Raymond Tallis

When I go to academic conferences, I'm usually struck by how incredibly polite everyone always is. Even the most mediocre papers get complimented for their "contribution" and the speakers are thanked and asked to elaborate on their ideas. There are exceptions to this rule of academic politeness, based on age: on the one hand, the cocky graduate student who thinks they already know pretty much everything that is worth knowing, on the other, the cantankerous older (inevitably male) professor whose contempt for newfangled ideas impresses itself on every line he utters. While I was probably the former type in my youth (I hope that I have learned some much-needed humility since), Raymond Tallis is definitely the latter.

If you read Tallis's earlier works, such as In Defence of Realism or Not Saussure, there is already an oppositional, iconoclastic tone on display. In those works, however, it is somewhat counterbalanced by the fact that Tallis has a reasonable point to make about the shortcomings of theory. Theorrhoea and After, by contrast, has stripped away much of that adventurous sense of critique and instead turned into an unadulterated diatribe of anger and resentment.

A lot of what Tallis includes in this volume he has published elsewhere. I mostly read this book for its chapter on Jacques Lacan - "The Strange Case of Jacques L." - which merely restates the points from Not Saussure about the problems of the mirror stage, together with complaints about Lacan's "unreadable" style and accusations that he is only famous because he hoodwinked people with his personal charisma. You know what? Both those things are true, Prof. Tallis, but there is even *more* to Lacan than that, as a number of recent groundbreaking works inspired by Lacanian ideas have shown.

Tallis's position, though, is that if he doesn't like or understand it, then no one should. There is so much arrogance and self-righteousness in both his rhetorical style and his grumpy-old-man opinions, many of which are as baseless and subjective as the positions he attacks, that it becomes impossible to take him seriously. I mean, just look at his title: "theorrhoea," a combination of "theory" and "diarrhea"? That kind of arrogant contempt tells you everything you need to know about the man and his work.… (mais)

In Defence of Realism is one of two books that Raymond Tallis published in 1988. The other, Not Saussure, is a critique of a tendency toward linguistic idealism in contemporary literary, a denunciation of the idea that reality is constructed in and through language. Not Saussure at least has the virtue of making some valid points about some of the more derivative (and stupid) versions of postmodernism, but then messes it up with woefully bad readings of Lacan's "mirror stage" and Derrida's notion of deconstruction.

It is in the context of that discussion that Tallis first advances what will be the core thesis of In Defence of Realism: namely, that the linguistic idealism of postmodern thought has caused literary authors to turn away from realism in favor of experimental meta-fiction that explores dreams, fantasies, alternative universes, magic, and so on. This whole phenomenon, he argues, is an attack on both our sense of reality and the principles of science that have enabled us to grasp that reality.

This thesis is, of course, simply nonsense. I am particularly annoyed by Tallis's argument because I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation on this very topic. Derivative postmodern theory's denunciation of realism as naive and outdated, I argued, was historically blind and critically naive. I showed the sophistication of texts by French realists like Balzac and Stendhal, demonstrating that they are as meta-textual and experimental as any postmodern novel. But it was also clear to me that this anti-realism was a product mainly of a vulgar version of postmodern theory. Just look at Roland Barthes: when it came to his examples of "writerly" texts, it wasn't just Mallarmé and Proust and Robbe-Grillet. Two of his most famous texts on this topic, S/Z and "The Death of the Author" are in-depth commentaries on Balzac, the founder of French realism. Even as a raw youth in graduate school, I had a sense of nuance to my argument that is missing from Tallis's book. Yes, some postmodern theorists dismiss realism, but there is a range of thinkers and positions out there, many of which warmly appreciate the realist tradition.

Reading In Defence of Realism, therefore, comes across as a vitriolic exercise with two aims. The first is simply a matter of Tallis's literary taste - or rather, distaste - for the literary trends of post-war fiction. Tallis hides behind an epistemological critique, but really this is mainly a question of aesthetic difference. He doesn't like contemporary literature much, which is his right, but his logical premise for attacking it in this way is absurd. The second aim, the true impulse from which this critique springs, is Tallis's hatred of "post-Saussurean" literary theory, as he calls it. As noted above, his main engagement with that topic takes place in Not Saussure.

Nonetheless, it is this second aim that keeps poking up through in this book, and leads to a lot of misreadings. Tallis is hopelessly unsophisticated when it comes to distinguishing what separates the various thinkers from each other - in Not Saussure, for instance, he repeatedly characterizes Lacan and Derrida as being essentially in agreement with each other, even though they were famously antagonistic toward key aspects of each other's ideas. Rather than carefully measuring where his own critique aligns with or departs from the critics he is dealing with, Tallis instead makes the hysterical claim that literature has been "raped" (p.ix) by postmodern ideas, whose "mighty Amazon of theorrhoea" (p.v) ("theorrhoea" being Tallis's oh-so-clever and sophisticated portmanteau of "theory" and "diarrhoea") has not a single good point to make.

