Cite this article as: Kẹ́hìndé, O. (2025). Topological and combinatory operations in Amu Djoleto’sThe Quest. Sokoto Journal of Linguistics and Communication Studies (SOJOLICS), 1(3), 195–201. https://doi.org/10.36349/sojolics.2025.v01i03.025
TOPOLOGICAL AND COMBINATORY OPERATIONS IN AMU
DJOLETO’S “THE QUEST”
By
KẸ́HÌNDÉ
Olúwabùkọ́lá, Ph.D
Department
of English and Literary Studies, Bayero University, Kano State
Abstract
The paper examines
the complex way by which the need to develop a veritable model of reading and
interpretation of a “text” (not just the so-called “literary” one, but all
kinds of semantic production) has generated endless and unresolved arguments
among literary theorists and critics, especially in the heyday of the abrupt
death of the “Author-God”. The paper offers a deconstructive reading of Amu
Djoleto’s “The Quest”. The central problematic of this paper is that the
various theoretical logics of reading (or “repression”) such as, for instance,
“disinterestedness” (Liberal Humanism),“depersonalization” (New Criticism),
“defamiliarization” (Formalism), and “decenter” (Post-structuralism) have not
eliminated, in actual sense, the intentionality or authorial sensibility from
its central place, but instead they have generated illimitable “centers” within
the marketplace of interpretation. The paper further demonstrates that the
logics of these theoretical impulses (or conflicts of interpretation) are
processes whereby a banished, denied, repressed, surpassed, buried element(s)
of a theory returned through the side doors and back doors to claim its central
place in a discourse; but such repression is never destroyed. The logic of
repression, to be sure, is another name for language game (or “topological
operation”), a situation whereby a theoretical model retains, keeps and
incorporated the repressed elements of opposing theorems. The paper concludes
that the problematic of theoretical impulse does not necessarily result to a
zero-game or totalizing closure, but rather it opens up a theoretic space for
the infinite crafty play of topological operations within the different
interpretive discourses.
Keywords: theoretical
impulse, topological and combinatory operations
1. Introduction
The play of a
language-game in literary criticism and discourse could be seen as a product of
various attempts to undermine and discard the God-surrogates which have been
formulated and accorded the central role of “full presence” before and beyond
the free-floating discourse; that is, the various attempts to overcome the
metaphysics of presence. Although, the metaphoric presence of God as “the
presiding deity”, who watches over the affairs of reading and interpretation of
texts, has been questioned by literary theorists and critics over the years;
however, despite their arguments, on the contrary, these theorists are still
intensely obsessed with the desire to replace God with other irreconcilable
final vocabularies. These final vocabularies not only displace and replace God
from its central position, but also used as methodological reforms or
theoretical tools for analyzing and reconciling the traditional reading of what
the texts “say” or “does” and what is really at stake in them. In this manner,
literary theorists have reconciled to the fact that there are four
irreconcilable final vocabularies, which “act” well in four different language
games, the Author, the Text, the Context and the Reader. The various
theoretical arguments surrounding these four interpretive grids attempt to
pinpoint each of these grids as a veritable methodological reform that gives
final or proper meaning to interpretation. The counter-claims of these various
interpretive models demonstrate the manner at which each model privileges itself
as the “center” of interpretation at the expense of “other” interpretive
procedures. Of course, this cannibalization of discourse points to the
conceptual difficulties or blind spots (or cracks) which are inherently
inscribed in every interpretive procedure. The more an interpreter unfolds the
mystery of a given interpretive model, the more he/she gets involve in the
predicaments of interpretation.
Whereas a certain
form of theoretical impulse could be seen as a “critique” of previous or
present “genre of writing”, but such process thus shows that critique does not
vanquish the accuser as innocent in the combat; instead, the accuser is
imbricated in the system it questioned and challenged. For Ibrahim Bello-Kano
(2018), “‘the theoretical impulse’ within literary theory also implies that all
kinds of theory are, one way or another, a form of enquiry into the concept
that a particular theory deploys in interpreting other theory-laden fields,
from literary to cultural object” (p.6). The play of interpretive discourses, Wolfgang Iser (2000) perceptively
argues,“reveals that none is able to establish amonopoly of interpretation…At
any rate, the conflict of interpretations, the reciprocal appropriation of
interpretive discourses, and the common need for support from outside
themselves prevent each of these types from fulfilling its inherent claim to be
all-encompassing” (p.23).
