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Someone called Jacques Derrida, someone called
him on the phone, someone who was dead – this was August 22nd
1979. A mystery, he thought; but it is a mystery that began more
than ten years earlier, in 1968, when Derrida, a philosopher, visits
Oxford and there, before the very eyes of the Philosophy Sub-Faculty,
he dies, several times. Murder, he thought. And so I shall investigate,
and begin with a sign that the philosopher says he left within a
book from the thirteenth century, a strange fortune-telling book
that he had found in the oldest part of Oxford’s Bodleian
Library. In the book are a host of cryptic questions, but the philosopher
directs us to one in particular, a peculiar question about a boy,
and the question is this: Does the boy live? The philosopher will
not, though, give the answer; he requires, instead, that we go to
Oxford to open the book for ourselves. So, I shall go. And, as I
do, there is a phone call from a boy who had struggled to live.
This boy was once my father, a man who, for the last five or six
years of his life, suffered from some kind of terrible dementia.
It was as if he had lost his memory and found someone else’s;
for he spoke of appalling things, unspeakable things. Above all,
he said, ‘I must telephone. He is murdering me.’ We
have, it seems, another call from the dead and, perhaps, another
murder on our hands. So, let us be going – and not just to
Oxford in the late 1960s but also to an English public school in
the middle of the Second World War. And much else may yet demand
our attention, may yet act as clues – a forested silence near
Freiburg, a stolen evening in America, an abandoned car in Paris.
And all the while, all the while, the radio transmits, the TV is
on, and, back in Oxford, analysts decrypt intercepted messages,
a Jew investigates, the Great Dictator counts to six million, and
Esther prepares to take the minutes.
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List of Illustrations
A Rather Dull but Important Note
Acknowledgments
The Critical Inventions Series – General Editor’s Preface
CHAPTER ONE ‘Si puer vivet’
CHAPTER TWO A Sleep of Prisoners
CHAPTER THREE XX
CHAPTER FOUR Silences
CHAPTER FIVE Freiburg
CHAPTER SIX Esther
CHAPTER SEVEN ‘They Weren’t Really You Know’
CHAPTER EIGHT The House
CHAPTER NINE Stolen Evening
CHAPTER TEN High Places
CHAPTER ELEVEN Fast Cars
CHAPTER TWELVE Secret Marriage
CHAPTER THIRTEEN Hastings
CHAPTER FOURTEEN Sacrifice
CHAPTER FIFTEEN Elijah
Appendix
Notes
Index
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“… a compelling narrative journey with Oxford
at its heart … that exposes and plays with personal
and public history as well as literary and philosophical stories.
… Schad reads as he dreams, or dreams as he reads, and
his reading is a beautiful performance of writing’s
iterability. … What else can I say to the readers of
Derrida? This book is calling you.” Derrida Today
“A remarkable novel …both challenging and ultimately
rewarding.” Ian Macmillan, on BBC Radio 3’s
‘The Verb’
“Schad examines literacy as it stands – or maybe
sprawls or even reclines – today in an experimental
style that echoes a novel. He states that all the quotations
are real, and referenced, except the ones that he makes up.
Primarily he quotes Jacques Derrida, mostly from his The Post
Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, and his own father
before he died.” Reference & Research Book News
“John Schad has written a moving memoir of his father’s
life, taking as his starting point the last traumatic years
(1992-96) marked by panicked and perplexing utterances prompted
by the onset of Alzheimer’s … Schad has threaded
through this intimate portrait of a dying father an elaborate
engagement with the philosophy of deconstruction, and with
a history of Oxford from the 1930s to the present. Creative
writing, life writing and literary theory are brought together
in this challenging text.
Schad does three things. He tells his father’s story
from schoolboy to Oxford undergraduate to Methodist turned
Presbyterian minister to final dramatic demise. He interlaces
his father’s life with the work of Jacques Derrida,
drawing extensively on one of Derrida’s many experiments
with the confessional mode, The Postcard: From Socrates to
Freud and Beyond (1987), a puzzling book, part novel, part
philosophical treatise, loaded with diary fragments and postcards
from the edge that are richly suggestive and resonant in relation
to Schad’s father’s life …. Between these
two father figures Schad lays out a latticework of links involving
the Second World War, anti-Semitism, blackmail, betrayal,
horror, guilt, history, martyrdom, memory (false and faithful),
resurrection and secrecy. The whole thing is framed by a piece
of archival detective-work in the Bodleian to solve an Oxford
mystery that would have Inspector Morse scratching his head.
Major figures of the period like Gilbert Ryle, C. S. Lewis,
and Hugh Trevor-Roper put in appearances in a work full of
fascinating vignettes of academic in-fighting and high-table
gossip. Schad shows the extent to which faith and reason are
intertwined in the lives of his father and the philosopher
who has shaped his son’s thinking, while bringing to
vivid life a whole post-war intellectual milieu.
… One wonders what ‘Shad’ would have thought
of his larger than life reincarnation in the pages of his
son’s academic experiment. Schad cites Freud to the
effect that ‘History is precisely the way we are implicated
in each other’s traumas’ (p. 70). In its evocation
of death and suffering, Someone Called Derrida is at once
an intensely personal story and a tale of trauma that touches
on larger issues of history and identity. It was Nietzsche
who said, ‘When one hasn't had a good father, it is
necessary to invent one’. Schad had two good fathers,
but that, happily, has not prevented him from being inventive.”
