized and public" on a "purloined postcard" seeking permission to use the scribble/quotation as an epigraph (Wake 17). Johnson has thus continued to return to the purloined letter (or it has returned to her) as a figure of difference even while the role of difference in her career itself has undergone a transition from the more purely formal consideration of difference in literary texts to the more political consideration of difference in the "real world" of "the social text" (World 2; Wake 71). For Johnson, then, the purloined letter appears to provide a tropic link between formal and political modes of theorizing, the difference between which she has in fact attempted to cross in the trajectory of her career. Johnson's work is in this respect distinctively American, for American literary criticism has been concerned since its inception with difference as a literary political problem. Early agitators for an American declaration of cultural independence from "the courtly muses of Europe ," as Emerson put it, explicitly linked the creation of an American literary difference with the growth of the new nation state. What is striking about these antebellum calls for difference is that difference itself becomes less a descriptive than a prescriptive signifier. Although difference indicates a gap between one thing and another, as a critical term in early national America difference itselfusually exhibits no such gap. It is the unified signifier of separation, almost as though, like the purloined letter itself (a signifier whose signified is never known), difference itself is only a place marker between other terms requiring interpretation . Johnson's work both participates in and interrogates an understanding ofdifference in many ways quite resonant with this early national view, and her career can thus be seen as part of the leading edge of an ongoing American cultural movement driven by the need to narrativize around difference. It is entirely appropriate that Johnson should find...