In fact, Andrew
Bennett (2005) argues, in the concluding chapter of his book, that the penchant
to decenter and re-theorised the author as the source or center of writing has,
paradoxically, “more securely fixed in place the question of the author in the
interpretationof literary and other cultural texts. Once you start looking for
them, indeed, you find authors everywhere in contemporary literary culture”
(p.108). It might be argued that the great waves of discourse within and around
the theoretical premises of the four vocabularies have rightly shown that the
act of interpretation cannot, ultimately, be reduced to mere human disposition
or impulse, thus their constitutive moments reveal the process of reading and
interpretation as recursive and self-reflexive. This is why, for Jacques
Derrida, the ideality of meaning is an effect of the differential play of
language, what he figurative calls the free-floating play of knots within the
context of language. In this vein there is no pure, unified objective meaning
to the interpretation of text; every interpretation is a fragment of previous
and surrounding interpretations, a situation whereby reading is a critical
process of “interpreting interpretation”. It is important to emphasize here
that the act of “interpreting interpretation” is not to reduce reading and
writing (in the sense made popular by Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida) to a
monopoly of interpretation; far from it, it projects writing as an endless
process of signifying practice without a closure. Or, as Patricia Waugh (2006)
discursively argues:
Theory insists
that assumptions underlying reading practices must be made explicit, and that
no reading is ever innocent or objective or purely descriptive... Theory asks
questions about authorship, criteria of value, contexts of reading, and the
definition of ‘literature’... Theory is a criticism of criticism, a recursive,
self-reflexive activity, and one very much part of the process of
‘disembedding’ ... definitive of modernity. (p.2)
The above excerpt
shows that “faith” in any theory—say Liberal Humanism/ Practical Criticism, New
Criticism, Formalism, Marxism, Post-colonial Theory, New Historicism,
Psychoanalytical Theory—as truth in itself or as transcendental signified is
superfluous and untenable. Indeed, all reading and interpretation are
conditioned and organized by these theoretical models; however, no model or
grid could be claimed to furnish the object of inquiry with “transcendental
grandstand views” or positioned itself as theoretical impulse “for the reality
to be grasped”, in those theoretical models“actually seek to shape that reality
according to their presuppositions” (Iser 2000, p.2). Therefore, there is no
theory of reading or interpretation that gives accurate and final direction or
explanation of discourse: to better understand the question of the author and
his theoretical death in discourse, it is crucial to analysis and interpret Amu
Djoleto’s poem entitled “The Quest” using the analytical framework of
Deconstruction.
2. A Perpetual Quest for a “Centre”
Amu Djoleto’s poem
entitled “The Quest” offers a lucid and poignant insight into the question of
authorship (“God”), textuality (word) and reading formation (“servant”). As the
title suggests, the poem is an attempt to engage in a perpetual search for a conceptual
grid that could serve as a “final vocabulary” to human meaning-making. The
poetic speaker notes that if there could be any dispute or “conflict”
concerning the reading and interpretation of literary texts, in principle, it
has nothing to do “with God”. For the speaker, it is impossible to “have a
quarrel with force” whose identity is alien or undesirable to the reading
experience of the reader. In fact Jacques Derrida (2013) argues that: “one does
not carry on a stormy discussion after the other has departed” (p.271). In
other words, since the identity of the author is neither desirable nor
pertinent in discourse, then the question of authorship has no place within the
methodological premise of literary theory and criticism:
The
conflict, if any, is not with God.
I
cannot have quarrel with force
I
have been trying much to understand.
It
is, then, with the word and the servant,
Of
the servant and the word, I prefer
The
word to which, in freedom, I refer.
