The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory

169 Pages·2007·1.197 MB·English

by  Sarah Dillon

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For Auntie Jean, Uncle Dave and Lynne.
I miss you
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4
Acknowledgements
Many of the chapters in this book were originally delivered as papers at
university conferences and seminars. I would like to thank the organizers
of such events, and all those who listened and responded, in particular at
the universities of Sussex, Stirling, Manchester, Nottingham, Oxford and
Swansea. Some of this material has originally appeared elsewhere, in
somewhat different forms. Distilled theoretical sections from chapters 1, 3
and 7 first appeared in ‘Reinscribing De Quincey’s palimpsest: The signif-
icance of the palimpsest in contemporary literary and cultural studies’
(Textual Practice, 19:3 (2005), pp. 243–63), and a very early version of
Chapter 7 appeared belatedly as ‘Palimpsesting: Reading and writing lives
in H. D.’s Palimpsest’ in a special issue of Critical Survey(19:1 (2007), Mod-
ernist Women Writers Using History, ed. Mark Llewellyn and Ann Heilmann).
I would like to express my thanks to the editors and publishers of Textual
Practice(www.tandf.co.uk/journals) and Critical Surveyfor their permission
to reprint. I am grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for
funding the research for this project, and to the Manuscripts and Special
Collections department at the University of Nottingham for their help,
patience and permission to reproduce a page from D. H. Lawrence’s
college notebook (Figure 2). Quotations from Palimpsest, by H. D. (Copy-
right 1968 Norman Holmes Pearson) are used by permission of New
Directions Publishing Corporation, New York. Grateful acknowledgement
is also made to the British Library for their permission to reproduce the
palimpsest image in Figure 1.
This book would not have been possible without the support of col-
leagues, friends and family. My thanks go to my colleagues at the Univer-
sity of Sussex and at the University of St Andrews, for their conversation,
thoughts and comments. In particular, I would like to thank Nora Bartlett,
Peter Boxall, Jennifer Cooke, Tom Jones, Eric Langley, Norman Vance
and, especially, Nicholas Royle. Producing the history of palaeographic
palimpsests for Chapter 2 required me to venture into an area beyond my
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x Acknowledgements
own field of expertise – I owe my greatest thanks to Michael Apthorp for
his overwhelming enthusiasm to guide me through that unfamiliar terri-
tory. For their specialist knowledge or technical help, I would also like to
thank John Barrell, Bettina Bildhauer, Stephen Daitz, Jim Dillon, Mary
Dove, Tatiana Kontou, Maarten van Ham, Christopher Pollnitz and, espe-
cially, Philippe Lejeune, for sharing the story of ‘palimpsestuous’ told in
the Introduction. My particular thanks go to my family for their unfailing
support, belief and love: to Mum and Jayne; to my father, who has been my
constant intellectual companion and guide; and to Gav, who lived every
day of the final revisions with me. This book would not have been possible
without them.
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Chapter 1
Introduction: The Palimpsest
In 1845 Thomas De Quincey published an essay in Blackwood’s Magazine
entitled ‘The palimpsest’. Coupling ‘palimpsest’ with the definite article
‘the’ (for the first time in a non-specific sense), De Quincey’s essay inaug-
urated – that is, both introduced, and initiated the subsequent use of – the
substantive concept of the palimpsest. The palimpsest is implicitly related to
palimpsests, which until 1845 were palaeographic oddities of concern only
to those researching and publishing ancient manuscripts. However, the
concept of the palimpsest exists independently of such phenomena – it is a
strange, new figurative entity, invested with the stature of the substantive. De
Quincey was not the first writer to use palimpsests in a figurative sense, but
his inauguration of the concept of the palimpsest marks the beginning of a
consistent process of metaphorization from the mid-nineteenth century to
the present day.1 Since 1845, the concept of the palimpsest has been
employed in areas as diverse as architecture, geography, geology, palaeon-
tology, glaciology, astrophysics, biochemistry, genetics, neuroscience, neuro-
biology, neurocomputing and information technology. Within and across
these fields, the figure of the palimpsest is invariably found in areas of
research which insist upon the interdisciplinary nature of their work.
Referring to the interdisciplinarity of linguistics, anthropology, Marxism
and psychoanalysis, Roland Barthes argues that:
what is new . . . comes not necessarily from the internal recasting of each
of these disciplines, but rather from their encounter in relation to an
object which traditionally is the province of none of them. It is indeed
as though the interdisciplinarity which is today held as a prime value
in research cannot be accomplished by the simple confrontation of
specialist branches of knowledge. Interdisciplinarity is not the calm of
an easy security; it begins effectively (as opposed to the mere expression
of a pious wish) when the solidarity of the old disciplines breaks down –
perhaps even violently, via the jolts in fashion – in the interests of a new
object and a new language neither of which has a place in the field of
the sciences that were to be brought peacefully together, this unease in
1
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2 The Palimpsest
classification being precisely the point from which it is possible to
diagnose a certain mutation. (1977a, p. 155)
Palimpsests are precisely such objects. They embody and provoke inter-
disciplinary encounter, both literally (as the diversity of the experts cur-
rently working on the Archimedes Palimpsest discussed in the following
chapter shows) and figuratively. The palimpsest cannot be the province of
any one discipline, since it admits all those terrains that write upon it to its
body; nor, indeed, does the palimpsest have a province of its own, since it
is anything other than that which offers itself at first sight, the literal
meaning of province.2 Disciplines encounter each other in and on the
palimpsest, and their relationality becomes defined by its logic. In this way,
the palimpsest becomes a figure for interdisciplinarity – for the productive
violence of the involvement, entanglement, interruption and inhabitation
of disciplines in and on each other.
