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A Reader
1.1
FORMALISM
1.1.1
Art is thinking in images. This maxim, which even high-school students parrot, is nevertheless the starting point for the erudite philologist who is beginning to put together some kind of systematic literary theory. The idea, originated in part by Potebnya, has spread. Without imagery there is no art, and in particular no poetry, Potebnya writes. And elsewhere, Poetry, as well as prose, is first and foremost a special way of thinking and knowing.1[...] Potebnyas conclusion, which can be formulated poetry equals imagery, gave rise to the whole theory that imagery equals symbolism, that the image may serve as the invariable predicate of various subjects. [...] The conclusion stems partly from the fact that Potebnya did not distinguish between the language of poetry and the language of prose. Consequently, he ignored the fact that there are two aspects of imagery: imagery as a practical means of thinking, as a means of placing objects within categories; and imagery as poetic, as a means of reinforcing an impression. I shall clarify with an example. I want to attract the attention of a young child who is eating bread and butter and getting the butter on her fingers. I call, Hey, butterfingers! This is a figure of speech, a clearly prosaic trope. Now a different example. The child is playing with my glasses and drops them. I call, Hey, butterfingers! This figure of speech is a poetic trope. (In the first example, butterfingers is metonymic; in the second, metaphoric - but this is not what I want to stress.)
1 Alexander Potebnya ([ed.] nineteenth-century Russian philologist and theorist), Iz zapisok po teorii slovesnosti [Notes on the Theory of Language] (Kharkov, 1905), pp. 83, 97.
Poetic imagery is a means of creating the strongest possible impression. As a method it is, depending upon its purpose, neither more nor less effective than other poetic techniques; it is neither more nor less effective than ordinary or negative parallelism, comparison, repetition, balanced structure, hyperbole, the commonly accepted rhetorical figures, and all those methods which emphasize the emotional effect of an expression (including words or even articulated sounds). [...] Poetic imagery is but one of the devices of poetic language. If we start to examine the general laws of perception, we see that as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic. Thus, for example, all of our habits retreat into the area of the unconsciously automatic; if one remembers the sensations of holding a pen or of speaking in a foreign language for the first time and compares that with his feeling at performing the action for the ten thousandth time, he will agree with us. [...] y^f04[...] Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, ones wife, and the fear of war. [...] And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects unfamiliar, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important. [...] After we see an object several times, we begin to recognize it. The object is in front of us and we know about it, but we do not see it - hence we cannot say anything significant about it. Art removes objects from the automatism of perception in several ways. Here I want to illustrate a way used repeatedly by Leo Tolstoy, that writer who [...] seems to present things as if he himself saw them, saw them in their entirety, and did not alter them. Tolstoy makes the familiar seem strange by not naming the familiar object. He describes an object as if he were seeing it for the first time, an event as if it were happening for the first time. In describing something
Let us first of all attempt to formulate our task. As already stated in the foreword, this work is dedicated to the study of fairy tales. The existence of fairy tales as a special class is assumed as an essential working hypothesis. By 'fairy tales' are meant at present those tales classified by Aarne under numbers 300 to 749. This definition is artificial, but the occasion will subsequently arise to give a more precise determination on the basis of resultant conclusions. We are undertaking a comparison of the themes of these tales. For the sake of comparison we shall separate the component parts of fairy tales by special methods; and then, we shall
Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale (University of Texas Press, Austin, 1968), pp. 19-22.
I [...] Five different stylistic approaches to novelistic discourse may be observed: (1) the authors portions alone in the novel are analyzed, that is, only direct words of the author more or less correctly isolated - an analysis constructed in terms of the usual, direct poetic methods of representation and expression (metaphors, comparisons, lexical register, etc.); (2) instead of a stylistic analysis of the novel as an artistic whole, there is a neutral linguistic description of the novelists language;2 (3) in a given novelists language, elements characteristic of his particular literary tendency are isolated (be it Romanticism, Naturalism, Impressionism, etc.);3 (4) what is sought in the language of the novel is examined as an expression of the individual personality, that is, language is analyzed as the individual style of the given novelist;4 (5) the novel is viewed as a rhetorical genre, and its devices are analyzed from the point of view of their effectiveness as rhetoric.5
2 Such, for example, is L. Saineans book, La Langue de Rabelais (Paris, vol. 1, 1922; vol. 2, 1923). 3 Such, for example, is G. Loeschs book, Die impressionistische Syntax der Goncourts (Nuremberg, 1919). 4 Of such a type are works of by the Vosslerians devoted to style: we should mention as especially worthwhile the works of Leo Spitzer on the stylistic of Charles-Louis Philippe, Charles Pguy and Marcel Proust, brought together in his book Stilstudien (vol. 2, Stilsprachen, 1928). 5 V. V. Vinogradovs book On Artistic Prose [O xudozestvennoj proze] (Moscow-Leningrad, 1930) assumes this position.
10 Die verhngnisvolle Gabel' (1826), a parody of Romantic fate tragedies by August, Graf von Platen-Hallermnde (1796-1835), who was concerned to re-establish classical norms in the face of what he saw
as the excesses of the Strmer und Drnger (see his Venetian sonnets [1825]). [Tr.]
11 Aulus Gellius (c. 130-c. 180 AD), author of the Noctes Atticae in twenty books, a collection of small chapters dealing with a great variety of topics: literary criticism, the law, grammar, history, etc. His Latin is remarkable for its mixture of classical purity and affected archaism. [Tr.] 12 The Moralia of Plutarch (translated in fourteen volumes by F. C. Babbit et al. [1927-1959] are essays and dialogues on a wide variety of literary, historical and ethical topics, with long sections of quotations from the ancient dramatists. [Tr.] 13 Ambrosius Theodosius Macrobius (a figure variously identified with several Macrobii), author of the Saturnalia, a symposium presented in the form of a dialogue in seven books, drawing heavily on Aulus Gellius (cf. note f). [Tr.] 14 Athenaeus (fl. 200 AD), author of Deipnosophistai (Doctors at Dinner, or as it is sometimes translated, Experts on Dining). This is a work of fifteen books filled with all kinds of miscellaneous information on medicine, literature, the law, etc., intermingled with anecdotes and quotations from a large number of other authors, many of whose works are otherwise lost or unknown. [Tr.]
laughter and with images from the material life of the body. The figure of the comic Hercules was extremely popular, not only in Greece but also in Rome, and later in Byzantium (where it became one of the central figures in the marionette theatre). Until quite recently this figure lived on in the Turkish game of shadow puppets. The comic Hercules is one of the most profound folk images for a cheerful and simple heroism, and had an enormous influence on all of world literature. When taken together with such figures as the comic Odysseus and the comic Hercules, the fourth drama, which was an indispensable conclusion to the tragic trilogy, indicates that the literary consciousness of the Greeks did not view the parodic-travestying reworkings of national myth as any particular profanation or blasphemy. It is characteristic that the Greeks were not at all embarrassed to attribute the authorship of the parodic work War between the Mice and the Frogs to Homer himself. Homer is also credited with a comic work (a long poem) about the fool Margit. For any and every straightforward genre, any and every direct discourse - epic, tragic, lyric, philosophical - may and indeed must itself become the object of representation, the object of a parodic travestying mimicry. It is as if such mimicry rips the word away from its object, disunifies the two, shows that a given straightforward generic word - epic or tragic - is one-sided, bounded, incapable of exhausting the object; the process of parodying forces us to experience those sides of the object that are not otherwise included in a given genre or a given style. Parodic-travestying literature introduces the permanent corrective of laughter, of a critique on the one-sided seriousness of the lofty direct word, the corrective of reality that is always richer, more fundamental and most importantly too contradictory and heteroglot to be fitted into a high and straightforward genre. The high genres are monotonic, while the fourth drama and genres akin to it retain the ancient binary tone of the word. Ancient parody was free of any nihilistic denial. It was not, after all, the heroes who were parodied, nor the Trojan War and its participants; what was parodied was only its epic heroization; not Hercules and its exploits but their tragic heroization. The genre itself, the style, the language are all put in cheerfully irreverent quotation marks, and they are
1. INTRODUCTORY This idea of a period of a development in time, with its consequent emphasis on influences and schools, happens to be exactly what I am hoping to avoid during our brief survey, and I believe that the author of Gazpacho will be lenient. Time, all the way through, is to be our enemy. We are to visualize the English novelists not as floating down the stream which bears all its sons away unless they are careful, but as seated together in a room, a circular room, a sort of British Museum reading-room - all writing their novels simultaneously. They do not, as they sit there, think I live under Queen Victoria, I under Anne, I carry on the tradition of Troloppe, I am reacting against Aldous Huxley. The fact that their pens are in their hands is far more vivid to them. They are half mesmerized, their sorrows and joys are pouring out through the ink, they are approximated by the act of creation, and when Professor Oliver Elton says, as he does, that after 1847 the novel of passion was never to be the same again, none of them understands what he means. That is to be our vision of them - an imperfect vision, but it is suited to our powers, it will preserve us from a serious danger, the danger of pseudo - scholarship. Pseudo-scholarship is, on its good side, the homage paid by ignorance to learning.