So, if God is thinned out
as the source of meaning or origin of the text, then the methodological tool to
evaluate the question must be sought within the context of the text itself. In
this manner, the ongoing literary debate or “conflict” should center on “the
word and the servant” because, as the speaker affirms, “Of the servant and the
word, I prefer/ The word to which, in freedom, I refer”. It is the words on the
page that enables reader to make sense of the text without any influence or
reference to alien force before or outside reading of the text. The “freedom”
of the reader in the act of meaning-making lies in his close reading of the
words on the page. Thus, the word “freedom” implicitly demonstrates the central
tenet (textual autonomy) of the diverse practices of Formalism and New
Criticism whose intervention in literary enterprise could be situated against
the question (and critique) of authorship; that is, their desire is to purify,
question, challenge and critique the Romantic metaphysics’ subjectivism,
primacy of philology, biographical, autobiographical and psychological details
of the authorial intentions. The authorial life and experience are not, so to
speak, the limit and condition for the analysis and interpretation of literary
texts, there is a separation of the author’s life from his work.
On the one hand, the
speaker conceives language or “word” as a transparent medium which accords him
the “freedom” of private self-fashioning, self-creation, self-effacement,
self-interest, self-realization, and personal autonomy: “The word to which, in
freedom, I refer”. As a proviso, language could be seen as a site of discursive
construction of identity, but this is not to reduce language as a mere
container of identity. To see language as a container of identity is to impede
identity formation to the practice of linguisticism or linguistic monism; that
is the conception of language as a telos
or metaphysics presence. Sean Homer (2005) notes, in his study of Jacques
Lacan’s corpus, that there is a sharp distinction between Lacanian conception
of language (as “la linguisterie”)
and linguistics, in that, he argues, “Linguistics is concerned with the
formalization of language and knowledge. La
linguisterie on the other hand is the side of language when meaning fails
and breaks down; it is the science of the world that fails” (p.69). Thus, la linguisterie is another name for what
is tagged as “unreadable” or “defective cornerstone” (Paul de Man 1971); the
“playfulness of the unconscious” (Freud and Lacan), “the unformulated part of
the text” (Wolfgang Iser 1972), the “hidden underside…symptomatic repressions,
evasions, slippages, self-contradictions and eloquent silences” (Terry Eagleton
2006) in the text; so as to explicate the auto-deconstruction, paradoxes,
ambiguity, tensions, disruptive volcanoes, eloquent silences, cracks,
slippages, impasses of meaning, symptomatic repressions, inherent limitations
between what the text commands and what its fails to command. Derrida (1982, p.11) argues that language is not a logic
of the self-presence of truth but rather a system of difference in which
meaning is not present in itself. Derrida (1976) further maintains that
the writer writes “in a language and in a logic whose proper
system, laws, and life his discourse by definition cannot dominate absolutely.
He uses them only by letting himself, after a fashion and up to a point, be
governed by the system” (p.158). While language serves as a viable site of
identity formation and construction, it also gives, in turn, a sense of the
rhetoricity of language as a performative act. In this manner, language does
not give a univocal or unified conception of identity.
