Printed: 3/14/2018 11:24 AM

OClC In Process Date:

32044093718799
'"1111111111"111111111111111111111'""1111111111111111"11111111"1111111"11

" HARVARD
LIBRARY

Borrower: HLS

Lending String: HLS Call #: WID WIDLCPR21.D56 2007

Patron: Aguirre-Oteiza, Daniel Location: WID

Ihournal Title: The palimpsest :literature criticism ODYSSEY ENABLED

t eory /Sarah Dillon. "

Volume: Issue: Borrowing Library:

Month/Year: 2007 Pages: 1-10 + notes 127-28? HarvardUniversity - Widener Library

Email:
Article Author:
Notes:
Article Title: Introduction TransactionOate:3/14/2018 11:23:09 AM

Imprint: Via Scan and Deliver Service S & D Processing Notes:

Special Instructions: o Not as cited

o Duplicate
ILL Number: 4990260 o Multiple articles
111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111 o Exceeds 10% of work
o Not on shelf
o On Reserve
o Too fragile
o Checked out/on hold
o Exceeds 100 pages

Initials: _
 Chapter 1

Introduction: The Palimpsest

In 1845 Thomas De Quincey published an essay in Blackwood's Magazine

entitled 'The palimpsest'. Coupling 'palimpsest' with the definite article
'the' '(for the first time in a non-specific sense), De Quincey's essay inaug-
urated - that is, both introduced, and initiated the subsequent use of - the
substantive concept of the palimpsest. The palimpsest is implicitly related to
palimpsests, which until 1845 were palaeographic oddities of concern only
to those researching and publishing ancient manuscripts. However, the
concept of the palimpsest exists independently of such phenomena - it is a
strange, new figurative entity, invested with the stature of the substantive. De
Quincey was not the first writer to use palimpsests in a figurative sense, but
his inauguration of the concept of the palimpsest marks the beginning of a
consistent process of rnetaphorization from the mid-nineteenth century to
the present day.' Since 1845, the concept of the palimpsest has been
employed in areas as diverse as architecture, geography, geology, palaeon-
tology, glaciology, astrophysics, biochemistry; genetics, neuroscience, neuro-
biology, neurocomputing and information technology. Within and across
these fields, the fignre of the palimpsest is invariably found in areas of
research which insist upon the interdisciplinary nature of their work.
Referring to the interdisciplinarity of lingnistics, anthropology, Marxism
and psychoanalysis, Roland Barthes argnes that:

what is new ... comes not necessarily from the internal recasting of each
of these disciplines, but rather from their encounter in relation to an
object which traditionally is the province of none of them. It is indeed
as though the interdisciplinarity which is today held as a prime value
in research c:annot be accomplished by the simple confrontation of
specialist branches of knowledge. Interdisciplinarity is not the calm of
an easy security; it begins effectively (as opposed to the mere expression
of a pious wish) when the solidarity of the old disciplines breaks down-
perhaps even.violently, via the jolts in fashion - in the interests of a new
object and a new langnage neither of which has a place in the field of
the sciences that were to be brought peacefully together, this unease in

1
2 The Palimpsest

classification being precisely the point from which it is possible to

diagnose a certain mutation. (1977a, p. 155)

Palimpsests are precisely such objects. They embody and provoke inter-
disciplinary encounter, both literally (as the diversity of the experts cur-
rently working on the Archimedes Palimpsest discussed in the following
chapter shows) and figuratively. The palimpsest cannot be the province of
anyone discipline. since it admits all those terrains that write upon it to its
body; nor, indeed, does the palimpsest have a province of its own, since it
is anything other than that which offers itself at first sight, the literal
meaning of province." Disciplines encounter each other in and on the
palimpsest, and their relationality becomes defined by its logic. In this way,
the palimpsest becomes a figure for interdisciplinarity - for the productive
violence of the involvement, entanglement, interruption and inhabitation
of disciplines in and on each other.
The disciplines that inhabit this particular palimpsest are those of liter-
ature, criticism and theory, with each chapter interweaving theorization of
the concept of the palimpsest with close readings of literary texts in which
it figures, including works by Thomas De Quincey, D. H. Lawrence, Arthur
Conan Doyle, Umberto Eco, Ian McEwan and H. D. In this sense, my study
is performative: at a time when the long-standing and fierce debate about
the place of theory in literary studies still rages, this study demonstrates
the palirnpsestuous intimacy that can exist between theoretical and critical
writing, an intimacy which manifests itself in a mode of writing I wish to
call theoretical criticism. In the interview "This strange institution called lit-
erature'" (1989), responding to Derek Attridge's question, 'ish necessary
to make a distinction between literature and literary criticism ., . ?'
(Derrida 1992, p. 49), Jacques Derrida outlines his belief that "'good"
literary criticism, the only worthwhile kind, implies an act, a literary signa-
ture or counter-signature, an inventive experience. of language, in
language, an inscription of the act of reading in the field of the text that
is read' (p. 52). Good literary criticism involves a physical intimacy, an
involutedness, between literature and literary criticism. Yet, at the same
time, Derrida wants to preserve a distinction between these two forms of
writing: 'I would not say that we can mix everything up and give up the
distinctions between all these types of "literary" or "critical" production'
(p. 52). Derrida is therefore left struggling to delineate the relationship
between literature and literary criticism: 'I wouldn't distinguish between
"literature" and "literary criticism", but I wouldn't assimilate all forms of
reading and Writing' (p. 52). He argues that it is necessary, when making
any such distinctions, 'to give up on the purity and linearity of frontiers.
 Introduction 3

