I have offered a mildly deconstructive reading: one that discloses in words "a 'spirit' peculiar to their nature as words" (Kenneth Burke). Such a reading refuses to substitute ideas for words, especially since in the empiricist tradition after Locke ideas are taken to be a faint replica of images, which are themselves directly referable to sense-experience. One way of bringing out the spirit peculiar to words, and so, paradoxically, making them material ‘emphasizing the letter in the spirit’ is to evoke their intertextual echoes. Ideas may be simple, but words are always complex. Yet the construction of an intertextual field is disconcerting as well as enriching because intertextual concordance produces a reality-discord, an overlay or distancing of the referential function of speech, of the word-thing, word-experience relation. Even though the fact of correspondence between language and experience is not in question (there is a complex answerability of the one to the other), the theory of correspondence remains a problem. (Hartman, 1987; pp. 159-160).
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References