Simultaneously, the
speaker supposedly affirms that these reading processes may be grouped under
the interpretive model called “Reader-response theory”. However, this
interpretive model, “like the hydra” comprises of numerous and irreducible
versions as formulated in the works of Stanley Fish, Wolfgang Iser, Etienne
Balibar, Pierre Macherey, Tony Bennett (other examples could be given). For the
speaker, the reader-response reading model does not give a final direction of
interpretation; rather the encounter between text and reader is one of
indefinite contradictions, in that in an attempt to furnish the text with
proper meaning the critic is invariably saying something in contrast to what
the text says or what he himself intended to say. The further the reader
penetrates in its reading and interpretation of the text, the more the reader,
in a curious manner, takes in that which it has previously rejected or
thinned-out. So, the reading process is not to accord the reader a critical
role in the creation of textual meaning based on its membership of an
“interpretive community” a la Stanley
Fish (1980, p.14)or the reader as the one who fills the gaps in the text a la Wolfgang Iser (1972, p.279); the
problematic of the shifting world of reading and interpretation demonstrates
the inherent limitations, tensions, paradoxes, tensions, discrepancy and
heterogeneity between a reader’s chosen analytical framework and what the text
says. As a self-reflexive model of reading which curiously fails to vindicate
its own central arguments or system, reader-response criticism poses itself as
an unbound movement of differential traces through which readers come to
understanding literature, reading and signifying practices. What the reader
get, in the end, is not a fixed or systematized identity of the text, but
rather a crafty play out of self-critical and self-transforming aspects of
writing. “At the same time,” Robert Young (1981) discursively points out,
“whereas the model implies an already constituted product, the more the surface
of the text is analysed the more it can be seen in terms of ‘textuality’, the
interaction of reader and text as a productivity, the production of a
multiplicity of signifying effects” (p.8). As a result of the
post-structuralist’s conception of “textuality”, the reading process has
shifted from repetition of intentionality, intent, consciousness, ideality to
the reading of performative act of language (Derrida 1981, p.82). The
post-structuralists are “playful” in discourse rather than being earnest. The
playfulness gives their discourses a topological surface of interpretation
whereby they are less concerned about interpretation of concepts or ideas as
truthful, but rather for the sheer pleasure of reading and interpretation. In
this context of discourse, the truth has been dismantled to the point in which
perceived truth can no longer contain itself as a transcendental, finality,
referential or telos; instead, truth has been reconstituted as a chain of
several plausibility of truths that disrupts the fundamental elements of truth:
I
know the servant has one large body,
But,
like the hydra, it has many heads
Any
of which may poison me to hell,
Unless
for safety, I follow the crowd,
Even
if the servant has just one head,
I
must be very careful how I tread.
Furthermore, as it could
be noted in the conceptual grids of the textual side of human meaning-making,
there is an irresistible desire to pin down the ultimate meaning of the text
and to subscribe or sign up to one or more interpretive communities. To traverse
discourse beyond delving deeper for ultimate reality would enable readers to
concentrate on the words-on-the-page: a literary text needs to be read and
interpreted, but interpretation opens up an understanding of what is at stake
in the text; an understanding which will stand in sharp contrast to other
irreducible contradictions. What is more in this context, rather than searching
for a stable and pure discursivity of meaning within the context of discourse,
poststructuralism or textuality conversely “trembles in an unstable
multiplicity [of languages or tropes] as long as there is no context to stop”,
in the sense that “no context is absolutely saturable or saturating. No context
can determine meaning to the point of exhaustiveness. Therefore, the context
neither produces nor guarantees impassable borders, thresholds that no step
could pass [trespasser], trespass” (Derrida 1993, p.9). In
Derridian term, postmodernism-poststructuralism involves the experience of the nonpassive
or impasses of totalizing closure and the experience of what happens [se passe] in the process of crossing the
indivisible border line, in that one goes on, not knowing where to go, to
engage and exceed the legitimation or systematization of meaning, of the
possibility of an unstable heterogeneity, and of the privy territory of a
secret.:
Because the work cannot
be said to understand or to explain itself without the intervention of another
language, interpretation is never mere duplication. It can legitimately be
called “repetition” but this term is itself so rich and complex that it raises
at once a host of theoretical problems. Repetition
is a temporal process that assumes difference as well as resemblance. It
functions as a regulative principle of rigor but assert the impossibility of
rigorous identity, etc. Precisely to the extent that all interpretation has to
be repetition it also has to be immanent. (de Man 1971, p.108; italics are
mine).
