20. Literary Theory: Past and Future1
[1. My statements and references in this chapter expressly cover only the works I reviewed, and by no means the entire opus of these critics. Of course, the scene has been much transformed since 1988, when I chiefly turned my attention from literature to the more general “foundations” of discourse and the prospects of their “study” in books with long gestation periods (e.g. Beaugrande 1997) (seven years), and Beaugrande 2004) (six years).]
We have now surveyed how seventeen major critical theorists of our time essay to think through the literary transaction from their respective standpoints and to situate criticism correspondingly. Though I was forced to condense compress, and omit, the variety and complexity of theoretical issues must be obvious. Although no one theorist can pretend to have covered the whole range of issues, a cross-section of critical discourse might enable a reasonably encompassing assessment. A concerted synthesis of diverse theories and proposals, however intractable to attain, deserves a central place on our future agenda -- utopian perhaps, but in the productive sense of unconstrainable advancement (Ch. 1).
Recent developments have undercut any prospect that explicit reflections upon the nature of literature and its relation to criticism would put everything neatly in place inside any single authoritative account. On the contrary, even the most trusted precepts have undergone such a violent shaking that none of them seems secure enough to provide an absolute foundation for the literary enterprise. The quest for the site of literature and criticism has generated a veritable wilderness of cartographics locating them everywhere and nowhere from one moment to the next, now close together, now far apart, like an vast edifice of impossibly joined staircases drawn by M.C. Escher.
The traditional critic sought to master the still-hidden complexity by sheer energetic decorum, as a vibrant factotum super-reader aspiring to play every part with the hearty, if improvised, alacrity of Bottom the Weaver. Borrowing the voice of the author, the reader, or the work itself, the critic would address the world in the name of art and its instances, or of taste, culture, history, or timeless truth. A vertiginous act, no doubt, but for that very reason uncannily appealing. Recently, though, the whole arena has suffered tremors and shocks that enforce a not always so ceremonious debate upon what remains or will become of the ancestral performance called criticism”; the very name may ring out like a captious irritant to the longing for identity.
Close inspection may find the old division of labour to be paradoxical. On the one hand, criticism has been clearly derivative upon literature and subsisted as the secondary agency in a tightly attuned symbiosis of action and reaction, of production and judgment. That criticism would be illegitimate without art seemed a mere truisrn. On the other hand, criticism has projected the semblance of having always already known the goals which art envisions but does not always attain. An influential critic or school could decide the success of authors or works, affect the production of future art, or restore neglected art back into favour. The prerogatives of judgment and explication implied that the critic's taste and expertise were above, or at least not subjected to, those of the authors being judged -- as if art might be illegitimate without being licensed criticism.
When literary and critical theory came to the fore, the guiding intent may have been to more this delicate balance than to unsettle much less overturn it. We might have revealed the status of criticism much as we would explore and map the bedrock upon which a monument or temple reposes. This foundation might have regrounded the authority of criticism, past and future, with a minimum of change or damage to the superstructure. Instead, we unearthed a perverse catacomb of perplexing fragments that disperse or regather even as we chart them, denied even the stony repose of dismemberment allotted to Ozymandias, whose passion yet survives by being stamped on lifeless things. Our supposedly well-fenced activities now seem irreducibly problematic; and the discourse to formulate and expatiate a rationale for them ventriloquises rather than ventilates the labyrinth of our habitation and habituation.
As criticism faces itself and finds its wonted complacency unjustified, de Man's motto gains an unruly momentum: “all true criticism occurs in the mode of crisis” (BI 8). The great works of art we were once quite content to celebrate and monumentalise become disquieting, subversive, disrupting our solemn ministrations and withholding their approbation from our struggle to fixate their meaning. The very acts of writing and reading, formerly treated as facts of life, come to look diffuse, evasive, exitless, utopian. Every step has to be laboriously worked through under the agonizing suspicion that nothing may prevent us from having to start all over. Our agony is a paradigm for the general crisis of modern epistemology, and our bootstraps are barely broken in yet, supposing we gain some ground (not stubbed) to stand on and some feet (not of clay) to carry us.
Meanwhile, the critical performance (de)constructs more frames around frames, more factual or fictitious sources and narrators, more asides to the audience. Disputes among the personnel, the stage managers or actors, get incorporated into the show; rehearsals are opened to the public and stage-machinery left crudely in view; the script is rewritten or misremembered; signatures and credits are pirated or effaced. Yet somehow the belated perquisites persist, ceaselessly reinscribed and reentitled, forever arising to bow at the end, even after the most sombre death-scenes.
All in all, literary theorizing resembles a crucible of rarefaction constantly invigilated lest it disperse the essences, or indeed be shattered. The theorist has to be more explicit than either society or customary criticism about what art has to offer. In the process, the prospect of diverging from social or critical experience and praxis remains uneasily painfully acute. The utopian imperative of literature energises the critical drive for discovery and elaboration to impel our theorizing further and further beyond the bounds of what can be solidly demonstrated. The generalizing perspective of theory foments a natural discontent with any one set of standards of practices, however time-honoured and well-anchored in academic departments and conferences. The ambition to gather and focus the forces of literature becomes more assertive as the public grows more estranged from art. Perhaps, theory offers a rugged terrain for criticism to bury its own past with a suitably monumental inscription, in a prelude to bidding for a different mode of authority.
But what can be realized in the current scheme, when our theorists seem so agonizingly, or agonistically, divided about our enterprise? Might the society that marginalizes art and rejects modernism do the same to modern critical theory? It might indeed, unless we can adduce compelling reasons to the contrary; this fate is among our more reliable certainties. So far [at least when this book was composed] our case teeters upon the Babel of critical discourse, a towering multitude of idioms, styles, terminologies, sources, and models, basking in attention, prestige, and funding, but showing a sense of direction far below what its momentum promises. So we must again set out in search of a rationale, sobered by the recent vision of our own wildness, wilderment, and wilderness.
Our possible futures point out in many directions. The grandest project is a full-scale cultural revolution (Jameson, Millett), unrealistic at this moment, but all the more urgent to design. More immediately, we face a new methodology that might engage wider sectors of society in artistic interaction than has been feasible in the past (Frye, Fiedler, Iser, Bleich, even Hartman,). One major benefit might be the increased fulfilment of the reader's personality and identity (Holland, Paris). More gradual or benefits influences are also foreseeable, directed to conditions of perception (Iser), historical awareness (Jauss), intellectual and cultural breadth (Frye), creative power (Bloom), rhetorical self-consciousness (de Man), and redefinition of institutions (Culler). In theory, our prospects are hardly meagre; but they certainly overreach our ordinary practice.
We can no longer deny that the customary functions of criticism, roughly labelled as historicizing, classifying, evaluating, and interpreting, are far less straightforward than business as usual had lulled us into believing (Ch. 3). The upheaval of critical theory has at least made us restively self-conscious about exercising these functions, and their fate hangs in many balances. At present, they are activities criticism wants to disown even as it keeps performing them -- repetition compulsion, the Freudians might say. We may abjure our innocence about history by opening our inquiry to all the winds of culture, society, and power, as Jauss Jameson, and Millett have done; we may renounce the search for bigger and finer taxonomics of genres or tropes, as post-structuralism has; we may call for an end to evaluation or interpretation, as Frye, Iser, and Culler have variously done. But we can hardly write a page without surprising ourselves in the acts we have disclaimed. Our options reduce to stealth or self-revelation or irony, and we shuttle between them.
Turned loose, the critical functions spiral around themselves in proliferating recursions. Classifying gets classified, interpretation interpreted, evaluation evaluated; and historicizing is revisioned as a historically determined praxis. And they carom with each other in multifarious trajectories, as when interpretation is summarily classified into a multitude of incompatible types in deconstruction; or when history is imperiously overtaken by the problematics of interpretation in the heterodox hermeneutics of Jauss or the remarshalled Marxism of Jameson.
The assumption that literature itself can be classified might make a reasonable starting point. Surely such a prominent phenomenon as literary communication must be, if not well-defined, at least definable. But this first step already proves refractory, plunging us into the disheartening perplexities invoked in Culler’'s motto: “It is the essence of literature to have no essence, to be protean, undefinable” (OD 182). Such paradoxes buy time while we meditate on how to face our major, if hidden, task of explaining and motivating the use of literature in a society inclining to marginalize it. Eventually, we must openly demonstrate this simultaneous avowal and evasion of essence, this protean motivity, and its purposes, rewards, and repercussions.
Taken together, the definitions and descriptions of literature propounded by our theorists compose a multiplex picture: “a system” or “structure of signs, serving an aesthetic purpose” (TL 141); a “verbal structure” in which “the final direction of meaning is inward” (AC 74); “texts” that “relate to” “models or concepts of reality, in which contingencies and complexities are reduced to a meaningful structure” (AR 70); “the most complex of sign systems,” “commenting on the validity of various ways of interpreting experience” and “exploring” “the creative, revelatory, and deceptive powers of language” (PS 35); “any text that implicitly or explicitly signifies its own rhetorical mode and prefigures its own misunderstanding” (BI 136); a mode for “transforming” an “unconscious fantasy” into “conscious meanings” (DY 28); and so on.
Some critics prefer to specifically address “poetry”: the “mediator between mythos and logos,” “the Marvelous as Credible” (NT 300, 303); “works” that “begin as an encounter between poems” and that “are bound to be misread” (MAP 70; BF 6); and so on. This limitation is not necessarily severe, insofar as poetry is frequently made to stand for all of literature or to be its pivotal instance (TL 142, 24; AC 17; PO 162; ALC 17; compare the Formalist view, PL 50). In some cases, however, prose forms, especially the novel, are chosen because they reward a different kind of attention (Fiedler, Iser, Paris, Jameson, Millett,).
The teaching that literature is essentially about itself has weathered better than other parts of the heritage of New Critics, those bad fathers against whom our theorists rebel, though often with implacable nostalgia. In Fiedler's opinion, “a work of art is on one level about its own composition” (NT 48). In de Man's, we just saw, the “literary” “text” “signifies its own rhetorical mode” (BI 136). In Frye's, “fact and truth are subordinated to the primary literary aim of producing a structure of words for its own sake” (AC 74). Even Jameson seems to “believe that there is a certain sense” in which “ultimately, all literary structures may be understood as taking themselves for their own object, as being “about” literature itself” (PL 89). Bloom varies the formula, preferring not “to say that a poem is about itself,” but that “it is about another poem” (MAP 198), albeit his method most radically encloses poetry in a space of his own arcane design.
