Hearing the Printed Voice

...Donoghue gives us some samples of his own practical criticism before braving the nasty alphabets of opposing critics...

...a vast quagmire of semiotic vagueness...

...their "enemy is the bourgeois state...

...Reviewed by Brian Thomas Most English-speaking writers tend to react to Continental avant-garde criticism with either slavish adherence or testy dismissal...

...As a result, the burden of his polemic is proving that their alphabets devour the message supposedly conveyed...

...Donoghue is also irked by William Gass' "spatially fostered art of juxtaposition: like a sentence released from the obligation of being gracious to its readers, it takes pleasure in the manipulation of incongruities...

...The alphabets of the graphireaders are ferocious, Donoghue demonstrates, because so many of today's literary critics are "fanatics of one idea, and...

...The epireading/graphireading distinction leads Donoghue to fruitful examinations of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Kenneth Burke, Paul Ricoeur, and the difference between Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens...

...He finds in their talk of the death of the self more of a prescription than a diagnosis...

...Ferocious Alphabets makes the radical oddity of Derrida's work plain: In his studies of Hegel, in his criticisms of Rousseau and Claude Levi-Strauss, in his labyrinthine commentaries on Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, Derrida is not so much being a philosopher as trying to make philosophy impossible...

...the other hurls back...

...Thus a careful reading of a few paragraphs of R. P. Blackmur leads him to conclude that the critic " is not dealing with ideas and trying to find...sentences to deliver them...

...Although scrupulousness renders his task more difficult than kicking the rock right away would be, and sometimes tangles him in the obscurity he is trying to dispel, it has the advantage of making his reasoning more persuasive...

...And in showing the implications of these obnoxious ideologies, he creates "an adversary idiom" that is the core of a prose Dunciad of deconstructionism...

...Converts to deconstruc-tionism, as it is called, ponder brain-curdling passages from the works of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and their epigones...

...They explore how a word falls into obsolescence despite the efforts of great writers to rescue it, recent shifts in the use of singulars and plurals, and the famous passage in A Farewell to Arms where the hero inveighs against abstract words...

...Barthes eventually abandoned this sort of atomizing, and shortly before his death he assured his readers that he was desperately opposed to any reductive system...

...Some of Donoghue's other asides are as lucid and suggestive as Poulet is prolix and diffusive: "Nabokov's sentences resort to pleasures sweeter than anything provided by the office of communication...

...Donoghue also blasts the upper-class British addiction to the pronoun "one" ("it eliminates the they of other people and rival judgments," he says), and witheringly cites a journal entry of Lytton Strachey's as an illustration of Hans-Georg Gadamer's "hermeneutic circle...

...Insisting that the "illusion of presence, created by a voice in the act by which we suppose we hear it, is no worse than the illusion of absence, created by print," Donoghue cites Shakespeare as the best text on epireading: "To hear with eyes belongs to love's fine wit...

...Jacques Derrida is the Great Satan here because of his attack on lo-gocentrism, the tendency to make the self and the voice—and what Derrida somewhat obscurely calls "presence"?supreme...

...Donoghue also rightly singles out Barthes' S/Z as the locus classicus of structuralism at its most reductionistic...

...He even convincingly defends F.R...

...The six BBC talks that constitute his opening chapters and his "Commentary on the Foregoing," reveal an attentive ear and a winning curiosity about our verbal habits...

...He detects the same sort of aspiring to dialogue at the heart of all writing...

...Donoghue nevertheless does include Bloom among the epireaders, "mainly because he does not regard words as ultimate...

...Epireader" comes from the Greek epos, meaning speech or utterance...

...its language is a program for making unofficial thinking impossible...

...But Donoghuetwits Hugh Kenner for oscillating between several mutually untenable positions, acerbically noting that some of Kenner's phrases seem to have been "secreted" from the typewriter without any loyalty to a voice...

...they assure us that such words as "author," "genius," "self," and "imagination" are passe because they can be explained away as the functioning of so many codes...

...Though he denies that he is a philosopher, Donoghue's explicit proddings at Derrida in the "Graphireading" chapter are quite effective in reminding us that he "has to retain what he attacks if only to pervert it...