Why is it that an episode 'told' by Fielding can strike us more fully realized than many of the scenes scrupulously 'shown' by imitators of James or Hemingway ? Why does some authorial commentary ruin the work in which it occurs, while the prolonged commentary of Tristram Shandy can still enthral us ? What, after all, does an author do when he 'intrudes' to tell us something about his story ? Such questions force us to consider closely what happens when an author engages a reader fully with a work of fiction; they lead us to a view of fictional technique which necessarily goes far beyond the reductions that we have sometimes accepted under the concept of 'point of view'. [...] One cannot restore telling to critical respect simply by jumping to its defense - not on this field of battle. Its opponents would have most of the effective ammunition. Many novels are seriously flawed by careless intrusions. What is more, it is easy to prove that an episode shown is more effective than the same episode told, so long as we must choose between two and only two technical extrems. And, finally, the novelists and critics who have deplored telling have won for fiction the kind of standing as a major art form which, before Flaubert, was generally denied to it, and they have often shown a seriousness and devotion to their art that in itself carries conviction about their doctrines. Nothing is gained indeed, everything is lost - if we say to James and Flaubert that we admire their experiments in artistic seriousness, but that we prefer now to
23 Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago University Press, Chicago,
1.1.6 Wayne C. Booth: from Emotions, Beliefs, and the Readers Objectivity
Every literary work of any power - whether or not its author composed it with his audience in mind - is in fact an elaborate system of controls over the readers involvement and detachment along various lines of
24 Summer, 1958, p. 182. 25 Poetry and Beliefs, Science and Poetry (1926), as reprinted in R. W. Stallman
Here are some articles of faith I could subscribe to: That literary criticism is a description and an evaluation of its object. That the primary concern of criticism is with the problem of unity - the kind of whole which the literary work forms or fails to form, and the relation of the various parts with each other in building up this whole. That the formal relations in a work of literature may include, but certainly exceed, those of logic. That in a successful work, form and content cannot be separated. That form is meaning. That literature is ultimately metaphorical and symbolic. That the general and the universal are not seized upon by abstractions, but got at through the concrete and the particular. That literature is not a surrogate for religion. That, as Allen Tate says, specific moral problems are the subject matter of literature, but that the purpose of literature is not to point a moral. That the principles of criticism define the area relevant to literary criticism; they do not constitute a method for carrying out literary criticism. Such statements as these would not, even though carefully elaborated, serve any useful purpose here. The interested reader already knows the general nature of the critical position adumbrated - or, if he does not, he can find it set forth in writings of mine or of other critics of like sympathy. Moreover, a condensed restatement of the position here would probably beget as many misunderstandings as have past attempts to set it forth. It seems much more profitable to use the present occasion for dealing with some persistent misunderstandings and objections.
27 Reprinted from the Kenyon Review, 13 (1951), pp. 72-81
''Intention, as we shall use the term, corresponds to what he intended in a formula which more or less explicitly has had wide acceptance. In order to judge the poet's performance, we must know what he intended. Intention is design or plan in the author's mind. Intention has obvious affinities for the author's attitude toward his work, the way he felt, what made him write. We begin our discussion with a series of propositions summarized and abstracted to a degree where they seem to us axiomatic. 1. A poem does not come into existence by accident. The words of a poem, as Professor Stoll has remarked, come out of a head, not out of a hat. Yet to insist on the designing intellect as a cause of a poem is not to grant the design or intention as a standard by which the critic is to judge the worth of the poet's performance. 2. One must ask how a critic expects to get an answer to the question about intention. How is he to find out what the poet tried to do? If the 28 Published in: W. K. Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon (Methuen, London, 1970), pp.4-5, 17-18).
As the title of this essay invites comparison with that of our first, it may be relevant ot assert at this point that we believe ourselves to be exploring two roads which have seemed to offer convenient detours around the acknowledged and usually feared obstacles to objective criticism, both of which, however, have actually led away from criticism and from poetry. The Intentional Fallacy is a confusion between the poem and its origins, a special case of what is known to philosophers as the Genetic Fallacy. It begins by trying to derive the standard of criticism from the psychological causes of the poem and ends in biography and relativism. The Affective Fallacy is a confusion between the poem and its results (what it is and what it does), a special case of epistemological scepticism, though usually advanced as if it had stronger claims than the overall forms of scepticism. It begins by trying to derive the standard of criticism from the psychological effects of the poem and ends in impressionism and relativism. The outcome of either Fallacy, the Intentional ot the Affective, is that the poem itself, as an object of specifically critical judgement, tends to disappear. [...] One of the most emphatic points in Stevensons system is the distinction between what a word means and what it suggests. [...] Although the term quasi-dependent emotive meaning is recommended by Stevenson for a
of persons subjected to a given moving picture. But, as Herbert J. Muller in his Science and Criticism points out: Students have sincerely reported an emotion at the mention of the word mother, although a galvanometer indicated no bodily change whatever. They have also reported no emotions at the mention of prostitute, although the galvanometer gave a definite kick. Thomas Mann and a friend came out of a movie weeping copiously - but Mann narrates the incident in support of his view that movies are not Art. Art is a cold sphere. The gap between between various levels of psychological experience and the recognition of value remains wide, in the laboratory or out. [...] Tennysons Tears, idle tears, as it deals with an emotion which the speaker at first seems not to understand, might be thought to be a specially emotive poem. The last stanza, says Brooks in his recent analysis, evokes an intense emotional response from the reader. But this statement is not really a part of Brooks criticism of the poem - rather a witness of his fondness for it. The second stanza - Brooks might have said at an earlier point in his analysis - gives us a momentary vivid realization of past happy experiences, then makes us sad at their loss. But he says actually : The conjuction of the qualities of sadness and freshness is reinforced by the fact that the same basic symbol - the light on the sails of a ship hull down - has been employed to suggest both qualities. The distinction between these formulations may seem slight, and in the first example which we furnished may be practically unimportant. Yet, the difference between translatable emotive formulas and more psychological and psychologically vague ones - cognitively untranslatable - is theoretically of greatest importance. The distinction even when it is a faint one is at the dividing point between paths which led to polar opposites in criticism, to classical objectivity and to romantic reader psychology. The critic whose formulations lean to the emotive and the critic whose formulations lean to the cognitive will in the long run produce a vastly different sort of criticism.
Ueber den Film, in Die Forderung des Tages (Berlin, 1930), 387.
