On On the Road.
On the Road to Absence.
------------------------
------------------------
“With the exception of this or that supplement, our questions will have nothing more to name but the texture of the text, reading and writing, mastery and play, the paradoxes of supplementarity, and the graphic relations between the living and the dead: with the textual, the textile and the histological. We will keep within the limits of this tissue: between the metaphor of the ‘histos’ and the question of ‘histos’ of metaphor.”
-- Jacques Derrida.
Everything that needs be said has already been said. Everything that needs be examined has already been examined and catalogued. Writing is an effort to end writing by writing the last word on writing. Maybe as I speak the last word is already being written. So who am I to violate the sanctity of the novel, by creating an appendix, a useless and potentially fatal organ, a post-text to a text that by its very nature wanted to be the end of all texts? Who am I to try and defeat the purpose of the text?
I am not fit enough to write. So I will not write. I will only pretend to write. You will have to bear with me over pages of nothingness while I pretend to write the last word. Consider this text as the post-face to the preface that I never wrote and also a post-face to the commentary written by Jack Kerouac and re-written by yours truly. I say I re-wrote ‘on the road’ because Jack lost all control of the book the moment he finished it. The reader is always born at the cost of the death of the writer. Jack Kerouac is not an Oracle that we can consult to interpret the novel; once the novel is born, it stands by itself in the crossroads as the connecting point of various discourses, grand-narratives, meta-narratives and of course various readers. And as it does that, it also has the power to influence everything that passes through its text.
I will pretend to write on the pre-text of composing the text, on the preface to the novel. In most analyses the preface is never analysed, it is pushed into oblivion, thrust under the text, is dominated by the text, the very same text it is supposed to precede. But is such a discrimination justified? Should the preface always be the bullied and culturally, logically, axiologically, psychologically dominated term in the opposition between the preface and the face, between the pretext and the text?
We shall presently see.
The pre-face to the novel was written after the book was finished. And it is ironic. The preface, in a sense, inagurates a novel, set of poems etc. and at the same time it signals an end, the end of the writing act. Let me say the preface is the point where the writer dies and the novel is born. Such an event cannot help being a vital part of a novel or at the very least be a violent twist in the plot of the novel.
In that sense a preface can be considered as a supplement to the novel with a supplementary plot. It would have been perfect and everyone would have lived happily ever after if it were not for the controversy over the term ‘supplement’. Even the quote from Derrida which I ‘preface’ this thing with makes a mention of it. For every post-structuralist the term ‘supplement’ is a very problematic term. It signifies an opposition but also a fulfillment. Colonies as supplements of civilised Western countries, absence as supplement to presence, history as a supplement to the present, the preface as a supplement to the text and the written text itself as a supplement to language; the phonocentrity of language(something which I might wrangle with towards the end of this project but let me not preface it here; let us not get ahead of ourselves). More accurate than the concept of SUPPLEMENT is, I guess, the Hegelian concept of AUFHEBUNG. “Aufhebung is a relationship between two terms where the second one at once annuls the first and lifts it up into a higher sphere of existence; it is a hierarchical concept generally translated ‘sublation’ and now sometimes translated ‘sublimation’.” (Gayatri Spivak’s words.) The preface has the same relation to a text as the sign has to the signified. But while the text annuls the preface and makes it redundant, at the same stroke it justifies it, proves that the preface is right, and hence puts it on a higher plane than itself. Does it mean that a preface is superior to the text? No it doesnot. What it does is that it puts the hierarchy in question and destroys the text’s supposed ascendancy over the preface.
This book is about a journey. A journey by itself needs no justification. But in the preface, Kerouac seems to feel a need to justify his journey to the critics. He wants to prove to them that even though it seems like a journey to the west to a rustic life, it was indeed a journey inside his soul; a holy and in his words “a religious journey”. But why the need to justify a few innocent journeys? Why try to justify it later in a preface while not doing it explicitly in the book itself? This later act of his present the context for the opposition (inside/outside) within which this book works, an opposition in which the first time dominates the other philosophically. Descartes wrote ‘Cogito, Ergo Sum’(I think, therefore I exist) and it is the most powerful statement in the history of the philosophy of ‘presence’. In both Cartesian and Kantian philosophy, the I, the mind, the ousia holds a central position. Descartes and after him most philosophers tried to find epistemological systems on the basis of the SELF or the mind. Only those things that are directly experienced ‘inside’ the mind are true and others experienced ‘outside’ the mind are useless addendums.