The disciplines that inhabit this particular palimpsest are those of liter-
ature, criticism and theory, with each chapter interweaving theorization of
the concept of the palimpsest with close readings of literary texts in which
it figures, including works by Thomas De Quincey, D. H. Lawrence, Arthur
Conan Doyle, Umberto Eco, Ian McEwan and H. D. In this sense, my study
is performative: at a time when the long-standing and fierce debate about
the place of theory in literary studies still rages, this study demonstrates
the palimpsestuous intimacy that can exist between theoretical and critical
writing, an intimacy which manifests itself in a mode of writing I wish to
call theoretical criticism. In the interview ‘“This strange institution called lit-
erature”’ (1989), responding to Derek Attridge’s question, ‘is it necessary
to make a distinction between literature and literary criticism . . . ?’
(Derrida 1992, p. 49), Jacques Derrida outlines his belief that ‘“good”
literary criticism, the only worthwhile kind, implies an act, a literary signa-
ture or counter-signature, an inventive experience of language, in
language, an inscription of the act of reading in the field of the text that
is read’ (p. 52). Good literary criticism involves a physical intimacy, an
involutedness, between literature and literary criticism. Yet, at the same
time, Derrida wants to preserve a distinction between these two forms of
writing: ‘I would not say that we can mix everything up and give up the
distinctions between all these types of “literary” or “critical” production’
(p. 52). Derrida is therefore left struggling to delineate the relationship
between literature and literary criticism: ‘I wouldn’t distinguish between
“literature” and “literary criticism”, but I wouldn’t assimilate all forms of
reading and writing’ (p. 52). He argues that it is necessary, when making
any such distinctions, ‘to give up on the purity and linearity of frontiers.
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Introduction 3
They should have a form that is both rigorous and capable of taking
account of the essential possibility of contamination between all these
oppositions’ (p. 52). ‘Palimpsestuousness’ – a simultaneous relation of
intimacy and separation – provides a model for this form, preserving as it
does the distinctness of its texts, while at the same time allowing for their
essential contamination and interdependence. The same model offers
itself as a paradigm for the relationship between critical and theoretical
writing manifest in theoretical criticism.3
This study brings together many of the creative, critical and theoretical
texts in which the palimpsest has figured since 1845 in order to investigate
its structure and logic and to demonstrate its crucial role in understand-
ing and advancing modern thought. While discussing the palimpsest’s
refiguration of concepts as diverse as history, subjectivity, temporality,
metaphor and sexuality, this study returns repeatedly and relentlessly to
the question of reading in its very broadest sense. In both theory and crit-
icism, it investigates a practice that is the source of the most fundamental
disagreements in academic and wider cultural belief: how do we under-
stand the world around us, and ourselves? In other words, how do we read?
For me, the answer to that question lies in a sustained interrogation, via
the palimpsest, of the way in which we read texts (be they historical,
literary, critical, theoretical, political, cultural, etc.). This study thus
consistently investigates the nature of writing and textuality, accepts the
insecurity of reading, and delights, unashamedly, in the pleasure involved
in the most productive – becauserisky – reading.