1.3
STRUCTURALISM
I have been asked for summary remarks about poetics in its relation to linguistics. Poetics deals primarily with the question , What makes a verbal message a work of art? Because the main subject of poetics is the differentia specifica [specific differences] of verbal art in relation to other arts and in relation to other kinds of verbal behaviour, poetics is entitled to the leading place in literary studies. Poetics deals with problems of verbal structure, just as the analysis of painting is concerned with pictorial structure. Since linguistics is the
30 Cf. Pauhlan, The Laws of Feeling, 105, 110. 31 The anthropologist, says Bronislaw Malinovski, has the myth-maker at his
CODE Each of these factors determines a different function of language. Although we distinguish six basic aspects of language, we could, however, hardly find verbal messages that would fulfil only one function. The diversity lies not in a monopoly of some one of these several functions but in a different hierarchical order of functions. The verbal structure of a message depends primarily on the predominant function. But even though a set (Einstellung) toward the referent, an orientation toward the CONTEXT - briefly the so-called REFERENTIAL, denotative, cognitive function - is the leading task of numerous messages, the accessory participation of the other functions in such messages must be taken into account by the observant linguist. The so-called EMOTIVE or expressive function, focused on the ADDRESSER, aims a direct expression of the speakers attitude toward what he is speaking about. It tends to produce an impression of a certain emotion whether true or feigned; therefore, the term emotive, launched and advocated by Marty (30) has proved to be preferable to emotional. The purely emotive stratum in language is presented by the interjections. They differ from the means of referential language both by their sound pattern (peculiar sound sequences or even sounds elsewhere unusual) and by their syntactic role (they are not components but equivalents of sentences). Tut! Tut! said McGinty : the complete utterance of Conan Doyles character consists in two suction clicks. The emotive function, laid bare in the interjections, flavors to some extent all our utterances, on their phonic, grammatical and lexical level. If we analyze language from the standpoint of the information it carries, we cannot restrict the notion of information to the cognitive aspect of language. A man, using expressive features to indicate his angry or ironic attitude, conveys ostensible information, and evidently this verbal behaviour cannot be likened to such nonsemiotic, nutritive activities as eating grapefruit (despite Chatmans bold simile). [...] A former actor of Stanislavskijs Moscow Theater told me how at his audition he was asked by the famous director to make forty different
celebrated contributors.
consists of three monosyllables and counts three diphthongs /ay/, each of them symmetrically followed by one consonantal phoneme, /.. l .. k .. k/. The make-up of the three words presents a variation: no consonantal phonemes in the first word, two around the diphthong in the second, and one final consonant in the third. A similar dominant nucleus /ay/ was noticed by Hymes in some of the sonnets of Keats. Both cola of the trisyllabic formula I like/ Ike rhyme with each other, and the second of the two rhyming words is fully included in the first one (echo rhyme), /layk/-/ayk/, a paronomastic image of a feeling which totally envelops its object. Both cola alliterate with each other, and the first of the two alliterating words is included in the second: /ay/-/ayk/, a paronomastic image of the loving subject enveloped by the beloved object. The secondary, poetic function of this electional catch phrase reinforces its impressiveness and efficacy. As we said, the linguistic study of the poetic function must overstep the limits of poetry, and, on the other hand, the linguistic scrutiny of poetry cannot limit itself to the poetic function. The particularities of diverse poetic genres imply a differently ranked participation of the other verbal functions along with the dominant poetic function. Epic poetry, focused on the third person, strongly involves the referential function of language; the lyric, oriented toward the first person, is intimately linked with the emotive function; poetry of the second person is imbued with the conative function and is either supplicatory or exhortative, depending on whether the first person is subordinated to the second one or the second to the first. Now that our cursory description of the six basic functions of verbal communication is more or less complete, we may complement our scheme of the fundamental factors by a corresponding scheme of the functions: REFERENTIAL EMOTIVE POETIC CONATIVE
of the United States 1956-61. I like Ike was a political campaign slogan.
Caesar is achieved by Shakespeares playing on grammatical categories and constructions. Mark Antony lampoons Brutuss speech by changing the alleged reasons for Caesars assassination into plain linguistics fictions. Brutuss accusation of Caesar, as he was ambitious, I slew him, undergoes successive transformations. First Antony reduces it to a mere quotation which puts the responsibility for the statement on the speaker quoted: The noble Brutus // Hath told you [...]. When repeated, this reference to Brutus is put into opposition to Antonys own assertions by an adversative but and further degraded by a concessive yet. The reference to the allegers honour ceases to justify the allegation, when repeated with a substitution of the merely copulative and instead of the previous causal for, and when finally put into question through the malicious insertion of a modal sure : The noble Brutus Hath told you Caesar was ambitious; For Brutus is an honourable man, But Brutus says he was ambitious, And Brutus is an honourable man. Yet Brutus says he was ambitious, And Brutus is an honourable man. Yet Brutus says he was ambitious, And, sure, he is an honourable man. The following polyptoton - I speak [...] Brutus spoke [...] I am to speak - presents the repeated allegation as mere reported speech instead of reported facts. The effect lies, modal logic would say, in the oblique context of the arguments adduced which makes them into unprovable belief sentences: I speak not to disprove what Brutus sopke,
The varieties of aphasia are numerous and diverse, but all of them lie between the two polar types just described. Every form of aphasic disturbance consists in some impairment, more or less severe, either of
37 Jakobsons seminal discussion of metaphor and metonymy comes at the end of a highly technical discussion of aphasia (i.e., language disorder). He begins by formulating one of the basic principles of Saussurian linguistics, that language, like all systems of signs, has a twofold character, involving two distinct operations, selection and combination. To produce a sentence like ships crossed the sea (the example is not Jakobson s), I select the words I need from the appropriate sets or paradigms of the English language and combine them according to the rules of that language. If I substitute ploughed for crossed, I create a metaphor based on a similarity between things otherwise different - the movements of a ship through water and the movement of a plough through the earth. If I substitute keels for ships, I have used the figure of synecdoche (part for whole or whole for part). If I substitute deep for sea I have used the figure of metonymy (an attribute or cause or effect of a thing signifies the thing). According to Jakobson, synecdoche is a subspecies of metonymy: both depend on contiguity in space/time (the keel is part of the ship, depth is a property of the sea), and thus correspond to the combination axis of language. Metaphor, in contrast, corresponds to the selection axis of language, and depends on similarity between things not normally contiguous. Aphasics tend to be more affected in one or other of the selection and combination functions. Those who suffer from selection deficiency or similarity disorder are heavily dependent on context or contiguity to speak, and make metonymic mistakes, substituting fork for knife, table for lamp, etc. Conversely, patients suffering from contexture deficiency or contiguity disorder are unable to combine words into a grammatical sentence, and make metaphorical mistakes - spyglass for microscope, or fire for gaslight.
To the stimulus hut one response was burnt out; another, is a poor, little house. Both reactions are predicative; but the first creates a purely narrative context, while in the second there is a double connection with the subject hut: on the one hand, a positional (namely, syntactic) contiguity, and on the other a semantic similarity. The same stimulus produced the following substitutive reactions: the tautology hut; the synonyms cabin and hovel; the antonym palace, and the metaphors den and burrow. The capacity of two words to replace one another is an instance of positional similarity, and in addition, all these responses are linked to the stimulus by semantic similarity (or contrast). Metonymical responses to the same stimulus, such as thatch, litter, or poverty, combine and contrast the positional similarity with semantic
contiguity. In manipulating these two kinds of connection (similarity and contiguity) in both their aspects (positional and semantic) - selecting, combining, and ranking them - an individual exhibits his personal style, his verbal predilections and preferences. In verbal art the interaction of these two elements is especially pronounced. Rich material for the study of this relationship is to be found in verse patterns which require a compulsory parallelism between adjacent lines, for example in Biblical poetry or in the Finnic and, to some extent, the Russian oral traditions. This provides an objective criterion or what in the given speech community acts as a correspondence. Since on any verbal level - morphemic, lexical, syntactic, and phraseological - either of these two relations (similarity and contiguity) can appear - and each in either of two aspects, an impressive range of possible configurations is created. Either of the two gravitational poles may prevail. In Russian lyrical songs, for example, metaphoric constructions predominate, while in the heroic epics the metonymic way is preponderant. In poetry there are various motives which determine the choice between these alternants. The primacy of the metaphoric process in the literary schools of romanticism and symbolism has been repeatedly acknowledged, but it is still insufficiently realized that it is the predominance of metonymy which underlies and actually predetermines the so-called realistic trend, which belongs to an intermediary stage between the decline of romanticism and the rise of symbolism and is opposed to both. Following the path of contiguous relationships, the realist author metonymically digresses from the plot to the atmosphere and from the characters to the setting in space and time. He is fond of synecdochic details. In the scene of Anna Kareninas suicide Tolstojs artistic attention is focused on the heroines handbag; and in War and Peace the synecdoches hair on the upper lip and bare shoulders are used by the same writer to stand for the female character to whom these features belong. The alternative predominance of one or the other of these two processes