The Glass (organ of the Christian Literary Studies Group);William
Maley, Professor of Renaissance Studies
at the University of Glasgow, and author of Nation, State
and Empire in English Renaissance Literature: Shakespeare
to Milton (2003), and editor, with Alex Benchimol, of
Spheres of Influence: Intellectual and Cultural Publics
from Shakespeare to Habermas (2007).
“John Schad deftly splices stories inherited from his
two fathers, the real one from Oxford, a minister of religion
who may have witnessed Satanic rituals as a boy, and the symbolic
father coming from across the Channel who invented deconstruction.
All the secrets and traumas of recent history return in this
non-linear chronicle that throws new light on the divide between
analytic philosophy and continental philosophy. This generates
endless narratives in which verve, erudition and suspense
appear laced with wry Freudian Schadenfreude. Should we laugh
when philosophy discloses old skeletons in its libraries,
or just follow odd couples like Derrida and Gilbert Ryle,
Hugh Trevor-Roper and Paul de Man, Elijah and Aleister Crowley
since they seem to hold the key to the murder mystery? Or,
should we attend to one single question: can I die of a death
that is not mine?” Jean-Michel Rabaté, Vartan
Gregorian Professor in the Humanities at the University of
Pennsylvania
“An extraordinary performance.” Sir Frank
Kermode
“An amazing book.”
J. Hillis Miller, UCI Distinguished Research Professor of
Comparative Literature and English at the University of California
at Irvine
“One of the many unique features of this intriguing,
emotionally powerful, and disturbingly entertaining book is
that it brings together three real people in what turns out
to be (at least) a triple mystery involving Jacques Derrida,
John Richard Schad, and John Schad, the author himself. The
title refers to an uncanny event in which someone called Derrida
on the phone on August 22, 1979, and identified himself as
Martin Heidegger, who had died in 1976. Derrida was a Jew;
and while Heidegger had been the Rektor of Freiburg University
in 1933, he dismissed Jews from the faculty of the University,
including philosophers with whom he had been professionally
and personally associated. Derrida’s philosophical writing,
nonetheless, was pervasively influenced by Heidegger. John
Richard Schad, the father of the author, who suffered from
dementia during the last five or six years of his life, was
a minister of religion in Oxford; he and Derrida were both
born in 1930.
… The book opens in the author’s own voice: ‘It
is late, later than I think, and I am reading; but even while
reading I keep drowsing and dreaming, and often I am dreaming
that I am still reading.’ This is an ordinary enough
situation, but it is also mysteriously uncanny in that it
is reminiscent of similar situations in Poe, as in his poem
‘The Raven.’ The book Schad is reading is Derrida’s
‘The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond,’
in which there are several references to Poe’s story
‘The Purloined Letter.’ Throughout his book, Schad
quotes freely from the Derrida text that he is reading (these
quotations appear in italics), but he also weaves into these
italicized passages and his own prose quotations from his
father as he was wasting away from Alzheimer’s during
the years 1992–96. Those utterances were recorded by
John Schad's mother, and they are included as an appendix
to the book. Essentially, then, what is happening is that
the author (John Schad) is mediating between the text he is
reading (Derrida's) and the final words of his father (John
Richard.) The mystery begins, however, not just when Shad
begins to discover striking connections between Derrida's
and his father's texts but especially when he realizes that
there are certain passages that seem to be directed specifically
to him.
… An important part of what he begins to discover is
that both Derrida and his father keep coming back, however
obliquely, to the scene of a murder, or perhaps more than
one. Schad never lets us forget how often Oxford has been
a place of mystery and intrigue. Not only were there the fictional
detectives – Lord Peter Wimsey, Prof. Gervase Fen, and
Inspector Morse – but there were also many non-fictional
ones as well: Gilbert Ryle, Hugh Trevor-Roper, and A.L. Rowse.
Here the history of Oxford's complicity in appeasement efforts
with the Nazis during the 1930s becomes an important part
of the mystery.
… Schad also narrates very
well several events from Derrida's life, including his visits
to Oxford, his arrest in Prague, his obsession with a dog
called Fido, his reaction to the Paul de Man affair, his encounter
with Schad in a hotel near Loughborough, and his terminal
illness.
An excellent intellectual thriller, this book is an important
contribution to the ‘Critical Inventions’ series
that Schad edits. In his preface Schad explains that this
series features books that ‘push the generic conventions
of literary criticism to breaking point’ by allowing
the critic to appear as autobiographer, novelist, mourner,
poet, parodist, detective, dreamer, diarist, etc. In this
book Schad has provided his future contributors with a brilliant
example of such a hybrid genre.” Michael Payne,
The Star (Lewisburg USA)
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Publication Details
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Hardback ISBN: |
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978-1-84519-030-9 |
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Paperback ISBN: |
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978-1-84519-031-6 |
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Page Extent / Format: |
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224 pp. / 229 x 152 mm |
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Release Date: |
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October 2007 |
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Illustrated: |
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Yes |
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Hardback Price: |
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£47.50 / $65.00 |
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Paperback Price: |
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£16.95 / $35 |
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| This book can be ordered online or by telephone. |
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For the UK and Rest of the World:
Gazelle Book Services
tel. 44 (0)1524-68765 |
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For the United States:
International Specialized Book Services
tel. (1) 503 287-3093 or (800) 944-6190 |
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For Canada:
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tel. (1) 800-565-9523 |
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