Despite the proliferation of the metaphor of the palimpsest, Josephine
McDonagh’s ‘Writings on the mind: The importance of the palimpsest in
nineteenth-century thought’ (1987) offers the only previous sustained study
of its significance. McDonagh considers how the palimpsest functions as a
psychological, historical and social model in various nineteenth-century
texts, including De Quincey’s essay, Thomas Carlyle’s ‘On history’ (1830),
and George Henry Lewes’ Problems of Life and Mind (1874–9). Her study is
valuable in identifying the importance of the palimpsest in nineteenth-
century thought, as well as in drawing attention to the radical potential of
De Quincey’s palimpsest model. Restricted to an investigation of nine-
teenth-century critical texts, however, McDonagh’s study makes no claim
for the contemporary relevance of the palimpsest in modern literature,
criticism or theory. McDonagh’s most significant theoretical insight is her
observation that the palimpsest provides only an ‘illusion of depth’ – it ‘feigns
a sense of depth while always in fact functioning on the surface level’ (1987,
p. 211).4Although the process that creates palimpsests is one of layering, the
result of that process, combined with the subsequent reappearance of the
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4 The Palimpsest
underlying script, is a surface structure which can be described by a term
coined by De Quincey – ‘involuted’. ‘Involute’ is De Quincey’s name for
the way in which ‘our deepest thoughts and feelings pass to us through
perplexed combinations of concrete objects . . . in compound experiences
incapable of being disentangled’ (1998b, p. 104). The adjective ‘involuted’
describes the relationship between the texts that inhabit the palimpsest as a
result of its palimpsesting and subsequent textual reappearance. The
palimpsest is thus an involuted phenomenon where otherwise unrelated
texts are involved and entangled, intricately interwoven, interrupting and
inhabiting each other. Throughout each of the following chapters, I am
concerned to interrogate and reformulate this complex structure of
(textual) relationality embodied in the palimpsest. One of the ways in which
I do so is through an extended theorization of the neologism ‘palimpsestu-
ous’, employed as a near synonym of involuted. According to The Oxford
English Dictionary, the official adjective from ‘palimpsest’ is ‘palimpsestic’,
meaning: ‘that is, or that makes, a palimpsest’. In contrast, ‘palimpsestuous’
does not name something as, or as making, a palimpsest, but describes the
type of relationality reified in the palimpsest. Where ‘palimpsestic’ refers to
the process of layering that produces a palimpsest, ‘palimpsestuous’
describes the structure that one is presented with as a result of that process,
and the subsequent reappearance of the underlying script.
The term ‘palimpsestuous’ first appeared in print in French in Gérard
Genette’s Palimpsestes(1982) to describe the new type of reading provoked
by his idea of the hypertext: ‘L’hypertexte nous invite à une lecture relationnelle
dont la saveur, perverse autant qu’on voudra, se condense assez bien dans cet
adjectif inédit qu’inventa naguère Philippe Lejeune : lecture palimpsestueuse’ (p.
452).5This word is translated by Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky
in Palimpsestsas ‘palimpsestuous’, which marks the first English use of the
term: ‘The hypertext invites us to engage in a relational reading, the
flavour of which, however perverse, may well be condensed in an adjective
recently coined by Philippe Lejeune: a palimpsestuous reading’ (1997, p.
399). Although Genette attributes the invention of this word to Lejeune,
he does not reference its textual source. Lejeune coined the word in a
Barthesian pastiche, ‘Le Roland Barthes sans peine’, which he wrote
during the summer of 1980 and intended for the journal Poétique’s forth-
coming festschrift for Barthes, who had just died. Genette read the essay
then, but it was not in fact published until 1984, two years after Palimpsests,
when it first appeared in the journal Textuel. As Lejeune explains, ‘you
understand now why, in his book, [Genette] refers to my invention, but
without providing a reference – since at that time my text was unpublished
. . . That is the little layered story of this palimpsest . . .’.6
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Introduction 5
Just as De Quincey’s concept of the palimpsest made strange and re-
vitalized palaeographic palimpsests, ‘palimpsestuous’ makes the concept
of the palimpsest strange in a way that rewrites and refigures it in the
context of late-twentieth and early twenty-first century literary and cultural
thought.7In doing so, ‘palimpsestuous’ performs Michael Dillon’s sugges-
tion that, in attempting to ‘investigate what kind of economy of meaning
is already installed (but generally overlooked) within’ (1996, p. 119) a
word,
it is useful also to estrange ourselves from the word, to put some
distance between it and ourselves – so that it shows-up for us in a way
that commands our attention, and makes us listen to what is invested in
it. (p. 120)8
As a striking and unfamiliar neologism, ‘palimpsestuous’ immediately
performs this function in relation to the concept of the palimpsest. In
addition, like all words, it is also itself palimpsestuous – it is composed of
meanings, sounds, and other words, which collide and collude on and in
its surface. These constitute its imagined etymology and its linguistic and
phonetic reverberations, both of which are explored at more length in
Chapter 5. Like Genette’s description of Proust’s work, the word
‘palimpsestuous’ is ‘a palimpsest in which several figures and several
meanings are merged and entangled together, all present together at all
times, and which can only be deciphered together, in their inextricable
totality’ (1982b, p. 226). Most obviously, ‘palimpsestuous’ is intimately
related with the ‘incestuous’.9 As such, it draws our attention to the per-
verseness of Dillon’s suggestion, that we must make a word strange in
order to enable a renewed and increased intimacy with it. Palimpsestuous
relationality, ‘palimpsestuousness’, treads the line of the problematic of
incest – the intimacy that is branded as illegitimate since it is between
those who are regarded as too closely related. The utmost intimacy is only
legitimate, and, one might suggest – recalling the biological myth sup-
porting the taboo on incest – productive, between those terms that retain
some amount of estrangement from one another.
In order to provide a sustained interrogation and theorization of the
concept of the palimpsest, and the relationality named by the term
‘palimpsestuousness’, then, this study adopts a methodology of
metaphoric coupling. In each chapter, the palimpsest is coupled with –
that is, enters into a palimpsestuous relationship with – a concept from
contemporary critical discourse. According to the nature of that relation-
ship, the two terms are intimate and yet remain distinct. They are involved