Mother Tongues: Sexuality, Trials, Motherhood, Translation Review

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Mother Tongues: Sexuality, Trials, Motherhood, Translation ReviewThe scholarship of the late Dr. Barbara Johnson, Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Frederic Wertham Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society at Harvard, has played a fundamental role in shaping the contours of literary criticism, critical theory, and gender studies in North America and beyond, and represents a touchstone and testimonial history for those seeking to understand the public, cultural, and ethical engagements of the humanities since the late 1970s. From her days at the Yale School under Paul de Man (a figure whose complex legacy is at much frank question in her work, and here in particular) to her pioneering translations of Derrida to her arduous interventions as the premiere (and most nuanced) interpreter of Deconstruction in the so-called 'Culture Wars' to her renowned classroom teaching, Dr. Johnson has brought her unique voice to reflectively examine and influence debates in the academy, legal scholarship, psychoanalytic theory, and cultural life at large. "Mother Tongues: Sexuality, Trials, Motherhood, Translation" (2003), one her last published works, takes up and addresses many of the questions and topics - poetic language, sexual difference, translation, ideology - that have driven her best work thus far, but does so with an unmatched personal candor and capacity for earnest reflection, and demonstrates how Dr. Johnson's fundamental commitment to a radically rigorous and ever-critical practice of reading has been distilled into a thinking of incomparable insight, graceful sensitivity, and urgent emotional power.
"Mother Tongues" offers an intricate architectonics of readings. Most prominent among these are treatments of Sylvia Plath, Charles Baudelaire, and Walter Benjamin, figures on whose works and biographies Dr. Johnson has herself spent a life of loving attention and scholarly reflection. Interweaving history with textual commentary, Dr. Johnson less collapses oppositions between intra- and extra-diagetic claims (that is, between stances that respectively emphasize a sola scriptura close-interpretation of literary texts "on their own terms" and a consideration of the historical and cultural contexts of their authors' composition of them ) than shows how each perspective sheds productive light on the other and challenges our hasty assumptions of what reading and writing should or shouldn't be or do. "Is there any relation, then, between the writing of scholarship and the writing of letters?" Johnson asks, "Does the existence of an addressee-and an address-change the nature of writing and also its relation to history? What are the correspondances in correspondence?" The limits of authorial authority and readerly insight themselves are open and ever-probed questions in Dr. Johnson's work, and it is trademark of her style and critical commitment here that the texts Dr. Johnson reads emerge not reduced in meaning but rather enlarged. Indeed, Dr. Johnson's erudite portraits of the lived experiences of the authors she reads, and of the dramas that haunted them (Plath's often misunderstood relation to her parents and roots in a German language she could never bring herself to learn ; Baudelaire's tangled and erratic relations - financial as well as emotional - with his mother ; Benjamin's friendship with Gershom Scholem, his obsessions with Paris' architecture, and his own, ever-deferred, and ultimately unrealizable pledges to learn Hebrew and leave Europe entirely) make the poems and prose Dr. Johnson reads take on an added poignancy and existential force that even jaded readers will be unable to gainsay. And it is a mark of the depth of Dr. Johnson's thought that while there are figures who "Mother Tongues" addresses at less length (Sappho, Lowell, Flaubert, Mallarmé, Woolf, Sexton, Derrida, Adorno), their inclusion never feels unnecessary, rote, or unproductive - rather, in each instance, these and other authors play cogent roles and receive concise, clear, and oftentimes strikingly persuasive original treatments that lack neither in depth nor in complexity, and which clue the reader in to roads of inquiry yet to be taken, suggestive challenges of thought yet to be embraced.
