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De Manian Valorization in Chimera's "Bellerophoniad"
This article evaluates de Manian concepts of ethos and pathos and their relation to valorization. Some critics consider de Man’s theories as total resistance to any value judgment, in other words, because of his emphasis upon the impossibility of making proper valorizations, he has been denigrated as anti-social or anarchist. However, the following reading of “Bellerophoniad” unravels de Man’s movement from resistance to value. “The Resistance to Theory” is as at the crux of this debate. In this article, he associates questions of value with both theory and resistance. But the major application comes from his concept of ethical judgment, and the ways through which valorization can exert itself. This part initially dissects de Man’s process of valorization and then shifts to the practical application of an ethical reading to “Bellerophoniad”.
Literary theory, for de Man, concerns itself with the purely verbal, and with the relation of and distance between reality and verbalization. It recognizes that verbalizations of reality do not of necessity coincide with that reality; representations are always representations and not the thing itself. Since it is not “certain that literature is a reliable source of information about anything but its own language”, the belief in reality, the natural immediacy of the representation with no fiction, is a belief of a particular type. “It would be unfortunate, for example to confuse the materiality of the signifier with the materiality of what it signifies”. No one, as he puts it, in his right mind would try to grow grapes by the luminosity of the word “day”. This does not mean that linguistic structures including fictional ones are out of the world; “the impact upon the world may well be all too strong for comfort. What we call ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural reality” (“Resistance” 11).
He continues that literary language, tropological language, is internally resistant, and it is therefore natural, indeed, justifiable for a resistance to be set up against literary language. “Literary language provokes resistance by infecting us with its resistant essence, and we immediately resist it because of the resistance it has taught us. Paradoxically, then, the extent to which we resist literature, and also act perhaps as aggressors is also the extent to which we have already been seduced by literature and are acquiescing in its powers” (17). The essence of tropological language is an originary doubling, which allows for internal friction. Because of this division, which ought to mandate weakness, literary language should be peculiarly without power, which is why perhaps, the poets will always be the unacknowledged legislators. An absence of strength, however, can have its own power. And, although absence of strength may never lead to victory, it need not lead to defeat either: “The more literary language is resisted, the more it flourishes, since language it speaks is the language of self-resistance. What remains impossible to decide is whether this flourishing is a triumph or a fall” (20). Self-resistance is resistance internal to the language of theory and of literature. It also suggests that the use of literary language, or language, involves one in resistance in oneself, resistance by oneself to oneself. So, the self is constituted doubly in a mode of inner division, the coefficient of friction of which is the self. Read theoretically, resistantly, literature opens up the possibility of unmasking ideology, and therefore leaves open the field for a new kind of social and political engagement.
After this introduction, the nature of ethics and values in de Man can be ruminated upon. De Man’s ethical readings of Rousseau’s Julie and Profession de Foi are the cornerstones of any reading in search of value judgment. The value system is that of being able to read the system of understanding, cause and effect, the value of non-contradiction, and so on. In these two narratives, the text by calling into question its readability represents a disruption of values. For “in the allegory of unreadability the imperatives of truth and falsehood oppose the narrative syntax and manifest themselves at its expense. The concatenation of the categories of truth and falsehood with the values of right and wrong is disrupted, affecting the economy of the narration in decisive ways” (Allegories 206). Truth and falsehood would seem to be sub-categories that would belong to a system of values. When an ethical question about truth is raised, is an interference of two system of values, and Value would no longer be a positive entity, but will be the scene of a mutual interference of systems of value. Value will lie in the conflict of values, or value systems. “We can call this shift in the economy of narration ethical, since it indeed involves a displacement from pathos to ethos. Allegories are always ethical, the term ethical designating the structural interference of two distinct value systems” (206).
Alan Kennedy in Reading Resistance Value (1990) dedicates a section, “Paul de Man: From Resistance to Value” to de Manian valorization. As he asserts, de Man shows that how judgments based on ethos eventually descend into pathos. “As confusion between structure and value increases, the tone and the terminology of the text glide almost imperceptibly from the language of judgment to the affections, and judgment finally openly declares itself to be another name for sentiment” (242). So judgment which ought properly to be a subservient function of an ethics, or ethos, reveals itself as a pathos, or as relying on an a priori sentiment, to which it ultimately returns.
