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It has been remarked with wry hauteur that literary criticism is the revenge of the intellectual upon art. This conclusion was presumably the product of observing that for someone who is clever and has time on his or her hands, a piece of writing is fair game. So literary criticism is implicitly viewed as an enterprise both democratic and aristocratic: democratic because in fact the discipline does not make excessively serious demands; aristocratic because the guild of critics requires that others take its gnostic expertise excessively seriously. Such allegations may or may not be ill-deserved, but the fact that they ring a bell with those who know little enough about it— and who might not recognize good literary criticism if they saw it—at least tells us something about perceptions. You only have to be clever at talking to talk cleverly about literature.
Possibly this attitude extends to literary theory, regarded as something vaguely akin to literary criticism, their intellectual fates intertwined if not inseparable. If so, exemplifiers of the attitude might do well to peruse a substantial essay on "Christian Identity and Literary Culture," namely David Jeffrey's People of the Book, to the end that they might think again. The range of questions the author wants to pose and to address, as listed in the preface, signals clearly enough the nature of the chapters that follow, whose contents are diffuse. We have something of a tour of the land of Western literary culture through the ages; a tour that is not meant to take in everything, not even everything important; a tour whose guide is explicitly Christian with an explicitly Christian interest and agenda; a tour where the reader's attention is designed to be arrested as much by the particulars of the sites visited as by the detailed plan of the journey. But of course there is a unifying theme and unifying threads. What are they?
"Logocentrism" is the idea under scrutiny. It is associated especially with Jacques Derrida. Jeffrey's interest is not in particular themes such as the relation of speech to writing, but in the wider characterization of the Western literary tradition, largely inspired or influenced by Christianity, as "logocentric." On this view of things, words embody truth and rationality, and truth and rationality are objective and normative. Derrida repudiates this philosophy.
Here we must stop for a moment to forestall a misunderstanding. When Jeffrey was writing People of the Book, "logocentrism" was a fashionable term to deploy in seminar rooms or literary journals. Today that's not so much the case; newer fashions have replaced it, while Derrida himself, ever elusive, has simply left it behind. But if the term has lost some of its cachet, the underlying notion is if anything more fashionable than ever, turning up in many guises—as when the authors of a recent Native American theology propose to deconstruct the Euro-American understanding of "truth" via the Trickster figure that appears in many Native traditions.
Jeffrey's mission in any case is not to rescue logocentricity; it is to rescue the tradition from the charge of logocentricity. The literary word has not functioned as Derrida and many others have assumed. This thesis is fleshed out in a number of investigations which take in Scripture, Augustine, medievals, Puritans, moderns, and other scenes and figures. It is defended by drawing attention principally to three things.
The first is the relation of words to extralinguistic realities as this is understood from the very beginnings of seminal Christian writing both in Scripture and Augustine. Minds are not to be stayed upon the words that convey truth. They are to be stayed on the truth conveyed. And it may be brokenly conveyed. Indeed, it is never adequately conveyed. For truth lies in the transcendent signified and it is incarnate, moreover, not first in words but in flesh.
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