Writing and Madness

Writing and Madness summary: Within a series of single-text studies, Feldman seeks the “uncanny moment” which, in its paradoxical attempts to conceptualize the inconceivable, points to the lack at the center of the rhetorical act, which itself forms the unreadable heart of literature.

Passage for close-reading:

“The text work is thus analogous to dream-work....Can it be said that the function of thematics is also to keep awake that we may sleep, to preserve the power of sleep that resides in language? For the theme blinds (us) by its very brightness; its task is to obscure the rhetoricity of the text, to make the rhetoric literally unreadable. Rhetoric, on the other hand, is whatever makes the theme malfunction, whatever makes the theme not work, undo itself” (97).

This passage is rich with different voices, some ventriloquized, some directly quoted, and some suggested with subtlety enough to make the reader question their presence, in the manner of a hallucination. The ellipses in my quoted selection above elides a passage in Feldman's chapter of embedded quotes drawn from a preceding discussion on Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. This shifts into a response by Nietzsche affirming that it is “no small art...to sleep” (96), responding to Freud's assertion that the dream functions as the “ 'guardian of sleep'” (96), drawn from Thus Spake Zarathustra. The succeeding footnote connects Heidegger to the discourse tangentially, citing a “beautiful passage” (97) from What is Called Thinking? concerning “both the madness and thought of Nietzsche” (97).Within this footnote, furthermore, the text's thematic points to the difficulty of finding Nietzsche's text, and, once finding it, to lose it again. Heidegger then quotes one of the “epistles of madness” which Nietzsche addressed to his friend and public lecturer Georg, in saying “After you had discovered me, it was no trick to find me: the difficulty now is to lose me....'”' Standing at the center of a Russian-doll formation of nested quotes, the epistle from Nietzsche points back to the great difficulty of this very layered structure: a difficulty not in locating the central extra-textual element, but in the impossible task of brushing aside the ghostly echoes of its implications.

If the ellipses thus point obliquely to outside writers situated both above and below the text they modify, the passage I've selected continues the spatial shifting of these layers of ghostly texts. Feldman's commentary on her constellation of quoted texts begins with a thematic of light and power, which suggests the dream, recounted by Freud and, subsequently, Lacan, in which the father of the recently dead child dreams his child awakens him with a reproachful, “ 'Don't you see I'm burning?'” in time to awaken fully and see the body of his child burning from a fallen candle, thanks to a sleeping attendant. Thematics function in the mirror image of the dream-work here, which keeps the father asleep to prolong both his rest and his child's life by an extra instant. The thematics work instead to keep one awake so as to sleep, inverting the order of the terms. The blinding power of the thematics, working to obscure the rhetoric, puts one in mind of the blinding blaze of the candles both within the father's dream, and without it in his child's sick-room.

Yet the word obscure has primary connotations of darkness, not light. The thematics then, blinds through brightness, and yet darkens the rhetoric into unreadability, as though the shifting rhetorical positions between light and darkness, as well as between speakers and the ghosts of speakers, throw shadows over the page. Theme, then, creates a double blindness so that there is no privileged position outside of the glare or the darkness, and hence no privileged place for reading, no condition or point of perspective that will align the relationships between texts and voices and clear out the shadows.

If the thematics blind us and therefore make the rhetoric unreadable, rhetoric makes the theme malfunction, shifting the register yet again into the mechanical, in the sense of a light shorting out. Furthermore, the phrase “undoes itself” is italicized, seemingly granting it favor over the term “malfunction.” With the word “undoes” the passage pulls into itself references to the knot metaphor, while concurrently suggesting the knot's slipperiness and ability to be pulled apart. In this way, the italicization ties together the otherwise distant registers of thematics and rhetoric, playing them at cross-purposes as they undo and obscure each other from different positions.

Throughout the passage, these italicized phrases function to highlighting its own rhetoricity. Italics apparently function to make writing more readable, by giving the reader a structure of emphasis and hence valuation. Here, however, the italics push the words into prominence, marking them as of a different register than other, un-italicized words, yet the italicized words are themselves often imported from other sources, where they are not italicized, hence setting up a play of differences based on repetition. Furthermore, the embedding of italics within quoted passages, and Feldman's quotations of her own italics, serve to form an orthographic tie between passages, pulling out a particular theme and then torquing it, through the emphasis of italics, to serve the rhetoric of the current analysis. In this way, Feldman serves to create the same power of rhetoric, the same ability to make theme malfunction, that she is citing,creating the kind of impossible, un-positionable and non-hierarchical reading that she analyzes.

The content of these italicized phrases further complicates the shifting ground on which this rhetoric is based. The first italicized phrase “keep awake” echoes Nietzsche's remarks quoted before, and, as remarked above, is paralleled with the verbal complement of the adverbial phrase “that we may sleep.” Within Nietzsche's quotation, it is apparent that the same generalized, proverbial subject is both sleeping and, to that end, keeping awake all day. Although, as quoted by Feldman, these phrases suggest a causal relationship, they vary notably in that the first lacks a pronoun. A variant like “keep us awake” make of thematics a relatively passive force which exists to engage our attention as readers, keeping us active and awake. The pronoun-less version instead serves to grant thematics an agency as the potential subject of the verb phrase “keep awake.” The use of the word “may” in the second phrase, as opposed to “can” grants us a permission rather than ability to sleep. Thematics, then, takes on the role of the watcher at the death-bed of the father's dream, with the exception that thematics is a more successful watchman, keeping awake so that we may sleep, granting (us) permission to sleep, opening a space to preserve this power of sleep that resides in language.