of how our identities are necessarily caught up in antagonisms that run
through civilization or as exclusively simply urging a return from civilization
to pastoral naturalness. Read carefully, his texts incorporate both views. In
practicing this kind of close reading, Derrida is, as Abrams notes, a kind of
hyperformalist who does manage to“open our eyes to the play of figuration
in a literary text”^18 and who emphasizes our possession by language and
visionary imagination against our ability always to control language instru-
mentally. The use of this strategy for understanding need not deny–though
Derrida himself in excessive moments sometimes seems to do so–that we
can also sometimes control some bits of language instrumentally and use
them to encode a definite message. Derrida’s animuses against determinacy
and control can effectively remind us, however, of how emergent within
fluid linguistic and cultural practices our own distinctively conceptual-
propositional consciousness is. In reminding us of this, Derrida can further
usefully prod and provoke us toward both new readings and new artistic
work, against the grain of any master scheme for the control of culture and
cultural expression. His stance here is not so far from Cleanth Brooks’
emphasis on accomplished poems as structures of paradox: readable, but
dense and self-revising, more dramatic than doctrinal. The poet, as Brooks
puts it,“must work by contradiction and qualification.”^19
Abrams himself is somewhat closer to the humanist stances of Spirit of
the Age understanding and of biographical understanding. His attention is
drawn more to large patterns of plot and imagery that are shared within a
historical period and forcefully present within a single author’sœuvre. He
emphasizes successes in what he calls“a transaction [in plot and imagery]
between a human author and his human reader”^20 and how the contents
thus transmittedaredistinctly identifiable in differentœuvres and different
literary epochs. HisNatural Supernaturalism^21 is a masterpiece survey of fun-
damental tropes of plot and imagery in major texts of English Romanticism,
especially Wordsworth, and in affiliated contemporary and subsequent(^18) M. H. Abrams,“A Colloquy on Recent Critical Theories,”in Abrams,Doing Things with
Texts, pp. 333–63 at p. 336.
(^19) See Cleanth Brooks,“The Language of Paradox,”in Brooks,Well Wrought Urn, pp. 3–21 at
p. 9.
(^20) Abrams,“How to do Things with Texts,”p. 269.
(^21) M. H. Abrams,Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1971).
154 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art