However, these meditations making literature into its own exponent are again more dilatory than resultful, bids to buy more time. We bend the problem of classifying literature back upon it, as if asking it to declare itself and release us from the job. Our act is not unjust: the classifier comes to suspect that literature is itself a mode of classification, running far ahead of us and upstaging our efforts. But a profession that can't explain what its genuine concern is supposed to be will continue to intimate an aura of crisis that draws the baleful gaze of accountability-minded authorities and a sceptical public, and under unprecedented attack from “conservatives” on our universities in general and on programs in literature, humanities, and cultural studies in particular.
The project of classifying literature as a special brand of language has not been markedly successful. Hardly had Wellek and Warren declared this approach “the simplest way of solving the question” when they found their own proposed “distinctions” “between the literary, the everyday, and the scientific uses of language” “by no means simple in practice” (TL 22). “Many mixed forms and subtle transitions undoubtedly exist”; literature can “approximate” “the scientific use” or deploy “resources” “preformed” by the “anonymous workings” of “everyday language” (TL 22ff). The quandary was eventually defused through a shift of emphasis enunciated by Culler: when we “stress literature's dependence on particular modes of reading,” we “need not struggle” “to find some objective property of language which distinguishes the literary from the non-literary, but may simply start from the fact that we can read texts as literature and then inquire what operations that involves” (PO 128f.) Here too, “simply” sounds discordant with our actual results; but the shift has opened new terrains to explore.
In a parallel drift, the special ontological or linguistic status of literature, once accepted as a matter of course, is placed in debate. That status is upheld by Wellek and Warren, Frye, Iser, Paris, and Bloom, yet denied by Hirsch, Holland, and at least officially by deconstruction. 2 [2. Culler warns against “inferring” “that for deconstruction literature is a privileged or superior mode of discourse” (OD 183). Still, the “claim for superiority” based on “explicitly announcing its fictional and rhetorical nature” is not refuted, though shown to be unprovable; and de Man certainly accepts it (OD 183; BI 136).] Several theorists hedged their positions. Fiedler at first accepted, then repudiated, the idea of a special canon. Frye suggested that the myths and metaphors of literature pervade all texts, yet he sought to circumscribe a host of specialized literary forms. Culler, de Man, and Hartman widen their critique to the point where literature becomes a more radical or self-conscious vehicle for aporias inherent in all language, a more deliberate engagement with rhetoricity and with the ungainly fit between signifier and signified. 3 [3. In his plea for interdisciplinarity, Hartman says: “If we give special attention to fiction and poetry, it is because they are insufficiently examined elsewhere, not because they are privileged” (CW 296). His own proceedings indicate a difference more in degree than in kind, especially where philosophical texts are the point of comparison.]
The total consensus would have to be a synthetic position: that literature is a distinctive, yet inescapably dialogical phenomenon. It draws back from other domains, but only a prelude for a movement toward renewed interaction. Indeed, the friction between literature and general discourse, we now find, constitutes one of its major contributions to culture. Being both similar and different, reflective and transformative, is a vital precondition for literature to exert its peculiar relevance as a mode and measure of human understanding. When other domains come in contact with literature, they become more special rather than making it less so.
Criticism in effect retraces this movement as it oscillates between confining and expanding its fields of concern. Formalism and New Criticism foregrounded the otherness of literature, especially poetry. Structuralist and psychoanalytic schools revoked that otherness in the name of top-heavy generalizations about language and mind. The archetypal and mythical schools genially looked both ways, since their prize examples for what they judged universal came from literary representations. All these schools take their place within a grand dialectic of closing and opening, dividing and fusing, that literature prefigures, way ahead of us here once again.
The transactive, bidirectional capabilities of literature are echoed in many theoretical formulations. We find many passages stating or implying that literature enables a rise in consciousness (e.g., AR 159, 212; IR 175; AC 88; BI 222; TAR 73, 144; DY 50; PIP 98). Criticism could be a mode for encouraging that process (cf. WL 131; CW 268; SX 88, 506; PL 207; MF 52). However, our critics often suggest that literature makes a special appeal to the unconscious (TL 88, 148; AC 88; NT 325; WL 137f, DY 28, 52, 310; RF 5; PAF 128; SX 182; TAR 174; PU 180). How the increasingly self-conscious activities of criticism could be made compatible with that appeal is by no means easily established. The danger of damaging the channels of communication with our exploratory surgery is not easy to ban.
The impact of literature on human life is relevant here. lser sees in “the production and subsequent negation of fictions” “the condition for establishing an open situation as regards life in general” (IR 268). Jauss maintains that “the experience of reading can liberate one from adaptations, prejudices, and predicaments of a lived praxis in that it compels one to a new perception of things” (TAR 423 41). Fiedler argues that “art” enables people to “achieve” a “coherence, a unity, a balance, a satisfaction of conflicting impulses which they cannot (but which they desperately long to) achieve in love, family relations, politics”; these “activities are represented in a perfectly articulated form” and thus “revealed in all their intolerable inadequacy” (NT 7). Jameson believes that “in art, consciousness prepares itself for a change in the world” and “learns to make demands on the real world which hasten that change” (MF 90). A critical awareness of “ideology” is recommended (WL 129; AR 202; CW 99; PU 296). And so forth
Hence, literature is the most conducive mode of communication for demonstrating that “'reality, when it includes human beings, is no longer just that which is, but also everything that is missing in it, everything that it must still become” (Garaudy, 1969: 214) (TAR 15). “The distinguishing element of literature” “depends” on an “awareness of what the element is not” (PL 43). “Literature” can “encompass whatever might be situated outside it” and “include what is opposed to it” (OD 182f.) “Reality” “pales to insignificance beside the vast number of unseen and unfulfilled possibilities” (IR 206).
These visions are best honoured if literature is conceived in a sphere of interchangeable influence with reality, rather than in the dependent role of imitation or reflection assumed by older mimetic theories or by orthodox Marxism (TAR 11; PU 33). Our theorists sometimes suggest that literature expressly moves us out of or away from reality (TL 2 5; WL 139; DY 70; BI 17, 191; AL 35). They direct their appeals not to “objective reality” (PIP 2; SC 15f; MF 343), but to the literary processes of creating “models” or “illusions of reality” (AR 70; PL 188; BI 18; IR 92, 198). We can view “literary experience as a part of the continuum of life,” and explore how “literature” “contains life and reality in a system of verbal relationships” or how it “relates to life” “after first relating to other figurations” (AC 115; 122; MAP 75; cf. AIM 109). Moreover, readers can heighten their “phenomenological knowledge of reality,” or direct their “attention to the interaction between perception and reality,” or recover a “repressed and buried reality” (PAF 23; IR 210; PU 20). And they can encounter “the “disappointment of expectations” whereby “'we actually make contact with reality” (Popper 1964: 102; TAR 41).
The [erstwhile] Yale group, however, makes criticism an occasion to foreground the failure of reference to reach beyond language, for instance: “a work of fiction asserts, by its very existence, its separation from empirical reality” (BI 17); or “language appears as a restless medium that both transcends and negates its relation to the phenomenal world” (CW 152). In both structuralism and deconstruction, the signified is annexed as a further layer or system of signifiers (PL 149, 185; OD 188; cf. LD 29).
These positions might be understood as affirmations of the natural leeway of literary modalities. Literature constitutionally implies that language always gets there first and stays there last, no matter where or whither we venture. As we might expect, theorists agree that “the reality of a work of fiction” is not primarily a reality of circumstance” (TL 213). “Literary texts take on their reality by being read” (AR 34). “The reader, in striving to produce the aesthetic object, actually produces the very conditions under which reality is perceived and comprehended” (AR 103). The “concreteness” of art and of its representations is also invoked (e.g., TL 129; AC 281; TAR 52, 148). The term “concretization” for the reader's realization of the work is emblematic here (c. g., TL 15 5; AR 149; IR 173; TAR 73).
In accord with this trend, “truth” in the everyday sense is rarely considered central to literature or criticism. 4 [4. Compare the wariness about looking for “facts” (TL 104, 239; AC 74; LD 486; WL 119; BI 219; TAR 32, 52; IT 211; MF x).] “A work of literature” “does not finally depend for its force and conviction on “truth” of action, character, or detail” (NT 147). A work's “truth to reality” is “deeper”: its “view of life” (TL 213, 34), though some critics deny this (PAF 286; BI 12). “Questions of fact or truth are subordinated to the primary literary aim of producing a structure of words” (AC 74). A negative accent may emerge: “it is the function of art” “to disturb by telling a truth which is always unwelcome” (LD 432, e.d.).
Abstentions become pivotal in some recent theories. In the subjective paradigm, “truth is not a viable goal” “in literary response and judgment” (RF 48). “Literary hermeneutics” is also “no longer interested today in interpreting the text as a revelation of a single truth” (TAR 147). In structuralism, “if the process of thought bears not so much on adequation to a real object or referent, but rather on the adjustment of the signified to the signifier,” “the traditional notion of “truth” becomes outmoded” and yields to one of “translation from one code to another” (PL 133, 216).
In post-structuralism, truth forms one pole of an irreconcilable tension. “Language” is “necessarily misleading,” and “just as necessarily conveys the promise of its own truth” (ALG 277). “The process of understanding” involves the “interference of truth and error” (ALC 72). “A reading” that is “productive of other texts” must “assert” “its truth,” which “can then, in its turn, be undermined” (MAP 69f.) “A gap” “within reading” “always prevents” “experiences” being “grasped” as “the truth of the text”; “any attempt to ground trope or figure in truth always contains the possibility of reducing truth to trope” (OD 67f, PS 204). Only Hirsch is left defending the lonely outpost where “the theoretical aim” is “the attainment of truth” (VAL viiif).