But look at Kerouac. He goes off in an external journey to discover his inner spirituality. It must mean what is external is more immediate to us than what is internal to our mind because to discover what is inside his mind he has to take the help of an external agent like a journey. If that is the case then why the need to defend a more immediate action by making an intellectual excuse. If Kerouac is right than the external journey is more immediate to us; affecting us more than the mind because only through an external journey can he find his inner self but he again as Holmes says in a part of the introduction “if they seemed to trespass most boundaries, legal and moral, it was only in the hope of finding a belief on the other side”. It again sets up the opposition (truth/illusion) where the ‘beliefs’ are the truths while legal and moral boundaries are the dominated illusions.
The opposition (truth/illusion) has been analysed and deconstructed by a whole lot of post-structuralists and I have no ambition to plagiarize them so I will leave it alone. (I am pretty sure you can figure it out by yourselves but a very good deconstruction of the truth/illusion opposition is the book “Walden’s False Bottoms” by Walter Michaels in which he at length deconstructs the truth/illusion myth in light of Thoreau’s book ‘Walden’.)
Kerouac doesnot stay in the NY ghettos to know about real life; instead he goes to the west while he could have had more experience of life living in NY. His journey was construed as an escape from richness(with which he identified NY keeping a blind eye to the slums of the City) to a rustic life of a Sufiian rustic ascetic. It was an essay against capitalism: an effort to obfuscate the effects of capitalism by going somewhere where it was not so evident. NY city is pictured as a rich ‘college’ city just because he needs a villain for the conflict of the novel. The city in all its richness becomes a passive though ever present villain and the protagonists Sal and Dean are chased all around the country by it. But it is only a feeling of escape that he manages to achieve. The opposition (affluent/rustic) is created by the metanarratives of capitalism itself; when we say we are running away from affluence in search for the rustic life, we are in a way strengthening capitalism because we are working withing the parameters/rules set down by capitalism. let us ask a supporting question: what does capitalism gain out of it? the answer is legality... by setting up our stand against the easy affluent life we concede that affluence is something opposed to rustic: they are essentially different and we set up the opposition (affluence/rustic). In the effort to fight capitalism, Kerouac suceeds in strengthening it by stating that he believes in it too.
His choice of written language is descriptive and very subjectively objective. It is treated as a parallel, writing as parallel to his philosophy of life. It creates its own set of unique problems. One accomplishment of using the language he uses is to revolt against the inter-textuality of his text. Inter-textuality is the concept that everything in literature stands in contrast to everything else and is defined by that difference. To quote my favorite example from Culler, the bumper sticker ‘Nuke a Whale for Jesus’ makes sense only in its opposition to other bumper stickers ‘No Nukes’,’Save Whales’ and ‘Jesus saves’. When you take that sticker out of its context, it makes no sense! His novel makes sense and is identified only by contrast and its ‘difference’ with other works of literature in the history of literature.
Kerouac renounces philosphy to become a philosopher. His book is not an anti-thesis of intellectualization but a synthesis of philosophy and rusticism. He explicitly renounces philosophy in the book when he talks about the futility of his friends’ views and decides that reality, which he differentiates as something non-intellectual, is something that should be pursued. He considers the harsh realities of life as an end in itself; not as a means to an end. But in doing so he reiterates the concept of utility; the basic principle of all Humanist philosophy(Utilitarianism, Marxism, Kantian ethics etc.) Other Humanist philosophies use the condition of individual life as a ‘means’ to further the common good of humanity which is the ‘end’ while Kerouac reverses it and uses the condition of humanity as a universal ‘means’ and construes the individual condition as an ‘end’. It, no doubt, is a brilliant move but the casual scheme of ‘means to an end’ is still unchallenged and he succeeds only in creating another kind of philosophical standpoint.