This blanket condemnation leads Tallis to multiple own goals, such as this attack on Baudrillard's "high-profile stupidity" (p.vii):

"Baudrillard's assertion that the Gulf War had not happened was only one of many damaging instances of the inadequacy of Theory to reality - in particular the political reality to which its exponents had claimed to bring special insights." (p.vii)

Why is Tallis attacking Baudrillard here? My understanding of Baudrillard's work is that he shares many of the same core concerns as Tallis, in particular the way that the virtuality of postmodern life is eroding our sense of reality. Baudrillard is not an advocate of this phenomenon, he is a vehement critic of it, and in this way he logically ought to be seen by Tallis as an ally. But no, Tallis is no making an argument from logic here, but from sheer anger - a fact that he admits in his preface to the reissued version of the book.

There is a similar perversity in Tallis's choice of literary targets. Donald Barthelme and Alain Robbe-Grillet get a thorough dressing-down - but were they really the forefront of contemporary literature in 1988? Doris Lessing gets a serve for turning away from her realistic (but "boring") earlier novels to write science fiction - too bad she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007. Iris Murdoch is dismissed because The Sea, the Sea is much too unrealistic - too bad it won the Booker Prize in 1978. And wasn't Murdoch's chief source of philosophical inspiration Plato, rather than Derrida? I found myself wondering why Tallis didn't take on, for instance, Don DeLillo's White Nose, one of the most famous novels of the 1980s, and a penetrating examination of the loss of reality in postmodern society? How about Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, which weaves together postmodern themes with scientific rationality? The answer probably lies in the fact that they don't fit the aesthetic and critical narrative that Tallis is trying to build, and so he left them out. You know, like good critics and scientists do when they encounter something that doesn't fit their hypothesis.

Indeed, when one considers realism in the larger history of the novel, Tallis's argument falls apart completely. Yes, the British novel emerged in particular emerged out of the development of Lockean empiricism in a predominantly realist manner, but alongside that there is a long and honored tradition of "unrealistic" writing that stretches from Swift's Gulliver's Travels to Shelley's Frankenstein to Stoker's Dracula. It would be ridiculous to denounce, say, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde as an attack on reality and science: its concern, as with so much of the history of the novel, is not epistemological but ethical.

This is the last text that I will read by Tallis. Not only does he write from a perspective that is skewed by his own prejudices, but he writes in an openly arrogant way that I find abhorrent. Even if you detest someone else's writing and ideas, it is a sign of maturity to write about those things without having to resort to derogatory names, personal attacks, ungrounded accusations of corruption, and constant sarcasm to get your point across. Tallis is the rudest, most immature critic I have encountered in this respect, someone who shows utter contempt for anyone who dares not to share his tastes or critical views.… (mais)

Raymond Tallis's Not Saussure was published in 1988, when Theory with a capital "T" was still at its height in the humanities, and so its targets and limitations very much echo that academic context. A lot of the theory-influenced books produced during that heady time have already fallen into obscurity, partly because they represented a passing trend, but mostly because they were superficial repetitions of weak ideas. For that reason, many of the targets of Tallis's withering criticism are not really all that relevant or prominent anymore.

Nonetheless, there are some lingering things about this book that I found interesting. The first is its critique of certain strands of structuralism and post-structuralism, represented in particular by Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan. Tallis charges these thinkers and the derivative theories they have inspired with over-emphasizing the importance of language over reality. The result, Tallis argues, is a kind of linguistic idealism, a conclusion with which I largely have to agree.

A second aspect of the book that I find of continuing interest is its refutation of realism as a "naive" mode of literature that assumes an equally naive view of language as the "mirror" of the world. Why am I interested in this subject? Because it was exactly, almost word for word, the focus of my doctoral dissertation! Unlike Tallis, I thought that this tendency to denigrate realism to be characteristic of the more derivative postmodernists rather than its more sophisticated practitioners. After all, Barthes may have lauded authors like Proust and Mallarmé for their "writerly" qualities, but the authors he analyzed most deeply in this respect were the classicist playwright Jean Racine (On Racine, 1963) and the French realist Honoré de Balzac (S/Z, 1970).