Yet “to believe that the timelessly true meaning” must “disclose itself” is to conceal the involvement of the historical consciousness” in order to “feign objectivity” (TAR 29). In general, our theorists, like Fiedler, do not purport to “speak” “objectively,” for instance, when dealing with “values,” “classifications,” “the “horizon of expectation,” or reader “tests” (NT xiv; TL 249, 59f, TAR xii; 5RR 42). “Objectivity” is chiefly regarded as a species of performance, perhaps one with a “fictional,” “religious,” “authoritarian,” or “solipsistic” nature (PIP 130; SC 123, 34, 151, 295). The prestige of “objectivity” as a “scientific ideal” fails to recommend it (TL 16; CW 162; TAR 7; SX 328). Nor is “literature” itself expected to be “objective” (TL 104; WL 167; SX 208), though it might encourage reconciling “subject” and “object” (AR 135, 154; MF 44, 38, 141, 146; cf. PS 155; PIP 99, 125). However, probably from force of habit, the text is occasionally designated an “objective” entity (DY 108; SC 129; PU 9). And Frye and Hirsch hold out, vowing to achieve objectivity either by excluding values or by marshaling evidence (AC 18; AIM 33).
Nonetheless, “subjectivity” (or “subjectivism”) is still treated with misgiving, even among the more flexible theorists (TL 18, 42, 44, 152, 156, 162, 168, 173, 249; AC 18, 28; VAL 37; AR 23; PIP 1; PO 81; TAR 39, 68,141; SX 258). Only Iser, Bleich, and Jameson fully accept subjectivity as a natural aspect (AR 19, 21; IR 134; SC 15f, 151; MF 297), though the “decentering” of the “subject” in modern thought may have affected it (AR 159; PU 60, 283; PL 140f; PO 29; BI 32f.) The notion of “intersubjectivity” has been a popular synthesis (TL 156; AR 123, 151, 230; SC 28; TAR 52; AL 35). After all, most of our theorists started out as regular critics and have not conclusively abjured their ambition to generalize their own responses and beliefs (cf. AR 18f.) Though subjectivity can no longer be simply denied, it might be viewed as the collective foundation for whatever objectivity we can still have (cf. AC 20; AIM 99; AR 24f; 5RR 231; TAR 173).
As we would predict, Hirsch's campaign for establishing the “valid” meaning and “increasing the probability” “that our interpretive guesses are correct” (VAL 207) is bleakly isolated. Jameson devotes “little attention” to “interpretive validity” (PU 13). Hartman laments the spectacle of “great talent” “reduced to quarreling about what interpretation” is “correct” (CW 248). Iser's notion of “aesthetic fecundity of meaning” denies any “frame of reference to offer criteria of right or wrong” (AR 230). The Yale group, and recently Culler, clinch the point by making “misreading,” “misunderstanding,” or “misinterpretation” the general case, not the deviation (ALC 277; ANX 30; CW 52; OD 179). They cover all bases with the tactic whereby a critic like Bloom is found, as de Man says, “to be wrong in precisely the way that his own theory of error anticipates” (BI 275). Also, de Man's vision of the “unreadable” text “leading to a set of assertions that radically exclude each other” (ALG 245) has stirred a wide interest.
Two motives for these trends seem plausible. First, the fixing of meanings is inimical to the alternativity that makes literature worthwhile; the authority of correctness too readily glides into the authoritarianism of exclusion. Second, the possibility of correctness is properly an issue for theory to put in question, not merely to accept at face value. Hence, we need not be surprised when our theorists converge on the divergence of meanings. Culler advocates “a semiotics of reading” that “leaves entirely open the question of how much readers agree or disagree in their interpretations”; “in general, a divergence of readings is more interesting than a convergence” (PS 50f.) Jauss repudiates an “understanding” that “reduces the surplus of meaning of the poetic text to just one” (TAR 142). Iser warns that “to impose one meaning as the right, or at least the best, interpretation” is “a fatal trap” that obscures “the potential of the text” (AR, 18). Bleich is disposed to “find “a truth value in any seriously given reading”; “to find complexity and value in a variety of readings” “is more relevant to literary study than the use of standards of interpretive accuracy” (SC 112, 104). Holland sees no “need” for “one central meaning”: “almost any coherent thought about the work will open up paths of gratification” (DY 185).
However, critics do not so easily relinquish the habituated control over meaning. They caution that the attainment of meaning cannot (or should not) be “arbitrary” (TL 42, 152; AR 85; PIP 148; BI 109. TAR 23, 69, 141, 147; MF 403). Hartman's vision of a “hermeneutic ‘infinitizing’ that makes all rules of closure appear arbitrary” (CW 244) is evidently unsettling. Again, most theorists retain the critic's gesture of proceeding in the name of consensus. But even projects for strengthening that consensus -- such as “criticizing a part of our knowledge in light of the higher standard set by another part” (TL 154), or obeying “the principles which underlie the drawing of objective probability judgments in all domains of thought” (VAL 207) -- suggest how fragile it may be.
As we see, the intent to classify literature cannot be pursued very far without immersing us deep in the issues of interpretation and communication, along with cognition and representation of life, reality, and certainty. Such a fate may await all relentless clarifying initiatives directed toward literature. The most hazardous “fallacy” now is the exact converse of those assembled for censure by Frye: truncating the issue at the moment when it becomes unwieldy but peculiarly vital. Being “right” about literature is a far less relevant aspiration than being flexible and radical, that is, etymologically, ready to dig down to the roots.
Instead of classifying literature, we might hope to classify the actions and actors within the literary transaction: how the author produces the text, and how the reader reads it. But as we come to terms with literary versions of this interchange, all straightforwardness and boundedness evaporate. The identities of author and reader seem unstable -- part historical, part symbolic, part created during the act. The text sometimes appears to get free and lead a life of its own, or to get the upper hand over its makers and users; other times, it goes mute and inert, utterly helpless by itself, like a stone graven with an inscription in a lost language.
Traditional “literary criticism” was not plagued by doubt about who should be classified in the leading role: “the author's point of view” was the “main concern” (IR 57). The displacement of this view is unmistakable, though the motives involved are not well analysed. The close interaction between authors and critics has declined, in part insofar as institutionalised criticism jas felt uncomfortable dealing with contemporary works (TL 8, 44), and in part insofar as authors had to strive with rising anguish to satisfy a reading public with tastes quite divorced from those of criticism (El 200). Perhaps too, the fate of criticism in our time depends on forces only indirectly related to authorship, such as the rediscovery of reading a book just because watching a film version of it got you interested.
The once-hallowed devotion to authors’ factual biographies has shrunk dramatically among the crowd I have reviewed. For Fiedler, to be sure, “the poet's life is the focusing glass through which pass the determinants of the shape of his work” (NT 315); and for Bleich, “biographical understanding becomes the starting point for response, interpretation, and literary pedagogy” (SC 160); but neither of them pursues these priorities throughout his practice. For other theorists, the “taboo against biographical criticism” seems to be the order of the day (cf. PU 179). “Considerations of the actual historical existence of writers are a waste of time from a critical viewpoint” (BI 35). “The monographic study of an individual writer” “imposes an inevitable falsification” (MF 315). Nor can a work be used to “draw any valid inference as to the biography of a writer” (TL 76). Even Hirsch, with his uncanny reverence for authorship, keeps “verbal meaning” distinct from “autobiographical meaning” (VAL 16).
The psychonanalytic theorists, as might be expected, approach the author's in terms of an implied personality. Usually, the main source here is the author's works (e.g., DY 241f, RF 4; 3FL 4); conventional biographical materials are chiefly annexed to support a reading.5 [5.To be fair, we must remember that biographical data are traditionally seldom of the kind personality analysis considers most revealing, e.g., about early childhood and psychic traumas. Holland's use of H.D.'s recorded therapy with Freud (PIP 1359) is quite unusual. Yet the Wolfman's rich case history turns up so often (PIP 59, 157, 170; SC 80ff; PS 179; CD 163, 191, 227) that it seems a great pity or else a great blessing that be didn't write literature, or even correspond with Virginia Woolf.] The direct formula of construing literary characters as fantasy projections of the author's self is used by Fiedler and Millett (e.g., LD 115, 252, 498; SX 352, 379, 397). But the strain is noticeable, since as we remarked, literature is no longer widely seen in a reliable relation to reality.
The author's intention also carries little weight in our times. Wellek and Warren sounded the keynote: “The whole idea that the intention of the author is the proper subject of literary history seems” “quite mistaken”; “the meaning of the work is not exhausted by, or even equivalent to, its intention” (TL 42). Other theorists have followed suit. “The author cannot tie the reception to the intention with which be produced the work” (AL 35). “The interpretation of an aesthetic object is not motivated by a wish to know the author's intention” (SC 93). “In literature, we have the least cause to arrest the play of differences by calling on a determinate communicative intention” (PO 133). “Intention” is “not something prior to the text that determines its meaning,” but “always a textual construct” (OD 216). “The attempt to reconstruct an author's intention is only a particular, highly restricted case of rewriting” (OD 38). As usual, Hirsch alone mans the deserted front, fervently ordaining that “the only proper foundation of criticism” is “the philological effort to find out what the author meant” (VAL 57).
The burgeoning skepticism probably pays tribute to a merely practical difficulty: the author's intention is frequently less accessible to scrutiny than the work, which may be the only clue (TL 148; SC 263; OD 216). This circularity, Hirsch hopes, can be broken by gathering “all clues” about “the cultural and personal attitudes the author might be expected to bring to bear” (VAL 240); but the decision regarding what counts as a clue is likely to be even more circular. Hirsch moves from interpretation to “evaluation” to sidestep the prospect that an “intention” might be quite unlike the “accomplishment” (VAL 12; cf. TL 149).
The author's prerogative to decide who the reader shall be is equally backgrounded in recent theorizing. Iser conternplates a “transformation” whereby we might “become” “the author's image of his reader,” but doubts whether a “reader” can “have an identical code to that of the author,” a case that could make “communication” “superfluous” anyway (IR 30; AR 28fi. “Writers” may “imagine a reader,” Holland says, but only to “assuage” their “inner needs”; they do “not predict the ways of real readers” (5RR 219). Conversely, “the reader symbolizes the author,” often into a version “based entirely on his reading” (Bleich, SC 159).
