Abstract

The suspicion that there is a dark or uncontrollable side to language, a material side of words which withholds itself from narrative, withdraws into darkness or obscurity or nonsense, is a notion that finds a forceful expression in works by Schlegel, Byron, Nietzsche and Joyce. These otherwise dissimilar writers are loosely linked by their pursuit of experimental modes of writing which deliberately endeavor to frustrate narrative, writing which refuses direct expression in favor of various strategies of indirection, digression and dissimulation. In this sense, they can all be said to approach understanding from the more or less upside-down perspective of misunderstanding or, as Schlegel has it in a famous essay, from the standpoint of "incomprehensibility." ;The common acknowledgement of this wayward side of language, a side excessive with respect to the transparent narrative, suggests that meaning or truth exceeds mere sense or intelligibility, that intelligibility itself may be a derivative mode of understanding mapped onto a more primordial poetic saying. But what would this saying be like? The efforts of these ironic writers, these hermeneutic ironists, is to get at this poetic saying, this self-saying of language, before sense or intelligibility sets in or is introduced, before language is brought under the control of the rational subject. The idea is to acknowledge the material side of language, to allow it to draw one out of the dominant narrative and into a zone of outsidedness or neutrality, a more unstable region of radical homelessness where objectifying consciousness is replaced by being-as-belonging-outside, a more linguistically-conscious consciousness characterized by experimental thinking, wandering and continual self-invention