Glas. This rebellion against his inheritance also evident from the way in which he creates confusion by juxtaposing his initial, "D," to distracting red herrings: "The debris of d-words is scattered all over the pages. Derrida describes (décrit), writes d (dé-écrit), and cries d (dé-crit)." Spivak notes, "I can read Glas as a fiction of Derrida's proper name turning into a thing, [...] crypting the signature so that it becomes impossible to spell it out." Autobiography and the signature The specific literary genre problematized in Glas is autobiography, and its inquiry traces the very concept of the signature, which in autobiography marks the identity of the author with the narrator of the text. Following Plato, Derrida sees the relation between author and text as one of filiation, but unlike Plato's idea of filiation, which involves only the father and the child, for Derrida author alternates between the father and the mother of the text. In this relationship, the author's signature becomes the guarantor of the text's truth, "it becomes its surrogate parent," according to Jane Marie Todd. The Genet column discusses his autobiographical writings, where one of the issues is Genet's very name—it is not that of his father, but of his mother, who abandoned him shortly after birth. According to Todd, "in the mother who abandons her bastard child, leaving only her name, Derrida finds a figure for the author/text/signature relationship." Critical response Glas is described as experimental and obscure. Literary theorist Geoffrey Hartman considered the text's playfulness "exhilarating to many within the discipline [of literary criticism]", acknowledging that to others it "may prove a disadvantage". Morris Dickstein, writing for The New York Sun, called it "a dizzying commentary on the work of Hegel and Genet". According to Jane Marie Todd, Glas is a study of literary genre, and its seeming defiance of genre "allows this curious and challenging text [to offer] a direct contribution to literary theory: in both form and subject matter, it details a new way of viewing genre definitions." Derrida himself described the text as "a sort of a wake," in reference to James Joyce's Finnegans Wake; Alan Roughley argues, It is clear that his reading of Joyce's text haunts the way in which Derrida has constructed his exploration of Hegel and Genet by positioning separate and discrete textual columns next to each other so that it is necessary to read intertextually and follow the