To indicate the possibilities of the projected comparative research, we choose an example from a Russian folktale which employs parallelism as a comic device: Thomas is a bachelor; Jeremiah is unmarried ( Fom xlost; Erjoma nezenat). Here the predicates in the two parallel clauses are associated by similarity: they are in fact synonymous. The subjects of both clauses are masculine proper names and hence morphologically similar, while on the other hand they denote two contiguous heroes of the same tale, created to perform identical actions and thus to justify the use of synonymous pairs of predicates. A somewhat modified version of the same construction occurs in a familiar wedding song in which each of the wedding guests is addressed in turn by his first name and patronymic: Gleb is a bachelor; Ivanovic is unmarried. While both predicates here are again synonyms, the relationship between the two objects changed: both are proper names denoting the same man and are normally used contiguously as a mode of polite address. In the quotation from the folktale, the two parallel clauses refer to two separate facts, the marital status of Thomas and the similar status of Jeremiah. In the verse from the wedding song, however, the two clauses are synonymous: they redundantly reiterate the celibacy of the same hero, splitting him into two verbal hypostases. The Russian novelist Gleb Ivanovic Uspenskij (1840-1902) in the last year of his life suffered from a mental illness involving a speech disorder. His first name and patronymic, Gleb Ivanovic, traditionally combined in polite intercourse, for him split into two distinct names designating two separate beings: Gleb was endowed with all his virtues, while Ivanovic, the same relating a son to his father, became the incarnation of all Uspenskijs vices. The linguistic aspect of this split personality is the patients inability to use two symbols for the same thing, and it is thus a similarity disorder. Since the similarity disorder is bound up with the
Batesons views on progressional and selective integration and Parsons on the conjunction disjunction dichotomy in child development: J. Ruesch and G. Bateson, Communication, the Social Matrix of Psychiatry (New York, 1951), pp. 183 ff.; T. Parsons and R. F. Bales, Family, Socialization and Interaction Process (Glencoe, 1955), pp. 119
magic.44 This bipartition is indeed illuminating. Nonetheless, for the most part, the question of the two poles is still neglected, despite its wide scope and importance for the study of any symbolic behavior, especially verbal, and of its impairments. What is the main reason for this neglect? Similarity in meaning connects the symbols of a metalanguage with the symbols of the language referred to. Similarity connects a metaphorical term with the term for which it is substituted. Consequently, when constructing a metalanguage to interpret tropes, the researcher possesses more homogenous means to handle metaphor, whereas metonymy, based on a different principle, easily defies interpretation. Therefore nothing comparable to the rich literature on metaphor 45 can be cited for the theory of metonymy. For the same reason, it is generally realized that romanticism is closely linked with metaphor, whereas the equally intimate ties of realism with metonymy usually remain unnoticed. Not only the tool of the observer but also the object of observation is responsible for the preponderance of metaphor over metonymy in scholarship. Since poetry is focused upon the sign, and pragmatical prose primarily upon the referent, tropes and figures were studied mainly as poetic devices. The principle of similarity underlies poetry; the metrical parallelism of lines, or the phonic equivalence of rhyming words prompts the question of semantic similarity and contrast; there exist, for instance, grammatical and anti-grammatical but never agrammatical rhymes. Prose, on the contrary, is forwarded essentially by contiguity. Thus, for poetry, metaphor, and for prose, metonymy is the line of least resistance and, consequently, the study of poetical tropes is directed chiefly toward metaphor. The actual bipolarity has been artificially replaced in these studies by an amputated, unipolar scheme which, strikingly enough coincides with one of the two aphasic patterns, namely with the contiguity disorder.
44 J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion , Part I, 3rd
ed. (Vienna, 1950), chapter III. 45 C. F. P. Stutterheim, Het begrip metaphor (Amsterdam, 1941).
After defining the folktale as a display on a temporal line of its thirty-one functions, Propp raises the question about the actants, or the dramatis personae, as he calls them. His conception of the actants is functional: the characters are defined, according to him, by the ''spheres of action in which they participate, these spheres being constituted by the bundles of functions which are attributed to them [...] The result is that if the actors can be established within a tale-occurence, the actants, which are classifications of actors, can be established only from the corpus of all the tales: an articulation of actors constitutes a particular tale; a structure of actants constitutes a genre. The actants therefore possess a metalinguistic status in relation to the actors. They presuppose, by the way, a functional analysis - that is to say, the achieved constitution of the spheres of action. This double procedure - the establishment of the actors by the description of the functions and the reduction of the classifications of actors to actants of the genre - allows Propp to establish a definitive inventory of the actants, which are: 1. The villain; 2. The donor (provider); 3. The helper; 4. The sought-for person (and her father); 5. The dispatcher; 6. The hero; 7. the false hero. This inventory authorizes Propp to give an actantial definition of the Russian folktale as a story with seven characters. [...] The interest in Souriau's thought lies in the fact that he has shown that the actantial interpretation can be applied to a kind of narrative - theatrical works - quite different from the folktale and that his results are comparable to Propp's. We find here, although expressed differently, the same distinction between the events of the story [lhistoire vnementielle] (which is for him only a collection of dramatic subjects) and the level of
46 University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1983. Pp. 200-8.
Sender God Receiver Mankind [...] It is much more difficult to be sure of the categorical articulation of the other actants if only because we lack a syntactic model. Two spheres of activity, however, and, inside those, two distinct kinds of functions are recognized without difficulty. 1. The first kinds bring the help by acting in the direction of the desire or by facilitating communication. 2. The others, on the contrary, create obstacles by opposing either the realization of the desire of the desire or the communication of the object. These two bundles of functions can be attributed to two distinct actants that we will designate under the name of Helper vs. Opponent This distinction corresponds rather well to the distinction made by Souriau, from whom we borrow the term opponent: we prefer the term of helper introduced by Guy Michaud, to Souriau's 'rescue.' In Propp's formulation we find that opponent is pejoratively called villain (traitor), while helper takes in two characters, the helper and the donor (provider). At first sight, this elasticity of analysis may be surprising. [...] We can wonder what corresponds, in the mythical universe whose actantial structure we want to make explicit, to this opposition between the helper and the opponent. At first glance everything takes place as if, besides the principal parties in question, there would appear now in the drama projected on an axiological screen actants representing in a schematic faschion the benevolent and malevolent forces in the world, incarnations of the guardian angel and the devil of medieval Christian
We have here a new division, of very wide scope, since it divides into two parts of roughly equal importance the whole of what we now call literature. This division corresponds more or less to the distinction proposed by mile Benveniste between narrative (or story) and discourse, except that Benveniste includes in the category of discourse everything that Aristotle called direct imitation, and which actually consists, at least as far as its verbal part is concerned, of discourse attributed by the poet or narrator to one of his characters. Benveniste shows that certain grammatical forms, like the pronoun I (and its implicit reference you), the pronominal (certain demonstratives), or adverbial indicators (like here, now, yesterday, today, tomorrow, etc.) and - at least in French - certain tenses of the verb, like the present, the present anterior, or the future, are confined to discourse, whereas narrative in its strict form is marked by the exclusive use of the third person and such forms as the aorist (past definite) and the pluperfect. Whatever the details and variotions from on idiom to another, all these differences amount clearly to an opposition between the objectivity of narrative and the subjectivity of discourse; but it should be pointed out that such objectivity and subjectivity are defined by criteria of a strictly, linguistic order: subjective discourse is that in which, explicitly or not, the presence of (or reference to) I is marked, but this is not defined in any other way except as the person who is speaking this discourse, just as the present, which is the tense par excellence of the discursive mode, is not defined other than as the moment when the discourse is being spoken, its use marking the coincidence of the event described with the instance of discourse that describes it. Conversely, the objectivity of narrative is defined by the absence of any reference to the narrator: As a matter of fact, there is then no longer even a narrator, The events are set forth chronologically, as they occur. No one speaks here; the
47 In Grard Genette, Figures of Literary Discourse (Blackwell, Oxford, 1982),
pp. 138-143.