Kennedy gives the definition of the terms ethos and pathos. The word ethics is, like ethos, based on a Greek word for character, and concerned with a science of morals. But the Oxford English Dictionary gives for ethos “character, a person’s nature or disposition”. It also gives “the characteristic spirit, prevalent tone of sentiment, of a people or community; the ‘genius’ of an institution or system” (Kennedy 76-7). The word ethical is glossed as “pertaining to” ethos as opposed to pathos. Pathos, of course, has to do with feeling or sentiment. But ethos has already been glossed as the prevalent tone of sentiment. Kennedy asks: “What can this dilemma mean?”,
It looks as if one’s values, morals, ethics, judgments on questions of value and so on, are part of an ethos; in other words, any thing that is characteristic of time and place. Thus it would be probable to think that the judgments of value according to an ethos are indeed pathetic in that they represent the actions of the general sentiment, rather than an individual act of will that somewhat springs from its own roots. Clearly, it is not difficult to imagine certain ethical judgments, made according to an ethos, as being called into question by another ethos, or system of values. (77)
The question of deciding which of those two sets of values is the set of values would again have to be referred to a higher tribunal, another transcendent set of values. But the infinite regression of systems of evaluation is clearly established, and there seems to be no resting point from which can make genuine value judgments that are not reducible to the sentiment of an ethic, or an ideology.
Now the final and the most vital of all questions is, should making judgments and determinations be given up? De Man’s answer is no. It is simply not possible to act without one’s sentiments coming into play, or in isolation from an ethic. When a determination of value is made, the realm of Value is substituted by the realm of value or ethics. The category of Value is an uncertain one, in which responsible thinking of alternatives takes place. The operations of Value will end in a judgment of value. The impossibility of a valuable value judgment can be mitigated by the promise of being able at least to do work, to enter the realm of valorization, not being passive or reluctant to it.
In conclusion, it can be said that the ethical is the area of uncertainty and conflict, where two or more sets of value conflict, offering different sets of interpretations. There is no valuable choice between the sets, since there are too many of them, and they speak from a different ethos. Anyone is justified, and all are contradicted by other justified positions. There is no middle position, and yet a third alternative is needed. As Kennedy puts it, “it is the job of the deconstruction to try to provide that middle, or that excluded middle, that alternative which is, technically speaking, impossible” (80). De Man’s attempt is to try to define the realm of value as the conflict, the point of intersection of values. Only when one questions values by a higher set of values subject themselves to questioning, is one really working in the area of values. The agreement to situate oneself at the intersection of ethoi in order to avoid operating by an ethos will itself become an ethos.
Ethos in “Bellerophoniad”
The ethical reading of “Bellerophoniad” involves a glimpse into the displacement of value systems within the narrative. As aforementioned, entering the world of ethics is substantiating the intersection of two or more value systems that vilify the Value system primarily espoused by the text. Accordingly, anything proposed to be an ethical judgment of the novella would turn out to be encumbered by pathos; that is why de Man considers the ethical reading of any text to be the realm of uncertainty and conflict. Henceforth, it is undeniably significant to detect the dissemination of various value systems in “Bellerophoniad”, which are constantly contrasting one another, to the extent that it is quite impossible to determine which one is the ultimate ultimacy; storytelling or authorship, Greek mythology or Barthian mythology, “transcension” or “extermination” (Chimera 208) and reorientation or mythotherapy, which are going to be valorized in this section. Once trying to make a choice between these Values, they are reduced to values, and can ethically be scrutinized.