The balance is further relaxed and complicated by repudiating “the idea that an author might be his own ideal reader” (TL 148; AC 6; AR 29). To re-enter the spotlight, the author takes the role of a reader, as in the question-answer dialectic adapted by lser, Jauss, and Jameson, or the threads of influence traced by Bloom. But the Yale group chips away at even this dignity by making the author a “misreader,” no more accurate anyone else, though maybe “stronger.”
And the reader, that modest participant so indispensable, yet barely visible during centuries of criticism, gains a theoretical ascendancy over the author. The gold rush of critics into theory and the grubstakes of funding have made reader and reading into a landscape dotted with innumerable camps hotly contesting bits of territory. So far, the reader is largely an abstraction and thus holds a status differently weighted from that of the author, whose historical existence can be brought into play at strategic moments. What is being classified is not so much practical participants as theoretical modes of reading, that is to say, types of interpretation or response. The number of types keeps growing as more critics scramble to carve out a personal chunk of the reader.
The fact that reading is going on all the time and might be recorded or observed hardly interests only a few of the theorists surveyed here. Wellek and Warren remark that although we might “reconstruct” “concretisations” “from the reports of critics and readers,” “the psychology of the reader” “will always remain outside the object of literary study” (TL 155, 147). Decades later, Culler performs the same advance and retreat: “poetics is essentially a theory of reading,” but “claims about literary competence are not to be verified by surveys of reader's reactions” (PO 128, 125).
Rather than concretely studying general readers, our theorists develop strategies of containment more congenial to their wonted proceedings and commitments. Culler magisterially holds “the considered reactions” of published critics to be “more than adequate as a point of departure for a semiotics of reading; a “survey of undergraduates” would be of scant “interest” (PS 53). The tradition whereby “the critic does not begin by taking surveys to discover the reactions of readers” (PO 50) can be expediently perpetuated: the critic merely “notes his own interpretations and reactions to literary works” and “formulates a set of explicit rules” (PO 128). This advice in effect back-transforms the new reader into the familiar critic. But the apparent convenience can bring severe drawbacks. The opportunity to motivate non-professional readers is thus insouciantly undercut.6 [6. Throughout his ruminations on why the “reader” now has “'a starring role” (OD 32ff), Culler never names the intent I proposed (Ch 2) to motivate ordinary readers with a more challenging view of their role. But of course, his position is mainly anti-empirical and elitist.] The margin between how critics read and how the rest of us read or might read is suppressed before it can be theoretically gauged. Besides, the prospect of finding “explicit rules” may be little more than wishful thinking that ultimately leads to Hirsch's desiccated hermeneutics.
Some of our theorists openly present themselves as readers with peculiar predispositions and personalities (Fiedler, Jauss Holland, Bleich, Paris). Others invoke or act out a reader prominently abstracted from their own theoretical interests (Iser, de Man, Bloom, Hartman, Jameson Millett). Neither group pursues the full implications of generalizing themselves in this way. Instead, personal elements are routinely treated as instantiations of tendencies most readers would enact in comparable terms. Only Holland and Bleich tried to confirm their exemplarily by interviewing more ordinary readers, and even there a certain pressure was exerted to fit one's style to the theorist's. All the same, the “actual and doubtless idiosyncratic performance of individual readers” that Culler thought “dangerous” to “take too seriously” (PO 258) was treated with respect and interest.
The problem of representing the reader is most often handled with a mixed strategy of containment, namely, to enrich the theorist's own idea of how to read with various idealized suppositions about general or desirable conditions and results. Early Fiedler dryly remarked that “the mature writer must write” for “the ideal understander,” a “nonexistent perfect reader” “represented imperfectly but hopefully by a self-perpetuating body of critics” (El 209). Culler's line of argument, inspired by “linguistics,” has a similar tenor, minus (of course) the sarcasm: “The question is not what actual readers happen to do but what an ideal reader must know implicitly” (PO 123f.) “The meaning of a poem within the institution of literature is not” “the immediate and spontaneous reactions of individual readers but the meanings which they are willing to accept when explained” (PO 124). Here, the “ideal reader” is responding not to literature, but to criticism!
An idealizing strategy, though not always named as such, also influences the procedures of Frye, Hirsch, Iser, Bloom, Jameson. and Jauss. 7 [7. We saw Jauss finally trying to make the reader concrete by using himself, but his results still seem to me idealized in scope, order, and detail.]. Each theorist idealizes in a peculiar way. Frye's reader surveys at a glance mighty expanses of human culture. Hirsch's is devoted to strict discipline and logical method. Jauss's is finely skilled in hermeneutics and literary history, Jameson's in dialectics. Bloom envisions a super-reader (“Oberleser”),” “a new mythic being” who “negatively fulfils and yet exuberantly transcends self” (MAP 5). De Man seems to be an example: an executor of “reading” as an “allegory” that “narrates the impossibility of reading” (MAP 5; ALC 77, 205). Iser's strategy is particularly emblematic when be rejects both the “ideal reader” as a figment from “the brain” of “the critic himself” or a “structural impossibility,” and “the “real reader” “reconstructed from documents,” in favour of “the implied reader, “construed in terms of “a network of response-inviting structures which may impel the reader to grasp the text” (AR 27ff, 34). As we noticed, this “reader” is still ideal (and Iser-like), willing to “adapt” and “modify himself” to “an unfamiliar experience” or to “a creative examination” of both text and self (AR 153, 85; IR 290).
But more importantly, the reader is essentially deduced from the text, which thereby becomes a full third agent in the transaction. The “polite fiction” “that books do things to people” (PIP 3) had enjoyed a long career in criticism, presumably as a handy means for hiding both critic and reader behind the text, along with ideology, taste, acculturation, and much else besides. Most of our theorists officially disavow the fiction but, as I kept pointing out, persist in having texts and sentences perform actions. Iser prefers to reshape the fiction by expanding the text from a linguistic artefact to a phenomenal patterning, entraining blanks or gaps which may be filled in more or less appropriate ways, and implying counterparts or negations of available experiences.8 [8. The “negative” potential of art is deemed essential by many theorists (NT 6f, 13, 20; BI 219; CW 183; TAR 41; EH 695; PL 90). That aspect might be an encouragement for applying the “negative” methods of dialectics (IT 211; PU 296) or Derridean deconstruction (SAV 7).] Though his model is still problematic and difficult to document in detail, he does make a spirited attempt to align text and reader in an interaction during which both of them undergo changes. Fiedler has a darker, but still transformative conception: “popular literature makes us more at home with” the “more perilous aspects of our own psyches” (WL 50). Holland's position is intermediate: “the words on the page and the character patterns a reader brings to them” are “fixed,” though the “transaction is highly fluid” (PIP 127). “The reader tries, as he proceeds through the work, to compose from it a literary experience in his particular lifestyle” (PIP 77). Iser protests here: “literature would be superfluous” if it “merely” “demonstrated the functioning or non-functioning of our psychological dispositions” (AR 40); genuine “experiences” demand that “our preconceptions have been modified or transformed” (IR 262). “The reader” “can “bring to light a layer of his personality that be had previously been unable to formulate in his conscious mind” (AR 50). Probably, Holland's model is closer to Iser's than the argy-bargy suggests; the Freudian framework just happens to be far more deterministic than the phenomenological one. Whether readers become different people or just get a better view of themselves as they are is not a burning issue as long as the relation between real and imaginary personalities remains loosely defined.9 [9. Jauss is among the few critics attempting to give some historical concreteness to the reader's acts of identifying with fictional “heroes” (AL 152-188). He blames the general neglect of this issue on Freud for having equated such acts with “daydreaming” (AL 160).]
Deconstruction has furthered a conception of the text being not merely a third agent, but a strenuously disruptive if not insidious one. The structuralist notion of “the subject” as “an abstract and interpersonal construct” “constituted by a series of conventions” easily leads to the vision of “the reader as a function rather than as a person” -- “a place where codes” “are inscribed” (PO 25; CD 33). With de Man and Hartman, language mushrooms into an inappeasable centrifuge of dispersal, a force field whose oscillations no reader can neutralize very long. Literature figures as an unending self-involved rehearsal of the problematics of reading. Paradoxically, however, these critics, far from evaporating in the process, remain starkly conspicuous in their relentless obsession with using every text to make this point and with abjuring mastery in the most masterful style.
A long distance has clearly been traversed since the New Critics banned the “affective fallacy” of failing to maintain a theoretical distinction between the text and a reading of it. The conception of “the work existing only when read,” once dismissed as an invitation to “complete skepticism and anarchy,” heralding “the definite end of all teaching of literature” (TL 146), is now serenely voiced by such baleful antagonists as Hirsch and Bleich (VAL 13; SC 109; cf. Iser, AR 20). The related idea that each rereading is a different experience, formerly harnessed as an argument against “psychological method” (TL 147) or “psychologism” (VAL 32ff), is welcomed by Iser: “the structure-determined unrepeatability of meaning” enables “innovative reading” “on repeated viewings” (AR 150; IR 281).
Descriptions of text and reader are complicated by the theorists’ subsidiary projects of appreciating texts and perhaps of motivating reading. Whatever their proclaimed stance, critics by nature can scarcely pass up an occasion to make text and reader appear ever more special. Interpretation gets evaluated, not merely classified and re-interpreted. Hence, a fair share of contemporary theory is concerned, though frequently beneath the surface, with expounding the benefits of reading in certain ways. Yet this concern impels theorists toward distasteful compromises. Literary roles should be pictured as interesting and challenging, but still feasible and accessible. The transactive, utopian qualities of literary communication are hard to expound to the current pragmatic and egoistic mentality of Western culture. That audience expects the usual school-bred simplifying and stabilizing that minimize creative participation in literature. Perhaps some of the solecisms of our theorists -- the stylistic obscurities, the peremptory arguments, the omission of crucial demonstrations, the strivings for bizarre revelations and paradoxes -- are a defense against a levelling and utilitarian appropriation of literary theory into the culture industry. Unfortunately, this defense may also be putting a severe strain on many people sincerely pledged to let literature be itself, if they just could learn what that means without churning through the fat, often difficult or erudite books I have summarised.