Thus, no interpretation
could deny the existence of desired subjectivity either through the
biographical, philology or autobiographical details of the author, or through
the intentional structure of literary form or through the intentional predicate
(self-effacement) of the reader. That is to say, every reading process has a
center, even if it is only an imagined one. The reader interprets the text out
of a desire for this center and in the hope that he would achieve an insight
and understanding with this center and with himself through the creation of
textual meaning. The reader is in a profound sense ignorant of the center
towards which his reading tends and the feeling of having attained it is always
metaphysic delusion (see Simon Critchley 2004, p.48). Interpretation could be
summed up as a “quest” for the desired subjectivity inherent in the text, but
the term “quest” suggests the inexhaustibility of the act of reading itself. On
this note, the search for a final direction on what is at stake in a given text
is not an end in itself, to be sure, but a perpetual quest for irreducible
temporal processes of the play of difference. Critchley perceptively argues
that: “The power of literature is located in the irreducibility of ambiguity
and the maintenance of this ambiguity is literature’s right. Literature
always has the right to mean something other than what one thought it meant”
(p.57; original italic).
A close reading of the
poem, however, unveils that what appears to be a headline quest beyond the
unpredictable and abolition of “Author-God” in discourse implicitly appears to
be an engagement of the abolished force. As its title suggests, the “quest” is
not an attempt to resolve the irresolvable “conflict”, tensions, paradoxes,
contradictions inherent in literary discourse; far from it, literary discourse
is a stream of polysemous and
progressive play of thoughts that cannot be furnished with a transcendental
signified. The speaker sees his attempt to fix discourse within the
interpretive model of Reader-response as false and deceptive, in that his
understanding or awareness of the various strands of reading formations should
propel him “to have…a march onward”, rather than reconstituting “the word and
the servant” as the “Centre” of reading and interpretation. Whereas the speaker
affirms, in stanza one, his desire for the words on the page and the reading
process, in the last stanza on the other hand he “blame[s] [him]self, the word
and the servant” for the attempt to reduce literary discourse to a coherent,
unified and seamless whole.
Concomitantly, the
speaker avers that to blame his misconception of the workings of the complex
interrelationship between the reader and the text is not to be confused with
his desire since the words on the page and the reading process cannot be
thinned-out (“mock”) in discourse. In fact, every text has its own reader(s)
who functions as the actor and speaker. According to Timothy Bahti (1996)
reading “is [a] co-constitutive activity”, an activity that brings both the
text and reader together in a complex and interactive way, with the ultimate
goal to fill in the gaps in the text (p.10). This process, to be sure, cannot
be said to have satisfactorily resolved the contradictions, but rather opened
up more irreducible process of reading. That is to say, the reading processes,
like their objects of study, only begin where they end, in that “by their end .
. . have inverted the end into its opposite, a non-end . . . [T]hey have
inverted the attempts at interpretation into discoveries of where reading has
to rebegin, never end . . .readings [become] rebeginning or not-yet-readings”
(Bahti13). On this model, to engage in a close reading of a text or the reading
process, the speaker declares, is nothing but a desire to reinstate a “Center”
or transcendental signified, a center that would serve as the absolute
interpretive model or conceptual grid of reading and writing. Theoretically
speaking, the speaker is not denying the obvious fact that the central
determinant of “conflict” and “quarrel” in literary discourse is a force or
author-as-God whose task is, as Roland Barthes puts it, to construe “a line of words, releasing a unique, sort
of theological, meaning (which would be the ‘message’ of the Author- God)”; but
rather it is a quest to “understand” and “be nearer [to] a force” that
conditions and informs the reading activity.
It is not accidental that the speaker, in the end, is caught up in
a fetishistic desire or split between what he knows intellectually and what he
desires, in that, as Nicholas Royle (2003) succinctly argues, there are
“differences, tensions, paradoxes between what a text says (or what an author
wants to say, or thinks s/he is saying) and what a text does” (p.27). In a
similar manner, Paul de Man (1971) concedes that: “Critics’ moments of greatest
blindness with regard to their own critical assumption are also the moment at
which they achieve their greatest insight…And one could say that the further
the critical text penetrates in its understanding, the more violent the
conflict becomes, to the point of mutual destruction” (p.109). In fact, it
might be argued that the fetish structure frames the speaker’s perverse desires
for the banished force in discourse: even though he know “[t]he conflict
[quarrel], if any, is not with God [force]” whose intentions are neither
available nor desirable, he nonetheless desires to embark on “a quest to be
nearer a force my own”. The simplistic dismissal of the authorial-based,
text-based and reader-response interpretive models is not to say that reading
and interpretation exists outside these grids, rather the interrelationship
between them is complicated and problematic.
