Derrida and the Future of Literature.

Derrida and the Future of Literature. By Joseph G. Kronick. (Intersections: Philosophy and Critical Theory) Albany: State University of New York Press. 1999. xiv + 216 pp.

Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship. By Bruce Lincoln. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. 2000. xv + 298 pp. $59; 41.50 [pounds sterling] paperbound $24; 17 [pounds sterling]).

These two books are fundamentally dissimilar. Joseph G. Kronick's reads like an essay, and perhaps would do better as an article, for it repeats itself a lot, especially in quotations from Derrida; yet, to do it justice, it is more than an article, and does not quite repeat, but re-writes the material, so that quotations appear in new and different perspectives. The thesis of the book turns on what Kronick, and Derrida, mean by literature, which is not novels, poems, and plays, or the institution of literature, but writing which escapes systematicity and cannot be named. Kronick says that he will speak not of `literature' but `of law, justice, the Jewish unhappy consciousness, apocalypse, nuclear destruction and the gift. When I speak of literature, I am speaking in place of ethics' (p. 28). Accordingly, there are chapters on the secret, on Jabes, on the apocalyptic tone adopted in philosophy and the nuclear age, and on the future, which is seen in relation to the monstrous. Throughout, there is a nuanced implicit and explicit discussion with John Caputo in his book The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1997) on the topic of negative theology and of God, identified on page 165 as `an example of the trace'. The book is intelligent, and since it does not try to cover all Derrida's interests (it would do well to indicate the importance it sees this particular fascination has in relation to Derrida's other work), it makes a few very cogent points. However, it falls into the category (a very well represented one) of those studies of Derrida that adopt a Derrida-like style to discuss their subject; the result is that the book is too much in the language of Derrida, and its drawback, apart from the difficulty of reading it and the sense that it need not be as difficult as it is (`precious' would be some people's word for it), is that it provides too little discussion that would involve a distancing from his work. For example, despite much discussion of the `fold', there is no reference to Deleuze, where this would provide an illuminating contrast; despite the reference to things being a venir, there is virtually no discussion of Blanchot. And the list of omitted figures who constellate around Derrida could be continued. The result is that there is an absence of means to offer a critique of Derrida, and the experience of reading, while it is akin to reading a piece of poetry, with the conviction that however hard a passage, a sort of light will be produced ten pages further on, is of something too inbred. (The critic most often referred to (though in fairness, it should be said that quite a few are, especially in the footnotes) is Rodolphe Gasche, who is also the general editor of the series, `Intersections: Philosophy and Critical Theory', in which the volume appears, and who also writes a blurb: this for me constitutes the inbred.)

Because Kronick says nothing about `literature', there is always the question of an alternative book to this one, especially as this one makes literature the impossible event, like nuclear warfare, (the monstrous event, the wholly other, that which would suspend all reference). Of course what Derrida says about nuclear war works as a form of metaphor, as an event that can be bracketed off in its absoluteness. Yet I find it significant that Hiroshima and Nagasaki should be brushed aside so soon (p. 131) as though there was nothing to be learned from them, as though they did not constitute events that suspended the wholly `otherness' of the possible existence of nuclear war. Is not Derrida's example, and Kronick's use of it, a form of desperation, which allows him not to speak about that which touches us? We are back to the familiar argument about Derrida and the political here, and to the point that the subtlety of the argument (about democracy, for instance, which is very interesting) is also a means of delaying a response to that which most nearly affects us.

Bruce Lincoln's book, Theorizing Myth, I found less interesting (Kronick is never uninteresting), though Lincoln is responsible and informative. It is wholly scholarly (seventy-two pages of footnotes and the last chapter is a justification of footnotes in the abstract as the marker of scholarship as outside myth and ideology) and in its first three chapters it offers a history of myth, replete with diagrams, some of them full of binary oppositions, but giving the official story, an encyclopaedic account of the fortunes of myth in the west, full of great names and dates, for which Lincoln clearly has an enthusiasm, though it looks a little pedantic. He describes Chapter 3 as `overly ambitious' in presenting a history of myth from the Renaissance to the Second World War; it is the second time he apologises for the chapter (see p. x), but actually, the apology deflects attention from the point that much of the book is like this: Chapter 2 goes from Homer to Plato, as long a period of time, and requiring a synthesizing spirit that can tell a story and be suspicious of narrative at the same time. The trouble is that Lincoln's story is a tale that is told: well known, not looked at with suspicion, and with a tendency to go for the common-sense explanation (Socrates did not write--that Derridean theme--because he was `rooted in the values and habits of an oral culture' (p. 38)). Should Lincoln, with all his scholarship, assume that the Odyssey followed the Iliad, the same writer at work (I refer to his argument beginning Chapter 2)?

The book argues the place of mythology as ideology in society. The point derives from Levi-Strauss, but it does not say enough about ideology; and is it here conscious or unconscious? If the latter, there should be a distinction made between the unconscious as natural and as constructed: obviously the work of Jung is relevant here. He is in the book, but does not get much attention. Myth licenses racism and anti-semitism; this is Lincoln's thesis, and towards the end of it he turns to Mircea Eliade and finds `real and grievous' flaws in his work (p. 146) as he also criticizes, in a lesser way, Georges Dumezil. At this point, the book is just getting to its main argument, which should involve a reading of Eliade, and would be very interesting, but it stops, and what follows is smaller anthropological/mythological material, which does not quite fit the book and reads very formalistically; the non-specialist reader dealing with the larger topic is bound to wonder why it has come his or her way. The book has, in fact, several emphases, some very synoptic, some quite focused and detailed. Its problem is that despite its title, it does not theorize its material. A short reference to Said is not enough to address the issue of Orientalism in the material on Sir William Jones (else very interesting, though treated in a manner a little too reminiscent of the anecdotal style of New Historicism), and the book's narrative is too European for it to take in a more comprehensive argument about mythology. It also strives too much for the polymathic: in that sense it is infected by the same universalism that attracts people to the study of myth in the first place, or that makes mythic study so contagious.

JEREMY TAMBLING
UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG JEREMY TAMBLING