Tallis, however, makes the rather dubious case that the denigration of realist fiction is a direct result of the linguistic idealism that once ruled postmodern theory. At one point he angrily points out that, against the critical mythology, there is no evidence that a naive, mirror-like view of language influenced literary realism - but the fact is, there is no evidence presented by Tallis that Lacanian or Derridean theories of the sign produced anti-realist writing either. In fact, it's not even clear what "anti-realist" writing is, apart from a couple of lame examples from Alain Robbe-Grillet. What about, say, Umberto Eco, or Salman Rushdie, writers that were firmly on the rise at the time of the work?

Tallis's complaints in this regard are particularly strange given that the 1980s saw the return of the historical novel as the dominant mode of postmodern fiction. That is to say, the domain of empirical reality did, in fact, make an enormous comeback in the area of literary fiction. It was aided in this respect by the historicism made possible by another of the post-structuralist theorists, Michel Foucault, a thinker who did insist upon the importance of facts and reality, but who only rates a single mention in Not Saussure.

Tallis dedicates two substantial chapters to take-downs of Lacan's essay on the mirror stage and Derrida's Of Grammatology. Tallis's critical approach is rather like that of a bulldog: he sees an error or an inconsistency, and he latches onto it and doesn't let go. That's fine. These two pieces of writing are ripe for criticism anyway, but I do have problems with Tallis's methodology for two reasons.

The first is that it lacks historical sense. These two works of criticism have many errors and problems, but Tallis seems unable to acknowledge the bigger picture of what made them important to a particular time and place. It's like Locke's famous idea of the "tabula rasa" - yes, it's wrong, but understanding its subversive influence on seventeenth-century political and religious structures is its enduring value, and that is why it should still be read and appreciated. The same thing goes for these two texts, which Tallis looks upon as so much intellectual excrement.

The second has to do with Lacan, who is my current focus of research. Tallis refers only to two texts by Lacan - one on the mirror stage (from 1949), the other "The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis" (1953). Lacan died in 1981, and in the intervening years he drastically reworked his ideas in ways that addressed and even transcended many of Tallis's criticisms, especially with regard to the question of the "real." I realize that many of Lacan's works were not available in translation in 1988, but certainly Seminar XI, in which this process of rethinking was already well under way, was available. One need only look at Tallis's book alongside, say, David Macey's Lacan in Contexts, also published in 1988, to see how unbelievably shallow Tallis's reading of Lacan really is.

To conclude, then, Not Saussure is a historical curiosity that attacks an era of criticism that is now largely a thing of the past anyway. Yes, Derrida and Lacan are still referenced in the humanities, but almost never through a framework of linguistic idealism that was prevalent in the 1980s. The ultimate problem I have with Tallis is that he is a exemplar of the kind of person who thinks that just because he is right about some things, he is right about everything. There is a self-righteous smugness and arrogance about his writing and criticism that I really loathe. Sure, Raymond, you may have a point sometimes, but you are transparently a self-regarding blowhard.… (mais)

Curious might be the best term to describe Raymond Tallis’ unique third-person biography of RT, who bears a strikingly resemblance to Raymond Tallis. Curious both in its interests and its execution. Its interests being the varieties of ways and means in which RT has interacted with the world around him. The ‘world’ includes other people but they, like stones, are largely opaque to RT and only the passionate encounter of Mrs RT reaches over that horizon of unknowability (or at least possibly). Curious also in its execution in that Tallis maintains this apparently disinterested interest in himself at length. It is a style that is oddly captivating at first, then a bit tiresome, then somewhat excruciating, and eventually oddly captivating again.

Why write such a book? We can ignore the bookseller labelling of this as philosophy. No practising philosopher would acknowledge it as such. It bears greater affinity to the elegy or perhaps a tone-poem. It is characterized, inordinately, by lists of things. Indeed, any sentence with less than 10 commas separating nouns or noun phrases is positively terse. I couldn’t help but wonder what it was like to write such a work. After all it is surprisingly lengthy. It isn’t particularly driven by any narrative. And its organizing superstructure is less than convincing, as though perhaps a publisher insisted on chapter headings to make it more palatable to the general reader. But what would it be like to sit down day after day and write in this manner? Even someone with Tallis’ prolixity might find it boring, wouldn’t he? Not that Tallis is unaware of the challenges his writing poses. There is a useful coda in which he brings himself to task for his failures. Though given that it is written in precisely the same manner, it rather seems as though he may not be fully serious about his self chastisement.

And so I’m left without much of anything to say about this. I suppose, as Tallis hopes, there might be someone who will find this inspirational. I’m just not sure that I’d want to meet that person at a dinner party. For my own part, I found it tedious despite fleeting moments of near wit.

And so, not recommended.… (mais)