events seem to narrate themselves. [...] In discourse, someone speaks, and his situation in the very act of speaking is the focus of the most important significations; in narrative, as Benveniste forcefully puts it, no one speaks, in the sense that at no moment do we ask ourselves who is speaking, where, when, and so forth, in order to receive the full signification of the text. But it should be added at once that these essences of narrative and discourse so defined are almost never to be found in their pure state in any text: there is almost always a certain proportion of narrative in discourse, a certain amount of discourse in narrative. In fact, the symmetry stops here, for it is as if both types of expression were very differently affected by the contamination: the insertion of narrative elements in the level of discourse is not enough to emancipate discourse, for they generally remain linked to the reference by the speaker, who remains implicitly present in the background, and who may intervene again at any moment without this return being experienced as an intrusion. [...] It is obvious that narrative does integrate these discursive enclaves, rightly called by Georges Blint authorial intrusions, as easily as discourse receives the narrative enclaves: narrative inserted into discourse is transformed into an element of discourse, discourse inserted into narrative remains discourse and forms a sort of cyst that is very easy to recognize and to locate. The purity of narrative, one might say, is more manifest than that of discourse. Though the reason for this dissymmetry is very simple, it indicates for us a decisive character of narrative: in fact, discourse has no purity to preserve, for it is the broadest and most universal natural mode of language, welcoming by definition all other forms; narrative, on the other hand, is a particular mode, marked, defined by a number of exclusions and restrictive conditions (refusal of the present, the first person, and so forth). Discourse can recount without ceasing to be discourse, narrative cannot discourse without emerging from itself. Nor can it abstain from it completely, however, without falling into aridity and poverty: this is why narrative exists nowhere, so to speak, in its strict form. The slightest
In a new chapter of La Pense sauvage, Claude Lvi-Strauss defines mythical thought as a kind of intellectual bricolage.48 The nature of bricolage is to make use of materials and tools that, unlike those of the engineer, for example, were not intended for the task in hand. [...] But there is another intellectual activity, peculiar to more developed cultures, to which this analysis might be applied almost word for word: I mean criticism, more particularly literary criticism, which distinguishes itself formally from other kinds of criticism by the fact that it uses the same materials - writing - as the works with which it is concerned; art criticism or musical criticism are obviously not expressed in sound or in color, but literary criticism speaks the same language as its object: it is a metalanguage, discourse upon a discourse.49 It can therefore be a metaliterature, that is to say, a literature of which literature itself is the imposed object.50 [...] [...] If the writer questions the universe, the critic questions literature, that is to say, the universe of signs. But what was a sign for the writer (the work) becomes meaning for the critic (since it is the object of critical discourse), and in another way what was meaning for the writer (his view of the world) becomes a sign for the critic, as the theme and symbol of a certain literary nature. [...] If such a thing as critical poetry exists, therefore, it is in the sense in which Lvi-Strauss speaks of a poetry of bricolage : just as the bricoleur speaks through things, the critic speaks - in the full sense, that is to say, speaks up - through books, and we will paraphrase Lvi-Strauss once more by saying that without ever completing his project he always puts something of himself into it. In this sense, therefore, one can regard literary criticism as a structuralist activity ; but it is not - as is quite clear - merely an implicit, unreflective structuralism. The question posed by the present
48 Claude Lvi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago, 1966), p. 17. 49 Roland Barthes, Critical Essays, p. 258. 50 Paul Valry, Albert Thibaudet, Nouvelle revue francaise (July 1936), p. 6.
To understand what poetics is, we must start from a general and of course a somewhat simplified image of literary studies. It is unnecessary to describe actual schools and tendencies; it will suffice to recall the positions taken with regard to several basic choices. Initially there are two attitudes to be distinguished: one sees the literary text itself as a sufficient object of knowledge; the other considers each individual text as the manifestation of an abstract structure. (I herewith disregard biographical studies, which are nor literary, as well as journalistic writings, which are not studies.) These two options are not, as we shall see, incompatible; we can even say that they achieve a necessary complementarity; nonetheless, depending on whether we emphasize one or the other, we can clearly distinguish between the two tendencies. Let us begin with a few words about the first attitude, for which the literary work is the ultimate and unique object, and which we shall here and henceforth call interpretation. Interpretation, which is sometimes also called exegesis, commentary, explication de text, close reading, analysis, or even just criticism (such a list does not mean we cannot distinguish or even set in opposition some of the terms), is defined, in the sense we give it here, by its aim, which is to name the meaning of the text examined. This aim forthwith determines the ideal of this attitude - which is to make the text itself speak; i.e., it is a fidelity to the object, to the other, and consequently an effacement of the subject - as well as its drama, which is to be forever incapable of realizing the meaning, but only a meaning subject to historical and psychological contingencies. This ideal, this drama will be modulated down through the history of commentary, itself coextensive with the history of humanity. In effect, it is impossible to interpret a work, literary or otherwise, for and in itself, without leaving it for a moment, without projecting it elsewhere than upon itself. Or rather, this task is possible, but then description is merely a word-for-word repetition of the work itself. It
espouses the forms of the work so closely that the two are identical. And, in a certain sense, every work constitutes its own best description. [...] If interpretation was the generic term for the first type of analysis to which we submit the literary text, the second attitude remarked above can be inscribed within the general context of science. By using this word, which the average literary man does not favor, we intend to refer less to the degree of precision this activity, achieves (a precision necessarily relative) than to the general perspective chosen by the analyst: his goal is no longer the description of the particular work, the designation of its meaning, but the establishment of general laws of which this particular text is the product. Within this second attitude, we may distinguish several varieties, at first glance very remote from one another. Indeed, we find here, side by side, psychological or psychoanalytic, sociological or ethnological studies, as well as those derived from philosophy or from the history of ideas. All deny the autonomous character of the literary work and regard it as the manifestation of laws that are external to it and that concern the psyche, or society, or even the human mind. The object of such studies is to transpose the work into the realm considered fundamental: it is a labor of decipherment and translation; the literary work is the expression of something, and the goal of such studies is to reach this something through the poetic code. Depending on whether the nature of this object to be reached is philosophical, psychological, sociological, or something else, the study in question will be inscribed within one of these types of discourse (one of these sciences), each of which possesses, of course, many subdivisions. Such an activity is related to science insofar as its object is no longer the particular phenomenon but the (psychological, sociological, etc.,) law that the phenomenon illustrates. Poetics breaks down the symmetry thus established between interpretation and science in the field of literary studies. In contradistinction to the interpretation of particular works, it does not seek to name meaning, but aims at a knowledge of the general laws that preside over the birth of each work. But in contradistinction of such sciences as psychology, sociology, etc., it seeks these laws within
When a speaker of a language hears a phonetic sequence, he is able to give it meaning because he brings to the act of communication an amazing repertoire of conscious and unconscious knowledge. Mastery of the phonological, syntactic and semantic systems of his language enables him to convert the sounds into discrete units, to recognize words, and to assign a structural description and interpretation to the resulting sentence,
51 Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1975, pp. 113-38.
The structural analysis of narrative is at present in the course of full elaboration. All research in this area has a common scientific origin: semiology or the science of signification; but already (and this is a good thing) divergences within that research are appearing, according to the critical stance each piece of work takes with respect to the scientific status of semiology, or in other words, with respect to its own discourse. These divergences (which are constructive) can be brought together under two broad tendencies: in the first, faced with all the narratives in the world, the analysis seeks to establish a narrative model - which is evidently formal - , a structure or grammar of narrative, on the basis of which (once this model, structure or grammar has been discovered) each particular narrative will be analysed in terms of divergences. In the second tendency, the narrative is immediately subsumed (at least when it lends itself to being subsumed) under the notion of text, space, process of meanings at work, in short, signifiance (we shall come back to this word at the end), which
rise. By meaning, it is clear that we do not mean the meanings of the words or groups of words which dictionary and grammar, in short a knowledge of the French language, would be sufficient to account for. We mean the connotations of the lexia, the secondary meanings. These connotation meanings can be associations (for example, the physical description of a character, spread out over several sentences, may have only one connoted signified, the nervousness of that character, even though the word does not figure at the level of denotation); they can also be relations, resulting form a linking of two points in the text, which are sometimes far apart, (an action begun here can be completed, finished, much further on). Our lexias will be, if I can put it like this, the finest possible sieves, thanks to which we shall cream off meanings, connotations.
3 Our analysis will be progressive: we shall cover the length of the text step by step, at least in theory, since for reasons of space we can only give two fragments of analysis here. This means that we shant be aiming to pick out the large (rhetorical) blocks of the text; we shant construct a plan of the text and we shant be seeking its thematics; in short, we shant be carrying out an explication of the text, unless we give the word explication its etymological sense, in so far as we shall be unfolding the text, the foliation of the text. Our analysis will retain the procedure of reading; only this reading will be, in some measure, filmed in slowmotion. This method of proceeding is theoretically important: it means that we are not aiming to reconstitute the structure of the text, but to follow its structuration, and that we consider the structuration of the reading to be more important than that of composition (a rhetorical, classical notion).