Lastly a note on his obssession with the concept of presence (as opposed to absence). His whole book is a celebration of presence. What gives the book its electrifying character is its obsession with things here and now. Sal and Dean do not plan anything nor they look back or have any substantial regret about some past event. The question is the present important enough to be the protagonist of a novel? (Here I wade not the clear pool of philosophical enquiry but the murky waters of personal standpoint.) I believe that, unlike Zeno’s paradox, presence is but a construct of absence. What is present is defined by what is not present. The fact that Sam is standing in front of you makes sense only in the broader idea that John or Mike or Clancy is not standing in front of you. The pure joy at observing and touching what is here is always diminished by the sorrow of what is not here. Such is the human condition. Reality is not defined by a series of present moments but a system of absences. To understand the kind of life I live, I must understand the kind of life I do not live. The novel instead turns presence into a novelty and succeeds only in trivializing what could have been, at its classical best, the austere poetic suffering of two individuals into a game of cat and mouse. Don’t get me wrong; there is nothing wrong with trivializing life. Life is meaningless so why not have some fun on the way? It is the postmodern viewpoint and something which I totally agree to. But it is the reason, the idea behind the trivialization in this novel that troubles me.
[ Note to L.:
First of all an apology. This is one of the most pointless ‘things’ I have ever written. When I was writing, I wandered, I jumped from concept to concept, got ‘sidetracked’ over little trifles and wrote about stuff which have no connection to the subject at hand. I do it not because I am incapable of writing a structured or logical prose. I am incapable of a lot of other things but not that. Sometimes I am vague out of respect; I did not want to insult your intelligence by explaining obvious stuff which you can, with very little effort, figure out for yourselves if I just start you out in that line of analysis. But my wandering and pointless style is due to another reason. My style is in fact a reflection of my philosophy; my belief in the Grafts and iterability of language. Very succinctly speaking, a written text is nothing but a collection of parts of various discources (writeen, unwritten, social, exlicit, implicit whatever) thrown together in a collage. Even though a certain text seem to be self-defining, it can be shown that it is nothing but a part of a ‘performative discourse’. So even though my composition seems weird, it can be construed as a part of a complex discourse and a series of incongruent grafts.
I don’t claim to know the truth and my style demonstrates it. I throw a lot of ideas inside a melting pot, sometimes in one single passage, and let the reader take a guess at the truth or idea I am about to express. Some of the stuff I throw in is meaningful and some are pointless. Together they paint a shadowy picture of what the idea I am trying to portray might be like. This whole project, this thing that I wrote (or rather any-‘thing’ that I write), hints at the truth, gives an idea of what the truth might be like: like a silhoutte (to steal Kierkegaard’s term), showing presence in absence, the image of a person in dark shadows. I hint at the truth without beig explicit, for that is the best I can do. That is the best I want to do. If I know the truth, there would be nothing else to know; and not only would that be boring but also very unfortunate. For by finding the truth about my philosophical quest, I would undermine the quest itself for I am in a quest to prove that the knowledge of the truth is not more important that knowledge about illusions. It is catch-22 situation because philosophy is a quest for the truth and once I find the truth, I undermine my whole philosophy. It is in this Existential quandary, in a journey from nothing to nothing that I have decided to define myself, and the anguish will always be there that I WILL NOT, I CAN NOT, I SHALL NOT find the truth.
Even my very act of writing is an act of revolt; a statement against the phonocentrism of language. I could have said this to you while talking but I choose to write (my trouble with articulating myself while speaking, my struggle with my accent, my dislike of my voice...whatever be the reason). And just by the act of writing I raise writing from a supplemental level to a central position where it is crucial to any of “my” language acts by fulfilling my attempts at articulation better than even spoken words can.