...Its proponents assail the subject as a swindle...

...So the sentences make an arbitrary festival...

...Donoghue is generous, though, in recognizing the pleasures to be had in reading Barthes: "His own writing, especially in the later books, is intensely personal, subjective, rich in glamour...

...accuses one...

...It is a great virtue of Ferocious Alphabets that Irish critic Denis Dono-ghuedisdains bluster...

...He is an outraged humanist, but instead of spluttering at the deconstructionists or assuming a guise of ostentatious literal-minded-ness when confronting their more bizarre notions, he explicates each opponent with conspicuous fairness...

...Like Samuel Johnson responding to Bishop Berkeley's idealism, they growl "I refute it thus...

...Finally, he dwells on a play about two inarticulate winners of a football lottery and raises the question of how intensely people can live when their vocabularies are impoverished...

...Along the way he also gently mocks Georges Poulet's phenomenology of reading, protesting that in Poulet's analysis of Stephane Mallarme's La distance interieure, the "prose sways to the rhythm of Mallarme's verse so lovingly that it is virtually impossible to distinguish between paraphrase, gloss, fiction, meditation, and gorgeous nonsense...

...When these opposing camps debate it is rarely edifying: "A tissue of bourgeois puerilities...

...As Barthes parses Sarrasine, Balzac's tale of transvestism and castration, each character becomes a proper name intersected by various codes, and the story is cutintosuchthin slices that Balzac himself vanishes...

...Graphi-reading might be taken as the spirit of calligraphy run amok, an absorption in letters so profound that the content is ignored (an aspect of Donoghue's thesis that is wittily captured in Sally Bin-dari's type design on the book's cover...

...Especially fine is his point about Wallace Stevens: "Prepositions are the most difficult parts of speech in Stevens' poems, and among them preeminently 'of: the reader is often bewildered to decide whether the word that depends on 'of names a function, an attribute, or the substance of the experience in question...

...Donoghue divides the world into angels and devils, whom he calls "epiread-ers" and "graphireaders"—a lapse into jargon rather startling for a partisan of the voice...

...Outraged humanists, on the other hand, mistake curmudgeonly vehemence for argument...

...When he became an author as distinct fromacritic,hedispensed himself from practicing his precepts...

...They are doing more than claiming that the voice is growing hoarse, according to Donoghue—to his disgust, they are deliberately trying to silence it...

...Looking upon "style as compensation for defects in the condition of writing, starting with the first defect, that it is not speech," he turns to how some have made up for this...

...Leavis' prose as unreadable only to the eye, not to the ear...

...His strategy is to strengthen a case and then counter it at its strongest...

...The opposition, by contrast, lacks love's fine wit, and a good deal else...

...for his BBC talks to be effective, he realized, he had to keep in mind the give and take of chatting with another...

...The epireading chapter closes with a detailed, telling critique of Harold Bloom's poetics of misreading, an apt choice because Bloom's failure to harmonize his humanism with the demands of his theory enables Donoghue to say more about the primacy of the voice...

...Such a miscellany might easily have become a bag of loose marbles, were it not for Donoghue's insights in the next chapter, entitled "Communication, Communion, Conversation...

...and boot the nearest rock...

...its arrangements are consolation prizes for a besotted populace...

...they are celebrated in the degree of the ferocity with which they enforce it...

...Nevertheless he continued to reject rationality, a vital element in epireading, and for Donoghue this is enough to banish Barthes the critic to the company of Derrida...

...In the radio talks, for example, he sought to do something more than merely convey bits of information...

...The procedure is acceptable in print and alien to conversation because conversation posits a commitment to the shared continuity of feeling, so long as it lasts, but the printed page has made no such promise...

...Behind the diversity of his topics was the desire to make contact with his listeners...

...he stay s alert to the possibilities disclosed in the stir of words...

...Donoghue faults Bloom for ignoring any instance that does not fit his "revi-sionary ratios" and for his indifference to poets once their relevance to his theory has been exhausted...

...Conversation is the axle Ferocious A Iphabets turns on, and it proves an admirable way of organizing his survey of modern criticism...