Adolph Tornars’ slogan, approved (in Ch. 4) by Wellek and Warren, that “aesthetic institutions” are “social institutions” must have had a shock value in 1941 for a critical profession wherein ‘art for art's sake” was still a fully respectable doctrine rather than an admission of social indifference or resignation (cf. TL 101; MF 386). But the promise behind the slogan has been slow in its fulfilment. Little is gained by merely asserting that “such traditional literary devices as symbolism or metre are social in their very nature” because they “could have arisen only in society” (TL 94). More interesting is the prospect that “the aesthetic” is not “the final resting place,” because “the work of art” “participates in the vision of the goal of social effort” (AC 348f, 95), but Frye too is sketchy with details.
Moreover, certain theses imply a contrary drift, notably that “literature” is “pure” of practical intent” (TL 239) and invokes “depragmatised norms” or “conventions” (AR 184, 61). “These conventions are taken out of their social contexts” “and so become objects of scrutiny in themselves” (AR 61). Even supposing this process has occurred, the reader is still challenged to bring the results of that “scrutiny” back to bear upon “social contexts”; and Iser too is not entirely clear about how that move might be guaranteed for readers who lack his own virtuosity.
In the context of society, literature is uncomfortably positioned between description and change. Our theorists often indicate that reading it helps loosen readers from social roles and strictures (e.g. AC 233, 348; AR 6, 212; IR xiii; PIP 46; SC 150; PAF 6f, TAR 41, 45; AL 154; PU 79). Yet an explicit interaction with “sociology” or “social science” is recommended by some (LD 10; WL 115; 5RR 270; SC 25f; CW 240; TAR 9, 40; AL 287; PU 297) and mistrusted by others (TL 16, 95, 130; PO 258; SX 312). Perhaps we don't relish contemplating how society is marginalizing the arts. Or we are nervous about the prospect of art being judged solely for its usefulness to current social systems. But some contact with social science is needed for probing how “literature” “tends to influence “real life” without being its “mirror” (LD 31; TL 103).
Moreover, the notion that art and aesthetics have contributed to the concepts of sociology deserves attention (TL 102; PU 55; 5RR 261f; AL 134; PU 55, 297). Wellek and Warren's view that “it will be the task of literary sociology to trace” the “exact social status” of the “intelligentsia” (TL 98) has intriguing implications for literary scholars and theorists. Frye proclaims “the social task of the “intellectual”: “to defend the autonomy of culture” (AC 127). Our theorists are themselves undeniably intellectuals (cf. El xii; DY 222; CW 197), and they affirm the value of “intellectual respectability” (VAL 164; DY 184) or “integrity” (BI 110; SX xiv). Yet current discussions signal an uneasiness that “intellectual” persons and activities can limit or distort experiences, including literary ones (e.g. TL 102; IE 7; RF 69; PL 6, 214). For Millett, “intellectuality” has traditionally been a “masculine” monopoly (SX 86, 280). For Paris, it marks “the “perfectionistic” person” (PAF 60). For Holland, “academics and intellectuals often present the appearance” of “cold fish,” because they “put up a barrier between sensuous emotional experience and the intellectual problems with which they concern themselves” (DY 171). For Jarneson, intellectuals are devoted to “purely contemplative consumption” (MF xv). Hence, the social role of at least some intellectuals might be to surround the arts with strategies of containment that serve ruling interests. Perhaps our theorists disparage traditional ideals in an attempt to escape suspicions levelled at the very establishment they work in for being “set apart from the general public” and “speaking a different language” (El 6; cf. CW 284).
While interpretation gets evaluated, evaluation clamours to be interpreted. Values have usually been incorporated or presupposed in the discussion as if they were self-evident. Later, theorists like the structuralists (and Frye) proposed to disregard values. The recent consensus is that values cannot be eliminated, but their use can be subjected to concentrated scrutiny. To keep the merit of literature or its works as an unexamined initial premise is to miss a cultural opportunity. The elitism, abjured by Wellek and Warren and espoused by Bloom (TL 21f; MAP 39), of refusing to contemplate anything but “great” works, is too costly for theory, especially when, as in Bloom's case, the standards of greatness are obscure. We not only overlook popular literature, which sheds light on central literary concerns, such as the transmission of myths and archetypes or the formation of expectations (cf. TL 46; AC 17, 108; WL 36, 129; PIP 128; AL 270f, PU 85f., MF 377). We also narrow our vision of potential criteria that encourage or discourage people to value literature.
No doubt, values seem intractable for theory on multiple grounds. They are nominally absent (i.e. really hidden) from scientific methods. They vary among different individuals, cultures, or times. They pervade virtually all experience and all language, with no special demarcations for art or literature. Their relation to other aspects of a literary work is often submerged and problematic. But although “value-judgements,” as Frye says, are “not statements of fact” (AC 20), the activity of making them is a fact of human response -- a crucial one for any argument to encourage reading.
Within the contexts of theory, value criteria have multiple functions. In a personal context, they motivate and guide the procedures of each theorist rnoving between a general theory and a specific work. In a social context, they account for the motives any group of real readers might have for working through literature. In a research context, they set future goals for theoretical explication. Few social activities today reflect values as diffuse and disputatious as our uses of art; and so far, our theorists have largely evaded the problems by idealizing reading and proclaiming values in very abstract terms: complexity, coherence, allusiveness, negativity, reflexivity, insight, pleasure, and so forth.
Since the social context is by far the most urgent at present, it deserves our primary focus. The privilege of trying out forms of experience without having to confront the material consequences of real life is claimed for literary reading by Fiedler, lser, Jauss, Holland, Bleich, Paris, and Jameson. Readers can escape their normal limitations without surmounting practical difficulties or setting off irreversible chains of events. Yet the ambivalence of this freedom is acknowledged by Iser, Jauss, Jameson, and Millett: readers may refuse the occasion for insight. Just as no author, critic, or teacher can directly enforce a single literary response, no theorist can guarantee that literature as a whole will be used according to its more productive opportunities. At most, we can work to create favourable conditions for the uses we advocate; and the rise to power of critical theory gives reason to hope that this project stands a chance.
Yet potential obstacles abound, as even the most hopeful theorists admit. Art may be severed from its alternativity and negative potential, and enlisted in an affirmation of the world as it is, or in a fantasy of pure escapism (Fiedler, lser, Jauss). Or, art may be made to carry reactionary programs encouraging society to return to outworn ideologies or to ignore social change (Jameson, Millett). In the view of Freudians like Fiedler, Holland, and Bloom, literature activates darker instincts, deflecting perhaps some more dangerous release, but not effectively lifting a reader above libido or savagery. Millett, on the contrary, proposes an enlightened counter-reading to transcend the power of instinct. She repudiates the Freudian orthodoxy that people irresistibly flee from all experiences which are perceived, however unrealistically, as threats, and tolerate literature only to the degree that it abets rather than dispels self-mystification.
Theorists who posit a genuine enrichment of understanding as a benefit of literature, such as Frye, Iser, Jauss, Bleich, Paris, and Jameson, often propound a multi-stage model of reading expanding from narrower out to larger concerns: from text to context, from private to public, from personal to social, from the present to history, and so on. Jauss and Bleich have traced in considerable detail how this sequence might be navigated for a specific work. Frye's and Jameson's progressions are less fine-tuned, their end-stages being hugely amplified -- at the point where “literature” “imitates the thought of a human mind” “at the circumference” of “reality,” or at “the ultimate horizon of human history as a whole” (AC 119; PU 76).
Another benefit of literature is typically designated “freedom” or “enancipation” (AC 348; AR 177; TAR 45; AL 110; EH 751; CW 2; MF 86, 101). On occasion, a “revolutionary” act of consciousness may be performed (AC 344; SX 29, 489; PL 90; PU 97). Yet because of “the emancipatory chance,” “those in authority are interested in making” art “serve their ends” (AL 13). Besides, “cultural activity” “presupposes” “class privileges” and “leisure” (MF 161). A special way of reading is thus required to offset these dangers, such as a Marxist “hermeneutic” that can “read the very content and formal impulse of the texts themselves as figures” of the “revolutionary wish,” of “psychic wholeness, or freedom, or of the drive toward Utopian transfiguration” (MF 159).
Aesthetic experience is generally regarded as a further benefit, an emancipation of a particular sort (e.g., TAR 41, 45). However, theorists are much sketchier about the nature and operation of this experience than about its rewards. The contemplation of beauty at the centre of classicist aesthetics is regarded with distrust, mainly because it underrates the active, dynamic aspect of response. As lser says, “the aesthetic quality” properly “lies in” the “structure” of “performances of meaning” (AR 27). Attempts are made to reinterpret the concept of a “renewal of perception” inherited from critics since Aristotle down to the Formalists (AL 12; PL 54). For Jauss, the “aesthetic” “makes possible a mode of perception at once more complex and more meaningful” than “everyday perception” (TAR 142). For Jameson, “the ostranenie or ‘making-strange’ of Russian Formalism” and “indeed the profound drive everywhere in modern art toward a renewal of our perception of the world, are but manifestations, in aesthetic form and on the aesthetic level, of the movement of dialectical consciousness as an assault on our conventionalised life patterns,” “an implicit critique and restructuration of our habitual consciousness” (MF 373f.)