And in using a style that defines my philosophy, I lead myself to fall into the same trap that I point out in Jack Kerouac: the self-defining nature of the text. Which leads us to some basic questions one of which is “Are the traps in the text of ‘On the Road’ a reflection on the literary capacity of the writer: traps which a better writer could have avoided?” The answer is no, at least not now, nor in the near forseeable future. The language we write in, the philosophy we pretend to propound and our very concept of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, social customs or religion (which Roland Barthes sums up together as SOCIAL MYTHOLOGIES) are based on oppositions between terms, as Derrida points out, not a peaceful co-existence of two opposing terms but a violent hierarchy in which one of the terms always dominate the other culturally and socially. Such oppositions, and conflicts are entwined into the very fabric of our concept of reality. I will go a step further and say that these very oppositions create reality. Philosophy is logocentric and language is phonocentric. All world philosophy however diverse is united in the search for the Logos: the truth. German Idealism, French Existentialism, Logical Positivism, Pragmatism, Marxism, Structuralism, Stoicism-- all are looking for the truth and this search for truth, by definition, creates the basic oppositions (truth/illusion) and (presence/absence): two oppositions on which present day philosophy is based on. It is impossible to escape them: the best we can try to do at the present moment is just to point them out.
A literary theorist (Was it Rorty or Culler? One of the two) said that for any good text, it is imperative that it deconstructs itself. It is necessary for it to undermine the philosphy it preaches for that is the mark of a great book. If a text doesnot deny anything, it doesnot preach anything. If a text doesnot undermine its own philosophy, it preaches no philosophy for any text that preaches anything must undermine it in its own text. (A discussion better kept for another sunny day.)
What do I really think about the novel behind this hastily concocted mask of textual obtuseness? I think it is one of the best books I have ever read... beautiful and touching; more so because it describes a life I am so foreign to in one sense and so close to in another. It promises a rustic life in America’s heartland on one hand and on the other, it has the gay abandon of life and the celebration of life’s fragile little pleasures like that of a Sufi’s and the catalleptic spirit like that in the Zikr. It presents the enigma and anguish of a graspable paradise which I chose not to grasp. A call of the wild. A novel that will linger inside me and haunt me. Like the mirage of a oasis; an anticipation of what could have been.
]
[Exit Sam.
------------------------
------------------------
“With the exception of this or that supplement, our questions will have nothing more to name but the texture of the text, reading and writing, mastery and play, the paradoxes of supplementarity, and the graphic relations between the living and the dead: with the textual, the textile and the histological. We will keep within the limits of this tissue: between the metaphor of the ‘histos’ and the question of ‘histos’ of metaphor.”
-- Jacques Derrida.
Everything that needs be said has already been said. Everything that needs be examined has already been examined and catalogued. Writing is an effort to end writing by writing the last word on writing. Maybe as I speak the last word is already being written. So who am I to violate the sanctity of the novel, by creating an appendix, a useless and potentially fatal organ, a post-text to a text that by its very nature wanted to be the end of all texts? Who am I to try and defeat the purpose of the text?
I am not fit enough to write. So I will not write. I will only pretend to write. You will have to bear with me over pages of nothingness while I pretend to write the last word. Consider this text as the post-face to the preface that I never wrote and also a post-face to the commentary written by Jack Kerouac and re-written by yours truly. I say I re-wrote ‘on the road’ because Jack lost all control of the book the moment he finished it. The reader is always born at the cost of the death of the writer. Jack Kerouac is not an Oracle that we can consult to interpret the novel; once the novel is born, it stands by itself in the crossroads as the connecting point of various discourses, grand-narratives, meta-narratives and of course various readers. And as it does that, it also has the power to influence everything that passes through its text.
I will pretend to write on the pre-text of composing the text, on the preface to the novel. In most analyses the preface is never analysed, it is pushed into oblivion, thrust under the text, is dominated by the text, the very same text it is supposed to precede. But is such a discrimination justified? Should the preface always be the bullied and culturally, logically, axiologically, psychologically dominated term in the opposition between the preface and the face, between the pretext and the text?
We shall presently see.
The pre-face to the novel was written after the book was finished. And it is ironic. The preface, in a sense, inagurates a novel, set of poems etc. and at the same time it signals an end, the end of the writing act. Let me say the preface is the point where the writer dies and the novel is born. Such an event cannot help being a vital part of a novel or at the very least be a violent twist in the plot of the novel.