De Manian valorization between storytelling and authorship as the two main Value systems in Barth’s fiction culminates into a duality inherent in the text. Telling a tale is what Barth has always been striving for. He metafictionalizes his own life as well as those of his characters, but at their core can be found the author’s philosophy of storytelling. His narrative gamesmanship both undermines traditional forms and affirms the importance of telling and receiving tales in people’s lives. It thus can be surmised that storytelling as one dominant Value for Barth becomes a platform for another Value, authorship. The conflict arises when telling one’s own life story is, as Bellerophon asserts, a means of emancipation form authoritative manipulation of any author, yet Barth’s frame-tale becomes a medium for exerting his authorial presence throughout “Bellerophoniad”, with his italicized notes and interpolations; he even tantalizes the reader to believe the tale of his tale more than Bellerophon’s life story,
The documents seemed to set forth its author’s plan for completing a project that sometimes appeared to be a written work of some heroically unorthodox sort, at other times a political revolution; but interspersed with Bray’s description of the project, the history of its first three years, and his prospectus for its completion, were literary polemics, political diatribes, autobiographical anecdotes and complaints, threats to sue a certain fellow-author for plagiarism, and pages of charts, mathematical calculations, diagrams, and notes of every sort. (256-7)
On the other hand, Bellerophon’s resistance, his tale’s resistance to be maneuvered by Barth’s authority cannot be overlooked. This is the ironic ending that he chooses for his tale: “So, well: their love, Bellerophon’s and Melanippe’s, winds through universal space and time and all; noted music of our tongue, silent visible signs, et cetera; Bellerophon’s content; he really is; good night” (304). Yet, Barth cannot distinguish his role as the storyteller and the author. Despite his endeavor for justification of his manipulations, such as claiming to be “a hypothetical author, named Bray”, he can never obliterate his trace in Bellerophon’s story. His domineering presence throughout “Bellerophoniad” is not what Scheherezade, his role model, did. Narrating not de-narrating by impinging oneself upon the text is the function of a storyteller.
Another displacement of value occurs within the scope of mythology. Georges Dumezil, as one of the new comparative mythologists, made a notable discovery in his “Les Trios Fonctions dans Quelques Traditions Grecques” (1953); a fundamental division of Greek mythology – Indo-European society – into three functions or ideological areas; “that of the priest/ruler, of the warrior and of the productive” (53). Bellerophon belongs to the second function in Greek mythology, which serves to be a Value system. However, Barth topples this Value into an ethically hurdled value system in which he introduces his own version of mythology through defragmentation, endism, fissure and indeterminacy. The functions of Barthian mythology are meta-fictionality, cosmopsis and catalysis. By catalysis, he means that any character or any person can never remain innocent, he finally wises up, and in this process he might catalyze another person’s loss of innocence. Bellerophon’s functions in Greek mythology, that of a ruler and warrior, lead to his Barthian functions of above. The maladies in which he is ensnared – the catalyzation of his brother’s death, Polyeidus’ daughter’s promiscuity and Melanippe’s life – all make him suffer a severe cosmopsis.
However, this shift in value system becomes entangled in an infinite regress. In other words, Barth can never do away with the implications of classical mythology, and they serve as the cornerstones of his text. The only thing that he has accomplished is to reorchestrate the classical element into a new version. The gist can never be jettisoned from the text. Thus, Barthian mythology cannot be considered as the ultimate Value in the novel. In its turn, it is imploded by an event; Bellerophon’s non-existence. Such an event outweighs Barth’s Value system with that of a merely pathos-bound judgment on the reader’s part. The farcical picaro is now a self-less, pathetic, self-alienated entity that shatters the borders between ethos and pathos; should Bellerophon be judged with respect to the ethics of Barthian meta-fictionality or the pathos of a tragic anti-hero? Is “Bellerophoniad” a tragic farce in Eugene Ionecso’s terminology? Thus, Barth’s mythology overlaps the implications of another system of literary value; tragedy. The distinction between the two is almost impossible, and they constantly contradict one another. The third value system, tragedy, never allows the first two values operate independently, and hinders a genuine decision making with respect to the novella.
Another of Value systems in “Bellerophoniad” is transcension. Bellerophon’s existence is tightly linked to the Pattern, and his hope of transcension into an immortal god like his cousin Perseus scores his acts throughout the narrative. Nonetheless, the ethical reading of the myth renders a decline in the value of transcension and the uproar of a protoplasmic along with a psychological decay on the part of Bellerophon. The extermination, accordingly, asserts a stance in the text, by which Bellerophon’s existence-for-transcension yields to existence-in-extinction. In other words, Bellerophon’s final decay can be considered as the start of a new existence, integration in disintegration. Thus, the value of striving towards transcension is conflicted by the value of decay and termination. De Man believes that meanings of locutions, such as extermination and transcension, are neither in the subject nor in the words, but in some kind of horizon. “But the horizon is always changing, moving, becoming different, disappearing, and turning into something else” (Kennedy 82). Anything considered to be the ultimate interpretation can always be substituted by something utterly contrasting, and the choice between the two is a somewhat not viable.