To the extent that the nature of reading and the question of interpretation are fundamental concerns for Dr. Johnson, the stakes are high - because a rigorous questioning of what it means to read and interpret what someone else has written cannot ever stop at questioning those assumptions about the nature of writing others might take to be given. As does Deconstructionist thought at its best, "Mother Tongues" proceeds ever-ready to reflect back on its methods and terms (and the terms of literary scholarship as a whole) with an eye towards unsettling our hidden assumptions-even when questioning those assumptions can provoke discomfort and incomprehension. Indeed, Dr. Johnson is equally at home contesting what, exactly, we fail to say when we invoke a dislike of 'realism' as gritty or somehow scandalous ("If any reality were desirable, why would we need realism to see it?") as she is challenging a knee-jerk reaction to 'art for art's sake' (formalism, Johnson notes, was also an aesthetic anathema for Nazis). Rigorously capable of thinking the ambiguities of our common assertions of meaning-making and textual understanding through to conclusions that are no less striking and revolutionary for being initially paradoxical, Dr. Johnson takes as a particular targets modes of thought marked by a foundational yearning for a lost unity - of a universal language before Babel, of a poem's 'meaning' before it is put on paper, of self-same coherence before a text is translated from one language to another, of a unified and harmonious complementarity between man and woman, of undifferentiated and blissful connection between mother and child - and asks what work these pleas for holism lost do and what wishes and relations they deny. With a lucid understanding of the claims and commitments of other disciplines and discourses (from Marxism to sociology to a lucidly explained and deeply understood psychoanalysis that includes not just striking readings of Freud and Lacan, but of Klein and Winnicott as well), Dr.
Johnson does not shirk from asking us to reverse and reconfigure the basic conceptual formulas that structure how we think and read: "Might poetry be an attempt not to address the mother, but to hear her voice? Is poetry a way of being addressed?" and "How might a language unmediatedly refer if reference itself is mediation?" And she is likewise unafraid of suggesting answers of simple elegance and jaw-dropping provocativeness - thus, in response to the question of language and mediation above, Dr. Johnson writes: "The problem, I think, is that we tend to think of Adam's language as similar to God's. But God's speech is creative to the extent that it is not based on similarity. Not, at least, until the creation of man. A God that tries to make a being similar to himself is already a God that takes himself as an object, a God who is well on his way to the sin of self-consciousness."
That 'Mother Tongues' addresses questions of foundational import and steps with wide-ranging fluency from questions of sexual to linguistic difference, or from between several key texts, does not mean, as one might worry, that arguments are abandoned once their immediate use dissipates or that concepts drop out in the name of rhetorical momentum - nor does the text ever grow dry or stale. Rather, with an ear for language and precision of vocabulary on par with the poets she reads, Dr. Johnson weaves her text's many themes and players together such that each thread progresses and recurs, warp and woof, enriched and ever more textured as the book proceeds. Dr. Johnson writes with pointed humor (reading the charges in Baudelaire's censorship trial, she notes "[the indictment's use of] 'religious' and 'public' make as strange an opposition as 'self' and 'full' in gas stations") and a plentiful real-world wisdom beautifully phrased (on Baudelaire and his mythos of intoxication: 'Boredom is the flip side of intoxication: the more you take a drug, the more of it you have to take to get the same effect, the mere repetition and routinization of an addiction becomes more and more necessary as it becomes less and less effective - the quest for stimulation becomes the incapacity to feel"; on the marriage of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath: "It was simply that perfect complementarity between was stifling. In a perfect fit between two people, there is really only room for one. But everything depends on who we think that one is."). And it is when Dr. Johnson's reflections turn most personal, and touch on the essence of what it means teach and to learn, to compose literature and to help others read it, that her prose grows most achingly beautiful ("The failure of the most gifted teacher is precisely to censor the student through the act of always being right"). It is in these moments of frank pathos that 'Mother Tongues' shines not just as a brilliant reading of a set of challenging and influential authors, nor as a unflinching meditation by one of America's greatest readers and teachers on recent intellectual history (and in which she has been a key player), but as a profound and original literary work in its own right.
It is hard to resist using, particularly in praise, a language of mastery - especially when confronted with a masterwork (albeit one whose ethos gives little credence to fictions of power). Those familiar with the disciplines Dr. Johnson has so impacted, of course, need no introduction and little encouragement to eagerly await her work, but it would be to enact precisely what Dr. Johnson teaches against if other potential readers were to be lead astray by the too-easy labels of movements and controversies - for Dr. Johnson's writing offers a profundity and humane...Read more›Mother Tongues: Sexuality, Trials, Motherhood, Translation Overview

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