In that sense a preface can be considered as a supplement to the novel with a supplementary plot. It would have been perfect and everyone would have lived happily ever after if it were not for the controversy over the term ‘supplement’. Even the quote from Derrida which I ‘preface’ this thing with makes a mention of it. For every post-structuralist the term ‘supplement’ is a very problematic term. It signifies an opposition but also a fulfillment. Colonies as supplements of civilised Western countries, absence as supplement to presence, history as a supplement to the present, the preface as a supplement to the text and the written text itself as a supplement to language; the phonocentrity of language(something which I might wrangle with towards the end of this project but let me not preface it here; let us not get ahead of ourselves). More accurate than the concept of SUPPLEMENT is, I guess, the Hegelian concept of AUFHEBUNG. “Aufhebung is a relationship between two terms where the second one at once annuls the first and lifts it up into a higher sphere of existence; it is a hierarchical concept generally translated ‘sublation’ and now sometimes translated ‘sublimation’.” (Gayatri Spivak’s words.) The preface has the same relation to a text as the sign has to the signified. But while the text annuls the preface and makes it redundant, at the same stroke it justifies it, proves that the preface is right, and hence puts it on a higher plane than itself. Does it mean that a preface is superior to the text? No it doesnot. What it does is that it puts the hierarchy in question and destroys the text’s supposed ascendancy over the preface.
This book is about a journey. A journey by itself needs no justification. But in the preface, Kerouac seems to feel a need to justify his journey to the critics. He wants to prove to them that even though it seems like a journey to the west to a rustic life, it was indeed a journey inside his soul; a holy and in his words “a religious journey”. But why the need to justify a few innocent journeys? Why try to justify it later in a preface while not doing it explicitly in the book itself? This later act of his present the context for the opposition (inside/outside) within which this book works, an opposition in which the first time dominates the other philosophically. Descartes wrote ‘Cogito, Ergo Sum’(I think, therefore I exist) and it is the most powerful statement in the history of the philosophy of ‘presence’. In both Cartesian and Kantian philosophy, the I, the mind, the ousia holds a central position. Descartes and after him most philosophers tried to find epistemological systems on the basis of the SELF or the mind. Only those things that are directly experienced ‘inside’ the mind are true and others experienced ‘outside’ the mind are useless addendums.
But look at Kerouac. He goes off in an external journey to discover his inner spirituality. It must mean what is external is more immediate to us than what is internal to our mind because to discover what is inside his mind he has to take the help of an external agent like a journey. If that is the case then why the need to defend a more immediate action by making an intellectual excuse. If Kerouac is right than the external journey is more immediate to us; affecting us more than the mind because only through an external journey can he find his inner self but he again as Holmes says in a part of the introduction “if they seemed to trespass most boundaries, legal and moral, it was only in the hope of finding a belief on the other side”. It again sets up the opposition (truth/illusion) where the ‘beliefs’ are the truths while legal and moral boundaries are the dominated illusions.
The opposition (truth/illusion) has been analysed and deconstructed by a whole lot of post-structuralists and I have no ambition to plagiarize them so I will leave it alone. (I am pretty sure you can figure it out by yourselves but a very good deconstruction of the truth/illusion opposition is the book “Walden’s False Bottoms” by Walter Michaels in which he at length deconstructs the truth/illusion myth in light of Thoreau’s book ‘Walden’.)
Kerouac doesnot stay in the NY ghettos to know about real life; instead he goes to the west while he could have had more experience of life living in NY. His journey was construed as an escape from richness(with which he identified NY keeping a blind eye to the slums of the City) to a rustic life of a Sufiian rustic ascetic. It was an essay against capitalism: an effort to obfuscate the effects of capitalism by going somewhere where it was not so evident. NY city is pictured as a rich ‘college’ city just because he needs a villain for the conflict of the novel. The city in all its richness becomes a passive though ever present villain and the protagonists Sal and Dean are chased all around the country by it. But it is only a feeling of escape that he manages to achieve. The opposition (affluent/rustic) is created by the metanarratives of capitalism itself; when we say we are running away from affluence in search for the rustic life, we are in a way strengthening capitalism because we are working withing the parameters/rules set down by capitalism. let us ask a supporting question: what does capitalism gain out of it? the answer is legality... by setting up our stand against the easy affluent life we concede that affluence is something opposed to rustic: they are essentially different and we set up the opposition (affluence/rustic). In the effort to fight capitalism, Kerouac suceeds in strengthening it by stating that he believes in it too.
