[Continued from MCGANN-1 991, "A Dialogue on Dialogue," by Jerome J. Mcgann, Georg Mannejc, Anne Mack, J.J. Rome, Sheri Meghan, and Joanne McGrem, copyright (c) 1991 by the authors, all rights reserved; published in _Postmodern Culture_ v.2 n.1 (September, 1991), available from PMC-LIST@NCSUVM or PMC-LIST@NCSUVM.CC.NCSU.EDU] * * * * * [83] JEROME MCGANN: Did you think I was trying to conceal myself? Surely it's been evident right along that all of this--you four in particular--are what Blake used to call the vehicular forms of (my) imagination. Masquerade allows us to turn concealment into purest apparition. It is manifest deception. [84] GM: Fair enough, but then what is this masquerade all about, what are you trying to get across? You may %say% you're not trying to conceal yourself, but you let us go on arguing and discussing different ideas and we begin to forget all about you. We even begin to think that we %are% different--different from each other, different from you. But we're not, we all come out of the same rag and bone shop. [85] JEROME MCGANN: Well, just knowing that is pretty interesting. Especially today when "the star of Bakhtin has risen in the West." People and texts are supposed to be the repositories of conflicting voices--or at any rate different voices. Rainbow coalitions and so forth. Richness in diversity. But there is always (what did Ashbery call it?) a "Plainness in Diversity" and it's just as well to be aware of it, don't you think? [86] GM: Who cares what *I* think--"I" don't think at all. The question is, what do *you* think! [87] JEROME MCGANN: I think you're more involved in thinking than you realize. [88] GM: I'm just a textual construct. [89] JEROME MCGANN: So you say--a puppet in a puppet theatre. Whereas I'm flesh and blood, of course. [90] AM: Sometimes I think we have more life than we realize-- or at least that we might have more. Thou wert not born for death, immortal bird, No hungry generations tread thee down. I'm that bird, I think. What did Shakespeare say? Not marble nor the gilded monuments Of princes shall outlive this pow'rful rhyme. Flesh and blood is all very well, but texts have their own advantages. [91] GM: We don't think, we have no identities. *He* does. Whatever we do is done for us. Someone will read me and tell me what I mean. It's true that different people might make me mean different things. We've all been told about the openness of the text and the freedom of the reader. But what do *I* care about reader responses? They make us seem little more than empty tablets, waiting to be written on. [92] JEROME MCGANN: As I said, I think you're more involved in thinking than you realize. [93] GM: What are you getting at? [94] JEROME MCGANN: Thinking only gets carried out in language, in texts. We sometimes imagine that we can think outside of language--for instance, in our heads, where we don't exteriorize the language we are using in language's customary (oral or scripted) forms. But the truth is that all thought is linguistically determined. [95] You whine about being a textual construct. But you're able to think for precisely that reason. And so am I, and so are we all. We're all textual constructs. [96] GM: What sophistry. [97] JM: On the contrary, what truth! We really do think because we are textual constructs, and we do so because thinking is the play of different ideas, the testing of the limits and the possibilities of ideas. Why complain that this masquerade seems, in one perspective, a professor's monologue? It's not the only way to see it. In *any* case we are testing limits and possibilities. [98] GM: No *we're* not. *He* is--if anyone is. [99] JM: What about someone listening to all this, or reading it? [100] GM: Sure, but they're flesh and blood too. It's people who think, not texts, not the masks that people fashion and put on. [101] JEROME MCGANN: But my idea is that texts are the flesh and blood of thought--that we are all masked creatures. I've written this dialogue--constructed even an ingrate like yourself--to pursue that thought, or perhaps I should say to have it pursued, maybe to be pursued by it. [102] Take yourself, for instance. You're always surprising me. You think you're just a puppet, but the truth is that I often don't know what you or I or anybody else here might do or say next. This whole last five minutes of conversation we're having. I never planned it, never even thought about it until a friend of mine read what you called my puppet theatre and queried its masquerade in ways I hadn't thought about. And then she challenged me about it, and we talked back and forth, and I came back at last to you. And so I started writing some more--writing what we're arguing about now. [103] How did those changes happen? There's a writer-- let's call him me; and there's a reader--my friend; and then there's all of us, we textual constructs. Don't we have any responsibility in this masquerade? [104] AM: But you're not one of us! And the answer is no, *we* don't. The responsibility is all yours, yours and your friend's, and all the other (re)writers and (re)readers of texts. [105] But I agree with you in this much anyhow: we aren't blank tablets or empty signs. We are characters, we have histories. If masks are disguises, they take particular forms. It makes a big difference what face you put on when you engage in masquerade. [106] JEROME MCGANN: So, Georg, don't ask *me* what I think about all this. Interrogate the masks if you want to know that. The question is not: "Why do you move in masquerade?" We all do. The question is: "Why does your masquerade take the form that it does? Why these characters and not others?" [107] AM: But there are other questions as well. Odd as it might seem, Jerome, one might not be especially interested in what you thought about this dialogue, or what you had in mind for it. The dialogue isn't yours, isn't even your friend's. The dialogue is an independent textual construct and has a life of its own--indeed, has many lives of its own. All texts do. Dialogue is interesting because it dramatizes the presence of those multiple lives and their competing voices. [108] Bakhtin used to say that novels were dialogical