|
To propose, as I have done, that The Portrait of a Lady is incoherently overdetermined and that no evidence exists to support a single univocal judgment is also to pass judgment and to perform a somewhat idiosyncratic form of the "recuperation" that de Man warns us we cannot avoid performing. The reader may wonder whether I am most interested, in this essay, in kisses or in undecidability, or whether I perhaps want to relate them in a general phenomenology of the kiss as indeterminate in meaning. Neither is the case. This essay grew out of a seminar on moments of decision in works of fiction. I was interested in the representation of decisions in words, specifically words in literary works. These were investigated in the context of various theories of decision, in Heidegger's Sein und Zeit , for example. The kiss in The Portrait of a Lady , I decided, is a splendid example of a moment of decision, but I would not call it typical, or generalize on its basis. Nor do I have a general theory of kisses. Each kiss, I suspect, is sui generis . I have found the topic fascinating, however, as I have accumulated more and more examples of kisses in literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. I am grateful to my many auditors around the world who have listened to this essay as a lecture and have given me kisses. My focus is on kisses in literature, which is a more restricted topic than kisses in general. The naming of a kiss in words is a quite different thing from a real kiss, as Kafka knew. Nor would I claim that all kisses in literature (however it may be in life) are indeterminate in meaning. Many kisses in literature, I should think, are more or less decidable in meaning, for example the kisses Adam and Eve exchange before the Fall in Milton's Paradise Lost , however difficult it may be for us now, after the fall, to imagine innocent kisses: "he, in delight/ . . . pressed her matron lip/With kisses pure."1 Caspar's kiss of Isabel is an imaginary historical event in the sense that it intervenes to deflect decisively the course of Isabel's history. That kiss, however, exists only as words within a fictional story. It operates in that story rather as an irrational interruption of the heroine's course than as a happening that can be incorporated into a coherent, verifiable, rationally comprehensible history of a kiss. De Man, in "The Return to Philology," affirms his allegiance to Reuben Brower's pedagogical law. According to this law students "were not to make any statements that they could not support by a specific use of language that actually occurred in the text."2 My reading of The Portrait of a Lady has indicated that this law perhaps cannot be obeyed except by silence. As soon as you say anything at all about a literary text, you have gone beyond the text and have said something about it that is, strictly speaking, unwarranted. Nevertheless you must take the plunge or else remain mute, as Penthesileia remains mute in one version of Kleist's play of that name rather than explaining, in the passage from the version I have cited, that she has confused "küssen" and "bissen" in a slip of the tongue and kissed/bitten Achilles to death. The you is not empty prior to the act of a reading decision. Isabel at the moment of Caspar's kiss is what her nature as a lover of liberty with a conscience plus all her yesses and noes, the decisions she has already taken, her refusals of Goodwood and Warburton, her acceptance of Osmond, have made her. In a similar way, no reader is a blank page on which the text as it is read writes itself. The reader always has all sorts of presuppositions and prejudices. But the irresponsible and ultimately unjustifiable act of deciding to fill in the missing link with a certain reading is nevertheless a response to the demand the text makes. In this it is like Isabel's decision to return to Osmond. A reading decision changes the reading you, reconstitutes it, interrupts what it was before, deflects it, turns it around, and heads it in another direction. Such a decision makes the reader thereafter to some degree determined as the you that has filled in that blank in a certain way, just as Isabel will be forever after a wife who decided to return to her bad husband. The Portrait of a Lady has an ethical lesson. It teaches that ethical decisions, if they are real decisions and not automatic, preprogrammed actions, are never fully justifiable by rational explanations. They are leaps in the dark. The novel teaches also that reading or writing about a literary work is analogous. A reading is a performative intervention, not a cognitive, completely verifiable assertion, though it is a response to the call for a reading that the text makes: "Read me!" 1John Milton, Paradise Lost (New York, 1940), bk. 4, ll. 497, 501-2, p. 92. |