(the) American (Novel of)

CHAPTER NINETEEN
Odysseus Lies
THOMAS THORP
Withdrawal
I
n “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,”
Benjamin wonders whether art is not rendered mute when
withdrawn from the culture that gave it voice. The case of oral
traditions might seem to be the extreme instance of such a dislocation.
Because it is a written text, the very artifact created in an effort to
preserve an oral culture’s stories and songs can represent the song only
by erasing it as an oral performance. And yet what is mute is not
illegible. Even in the written representation, the logical outline of a
community created by the oral/aural performance marks the text. In
the written form that claims to be a repetition, or preservation, the oral
logic withdraws, but the traces of that withdrawal are still legible if we
can learn to read the acts of human and political representation that are
retraced and reformed in the withdrawal. Perhaps the communal binding
force that is withdrawn when the performance gives way to the text
is preserved at the level of etiquette: a system of imperatives that,
mirroring and in a precise sense reversing the force of rational law, bind
us to one another at the level of the preliminary, the gestural, the
merely preparatory. Perhaps this very opposition between what we are
compelled and what we choose to do can be informatively disrupted
if we attend to the political logic at work in etiquette.
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