They should have a form that is both rigorous and capable of taking
account of the essential possibility of contamination between all these
oppositions' (p. 52). 'Palimpsestuousness' - a simultaneous relation of
intimacy and separation - provides a model for this form, preserving as it
does the distinctness of its texts, while at the same time allowing for their
essential contamination and interdependence. The same model offers
itself as a paradigm for the relationship between critical and theoretical
writing manifest in theoretical criticism."
This study brings together many of the creative, critical and theoretical
texts in which the palimpsest has figured since 1845 in order to investigate
its structure and logic and to demonstrate its crucial role in .understand-
ing and advancing modern thought. 'While discussing the palimpsest's
refiguration of concepts as diverse as history, subjectivity, temporality,
metaphor and sexuality, this study returns repeatedly and relentlessly to
the question of reading in its very broadest sense. In both theory and crit-
icism, it investigates a practice that is the source of the most fundamental
disagreements in academic and wider cultural belief: how do we under-
stand the world around us, and ourselves? In other words, how do we read?
For me, the answer to that question lies in a sustained interrogation, via
the palimpsest, of the way in which we read texts (be they historical,
literary, critical, theoretical, political, cultural, etc.). This study thus
consistently investigates the nature of writing and textualiry; accepts the
insecurity of reading, and delights, unashamedly, in the pleasure involved
in the most productive - because risky - reading.
Despite the proliferation of the metaphor of the palimpsest, Josephine
McDonagh's 'Writings on the mind: The importance of the palimpsest in
nineteenth-century thought' (1987) offers the only previous sustained study
of its significance. McDonagh considers how the palimpsest functions as a
psychological, historical and social model in various nineteenth-century
texts, including De Quincey's essay, Thomas Carlyle'S 'On history' (1830),
and George Henry Lewes' Problems of Life and Mind (1874-9). Her study is
valuable in identifying the importance of the palimpsest in nineteenth-
century thought, as well as in drawing attention to the radical potential of
De Quincey's palimpsest model. Restricted to an investigation of nine-
teenth-century critical texts, however, McDonagh's study makes no claim
for the contemporary relevance of the palimpsest in modern literature,
criticism or theory. McDonagh's most significant theoretical insight is her
observation that the palimpsest provides only an 'illusion of depth' - it 'feigns
a sense of depth while always in fact functioning on the surface level' (1987,
p. 211)4 Although the process that creates palimpsests is one oflayering, the
result of that process, combined with the subsequent reappearance of the
 4 The Palimpsest