4 Finally, we shant get unduly worried if in our account we forget some meanings. Forgetting meanings is in some sense part of reading: the important thing is to show departures of meaning, not arrivals (and is meaning basically anything other than a departure?). What founds the text is not an internal, closed, accountable structure, but the outlet of the text on to other texts, other signs; what makes the text is the intertextual. We are beginning to glimpse (through other sciences) the fact that research must little by little get used to the conjunction of two ideas which for long time were thought incompatible: the idea of structure and the idea of combinational infinity; the conciliation of these two postulations is forced upon us now because language, which we are getting to know better, is at
A final word, which is perhaps one of conjuration, exorcism: the text we are going to analyse is neither lyrical nor political, it speaks neither of love nor society, it speaks of death. This means that we shall have to lift a particular censorship: that attached to the sinister. We shall do this, persuaded that any censorship stands for all others: speaking of death outside all religion lifts at once the religious interdict and the rationalist one. [...] Analysis of lexias 1-17 [...] (1) - The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar - [ - La Vrit sur le cas de M. Valdemar] The function of the title has not been well studied, at least from a structural point of view. What can be said straight away is that for commercial reasons, society, needing to assimilate the text to a product, a commodity, has need of markers: the function of the title is to mark the beginning of the text, that is, to constitute the text as a commodity. Every title thus has several simultaneous meanings, including at least two: (i) what it says linked to the contingency of what follows it; (ii) the announcement itself that a piece of literature (which means, in fact, a commodity) is going to follow; in other words, the title always has a double function; enunciating and deictic. (a) Announcing a truth involves the stipulation of an enigma. The posing of the enigma is a result (at the level of the signifiers): of the word truth [in the French title]; of the word case (that which is exceptional, therefore marked, therefore signifying, and consequently of which the meaning must be found); of the definite article the [in the French title] (there is only one truth, all the work of the text will, then, be needed to pass through this narrow gate); of all the cataphorical56 form implied by the title: what follows will realise what is announced, the resolution of
56 There is no English equivalent to this word, by which Barthes seems to
Printemps, and who has gone to her hairdressers, etc.59 The turning of the metaphorical into the literal, precisely for this metaphor, is impossible: the enunciation I am dead, is literally foreclosed (whereas I sleep remained literally possible in the field of hypnotic sleep). It is, then, if you like, scandal of language which is in question. (iii) There is also a scandal at the level of language (and no longer at the level of discourse). In the ideal sum of all the possible utterances of language, the link of the first person (I) and the attribute dead is precisely the one which is radically impossible: it is the empty point, this blind spot of language which the story comes, very exactly, to occupy. What is said is no other than this impossibility: the sentence is not descriptive, it is not constative, it delivers no message other than its own enunciation. In a sense we can say that we have here a performative, but such, certainly, that neither Austin nor Benveniste had foreseen it in their analyses (let us recall that the performative is the mode of utterance according to which the utterance refers only to its enunciation: I declare war ; performatives are always, by force, in the first person, otherwise they would slip towards the constative: he declares war); here, the unwarranted sentence performs an impossibility60. (iv) From a strictly semantic point of view, the sentence I am dead asserts two contrary elements at once (life, death): it is an enantioseme, but is, once again, unique: the signifier expresses a signified (death) which is contradictory with its enunciation. And yet, we have to go further still: it is not simply a matter of a simple negation, in the psychoanalytical sense, I am dead meaning in that case I am not dead, but rather an affirmation-negation: I am dead and not dead ; this is the paroxysm of transgression, the invention of an unheard-of category: the true-false, the yes-no, the death-life is thought of as a whole which is indivisible, uncombinable, non-dialectic, for the antithesis implies no
59 [In French this metaphorical usage corresponds to the English expression Im dead tired. ] 60 [See J.L.Austin, Philosophical Papers, ed. J.O. Urmson and G.J. Warnock, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1961; How to Do Things with Words, ed. J.O.Urmson and Marina Sbisa, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1962.]
Although all the codes are in fact cultural, there is yet one, among those we have met with, which we shall privilege by calling it the cultural code: it is the code of knowledge, or rather of human knowledges, of public opinions, of culture as it is transmitted by the book, by education, and in a more general and diffuse form, by the whole of sociality. We met several of these cultural codes (or general sub-codes of the general cultural code): the scientific code, which (in our story) is supported at once by the principles of experimentation and by the principles of medical deontology; the rhetorical code, which gathers up all the social rules of what is said: coded forms of narrative, coded forms of discourse (the announcement, the rsum, etc.); metalinguistic enunciation (discourse talking about itself) forms part of this code; the chronological code: dating, which seems natural and objective to us today, is in fact a highly cultural practice - which is to be expected since it implies a certain ideology of time (historical time is not the same as mythical time); the set of chronological reference-points thus constitute a strong cultural code (a historical way of cutting up time for purposes of dramatisation, of scientific appearance, of reality-effect); the sociohistorical code allows the mobilisation in the enunciation, of all the inbred knowledge that we have about our time, our society, our country (the fact of saying M. Valdemar and not Valdemar, it will be remembered, finds its place here). We must not be worried by the fact that we can constitute extremely banal notations into code: it is on the contrary their banality, their apparent insignificance that predisposes them to codification, given our definition of code: a corpus of rules that are so worn we take them to be marks of nature; but if the narrative departed from them, it would very rapidly become unreadable. The code of communication could also be called the code of destination. Communication should be understood in a restricted sense; it does not cover the whole of the signification which is in a text and still less its signifiance ; it simply designates every relationship in the text which is stated as an address (this is the case of the phatic code, charged with the accentuation of the relationship between narrator and reader), or as an exchange (the narrative is exchanged for truth, for life). In short,
1.4
DECONSTRUCTION
We need to interpret interpretations more than we interpret things. (Montaigne) Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called an event, if this loaded word did not entail a meaning which it is precisely the function of structural - or structuralist - thought to reduce or to suspect. Let us speak of an event, nevertheless, and let us use quotations marks to serve as a precaution. What would this event be then? Its exterior form would be that of a rupture and a redoubling. It would be easy enough to show that the concept of structure and even the word structure are old as the episteme - that is to say, as old as Western science and Western philosophy - and that their roots thrust deep into the soil of ordinary language, into whose deepest recesses the episteme plunges in order to gather them up and to make them part of itself in a metaphorical displacement. Nevertheless, up to the event which I wish to mark out and define, structure - or rather the structurality of structure although it has been at work, has always been neutralized or reduced, and this by a process of giving it a center or of referring it to a point of presence, a fixed origin. The function of this center was not only to orient, balance, and organize the structure - one cannot in fact conceive of an unorganized structure - but above all to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the play of the structure. By orienting and organizing the coherence of the system, the center of a structure permits the play of its elements inside the total form. And even today the notion of a structure lacking any center represents the unthinkable itself. Nevertheless, the center also closes off the play which it opens up and makes possible. As center, it is the point at which the substitution of
62 Published in: Hazard Adams, Leroy Searle (eds), Critical Theory since 1965
contents, elements, or terms is no longer possible. At the center, the permutation of the transformation of elements (which may of course be structures enclosed within a structure) is forbidden. As least this permutation has always remained interdicted (and I am using this word deliberately). Thus it has always been thought that the center, which is by definition unique, constituted that very thing within a structure which while governing the structure, escapes structurality. This is why classical thought concerning structure could say that the center is, paradoxically, within the structure and outside it. The center is at the center of the totality, and yet, since the center does not belong to the totality (is not part of the totality), the totality has its center elsewhere. The center is not the center. The concept of centred structure - although it represents coherence itself, the condition of the episteme as philosophy or science is contradictorily coherent. And as always coherence in contradiction expresses the force of a desire. The concept of centred structure is in fact the concept of the play based on a fundamental ground, a play constituted on the basis of a fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude, which itself is beyond the reach of play. And on the basis of this certitude anxiety can be mastered, for anxiety is invariably the result of a certain mode of being implicated in the game, of being caught by the game, of being as it were at stake in the game from the outset. And again on the basis of what we call the center (and which, because it can be either inside or outside, can also indifferently be called, the origin or end, arche or telos), repetitions, substitutions, transformations and permutations are always taken from a history of meaning [ sens] - that is, in a word, a history - whose origin may always be reawakened or whose end may always be anticipated in the form of presence. This is why one perhaps could say that the movement of any archaelogy, like that of any eschatology, is an accomplice of this reduction of the structurality of structure and always attempts to conceive of structure on the basis of a full presence which is beyond play. If this is so, the entire history of the concept of structure, before the rupture of which we are speaking, must be thought of as a series of substitutions of center for center, as a linked chain of determinations of