His choice of written language is descriptive and very subjectively objective. It is treated as a parallel, writing as parallel to his philosophy of life. It creates its own set of unique problems. One accomplishment of using the language he uses is to revolt against the inter-textuality of his text. Inter-textuality is the concept that everything in literature stands in contrast to everything else and is defined by that difference. To quote my favorite example from Culler, the bumper sticker ‘Nuke a Whale for Jesus’ makes sense only in its opposition to other bumper stickers ‘No Nukes’,’Save Whales’ and ‘Jesus saves’. When you take that sticker out of its context, it makes no sense! His novel makes sense and is identified only by contrast and its ‘difference’ with other works of literature in the history of literature.
Kerouac renounces philosphy to become a philosopher. His book is not an anti-thesis of intellectualization but a synthesis of philosophy and rusticism. He explicitly renounces philosophy in the book when he talks about the futility of his friends’ views and decides that reality, which he differentiates as something non-intellectual, is something that should be pursued. He considers the harsh realities of life as an end in itself; not as a means to an end. But in doing so he reiterates the concept of utility; the basic principle of all Humanist philosophy(Utilitarianism, Marxism, Kantian ethics etc.) Other Humanist philosophies use the condition of individual life as a ‘means’ to further the common good of humanity which is the ‘end’ while Kerouac reverses it and uses the condition of humanity as a universal ‘means’ and construes the individual condition as an ‘end’. It, no doubt, is a brilliant move but the casual scheme of ‘means to an end’ is still unchallenged and he succeeds only in creating another kind of philosophical standpoint.
Lastly a note on his obssession with the concept of presence (as opposed to absence). His whole book is a celebration of presence. What gives the book its electrifying character is its obsession with things here and now. Sal and Dean do not plan anything nor they look back or have any substantial regret about some past event. The question is the present important enough to be the protagonist of a novel? (Here I wade not the clear pool of philosophical enquiry but the murky waters of personal standpoint.) I believe that, unlike Zeno’s paradox, presence is but a construct of absence. What is present is defined by what is not present. The fact that Sam is standing in front of you makes sense only in the broader idea that John or Mike or Clancy is not standing in front of you. The pure joy at observing and touching what is here is always diminished by the sorrow of what is not here. Such is the human condition. Reality is not defined by a series of present moments but a system of absences. To understand the kind of life I live, I must understand the kind of life I do not live. The novel instead turns presence into a novelty and succeeds only in trivializing what could have been, at its classical best, the austere poetic suffering of two individuals into a game of cat and mouse. Don’t get me wrong; there is nothing wrong with trivializing life. Life is meaningless so why not have some fun on the way? It is the postmodern viewpoint and something which I totally agree to. But it is the reason, the idea behind the trivialization in this novel that troubles me.
[ Note to L.:
First of all an apology. This is one of the most pointless ‘things’ I have ever written. When I was writing, I wandered, I jumped from concept to concept, got ‘sidetracked’ over little trifles and wrote about stuff which have no connection to the subject at hand. I do it not because I am incapable of writing a structured or logical prose. I am incapable of a lot of other things but not that. Sometimes I am vague out of respect; I did not want to insult your intelligence by explaining obvious stuff which you can, with very little effort, figure out for yourselves if I just start you out in that line of analysis. But my wandering and pointless style is due to another reason. My style is in fact a reflection of my philosophy; my belief in the Grafts and iterability of language. Very succinctly speaking, a written text is nothing but a collection of parts of various discources (writeen, unwritten, social, exlicit, implicit whatever) thrown together in a collage. Even though a certain text seem to be self-defining, it can be shown that it is nothing but a part of a ‘performative discourse’. So even though my composition seems weird, it can be construed as a part of a complex discourse and a series of incongruent grafts.