underlying script, is a surface structure which can be described by a term

coined by De Quincey - 'involuted'. 'Involute' is De Quincey's name for
the way in which 'our deepest thoughts and feelings pass to us through
perplexed combinations of concrete objects ... in compound experiences
incapable of being disentangled' (1998b, p. 104). The adjective 'involuted'
describes the relationship between the texts that inhabit the palimpsest as a
result of its palirnpsesting and subsequent textual reappearance. The
palimpsest is thus an involuted phenomenon where otherwise unrelated
texts are involved and entangled, intricately interwoven, interrupting and
inhabiting each other. Throughout each of the following chapters, I am
concerned to interrogate and reformulate this complex structure of
~ (textual) relationality embodied in the palimpsest. One of the waysin which
( I do so is through an extended theorization of the neologism 'palimpscstu-
ous', employed as a near synonym of involuted. According to The Oxford
English Dictionary, the official adjective from 'palimpsest' is__ ~p''~limpsestic',
( meaning: 'that is, or that makes, a palimpsest'. In contrast, '.p-c.~I~~ps.~~~~ous'
\ does not name something as, or as making, a palimpsest, but describes the
\type of relationality reified in the palimpsest. Where 'palimpsestic' refers to
the process of layering that produces a palimpsest, 'palimpsestuous'
describes the structure that one is presented with as a result of that process,
and the subsequent reappearance of the underlying script.
The term 'palimpsestuous' first appeared in print in French in Gerard
Genette's Palimpsestes (1982) to describe the new type of reading provoked
by his idea of the hypertext: 'L'hypertexte nous invite a une lecture relationnelle
doni la saveur, perverse autant qu 'on voudra, se condense assez bien dans cet
adjectif inedi: qu'inventa naguere Philippe Lejeune: lecture palimpsestueuse' (p.
452),5 This word is translated by Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky
in Palimpsests as 'palimpsestuous', which marks the first English use of the
term: 'The hypertext invit~9-'$~ in _a_!~()_~ding, the
flavour of which, however perverse, may well be condensed in an adjective
recently coined by Philippe Lejeune: a palimpsestuous reading' (1997, p.
399). Although Genette attributes the invention of thiS word to Lejeune,
he does not reference its textual source. Lejeune coined the word in a
Barthesian pastiche, 'Le Roland Barthes sans peine'. which he wrote
during the summer of 1980 and intended for the journal Poetique's forth-
coming festschrift for Barthes, who had just died. Genette read the essay
then, but it was not in fact published until 1984, two years after Palimpsests,
when it first appeared in the journal TextueL As Lejeune explains, 'you
understand now why, in his book, [Genette] refers to my invention, but
without providing a reference - since at that time my text was unpublished
... That is the little layered story of this palimpsest ... '.6
 Introduction 5

Just as De Quincey's concept of the palimpsest made strange and re-

vitalized palaeographic palimpsests, 'palimpsestuous' makes the concept
of the palimpsest strange in a way that rewrites and refigures it in the
context of late-twentieth and early twenty-first century literary and cultural
thought.' In doing so, 'palimpsestuous' performs Michael Dillon's sugges-
tion that, in attempting to 'investigate what kind of economy of meaning
is already installed (but generally overlooked) within' (1996, P: 119) a
word,

It IS useful also to estrange ourselves from the. word, to put some

distance between it and ourselves - so that it shows-up for us in a way
that commands our attention, and makes us listen to what is invested in
it. (p. 120)8

As a striking and unfamiliar neologism, 'palimpsestuous' immediately

performs this function in relation to the concept of the palimpsest. In
addition, like all words, it is also itself palimpsestuous - it is composed of
meanings, sounds, and other words, which collide and collude on arid in
its surface. These constitute its imagined etymology and its linguistic and
phonetic reverberations, both of which are explored at more length in
Chapter 5. Like Genette's description of Proust's work, the word
'palimpsestuous' is 'a palimpsest in which~~_~':.~.r:~!_~~~_s.~_~_~.~<:Y~~_
m~~ni~~.,.r:r;!'"g. and"~"ii\iJ"igTedtog':ther, all present together at all
times, and which can only be deciphered ,t()gether, in tll~ir inextricable
totality' (1982b,-p~Y26)~ost obvio;;;ly~ 'palimpsestuous' i;-;;:;-;i;;.;;;:t~iy
related' with the "incestuous'." AS"'s-;ch~tdraws--our -atte~i-ron--i~the per-
versenessorDilIon"s suggestion, that we must make a word strange in
order to enable a renewed and -increased intimacy with it. P~i1!!P.!estuous
relatioQ~.ity, 'palimp~~sttl0usness', treads the line of the proble~of--'
incest - the iniImaq" ili'atj;branded as illegitimate since it is between
those who are regarded as too closely related. The utmost intimacy is only
legitimate, and, one might suggest - recalling the biological myth sup-
porting the taboo on incest - productive, between those tenus that retain
some amount of estrangement from one another.
In order to provide a sustained interrogation and theorization of the
concept of the palimpsest, and the relationality named by the term
'palimpsestuousness', then, this study adopts a methodology of
metaphoric coupling. In each chapter, the palimpsest is coupled with -
that is, enters into a palimpsestuous relationship with - a concept from
contemporary critical discourse. According to the nature of that relation-
ship, the two terms are intimate and yet remain distinct. They are involved
 6 The Palimpsest