The problematic of repressing one
conceptual grid in favour of others could be discerned in a situation whereby
every quest to abolish one element of signification at the expense of the other
usually leads to self (auto)-deconstruction; that is, the banished element rush
back through the backdoors to claim its rightful place in unguarded moments.
This problematic is what Sigmund Freud called “the law of return” or the return
of the repressed. Therefore, the speaker has not destroyed his desire for the presence
of “Author-God” in discourse; he has only repressed it to the “Unconscious”.
Jacques Lacan perceptively argues that the play of the unconscious desires in
texts manifests themselves through the performative act of language. Sean Homer
(2005) notes, “The focus of Lacanian criticism, therefore, is not upon the
unconscious of the character [the servant/ the speaker] or the author [God] but
upon the text itself and the relationship between text [the word] and reader
[the servant]” (p.2; emphases in parentheses is mine). According to this logic,
Lacan summarizes the unconscious as a gap or rupture; as structured like a
language; as the discourse of the Other (Sean Homer, p.66). It is important to
emphasis here that the unconscious play of language in the poem is not to
postulate that there is nothing at all in the text—no content, no form, no
speaker, no intention—rather none of these elements could be signposted as the
“Center” of reading and writing: “The unconscious is the unknown that lies
beyond doubt” and “manifests itself at those points when language fails and
stumbles”, and which “is precisely
the gap or rupture in the symbolic chain” (Homer, pp67-68; original italic):
I
am, I know, quite simply a coward,
I
have to have, I think, march onward,
I
blame myself, the word and the servant,
I
cannot mock the word and the servant,
I’m
not asking to be left on my own.
It’s
a quest to be nearer a force my own.
3.
Conclusion
The preceding analysis of
Djoleto’s “The Quest” demonstrates that the act of reading and interpretation
of literary text does not find its fulfillment in the “Author-God”, the “word”
or the “servant”. Rather, interpretation is related to and directed towards the
absence of the “Author-God”, the “word” or the “servant”, that is, the
production of unreadability and undecidability in the text. Thus,
undecidability opens a text to the unanticipatable and unpredictable future,
not in the form a modalized or modified present but rather as a new encounter
with the infinite crafty play of difference.
In other words, it is the undecidability of textual identity or the erasure of
human subjectivity that reconstitutes texts as repeating machines in which
every reading is singular and different. The play of difference demonstrates
the unreadability of the privy of secrets that keeps all texts in an
unstoppable motion or movement of erasure in which a reading process cannot
accede to its proper significance or to the cryptic inconsistent content of the
texts. Thus, literary text passes through the “Author-God”, the “word” and the
“servant”, but these forces are not the destiny of the text. The problematic
here is that the process of subverting all forms of “centre” in discourse the
critic might curiously be creating a self-deconstructive center—meta-discourses
or para-philosophical discourses. Therefore, fetishistic desire, to be sure, is
the decentering of hierarchy of meaning, where all that is conceived or taken
as the “Centre” of writing liquidates as a play of tropes; where there is no
interpretive or conceptual grid that could be used to vindicate the final
meaning or direction of a text. All extraneous values have been reconstituted
as play of difference.
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Appendix
“The
Quest”
By
Amu Djoleto
The
conflict, if any, is not with God.
I
cannot have quarrel with force
I have been trying much to understand.
It is, then, with the word and the
servant,
Of the servant and the word, I prefer
The word to which, in freedom, I refer.
I know the servant has one large body,
But, like the hydra, it has many heads
Any of which may poison me to hell,
Unless for safety, I follow the crowd,
Even
if the servant has just one head,
I
must be very careful how I tread.
I
am, I know, quite simply a coward,
I
have to have, I think, march onward,
I
blame myself, the word and the servant,
I
cannot mock the word and the servant,
I’m
not asking to be left on my own.
It’s
a quest to be nearer a force my own.
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