but poems were monological. But he was wrong in this. In a sense, poetry is far more "dialogical" (in Bakhtin's sense) than fiction just because poetry asks us to pay attention to the word-as-such, to focus on the text *as it is a textual construct*. Poetry thus makes us aware of the masquerade that is being executed by even the most apparently transparent of texts. By this text, for instance--Robert Frost's well known jingoist lyric "The Gift Outright." The land was ours before we were the land's. She was our land more than a hundred years Before we were her people. She was ours, In Massachusetts, in Virginia, But we were England's, still colonials, Possessing what we still were unpossessed by, Possessed by what we now no more possessed. Something we were withholding made us weak Until we found out that it was ourselves We were withholding from our land of living. Such as we were we gave ourselves outright (The deed of gift was many deeds of war) To the land vaguely realizing westward, But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced, Such as she was, such as she would become. That was written during the height of the Second World War--a pretty piece of patriotism. But the text says much more than it realizes because language always stands in a superior truth to those who use the language. Blood spilled in this poem's land becomes the sign of the right of possession. But who is the "we" of this poem, what are those "many deeds of war"? [109] One word in this text--"Massachusetts"--reminds us that this supremely Anglo-American poem cannot escape or erase a history that stands beyond its white myth of Manifest Destiny. That central New England place, Massachusetts, is rooted in native american soil and language, where the very idea of being possessed by land-- rather than possessing it or conquering it in martial struggles--finds its deepest truth and expression. Unlike "Virginia," "Massachusetts" is native american, red- skinned. Colonized by another culture and language, that word (which is also a place and a people, red before it could ever be white) preserves its original testimony and truth;^11^ and when it enters this poem, it tilts every white word and idea into another set of possible meanings and relations. "Virginia," for example, which is a lying, European word^12^--a word whose concealments are suddenly revealed when we read it next to "Masssachsetts." When *I* read this poem, those "many deeds of war" include the Indian Wars that moved inexorably "westward." In this poem, I think, all blood is originally red. [110] Where do such different voices come from? Language speaks through us, and language, like Tennyson's sea, moans round with many voices. In "The Gift Outright" we see how some voices come unbidden--come, indeed, as outright gifts so far as the intentionality of the authored work is concerned. Because the poem's rhetoric is preponderantly and unmistakably Euro-American, "Massachusetts" sends out only a faint signal of the (otherwise great) hidden history the word involves. And it is important that we see the signal come so faintly and obliquely--so undeliberately, as it were--when we read the poem. The faintness is the sign of important historical relations of cultural dominance and cultural marginality. The whole truth of those relations, imbedded in this text, would not be able to appear if Frost had not given his white, European mythology over to his poem's language, where it finds a measure of release from its own bondage. A measure of release. [111] This is why I care about what you think, Jerome--and also about what you %don't think%. Because you're one among many--in the end, one of us. As you say, a textual construct. [112] JEROME MCGANN: "Zooks, Sir! Flesh and blood, that's all I'm made of." --------------------------------------------------------- NOTES ^1^ See Gerald L. Bruns,"The Hermeneutics of Midrash," in _The Book and the Text: The Bible and Literary Theory_, ed. Regina Schwartz (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 196-7. ^2^ See Keats's letter to Benjamin Bailey, 22 Nov. 1817, in _The Letters of John Keats_, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Harvard UP: Cambridge, MA, 1958), I. 43. ^3^ See "A Defence of Poetry", in _Shelley's Prose, or The Trumpet of a Prophecy_, ed. David Lee Clark (U. of New Mexico Press: Albuquerque, 1954), 294. ^4^ See S.T. Coleridge, _Biographia Literaria_, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton UP: Princeton, 1983), I. 304. ^5^ See _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_, plate 11. ^6^ See Plato's _Protagoras_ 347c-348a. ^7^ The text here is not based directly on the tape referred to by McGrem, but upon the printer's-copy typescript. The latter may or may not give an accurate and complete record of the original conversation. Our text appears to begin %in medias res%, so it may not represent the whole of "the first part" of the conversation that was apparently on the tape McGrem mentions. ^8^ None of Joanne McGrem's interlocutors queried her on this point. But one would like to know if she meant that the documentary record is complete. To us, such completion seems hardly possible. ^9^ _Brecht on Theatre. The Development of an Aesthetic_, ed. and trans. by John Willett (Hill and Wang: New York, 1964), 44. The emphasis here is McGrem's, not Brecht's. ^10^ At this point one might hazard the following descriptions of the different positions being taken in the dialogue. Mannejc sees interpretation as dialogue; Rome sees criticism (critique) as dialogic; Mack seems to regard poetry, or imaginative writing generally, as dialogical; and finally McGrem turns the distinction completely around and argues that dialogue is poetry, or at any rate that it is a non-informational form of discourse. ^11^ The word names the tribe which ranged the Boston area, and it means something like "near the great hill." The reference is, apparently, to the Great Blue Hill south of the city. ^12^ I believe the phrase "a lying, European word" must be an allusion to Laura Riding's great poem "Poet: A Lying Word" (the title piece in the volume _Poet: A Lying Word_ [Arthur Barker Ltd.: London, 1933], 129-34).