Vitalpoetics

Reading Emily Finlay’s first Vitalpoetics post reminded me of an essay Kevin Hart wrote about the poetry of Francis Webb. In “Francis Webb: Unsaying Transcendence”, Hart described Webb’s poem ‘Poet’ as a Midrash because it retells the biblical story of Jesus and the woman accused of adultery: “can ever this stone fly into the face of beauty / While the wind, as his delicate burning finger, / Gives a Word to the Sand?” (Webb 158).

The purpose of a Midrash, Hart suggests, is commonly “the desire to make sense of oddities in scripture–contradictions, gaps, repetitions and the like…” (11), thus serving to stabilise a (biblical) source text. While reading Hart it occurred to me that much of Jacques Derrida’s work can be viewed as a radicalisation of this practice: Derrida often interrogates and explodes anomalies in source texts, thus destabilising, rather than stabilising them. For me, when the instability of a source text is exposed it is often fiction that finds its way in, or perhaps fiction has a way of excavating what was lurking there all along. I performed the following [Radical] Midrash on an extract from Derrida’s “Plato’s Pharmacy”, itself an interrogation of Plato’s Phaedrus:

“Pla[y] to[o much with the oven and it will awaken – Swedenborg, that great big woman, used to roast heads in there. He] maintains [his dream diary, experiencing] both the exteriority of writing and its power of maleficent penetration, its ability to affect or infect what lies deepest inside [his memory]. The pharmakon is that dangerous supplement that breaks into the very thing that would have liked to do without it yet [Swedenborg, of course, cannot resist the lure of writing: this remedy for memory-loss, this poison for memory, this pharmakon. As he shapes on paper each dream, its impression is erased from his living memory. It is, not surprisingly, his tongue that displays the symptoms first,] lets itself at once be breached, [each word clanging between his lips,] roughed up [to furnace-touch], fulfilled, and replaced, completed by the very trace through which the present increases itself in the act of disappearing.” (110)

Derrida, Jacques. “Plato’s Pharmacy.” Dissemination. Trans.: Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981, 61-172.

Hart, Kevin. “Francis Webb: Unsaying Transcendence” Southerly 60.2 (2000),10-25.

Webb, Francis. Cap and Bells: Poetry of Francis Webb. Ed. Michael Griffith and James A. McGlade. Sydney: Collins Angus & Robertson Publishers Pty Ltd, 1991.