The unity of the work, another mainstay of classicist aesthetics, is still assumed at times (TL 27, 78; AC 77, 80, 82, 246; NT 7), but more often put in question. 10 [10. A typical instance would be when Cassirer's (1953:182) position is called in question by Paris that “'in every artistic creation, we find a definite teleological structure,” wherein “every facet of the work is part of a coherent structural whole”(PAF 71). The notion of “materials” of a literary work” being “pulled into polyphonic relations by the dynamics of aesthetic purpose,” as propounded by Wellek and Warren after Ingarden (TL 241), reconciles diversity and unity, but is perhaps still too strong for recent theorists.] Wellek and Warren remark on the ensuing “rigid” quality of “tone” (TL 234). Holland moves “unity” from the “text” over to the reader's “identity” (PIP 112; 5RR Ill, 259f.) Paris suspects that demands for unity of viewpoint cloud readers” appreciation for the mimetic value of disparities between representation and interpretation, or between diverse perspectives or personalities of characters (PAF 11; HAR 212). Iser's ideas that “aesthetic” “designates a gap in the defining qualities of language,” and that its “experience” reveals “the gulf between illusion and reality” (AR 22; IR 111) find a counterpart in the deconstructionist pursuit of incurable “gaps within reading,” between sign-systems, between constative and performative, and so on, whereby “the unity of the text becomes uncertain” (SAV 8; cf. OD 256, 260; ALC 40, 44, 99, 249).11 [11. De Man decries the “symbol” for being “founded on an intimate unity” between “image” and “totality” (BI 189), but it's hard to see how his general view of language could allow such a unity anyway.] But this trend is sometimes restrained: Culler abandoned his confidence that “unity is produced” by “the intent at totality of the interpretive process,” but retained “unity as a problematic figure” “not easy to banish” and as a “question” “interpreters” cannot “ignore” (PO 91; OD 200, 220).
The problems of aesthetics reveal critical theory again caught between describing and re-estimating. The attempt to tell us how aesthetic experience works can lead to a protest that both society and previous aestheticians have been significantly misled; instead of merely documenting widespread expectations, theorists now try to disavow them. Evidently, traditional aesthetics is considered sufficiently inadequate for the literary transaction as to call for an energetic revision, even at the risk of undermining a common argument in support of art. One motive might be to tip the balance away from passivising consumption toward creative participation (Iser, Jauss, Bleich, de Man, Hartman): beauty, harmony, and unity are not achieved by the work for everyone and forever, but, optionally and perhaps optimally, by the experience. Another motive might be to animate society into reducing the lag between its classicist orientation and the praxis of modernist art, and thereby making the reception of art more vital and immediate.
However, our theorists are not necessarily anxious to replace classicism with modernism. Modernist art and literature are occasionally decried as “a dead end,” a striving for “extreme incoherence,” or an “impoverishing” “disruption” of “old long-felt self-coherent ways of life” (WL 93, 90; TL 192). “The widely intelligible symbolism” of the past yields to “private symbolism” (TL 189). “The avant-gardism of modern écriture” arouses only “a theoretical and philological interest in a reference-less language game” (AL 87). Now that “the aesthetics of mimesis has lost its obligatory character,” “the modern development of art” was "put down” by “doctrinaire” “Marxism” as “decadent because “true reality” is missing” (TAR 31, 11). Also, a decline in the power of “myths” is diagnosed (TL 192; IR xiii, 200), though Frye finds instead a “reappearance of myth” (AC 42, 48f.)
Apparently, our theorists are worried lest modernism “produce novels intended not for the marketplace of their own time, but for the libraries” of the future; or “surrender the cognitive and communicative efficacy of aisthesis” (WL 64; AL 87). Iser, however, recognizes the “esotericism,” the “increased” “indeterminacy,” and the “reaction against the norms of prevailing aesthetic theory” as appropriate for “the modern world,” wherein “we are denied direct insight into the meaning of events” (AR 208, 206 11; IR 180). Also, “the modern novel thematizes” “blanks” “in order to confront the reader with his own projections” (AR 194). Accordingly, modern criticism should surrender “the traditional form of interpretation,” the quest for “a single ‘hidden’ meaning” (AR 10). “Modern hermeneutics” becomes “negative” and “doubts” “master theories” (CW 239).
So, having pursued literature through classification, interpretation, and evaluation in various combinations, we come back to historicizing. Our theorists agree the conventional study of literary history has been weakened in its credibility and cries out for change (TL 2 54; AC 62, 315; AR 77, 130; DY xvii; PIP 134; ALC ix; BI 165; ANX 69; CW 102f; SX xiv; TAR 3, 49, 51; PL 5, 97). But little consensus obtains about where to go now. The most urgent project would seem to be situating literature and literary theory in their contemporary historical setting. Yet attempts to do so are tremendously complicated by the range of variations among current programs and projects. The traditional reverence for author, work, and art have all been unsettled. The renewed devotion to the reader still lacks effective unity and is managed with complex strategies of containment.
In whose name then does the contemporary theorist speak, and with whose voice? With a borrowed voice, entering partly by stealthy expropriation, partly by ancestral haunting, said the Yale critics, and did their best to stage it that way. But that reply could be only the darker side of the story. The whole is not just one more “story of reading,” as Culler is pleased to say, but a communal story of storytelling about reading, and a drama as well, one which tells us as we tell it, and interchanges roles in the very midst of its episodes. The theme of this story is vision, the possibilities and perils of seeing into and through texts and textuality. The narrative line seems to herald some turn of events, if not a declamatory denouement, at least an upward fall, the start of a more animate life.
Could we at least classify the story? According to Frye's scheme of “modes,” when a protagonist is superior to us in kind, the story is a “myth”; when superior in degree, the story is a “romance” (cf. AC 33). We have had many “myths” about authors in the past, and Bloom now invents one more, proffering it for the critic to usurp; but the age of myths seems unrecallable. Even “romance” is impractical to sustain, though the heroics of Bloom and early Fiedler flitter stirringly between metempsychosis and meta-psychosis. So we are left to tell of author, reader, and critic in the “high mimetic mode” of tragedy, the “low mimetic mode” of comedy and realism, or the “ironic mode” Frye feels is most appropriate to our age. The composite story of reading blends these modes, depending on who is cast in the leading role: tragedy (the real Bloom and early Fiedler), comedy (Holland, late Fiedler), realism (Paris, Bleich), and irony (de Man, Culler), plus the erudite, allusive satire or “anatomy” (with Frye as best actor and Hartman in a close supporting role).
But this classification is itself a satire, another wave of irony and rhetoric washing across the mosaic detritus of criticism. Still, we may profit from the allegory of modes to recall how far the theorist-critic is both acting the reader and casting the dramatis personae for the story of the reader. Differences in vision and action begin to protrude; what is visible to theorist, critic, and reader, so often rolled into one, might be unpacked, situated, historicized.
In the most abstract scenario, the theorist reads a work and responds first as reader, then as critic; this response is thereafter read as a further text to generate another mode of response that foregrounds what is general, permanent, essential, or desirable. This higher response leads to yet another text, being the theory (or model, or method, or approach, or whatever one calls it). Yet real-life performances complicate this scenario at every turn. The critic cannot start as the typical reader, but at most try to compel a momentary reduction or regression into that role. The line between the individual and the general won't hold still, being elasticized by the literary process itself. As a result, the various responses and texts spill over into each other, and the slippage and seepage forms a new scenario, untidy but revealing.
Here, the key moves to watch are the motions whereby the theorist-critics end up treating their own reading (both the act and the report) as the proper one; and their gesture of observing themselves in that motion and explaining the why and the how. When students” interpretations are critiqued or rejected (e.g. VAL 73f, 194f; SC 103f; RF 28f; PS 53), nothing more than the traditional criteria of credentials and expertise may be implicated. But refutations of other critics and theorists imply some claim that the theorist's own model affords a special vision which demands and rewards our consideration.
Our curiosity should be piqued when a theorist introduces subsidiary materials a firm sceptic might refuse to find in the immediately perceived text: “gaps,” “blanks,” or “minus functions” (Iser), “horizons of expectations” (Jauss), “archetypes” (Frye, Fiedler), “unwitting” “insights” (de Man), “inner conflicts” (Paris), “libidinal fantasies” (Holland), “revisionary ratios” (Bloom), “alien presences” (Hartman), “history as an absent cause” (Jameson), and so on. The theorist's own vision endows such constructs with an assertive presence. But each theorist seems to have difficulty seeing what the others see. To maintain that “blanks,” “ratios,” or whatever, are “present” or “there” “in the text” (AR 216; BF 29) is an anachronistic reflex, a reversion to traditional authorization, understandable but, in this belated era, merely diversionary.
The theorist is thus obliged to enrich the story with a subplot expatiating on differences in vision. Deconstructionists stage a scene of recognition in which other critics are displayed stumbling blindly upon unwanted insights while undermining what is expressly asserted (e.g., BI 28; OD 203ff); since the argument makes this quandary universal, one's own understanding must always be purchased with somebody else's misprision. Jauss surpasses critics who lacked “the hermeneutic key of the allegorical method” (TAR 180); Iser those who “scrutinize a work of art for its hidden meaning” (AR 12); Jameson those who “sort out” “literary history into the classic periodisation” in a “nondialectical” fashion (MF 375); and so on.
Thus far, the leading protagonist for this kind of subplot is the “unconscious”': the agent-space where all manner of processes occur that authors and readers wouldn't know about. As we have observed, some appeal to the “unconscious” is made in the theorizing of all our sample critics, constituting an astonishing unison within the discord of voices. Some of the enthusiasm may be due to a simple lack of knowledge about writing and reading and to the related difficulties of observing what's going on, even for the people involved in the actions. The unconscious has a comfortably intangible quality that makes it a congenial preserve for correspondingly intangible entities.
However, unanimity quickly vanishes when our theorists declare what the unconscious contributes. The orthodox Freudian admits only libidinal fantasies; the Jungian revisionist derives collective myths and archetypes; the Horneyan points to inner needs deferred by one's dominant solution (e.g., DY 28; AC 17, 100; NT 319; 3FL 37). Feminists and Marxists interpret the unconscious as political. Post-structuralists hold it to be rhetorical. It even makes guest appearances in the phenomenological and historical methods of Iser and Jauss as a supplier of “symbols” (e.g. AR 158; TAR 439 169).12 [12. “Symbolic” qualities of literature are typically foregrounded (TL 94; NT 3 Is; LD 28f; AR 158 ; PIP 151; LEE 125; MF 143; PU 20). But concern is voiced over the possible deviousness of “symbolic” interpretation (PIP 29; 5RR 218; SX 402; TAR 181; PU 65), and de Man would strip the “symbol” of all its privileges (BI 189, 208). See Note 12.] Hirsch brings up “unconscious meanings” only to filter them out of the author's intention for not involving “the element of will” (VAL 51f.)