1.4.6 Barbara Johnson: from The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida 64
[...] A literary text that both analyses and shows that it actually has neither a self nor any neutral metalanguage with which to do the analysing calls out irresistibly for analysis. And when that call is answered by two eminent thinkers whose readings emit an equally paradoxical call to analysis of their own, the resulting triptych, in the context of the question of the act of reading (literature), places its would-be reader in a vertiginously insecure position. The three texts in question are Edgar Allan Poe's short story - The Purloined Letter, Jacques Lacan's - Seminar on The Purloined Letter, and Jacques Derrida's reading of Lacan's reading of Poe - The Purveyor of Truth (Le Facteur de la Vrit). In all three texts, it is the act of analysis that seems to occupy the centre of the discursive stage and the act of analysis of the act of analysis that in some way disrupts that centrality,
64 Published in: Robert Young (ed), Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist
story does not require that its meaning be revealed: the letter was able to produce its effects within the story: on the actors in the tale, including the narrator, as well as outside the story: on us, the readers, and also on its author, without anyone's ever bothering to worry about what it meant. The Purloined Letter thus becomes for Lacan a kind of allegory of the signifier. Derrida's critique of Lacan's reading does not dispute the validity of the allegorical interpretation on its own terms, but questions rather its implicit presuppositions and its modus operandi. Derrida aims its objections at two kinds of targets: (1) what Lacan puts into the letter, and (2) what Lacan leaves out of the text. (1) What Lacan puts into the letter: While asserting that the letter's meaning is lacking, Lacan, according to Derrida, makes this lack into the meaning of the letter. But Derrida does not stop there: he goes on to assert that what Lacan means by that lack is the truth of lack-ascastration-as-truth: The truth of the purloined letter is the truth itself[...]What is veiled/unveiled in this case is the hole, a non-being (non-tant); the truth of being (l'tre), as non-being. Truth is woman as veiled/unveiled castration [PT,66 pp. 60-1]. Lacan himself, however, never uses the word castration in the text of the original seminar. That it is suggested is indisputable, but Derrida, by filling in what Lacan left blank, is repeating precisely the gesture of blank-filling for which he is criticising Lacan. (2) What Lacan leaves out of the text: This objection is itself double: on the one hand, Derrida criticises Lacan for neglecting to consider The Purloined Letter in connection with the other two stories in what Derrida calls Poe's Dupin Trilogy. And on the other hand, according to Derrida, at the very moment Lacan is reading the story as an allegory of the signifier, he is being blind to the disseminating power of the signifier in the text of the allegory, in what Derrida calls the scene of writing. To cut out part of a text's frame of reference as though it did not exist and to
Jacques Derrida, The Purveyor of Truth, in Yale French Studies, 52 (1975), pp. 31-113.
66
neutralisation is possible, no general point of view (PT, p.106). This is also precisely the discovery of psychoanalysis - that the analyst is involved (through transference) in the very object of his analysis. Everyone who has held the letter - or even beheld it - including the narrator, has ended up having the letter addressed to him as its destination. The reader is comprehended by the letter: there is no place from which he can stand back and observe it. Not that the letter's meaning is subjective rather than objective, but that the letter is precisely that which subverts the polarity subjective/objective, that which makes subjectivity into something whose position in a structure is situated by the passage through it of an object. The letter's destination is thus wherever it is read, the place it assigns to its reader as his own partiality. Its destination is not a place, decided a priori by the sender, because the receiver is the sender, and the receiver is whoever receives the letter, including nobody. When Derrida says that a letter can miss its destination and be disseminated, he reads destination as a place that pre-exists the letter's movement. But if, as Lacan shows, the letter's destination is not its literal addressee, nor even whoever possesses it, but whoever is possessed by it, then the very disagreement over the meaning of reaching the destination is an illustration of the non-objective nature of that destination. The rhetoric of Derrida's differentiation of his own point of view from Lacan's enacts that law: Thanks to castration, the phallus always stays in its place in the transcendental topology we spoke of earlier. It is indivisible and indestructible there, like the letter that takes its place. And that is why the interested presupposition, never proved, of the letter's materiality as indivisibility was indispensable to this restricted economy, this circulation of propriety. The difference I am interested in here is that, a formula to be read however one wishes, the lack has no place of its own in dissemination (PT, p.63; translation modified, emphasis mine). The play of interest in this expression of difference is quite too
1951).
Leaving the father's hall at midnight, by a gate that was ironed within and without, and kneeling in prayer in a forest, beneath a huge oak tree, the lady Christabel hears a low sound of moaning. She springs to her feet, listens again, then steals around the tree for a look at the other side: There she sees a damsel bright / Drest in a silken robe of white, / That shadowy in the moonlight shone: / The neck that made that white robe wan, / Her stately neck, and arms were bare; / Her blue-veined feet
68 Published in: Robert Young, op. cit., pp. 281-316.
2. PROTO -THEMES
2.1.1 Joseph Campbell: from The Hero With A Thousand Faces 1. THE MONOMYTH: THE HERO AND THE GOD The standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero is a magnification of the formula represented in the rites of passage: separation-initiation-return: which might be named the nuclear unit of the monomyth. A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from his mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man. Prometheus ascended to the heavens, stole fire from the gods, and descended. Jason sailed through the Clashing Rocks into a sea of marvels, circumvented the dragon that guarded the Golden Fleece, and returned with the fleece and the power to wrest his rightful throne from a usurper. Aeneas went down into the underworld, crossed the dreadful river of the dead, threw a sop to the three-headed watchdog Cerberus, and conversed, at last, with the shade of his dead father. All things were unfolded to him: the destiny of souls, the destiny of Rome, which he was about to found, and in what wise he might avoid or endure every burden. He returned through the ivory gate to his work in the world. [...] As we soon shall see, whether presented in the vast, almost oceanic images of the Orient, in the vigorous narratives of the Greeks, or in the
2.1.2 Northrop Frye: from The Archetypes of Literature [...] It is clear that criticism cannot be systematic unless there is a quality in literature which enables it to be so, an order of words corresponding to the order of nature in the natural sciences. An archetype should be not only a unifying category of criticism, but itself a part of a total form, and it leads us at once to the question of what sort of form criticism can see in literature. Our survey of critical techniques has taken us as far as literary history. Total literary history moves from the primitive to the sophisticated, and here we glimpse the possibility of seeing literature as a complication of a relatively restricted and simple group of formulas that can be studied in primitive culture. If so, then the search for archetypes is a kind of literary anthropology, concerned with the way that literature is informed by pre-literary categories such as ritual, myth and folktale. We next realize that the relation between these categories and literature is by no means purely one of descent, as we find them reappearing in the greatest classics - in fact there seems to be a general tendency on the part of great classics
2.1.4 Leslie A. Fiedler: from Archetype and Signature: The Relationship of Poet and Poem [...] One of the essential functions of a poet is the assertion and creation of a personality, in a profounder sense than any non-artist can attain. We ask of a poet the definition of man, at once particular and abstract, stated and acted out. It is impossible to draw a line between the work the poet writes and the work he lives, between the life he lives and the life he writes. And the agile critic, therefore, must be prepared to move constantly back and forth between life and poem, not in a pointless circle, but in a meaningful spiralling toward the absolute point. To pursue this matter further, we will have to abandon at this point the nominalist notion of the poem as words or only words. We have the best of excuses, that such terminology gets in the way of truth. We will not, however, return to the older notions of the poem as a document or the embodiment of an idea, for these older conceptions are equally inimical to the essential concept of the marvellous ; and they have the further difficulty of raising political and moral criteria of truth as relevant to works of art. To redeem the sense of what words are all the time pointing to and what cannot be adequately explained by syntactic analysis or semantics, I shall speak of the poem as Archetype and Signature, suggesting that the key to analysis is symbolics; and I shall not forget that the poet's life is also capable of being analyzed in those terms. We have