The final and the most significant of Value systems in not only Chimera but also in most of Barth’s novels is reorientation. Barth in his article, “Welcome to College and My Books” undertakes the definition of orientation and its thematic application to Chimera,
I remind you that orientation literally means determining which way is east, whether for architectural purposes (if you’re building a medieval Christian church, you aim it in that direction), or for funerary purposes (a well-oriented corpse lies with its feet to the rising sun). Apparently it wasn’t until the end of the 19th century that orientation came to mean getting one’s bearings, literally or figuratively, and not until well into the 20th that it was used specifically to name the project of suggesting to new American college students that they’re not high school kids any longer, but responsible young adults commencing a major phase of their intellectual apprenticeship; taking a tour as it were of the lunchrooms and classrooms, lavatories and laboratories of the Western cultural conglomerate. (2)
In short, the word orientation came to mean finding out where in the Occidental world humans are, as more and more of them came to suspect they did not know. “I feel on familiar ground. Indeed, when I set about to find something from my fiction suitable for this occasion, I realized that the general project of orientation – at least the condition of disorientation which the project presumes – is my characteristic subject matter, my fictionary stock in trade” (2). Intellectual and spiritual disorientation is the family disease of Bellerophon – a disease usually complicated by ontological disorientation, since knowing where he is at is often contingent upon knowing who he is.
Barth acclaims: “All of my books, I see now, are in the genre the Germans call Erziehungsromane: ”upbringing-novels”, education novels – a genre I had not found especially interesting after David Copperfield except as a vehicle for satire or an object of parody”. However, he notices that what he has been writing “is not only orientation and education (rather, disorientation and education), but imperfect or unsuccessful or misfired education at that: not Erziehungsromane but Herabziehungsro-mane: ”down-bringing novels” (3). Accordingly, it can be inferred that the major themes in “Bellerophoniad” are regression, re-enactment and reorientation; one must sometimes go forward by going back. Bellerophon reaches an impasse at the crucial point of his life, from which he can proceed only by a laborious retracing of his steps; that is, deciding to re-kill Chimera, re-empower Pegasus by giving him hippomanes, re-find Melanippe, and all in all recycle the Pattern.
However, reorientation as Barthian prime Value is displaced by his own Value of mythotherapy; the willful selection of a role-model as the prototype for one’s own life and for every process of decision-making. According to Dirk Vanderbeke in “Vineland in the Novels of John Barth and Thomas Pynchon” (1996), mythotherapy is based on two assumptions: that human existence precedes human essence, if either of the two terms really signifies anything; and that a man is free not only to choose his own essence but to change it at will. Those are both good existentialist premises. Barth’s attempt in healing the Bellerophonic cosmopsis by mythotherapy sharply contrasts his concept of reorientation. The philosophical principle of “Know thyself”, or reorientation is thus undermined by the realization that there is no self to be known, that there are only multitudes of masks to conceal the essential emptiness. Bellerophon’s final paralysis is rather the result of not being able to participate in mythotherapy any longer. The Pattern as the individually-formed guide for his reorientation turns out to be the main cause of his fall. Thus, the value system of reorientation, which in its turn, is utterly futile, is substituted by a so-called higher value system of mythotherapy, which aggravates the situation by ensnaring Bellerophon in the state of mythic distraught, neither inside nor outside the Pattern.
The ethical reading of “Bellerophoniad” exemplifies de Manian concept that totalization of meaning is impossible. There is always a higher set of value lurking in the text in order to demolish its proposed Values. It is not feasible to decide which one is the prime value for Barth, being a storyteller or an author, reorchestration of Greek mythology or putrefying Barthian mythology, cosmophilic transcending or an existentialist extinction, and reorientation without any orient or mythotherapy without any proper myth to therapy. There is always another criterion impinging upon the text, and leaving it in an infinite regress that can never be overcome.