The borderline between the unconscious and the conscious is also in dispute. For Wellek and Warren, “the relative parts played” by each side are essential for “any modern treatment of the creative process” (TL 88). For Culler, “the line between” the two is “highly variable, impossible to verify, and supremely uninteresting” (PO 118), a view Hirsch too adopts for “many cases” (VAL 51). Still, however the line may be drawn, criticism inevitably reshapes it by “helping to make conscious those aspects of the text which would otherwise remain concealed in the subconscious” (IR 260). For the Freud-Jung group, the result is a loss of power; for phenomenologists, a rise in self-realization; for feminists and Marxists, a gain in social awareness. Whether loss or gain, the status of the revealed materials may be altered so drastically that their original function is hard to estimate. Fiedler is most profoundly troubled by this recycling (El 146; NT 49; WL 130f.); criticism might uproot the power of literature with too much digging.
The story of different visions can be strategically dramatized through the Freudian view of the unconscious (or “id” or “libido”) waging implacable warfare with the conscious (or “ego” or “superego”). Gaps in vision are created by the “censorship” of messages passing between combatants (e.g., DY 114; SX 393, 402). The cast of characters is a natural hit, replete with lurid overtones of the battle of darkness and light, evil and good. And a stark way to score victories is to cast one's lot with the dark side (Bloom, Fiedler, Holland).
But more temperate positions proliferate. The theorist may stress the division or decentering of the “self” or “subject” without loading the values (Iser, de Man, Hartman, Culler, Jameson). Or, prospects of a movement toward unity and equilibrium may be raised -- the identity theme (Holland), the balancing of needs and conflicts (Paris), a free, non-proprietary sexuality (Millett), or a reconciliation of subject and object (Iser, Jameson). These movements are utopian, but then, I maintain, so is the understanding of literature – and such is the ultimate motive for writing and reading it, no matter what any senior professor turned “literary theorist” may say. The sombre rebellion of the underself is one pathway in this unfenced utopia; even the stern Freudians relax the hostilities by portraying literature as a refined mode of “defense” against fear and inner recidivism. 13 [13. But Hartman thinks that language itself is partly the agent whereby the “self” is “bypassed” and unsettled” (SAV 2).]
Another popular story of different visions sets literature in the realm of processes similar to dreaming (Wellek, Warren, Frye, Fiedler, Holland, Bleich, Hartman). This move entails some evasive parallels between rhetoric and dreamwork, such as that between “metaphor” and “sublimation” (MAP 100), or between “condensations” and “linguistic effects” like “ambiguity” and “wit” (DY 58f.) The dream is the classic window into the unconscious, and in the Freudian vision, has the attraction of lending the unreal a peculiarly tyrannical unseen presence.
Nonetheless, Freud's theory of dreams make a shaky foundation after severe setbacks from empirical evidence indicating that a repressed wish is by no means always the origin; that much of the material may be generated via nonsensical signals from the brain stem, which the forebrain does its best to interpret; and that the search for underlying meanings may therefore be otiose. 14 [14. Compare the references in Note 34 to Ch. 10 and in Beaugrande (1984b).] Until now, however, contemporary theorists are unperturbed by the weakening of the dream-process as a literal model for the literary experience. As a figural model, the exemplary interpretations performed by Freud, Jung, or Lacan continue to spearhead the drive for a more radical hermeneutics, an expanded mode of troping and rewriting. 15 [15. Jameson's estimation of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams as a 'fundamental hermeneutic manual' seems widely shared, e.g., by Fiedler (WL 138f), Bleich (SC 69, 79), Hartman (CW 290), Culler (OD 160), and of course Holland (5RR 16, 207).] The move to convert defenses and syndromes into rhetorical figurations is highly emblematic (Culler, de Man, Bloom, Hartman, occasionally Jauss and Frye). The marginalising of sexuality in Freudian argument is another powerful signal of revision (ANX 115; PU 64f; MF xv).
The story of vision may have helped to set criticism free from the author. The theorist can see what is hidden not only to the ordinary reader or mundane colleague, but to the work's own creator. The putative intention of the author reduces to one proposal among others, possibly, but not necessarily, in contact with privileged information. The author may equally well have been constrained or misled by an inner conflict, a repression of libidinal fantasies, an anxiety about influences, a blindness inherent in the practice of language, and so forth. Theories that expound such constraints empower us to surpass or reshape authorial intentions, even explicitly declared ones. This step in effect brings criticism closer to literary creativity -- a prospective grounding for the Yale group's move toward assimilation (but that is another story I'll save for a bit).
The revision of psychoanalysis to suit the purposes of critical theory is only the most developed and widespread example to date of a general modus vivendi, in which claims for special vision are anchored in domains beyond literature. Bleich brings tidings from developmental biology, Hartman from philosophy and theology, Jameson from Marxism, and Millett from feminism. In each case, what results is by no means the routine vision those domains put into practice. Bleich pleads for the experience of negotiated subjectivity in defiance of the actual evolution of human development. Hartman's appropriation of philosophy and theology pointedly breaks with their hallowed decorum and tradition. Jameson strenuously detaches himself from Marxist orthodoxies. And Millett's expose creates the feminist outlook as much as demonstrates it, and in the process, the foundations of social science and psychoanalysis. Within these respective domains, our theorists would be marginal heretics, easily neutralized. But here in critical theory, their stories have the gradiose dramatic momentum of a double heresy whose vision falls on uncharted and unchartered lands in between the two realms they seek to span.16 [16. Should general systems theory and cybernetics become points of reference, as suggested by lser and Holland (AR 67, 194, 200f; 5RR 288; DGF 2), a similar revision will be in the offing, since aesthetic systems have none of the classical properties like linearity, closed-loop feedback, or invariant reference standards. Compare Beaugrande (1987a).]
We may thus appreciate why our theorists resists a direct importation of scientific method (TL 16; NT 300; WL 115, 131; 5RR 42; SC 14, 33f; BI 109; CW 156; SX 313; TAR 55; PU 38; PL vi). True, they cannot quite quell their nostalgia for discipline and solidarity. Frye claims for literary study a “precisely similar training of mind” to that in “the study of science” (AC 10f.) Culler finds the “mental process” in “literary education” just as “coherent and progressive” (PO 121). Hirsch sees “the same” “cognitive element in both” (AIM 149). Fiedler would propose “poetry” as the “conscience” of “science” (NT 300). Even Bloom, who panegyrically ululates that “there is no method other than yourself,” likens his byzantine “map” to a “paradigm” in “normal science” (CCP 9, e.d.; BF 19). Still, the project of using “linguistics” to make literary studies into a science is generally disavowed (PO 4, 7, 27, 73; TL 176, 178; AR 31f, 34; SC 100; BI 12; TAR 140, 181; PU 9).17 [17. Jauss does however foresee a role for “text linguistics” in studying “the psychic process in the reception of a text” (TAR 23). For a survey of the field with many literary examples, see Beaugrande and Dressler (1981).]
Critical theory prefers to pursue its own modes of vision while offering them to the sciences as a complement rather than a derivate, and stands ready to “reforge the broken links” between “art and science” (AC 354). The key precondition is plain: the relation between the sciences and criticism must be dialogical rather than imitative or imperialistic. Critical theory should interact with philosophy, psychology, psychoanalysis, sociology, anthropology, and so on (AC 350; LD 10; PIP 135; 5RR 270; OD 182; CW 240; PU 37f); but it should not abandon its own methods in favour of theirs -- or arrantly command them to give up theirs for its own. Literature can “illuminate and situate the problems addressed by these disciplines by offering a perspective that consists primarily” of the “awareness of textuality” (PS 226). A beneficial expansion of scope is promised, since, as I said, “literary theorists” “are able to welcome theories that challenge the assumptions of orthodox” science (OD 11).
Some of our theorists are already busily unveiling the extent to which literary categories and methods are entailed in psychoanalysis and therapy, in the sociology of roles and identities, or in the representational strategies of historiography, philosophy, and theology. The transactive, dialogical qualities of literature ensure that its theoretical explorations will spill over into the concerns of these domains. It estranges by summarily putting a particular philosophy or theology into a quasi-experiential practice; reanimates history by making us impossible spectators of a past rendered too alive to resist; rewrites human existence by recasting personalities and societies into patterns we see as both fiction and essence; and so forth. In such imaginative spaces, science can realize how far reality can embrace all that happens to be missing.
At the other end of the spectrum from scientific interchanges comes a strange story indeed -- simple, old, and yet new enough to awaken the antique surprise of a pre-socratic sophism or a Zen parable. Some theorists carried their search for the realms of literature and criticism to the conclusion that the two are one and the same. This genial stroke sweetens the labours of the search and monumentalises the practice of critical writing. De Man seems to have revivified the aesthetics of Friedrich Schlegel -- who succeeded as a critic and failed as an author -- in order to decree that “critics can be granted the full authority of literary authorship” (BI 80), and his colleagues at Yale concurred heartily, startlingly (ANX 25, 94f; CW 6, 9, 152). 18 [18. The paper on Poulet wherein the decree was made in these words (BI 80) dates from 1969. De Man's austere, sparse work is filled with such hints and flashes that appear in more drastic formulations of Hartman and Bloom.]De Man's view of authors circling in quiet desperation in or around the prison-house of language would seem to place criticism beyond any pleasure principle. Hartman's authors, however, hear sacred voices, and Bloom's are prophets, daemons, or gods; the critics stand to radiate a glory of utmost sublimity.
Notes toward a supreme fiction, a rousing winter’s tale to enliven an ordinary evening in New Haven? Pursued to its limits, the story unravels, too much like some serf-aggrandising fantasy woven from the Annunciation, the Promised Land, the frog-prince, Narcissus, and Horatio Alger, and staged by Monty Python. The climax is still missing, and most of the possible denouements are dubious. In the most proximate scenario, future anthologies of literature for our times would be filled with Yale-school criticism. 19 [19. Tom Wolfe (1975: 118F) similarly (and facetiously) suggests that in “the great retrospective exhibition of American Art 1945-75, the three artists who will be featured” will be not painters, but the art critics Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, and Leo Steinberg.] Further criticism of those works would be required, but that too should become literature through the same equation, and the cycle might reverberate indefinitely, even into an avowedly unliterary study like my book.