I don’t claim to know the truth and my style demonstrates it. I throw a lot of ideas inside a melting pot, sometimes in one single passage, and let the reader take a guess at the truth or idea I am about to express. Some of the stuff I throw in is meaningful and some are pointless. Together they paint a shadowy picture of what the idea I am trying to portray might be like. This whole project, this thing that I wrote (or rather any-‘thing’ that I write), hints at the truth, gives an idea of what the truth might be like: like a silhoutte (to steal Kierkegaard’s term), showing presence in absence, the image of a person in dark shadows. I hint at the truth without beig explicit, for that is the best I can do. That is the best I want to do. If I know the truth, there would be nothing else to know; and not only would that be boring but also very unfortunate. For by finding the truth about my philosophical quest, I would undermine the quest itself for I am in a quest to prove that the knowledge of the truth is not more important that knowledge about illusions. It is catch-22 situation because philosophy is a quest for the truth and once I find the truth, I undermine my whole philosophy. It is in this Existential quandary, in a journey from nothing to nothing that I have decided to define myself, and the anguish will always be there that I WILL NOT, I CAN NOT, I SHALL NOT find the truth.
Even my very act of writing is an act of revolt; a statement against the phonocentrism of language. I could have said this to you while talking but I choose to write (my trouble with articulating myself while speaking, my struggle with my accent, my dislike of my voice...whatever be the reason). And just by the act of writing I raise writing from a supplemental level to a central position where it is crucial to any of “my” language acts by fulfilling my attempts at articulation better than even spoken words can.
And in using a style that defines my philosophy, I lead myself to fall into the same trap that I point out in Jack Kerouac: the self-defining nature of the text. Which leads us to some basic questions one of which is “Are the traps in the text of ‘On the Road’ a reflection on the literary capacity of the writer: traps which a better writer could have avoided?” The answer is no, at least not now, nor in the near forseeable future. The language we write in, the philosophy we pretend to propound and our very concept of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, social customs or religion (which Roland Barthes sums up together as SOCIAL MYTHOLOGIES) are based on oppositions between terms, as Derrida points out, not a peaceful co-existence of two opposing terms but a violent hierarchy in which one of the terms always dominate the other culturally and socially. Such oppositions, and conflicts are entwined into the very fabric of our concept of reality. I will go a step further and say that these very oppositions create reality. Philosophy is logocentric and language is phonocentric. All world philosophy however diverse is united in the search for the Logos: the truth. German Idealism, French Existentialism, Logical Positivism, Pragmatism, Marxism, Structuralism, Stoicism-- all are looking for the truth and this search for truth, by definition, creates the basic oppositions (truth/illusion) and (presence/absence): two oppositions on which present day philosophy is based on. It is impossible to escape them: the best we can try to do at the present moment is just to point them out.
A literary theorist (Was it Rorty or Culler? One of the two) said that for any good text, it is imperative that it deconstructs itself. It is necessary for it to undermine the philosphy it preaches for that is the mark of a great book. If a text doesnot deny anything, it doesnot preach anything. If a text doesnot undermine its own philosophy, it preaches no philosophy for any text that preaches anything must undermine it in its own text. (A discussion better kept for another sunny day.)
What do I really think about the novel behind this hastily concocted mask of textual obtuseness? I think it is one of the best books I have ever read... beautiful and touching; more so because it describes a life I am so foreign to in one sense and so close to in another. It promises a rustic life in America’s heartland on one hand and on the other, it has the gay abandon of life and the celebration of life’s fragile little pleasures like that of a Sufi’s and the catalleptic spirit like that in the Zikr. It presents the enigma and anguish of a graspable paradise which I chose not to grasp. A call of the wild. A novel that will linger inside me and haunt me. Like the mirage of a oasis; an anticipation of what could have been.
]
[Exit Sam.
posted by saikia_s at 1:47 PM
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