in a movement of reciprocal elucidation in which the palimpsest reifies

and aids an understanding of the other concept, and that concept enables
a reinscription of the palimpsest that sophisticates our understanding of
its complex structure and logic. For example, in Chapter 3, the palimpsest
is coupled with Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok's notion of the crypt
in order to explain the cryptic structure of De Quincey's idea of the
palimpsest of the mind. This explains how the palimpsest functions as one
of a number of resurrective fantasies in Suspiria de ProJundis (1845) with
which De Quincey attempts to secure the continued life of his dead sister
Elizabeth. The coupling of the palimpsest and the crypt also draws atten-
tion to the complex ontological status of the concept of the palimpsest
more generally. Like the crypt, the palimpsest is a concept with no literal
meaning - since it is related to, but different from, palimpsests - that is, it
obeys a different tropography than that represented by traditional construc-
tions of metaphor. The nature of this new tropography is the subject of
Chapter 4, in which I explain how a simultaneity of intimacy and separa-
tion defines both the palimpsestuous and the metaphoric relationship.
Chapter 5 provides the most explicit demonstration of theoretical criti-
cism, structured as it is as a palimpsest comprised of two critical and two
theoretical texts. These couple the palimpsest with the very idea of the
'text' in order to explore reading and writing in relation to the palimpsest,
the difference between classical and modern detective fictiori, and the
intimate yet distinct theories of structuralism and poststructuralism.
Although distinguished by their subheadings, these texts inhabit and
interrupt each other in ways not explicitly remarkedin the discussion, but
which will hopefully be detected by their readers. The final two chapters
employ the same methodologies as their predecessors. Chapter 6 couples
the palimpsest with Julia Kristeva's concept of intertextuality in order to
argue for a reinscription. of that concept in tenus of palimpsestuous
textuality. Drawing further on Kristeva's theoretical criticism, in close
readings of one critical and one theoretical text - Genette's Palimpsests and
J Ian McEwan's Atonement (2001) - this chapter investigates the relationship
~et:w_<:-en_'pal!~esnlOUS textuality and any singular text. Chapter 7
couples the palimpsest"\Vit11-theconcept of 'queer' in order to argue for a
changing approach to literary texts from traditional palimpsestic feminist
criticism to more radical palimpsestuous queer theory: Since both these
discourses derive their discussion of the palimpsest from the writing of
H. D., the chapter performs palimpsestuous queer readings of two of the
stories in H. D.'s volume Palimpsest (1926). Chapter 7 concludes the study
by arguing that the coupling of queer and the palimpsest reveals that these
tenus must remain open to reinscription if they are to remain viable
 Introduction 7

critical currency, an openness embodied precisely in and by the

palimpsest.
In addition to metaphoric coupling and theoretical criticism, this study
employs a third methodology, one that is equally determined by the struc-
ture of the palimpsest: critical history, or, genealogy. In 'Nietzsche,
genealogy, history' (1971), Michel Foucault elaborates, after Nietzsche,
the concept of 'genealogy', thereby reinscribing the traditional under-
standing of the proc~ss of writing history. Integral to this reinscription is
the refiguration of the subject of that writing - 'history' - as a collection of
palirnpsestuous, documents:

Genealogy is gray, meticulous, and patiently documentary. It operates

on a field of entangled and confused parchments, on documents that
have been scratched over and recopied many times. (1996, p. 139)

In response to the palimpsestuous body of history, genealogy 'must record

the singularity of events outside of any monotonous finality ... it must be
sensitive to their recurrence, not in order to trace the gradual curve of
their evolution, but to isolate the different scenes where they engaged in
different roles' (pp. 139-40). Genealogy is not a search for 'origins' that
attempts 'to capture the exact essence of things, their purest possibilities,
and their carefully protected identities' (p. 142). It does not assume 'the
existence of immobile fOnTISthat precede the external world of accident
and succession' (p. 142). While the search for origins 'is directed to "that
which was already there", the image of a primordial truth fully adequate to
its nature, and ... necessitates the removal of every mask to ultimately
disclose an original identity' (p. 142), genealogy perceives the palimpses-
tuous structure of 'things', that there is "something altogether different"
behind things: not a timeless and essential secret, but the secret that they
have no essence or that their essence was fabricated in a piecemeal fashion
from alien forms' (p. 142). In its structure, the palimpsest embodies this
new conception of a thin~~~~~~~c~i~~~;_"l.~1~~.~.'i~i'Tig~~
the J
C~~~?~~.~gP:_QLtwQ_.QL!n.9I~,"~~en
texts. The palimpsest reifie;-Foucauli's
assertion that what genealogy finds 'at the beginning of things is not the
inviolable identity of their origins; it is the dissension of other things. It is
disparity' (p. 142). Genealogy must pay attention to this disparity, to the
'vicissitudes of history' (p. 144), to the palimpsest of 'details and accidents
that accompany every beginning' (p. 144), to 'the subtle, singular, and
subindividual marks that might possibly intersect' on the palimpsest that
is history and that 'form a network that is difficult to unravel' (p. 145). It
must discover, 'under the unique aspect of a trait or a concept ... the
 8 The Palimpsest