And if made retroactive, the equation would titanically inflate the vessel of past literature. Such proliferating might seem desirable if one assumes that new literature will decline while criticism expands to fill the void. This hybrid “art” would dwell entirely in the universities, where writers-in-residence are already established; but now authorship would be granted along with a degree in criticism. Meanwhile, the study of works traditionally considered “literature” would have to compete with the burgeoning self-preoccupation of the new literature-criticism.
A grandiose dream, perhaps, to refound the valence of criticism by swift expropriation rather than by the long trek across the turbulent expanse of closely argued methodologies. The whole equation would be better seen as the figure for a wish that the critic's progress through the work could somehow finally merge into the text it traverses; and as a further move to clear a space for more creative discourse, and to problematise the function of criticism by adding some more extravagant positions to the spectrum. Moreover, the power of literature to prefigure its own criticism becomes thematic as the inversion of the critic's scramble to postfigure literature.
One unmistakable impact of “creative” criticism has been a marked change in verbal decorum in the erstwhile homeland of the dapper New Critics. From the “sober exposition” still practised by Hirsch (VAL 33) to the bombastic manifesto of Bloom or the wrenching word-wit of Hartman stretches a territory made broader and freeer by the annexation of intemperate zones. Complaints are lodged from time to time against a new violence of language, styles, and tropes. But what is at stake may be rather a counteraction answering a presumed original violence of language and representation (a theme of Derrida’s cited in Ch. 19 on Irigaray) that academic criticism had solicitously declined to see in our texts.20 [20. An eloquent passage in the Grammatology argues that the ‘'originary violence of language’ is that of inscribing in a classifying and differentiating system” (SAV 92). The “instance of violent inscription” Hartman provides is contemplated as “the sign of an internal discourse that has become lacunary, because censored or mutilated” (SAV 92, 58). Compare Note 31 to Ch. 14; Note 27 to Ch. 15; and Note 24 to Ch. 16].
Jameson, Millett, Fiedler, and Holland contemplate from different coigns the troubling undercurrent of physical and social violence in cultural monuments, sometimes explicit, but often carefully repressed, transformed, and displaced, with the compliance of customary criticism. The language of post-structuralism cuts closer to the bone by injecting violence into the very medium of criticism and saluting, rather than masking, the dark denied underside of discourse (cf. BI 109). The “organized violence” committed on everyday language,” discovered in poetry by the Formalists (TL 171), and the “violent dislocations” of “customary logic,” seen by Frye in the “satire” (AC 310), drift into criticism for a new purpose.
Viewed as an episode within the full story of critical theory, even the most radical, specialized, or arcane project assumes an incisive valence, as if the fate of reading and criticism are always at stake. Our theorists seem to sense the urgency; their engagement with a text, and be it the briefest fragment, becomes a microcosm, an epigram for the most general drifts and quandaries the use of language can raise. Since some form of practice must match any theory, 21 [21. Hartman denounces a “false conception of a rift between theory and practice” that “keeps growing” (CW 297). “Even when we engage theory, we often do so to delimit it.” Therefore, “the initiative passed so completely to Europe that practice there bears too small a proportion to theory.”] why not enlist the text as performer and practitioner? That the practice of “écriture” -- reading, writing, and the whole institutional nexus they entail-should remain the test of critical theories is only just consequence, forty years after Wellek and Warren inaugurated the “theory of literature” squarely within the purview of the “actual works of art” (TL 139). “Typical” for a whole “generation,” de Man “found himself unable to progress beyond local difficulties of interpretation” and “had to shift” to “the problematics of reading” (ALC ix).
Since then, “the difficult alliance” “between speculation and close reading” has animated critical practice “to reject previous rules of expository spareness, pedagogical decorum, and social accommodation” (CW 174). Yet still today, “the avant-garde essay insists on the priority of reading over theory even while insisting on the importance of theory” (CW 175). And the “theory it engages” is “a textual entity to be worked through like a poem or prose artefact. Theory is (as yet) part of our textual environment and not an independent or premature agency to unify that environment.” Theory thus compounds the task of reading it was supposed to master, assigning us the additional labour of reading ourselves reading, writing ourselves writing, and nothing but inertia or exhaustion can halt the regress into ever-further layers in the onion of our self-consciousness.
In true poetic justice, contemporary theory is left hovering between show and tell, between acting out and analysing the roles in literary transactions. Our critics want to prove upon themselves how theory can be practised. They invest enough zeal in the proof to nearly bankrupt their successors with performances of unreachable virtuosity. The anxiety of influence casts a growing shadow upon the future of criticism. The belief in one's own specialness will never rest quietly beside the drive to be a model for the general reader. The very sincerity of the theorist enforces some exercise of duplicity whereby the most intensely personal moment of insight is hinted to be eternal, universal. “That every literary theory is based on the experience of a limited canon or generalizes strongly from a particular text-milieu” (CW 299) is a part of the dilemma and cannot be excised. Perhaps a theory that extends no further than the talents and powers of its own proponent exerts a weak claim on our concern. As many stars in the theoretical firmament approach the age of retirement, the discipline honours them assiduously with symposia, salaries, and academic distinctions of unprecedented resplendence, as if to congratulate all of us, yet secretly wondering if their performance even allows, let alone guarantees, a future. A sense of common direction can hardly be expected to crystallize by itself out of private charisma in public action. Attempting to follow, say, the act of a de Man, a Bloom, or a Jameson -- to say nothing of a Derrida or a Lacan -- with echo or imitation is to risk intransigent irony and irredeemable parody that most damages what it would preserve. A method with no madness in it may seem paltry just now; but contagion is no substitute for generation.
My own impression is that some fundamental policy-making is in order. Not that we should narrow down our options, but that we should enumerate and circumscribe them as points in a sharable space of discourse. We need to see more clearly where they split and converge, cross and uncross, and circle back around certain landmarks familiar and strange at once, as in allegory or dream. We have a set of ways of reading which theorists may not openly prescribe, recalling the rebuke of our older prescriptivism by the scientist; but which are recommended by their very example and the attention they call to their every move. We thus have a range of imperatives to read in particular ways; but their totality is the imperative that we must not read in only one way, ever again, no matter what the partisans of the day proclaim.
I have essayed to push my own reading of a gallery of critics to the threshold where I might try out their respective modes of vision like E.T.A. Hoffmann's wondrous spectacles, perhaps at the risk of being smitten by a marvellously crafted automaton, or of stuffing a new ghost into the old machine. Until recently, we might have indeed beheld many mechanical methods in the making. Structuralism certainly, under the tutelage of linguistics, aspired to become automatic, to churn out pure formalisms for attested facts voided of messy contexts and with all content converted to form. And in their own ways, the earlier efforts of Formalism, New Criticism, close reading, and explication de texte had extended some promise of a rationality and efficiency fully independent of user and material, or of subject and object. Today, however, we behold no smooth-running critical machines or factories. Even the ambition to see 'schools” in recent theory is swiftly defeated, or maintained only through sly decantings and denaturings. The mass exodus from Yale of all the “Yale critics” looks only too fitting to someone like me who has burrowed in search of their commonalities; Bloom may have de Man as a daemon, and Hartman as an apostle-apologist-apostate, but the three super-egos defy seamless subsumption as resolutely as if they had never been neighbours.
So whatever critical theory may be, it cannot exhaust itself in normalizing reading by making standard intuitions explicit, as Culler once hoped. Instead, we set in motion a problematics that rapidly loses all semblance of regularity or self-evidence upon contact between theory and text, or theorist and reader. The theorist may struggle to contain, delimit, define (Hirsch, Wellek and Warren); or may welcome the tumult (de Man, Bloom,); or may start with containment and end in tumult (Frye, Culler); or propose a different mode of order behind apparent disarray (Jameson, Bleich, Paris), previously obscured by an evasion of what is unwelcome to face (Holland, Fiedler, Millett, Irigaray). But none get themselves and their enterprise back unmediated.
In an age of dauntless explorers, individual performances are both inspiring and intimidating. The great master makes the art look to outsiders unimaginably effortless and effortful at once; that the mastery of reading should be of the same order is surprising only insofar as we had been lulled by our slick literacy into routines safely guarded from all extremities. We thought we knew how to read literature. Now we are told, whether noisily by Bloom, or quietly by de Man, or scandalously by Holland and Fiedler, or revolutionarily by Jameson, Millett and Irigaray, or unintentionally by Hirsch, that we do not; yet we cannot help reading, even about the impracticability of reading.
Or, we find that when we read we have stepped into contexts so overwhelmingly vast we seem to have no business there, nothing within our poor power to fulfill; and yet we urgently belong there, and we must keep tackling the job. The once-transparent act of reading grows opaque or presents itself as an inscribed pane behind which the shapes of signs blur and waver. Meanwhile, we wonder: is criticism being vivified or vivisected?
This reward is hardly a reassuring return for decades of strenuous exertion. We would have liked to display an armoury of proven techniques, or at least an account of implied functions each new generation of readers can reliably exercise and make concrete. We discover instead that the dynamics of the literary transaction keep those functions in perpetual motion; they may be exercised not with greater certainty, but only with greater self-awareness or irony -- witness the evasive, self-preoccupied styles and the restless coexistence of contradictory positions within the theoretical discourses recorded here. This medium at least is the message, or story as I called it, though not all of it. We must yet summon new ranks of readers to the challenge and perform without blocking, prefigure without disfiguring, so that we may fionally bring the audience to the centre of our stage and hold them there.
What has been established then? The need for new departures, surely; and a farewell to authoritarian ambitions for correctness, and to fond hopes for immanent or imminent closure. And the urgency of steering between the unabashed dictatorship of a single method and the deceptive freedom of fragmentation: of a pluralism that merrily multiplies positions with no vision of their context, consonance, confluence, contiguity, coterminousness. A determination, then, not to be distracted (though sometimes enchanted) by flashes of brilliance, celebrations of uniqueness, cults of personality, gestures of ritual, or quiddities of taste.
My own hope to advance such a need has led me to offer my own consolidated meditations as a moment in an open dialectic -- of contraction and expansion, of proposal and counterproposal, of interchangeable supremacy among multiplex centripetal or centrifugal positions -- that literature itself most essentially enacts and holds in unending readiness.
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