1 Death and the Lighthouses (1 January 2001)

often unintelligible criticism produced by academics enraptured by literary
theory. But Currie has nothing at all to say about biographical criticism,
whether populist or professional. Instead, while acknowledging that “the
language of literary criticism and theory has become the ugliest private
language in the world”, Currie guides the reader through the quagmire of
the writings of a theorist such as Jacques Derrida with explanations like
this:
A concept as apparently innocent as the “minimum free form” turns
out to be a multidimensional repression of difference, a structure of
exclusion which seeks to establish hard and fast boundaries around
its meaning as if that meaning were not marked by protensions and
retensions of other signs in the discourse, of former discourses and
those still to come.
Currie’s explanation of what Derrida means by “supplementarity” yields the
following insight:
Supplementarity names one of the ways in which a structure of
exclusion can be opened up to difference, where the purity of an
origin is seen as already structured by the loss of purity which follows
from it. This might be called an intra-narrative structure of exclusion,
since the mythic origin excludes the future events which form the
remainder of the same narrative. I want to turn now to another kind of
structure of exclusion which could be called inter-narrative
exclusion...
If observations like these were meaningfully applied to fictional narrative in
order to yield new insights or intelligent and persuasive new readings, this
would be okay. But they aren’t, and simply remain at the level of mindnumbing
waffle.
There are two references in the book which suggest that Currie may have
once actually talked like this and been laughed at. In Chapter Two (entitled
“Terminologisation” — a word only teetotallers should ever be required to
pronounce) Currie hotly refers to “those stupid arguments in university
bars” about deconstruction. According to Currie, deconstruction has been
much misunderstood. Ten pages earlier in the chapter Currie remembers a
dark moment in the evolution of postmodern narrative theory:
Stupid arguments broke out in university bars. If you die of exposure
in a snowstorm, is it exposure to language If you are attacked by a
lion in the jungle, are your wounds generated by the differential
relations between signs
1 (1 January 2001) 40