John Keats’s Epistolary Intimacy

Abstract

To read a work of literature, or to read a work as a work of literature—rather than reading it simply as, say, a description of a person, place or thing; an anecdote concerning an event or a series of events; an analysis of an object or idea; a set of instructions or directive; a request, petition or plea; a promise; or an expression of hope, fear, love or aggression—is to attend to the individuality of the people, places, events, speech acts and ideas that the work describes while at the same time taking each of these particulars as standing for a set of undefined others. It is to understand these objects, ideas, people and feelings not just as and in themselves but also as representing a type, class or mode of being. ‘Why else would one read it?’ Jonathan Culler asks of the literary work. But as Culler also points out, literary works characteristically resist any definitive account of what it is that they may be said to exemplify: novels, poems and plays ‘decline to explore what they are exemplary of’, Culler comments, even while they characteristically present the individual situations, affects and conditions of the objects, ideas and people that they present as ‘in some way…exemplary’. As Culler argues, the ‘power’ of the work may in fact be said to reside in and emerge from a ‘special combination’ of singularity and exemplarity (of the singular within the exemplary, of the singular indeed as a form of exemplarity): its power may be understood to be a function of the way that it registers and represents the undecidable space between the individual and the general in thematic as much as in formal and rhetorical terms. As Jacques Derrida observes, what is categorized as ‘literary’ involves uncertainty over whether, in speaking of something, ‘I am speaking indeed of something (of the thing itself, this one, for itself)’ or if I may instead be said to be offering an example—an example of something or an example of the fact that I can speak of something: it is this that accounts for the ‘pleasure’ [jouissance] of reading as well as its ‘immeasurable frustration’, Derrida remarks.