A Self-Referential Density

'A Self-Referential Density':Glyph and the 'Theory' Thing Julian Wolfreys (bio) I assert that no other reading than the one I intend is possible and I defy interpretation beyond my mission. —Ralph Townsend Like all stories, any of these I offer here has another side. —Ralph Townsend The individual cannot exist in language . . . —Tzvetan Todorov I Let's start with the first two epigraphs. I have given these citations as epigraphs for a couple of reasons: the gesture of the epigraph gives the essay the patina of clever scholarly activity while at the same time reminding one that a scene of writing has taken place. There is a calm, almost arrogant certainty in such an inaugural gesture, one that incisively marks the page and demands full attention. The epigraph is that device which is employed, conventionally, in order to bully the reader through its supposed authority as a source or indicator of truth, and also to impress her with the erudition of the scholar. Moreover, the epigraph, in providing an authoritative voice, gets things underway for the critic, making it easier to situate an argument, however elliptically. There is none of that hesitation associated, as J. Hillis Miller has reminded us, with the footnote. "Footnotes," he remarks, "are often places where an author gives himself away in one way or another in the act of fabricating a protective cover. [End Page 345] A footnote often reveals an uneasiness, identifies a fissure or seam in an author's thought by saying it is not there" (Miller The Ethics of Reading, 15). So, epigraphs, markedly "there." (I would say take them or leave them, but then that's the point, isn't it? You can't leave them.) The first two epigraphs–I will ignore the third, leaving it to you to figure out its relevance (or otherwise)—above are as good a place as any from which to begin, and I have a feeling that those lines will still have some force by the time I reach the end of this essay, that they will have refused to go away. Such inscriptions, for all that they are unseemly, intruding themselves before the author can get underway, leave an indelible imprint. They have imposed themselves on me from Percival Everett's thirteenth book, Glyph,1 both lines being spoken by that fictive device known as the narrator, in this case, a first-person narrator. This narrator goes by the name of Ralph Townsend, as you can see. I will tell you more about Ralph shortly. Right now though, who he is or might be is less important—that is to say, less important strategically, rhetorically, to me, the critic—than what he has to say, particularly what I cite him as saying. Between these two remarks, which on first blush seem to be somewhat contradictory, a structure appears. This structure can be rendered graphically and economically as follows. "On the one hand . . . on the other hand." This is a figure, which, as we shall see, can be attributed if not to Ralph's "personality," then at least to one of his favoured forms of argument. Ralph enjoys nothing more than the dislocation of the re-mark, of that act of writing which destabilizes propriety and identity, certain meaning and ontology. But let me pause for a moment. I feel the onset of a digression—a minor instance of Shandeanism in the face of Everett's playful novel, doubtless—born out of nervousness; or perhaps just call it performance anxiety, which I might always excuse as circumspection. How could I do otherwise, in the face of a narrator who claims to have read "all of Sterne" (G 17)? However, to go back to my hesitation, signalled beforehand in the use of quotation marks in the last sentence of the previous paragraph: I suspend the term "personality" in scare quotes because it implies behind it a "real" human being. And as we know—don't we?—the self is an illusion produced in fiction, an effect of a web of words—"the sign of a constellation of signs." This is hardly an original remark. In certain schools of critical thought, or from what

Anecdote · Art · Epigraph · Epistemology · Gesture · Linguistics · Literature · Miller · Reflexive pronoun · Townsend · Computer Science · Digital Humanities and Scholarship · History · Philosophy · Translation Studies and Practices

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