myriad events through which - thanks to which, against which - they were
formed' (p. 146).
Genealogy does not create an evolutionary narrative, it does not 'restore
an unbroken continuity that operates beyond the dispersion of forgotten
things' (p. 146). Rather, it operates upon the field of history as palimpsest
and identifies 'the accidents, the minute deviations - or, conversely, the
complete reversals - the. errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calcula-
tions that gave birth to those things that continue to exist and have value
for us' (p. 146). Genealogy 'shows the heterogeneity of what was imagined
consistent with itself' (p. 147). Foucault explains that, as such, in
Nietzsche's writing, genealogy is opposed to

the form of history that reintroduces (and always assumes) a suprahis-

torical perspective: a history whose function is to compose the finally
reduced diversity of time into a totality fully closed upon itself; a history
that always encourages subjective recognitions and attributes a form of
reconciliation to all the displacements of the past; a history whose per-
spective on all that precedes it implies the end of time, a completed
development. (p. 152)

This is not the form of history that this study presents, nor, in fact, that the
alimpsest demands. Since the palimpsest figuratively represents the field
j

G
of operation of genealogy, a history of the palimpsest could be nothing
other than a genealogy . .As such, this study does not describe a linear devel-
opment of the concept of the palimpsest, nor does it provide a narrative
of evolution. Rather, it traces the inscriptions, erasures and reinscriptions
of the concept of the palimpsest in various texts that compete and struggle
with each other, and that constitute the involuted palimpsest of the
concept's own palimpsestuous history. This study does not attempt to
disclose the 'origin' of the palimpsest, nor to define its 'exact essence',
'identity' or 'truth', as those concepts might be traditionally understood.
Rather, it shows how the concept of the palimpsest redefines these notions
according to its own palirnpsestuous logic - how it reveals that at the
'heart' of things is 'the dissension of other things', 'disparity'. This study
pays attention to the disparate essence of the palimpsest, to the involution
of details, traces and texts that constitute its 'essence' and define (its)
history. This genealogy thus partakes in the systematic dismantling of 'the
traditional devices for constructing a comprehensive view of history and
for retracing the past as a patient and continuous development' (p. 153)
that Foucault demands and that genealogy performs. to
This study does not assume a 'suprahistorical perspective', nor does it
 Introduction 9

record the history of the palimpsest with any 'monotonous finality'.

Rather, it reveals how writing about the palimpsest becomes an act of
palimpsesting: any new text about the palimpsest erases, superimposes
itself upon, and yet is still haunted by, the other texts in the palimpsest's
history. Writing about the palimpsest is a process of writing on the
palimpsest - of partaking in its history and of adding another layer to
the involution of texts that characterizes that history. Moreover, the
palimpsest's perpetual openness to new inscription ensures that this
history will constantly be rewritten. Although in 'The dark interpreter and
the palimpsest of violence', Robert Maniquis argues that 'the palimpsest
has suffered its own partial erasure and become only a remembered
writing surface on which no more can be written' (1985, p. 134), this asser-
tion is directly contradicted by Maniquis' essay - which adds another text
to the history of the palimpsest even while denying that possibility - and
by the weight of texts he cites, both past and present, in which the
palimpsest as metaphor is continually rewritten. Maniquis' assertion is
further undermined by this study, which provides undeniable evidence of
the palimpsest's past, present and continuing figurative power and theo-
retical significance. In seeming recognition of this, Maniquis' final
attempt to close down the palimpsest at the end of his essay is infected by
unexpected expressions of uncertainty and possibility in relation to it, by
anticipation of the future event yet to come:

Surely it [the palimpsest] will settle into some succeeding taxonomy of

mental forms awaiting elaboration in our decentrcd culture _0 But
••

whatever new rhetorics of figuration we may need, we know that few nar-
rative and textual figures have claimed more ideological power than the
circular route between the conscious and the unconscious in images
such as the palimpsest. If that particular figure has drifted into the past,
it is only replaced by others in a cultural power of figuration that, of
course, has not weakened - and never will. [emphases addeds (1985,
p. 134)

The palimpsest has not drifted into the past and never could. In its per-
sistent figurative power and its theoretical adaptability it determines how
we view the past and the present, and embodies within itself the promise
of the future: 'To invoke a word is to recall a history. To use a word is to set
history on its way again' (Dillon 1996, p. lI5).