2.1.5 Herbert Weisinger: from The Myth and Ritual Approach to Shakespearean Tragedy [...] It is my contention that while the last plays of Shakespeare do indeed carry forward the tragic pattern established in Hamlet, Othello,
2.1
2.2.1 Carl Gustav Jung: from Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious The hypothesis of a collective unconscious belongs to the class of ideas that people at first find strange but soon come to possess and use as
2.2.2 Carl Gustav Jung: from Psychology and Literature The profound difference between the first and second parts of Faust marks the difference between the psychological and the visionary modes of artistic creation. The latter reverses all the conditions of the former. The experience that furnishes the material for the artistic is no longer familiar. It is a strange something that derives its existence from the
2.2.4 Albert Gelpi: from Emily Dickinson and the Deerslayer: the Dilemma of the Woman Poet in America [...] In the Dickinson canon the poem that has caused commentators the most consternation over the years is My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun-. It figures prominently and frequently in After Great Pain, John Codys Freudian biography of Dickinson, and more recently Robert Weisbuch prefaces his explication in Emily Dickinsons Poetry with the remark that it is the single most difficult poem Dickinson wrote, a riddle to be solved. The poem requires our close attention and, if possible, our unriddling, because it is a powerful symbolic enactment of the psychological dilemma facing the intelligent and aware woman, and particularly the woman artist, in patriarchal America. Here is the full text of the poem, number 754 in Johnson variorum edition, without, for the moment, the variants in the manuscript: My life had stood - a Loaded Gun - / In Corners - till a Day / The Owner passed - identified - / And carried Me away - // And now We roam in Sovreign Woods - / And now We hunt the Doe - / And every
3.1
PSYCHOANALYTICAL APPROACHES
3.1.1.1 From On Dreams (1901) [...] A good proportion of what we have learnt about condensation in dreams may be summarized in this formula: each element in the content of a dream is overdetermined by material in the dream-thoughts; it is not derived from a single element in the dream-thoughts, but may be traced back to a whole number. These elements need not necessarily be closely be related to each other in the dream-thoughts themselves; they may belong to the most widely separated regions of the fabric of those thoughts. A dreamelement is, in the strictest sense of the word, the representative of all this disparate material in the content of the dream. But analysis reveals yet another side of the complicated relation between the content of the dream and the dream-thoughts. Just as connections lead from each element of the dream to several dream-thoughts, so as a rule a single dream-thought is represented by more than one dream-element; the threads of association do not simply converge from the dream-thoughts to the dream-content, they cross and interwave with each other many times over in the course of their journey. Condensation, together with the transformation of thoughts into situations (dramatization), is the most important and peculiar characteristic of the dream-work. So far, however, nothing has transpired as to any motive necessitating this compression of the material.
Ever since, under the powerful impression of this clinical picture, I formed the idea that the separation of the observing agency from the rest of the ego might be a regular feature of the egos structure, that idea has never left me, and I was driven to investigate the further characteristics and connections of the agency which was thus separated off. The next step is quickly taken. The content of the delusions of being observed already suggests that the observing is only a preparation for judging and punishing, and we accordingly guess that another function of this agency must be what we call our conscience. There is scarcely anything else in us that we so regularly separate from our ego and so easily set over against it as precisely our conscience. I feel an inclination to do something that I think will give me pleasure, but I abandon it on the ground that my conscience does not allow it. Or I have let myself be persuaded by too great an expectation of pleasure into doing something to which the voice of conscience has objected and after the deed my conscience punishes me with distressing reproaches and causes me to feel remorse for the deed. I might simply say that the special agency which I am beginning to distinguish in the ego is conscience. But it is more prudent to keep the agency as something independent and to suppose that conscience is one of its functions and that self-observation, which is an essential preliminary to the judging activity of conscience, is another of them. And since when we recognize that something has a separate existence we give it a name of its own, from this time forward I will describe this agency in the ego as the super-ego. [...] Hardly have we familiarized ourselves wih the idea of a super-ego like this which enjoys a certain degree of autonomy, follows its own intentions and is independent of the ego for its supply of energy, than a clinical picture forces itself on our notice which throws a striking light on the severity of this agency and indeed its cruelty, and on its changing relations to the ego. I am thinking of the condition of melancholia, or, more precisely, of melancholic attacks, which you too will have heard
3.1.3 Jacques Lacan: from The Mirror Stage As Formative of the Function of the I As Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience The child, at an age when he is for a time, however short, outdone by the chimpanzee in instrumental intelligence, can nevertheless already recognize as such his own image in a mirror. This recognition is indicated in the illuminative mimicry of the Aha-Erlebnis, which Khler sees as the expression of situational apperception, an essential stage of the act of intelligence. This act, far from exhausting itself, as in the case of the monkey, once the image has been mastered and found empty, immediately rebounds in the case of the child in a series of gestures in which he experiences in play the relation between the movements assumed in the image and the reflected environment, and between this virtual complex and the reality it reduplicates - the childs own body, and the persons and things, around him. This event can take place, as we have known since Baldwin, from the age of six months, and its repetition has often made me reflect upon the
3.1.4 Jacques Lacan: from The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud A. The Meaning of the Letter As my title suggests, beyond this speech, what the psychoanalytic experience discovers in the unconscious is the whole structure of language. Thus from the outset I have alerted informed minds to the extent to which the notion that the unconscious is merely the seat of the instincts will have to be rethought. But how are we to take this letter here? Quite simply, literally. By letter I designate the material support that concrete discourse borrows from language. This simple definition assumes that language is not to be confused with the various psychical and somatic functions that serve it in the speaking subject - primarily because language and its structure exist prior to the moment at which each subject at a certain point in his mental development makes his entry into it.
3.1.8 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: from Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Psychoanalysis
3.2.2 Georges Poulet: from The Self and Other Critical in Consciousness Critical consciousness relies, by definition, on the thinking of another ; it finds its nourishment and its substance only therein. [...] [...] Each literary work, of no matter what kind, implies, for the writer, an act of self-discovery. Writing does not mean simply to allow an unstemed rush of thoughts to flow onto the paper; writing means rather to construe oneself as the subject of these thoughts! I think means first and foremost: I reveal myself as the subject of that which I think. The thought that flows through me, like a rapid stream that rushes past its banks without being soaked in, moistens and refreshes the always vital foundations of my being. I am a spectator of the phenomena that take place in me. My awakened thought, whether frail or powerful, lucid or murky, never fully coincides with that which is thought. My thought is a separateness; it peaches the key. I cannot say exactly when I came to the conviction that literature as a whole depends on this kind of fact. I read the philosophers; above all those who had thought more than others about the significance of the cogito. Nearly all of modern philosophy, from Montaigne to Husserl, seemed to me to begin with a reflection which had its roots in the function of consciousness. [...] Each literary text, whether essay, novel, or poem, had a point of departure; each organized language grew out of an original moment of awareness, adjusted itself then according to the successive points it subsequently touched upon. In this realm there was no basic difference between literary and philosophical texts. All literature was philosophy for me, each philosophy was literature. No matter what sort of text I read, at the instant I began to sense the effect of a concept in it, I found the same origin in almost each line and the same course running from this source.
3.2.5 Geoffrey Hartman: from Wordsworths Poetry 1787-1814 Retrospect 1971 What I did, basically, was to describe Wordsworths consciousness of consciousness. Everything else - psychology, epistemology, religious ideas, politics - was subordinated. If that is phenomennological procedure, so be it. I did not, however, support any special (Hegelian, Jungian, etc.) theory of personal identity of human and historical development. Though sometimes adducing analogies from other writers, I tried to describe things strictly as they appeared to the poet, while raising the question as to why he so carefully respected their modes of appearance. The answer given by Wordsworth was that he had made when young a providential error: then it was already consciousness that was appearing, not simply things; and the blindness which caused the growing spirit to feel not its own burden but that of natural objects (they lay upon his mind like substances and perplexed the bodily sense) initiated a quest-romance in pursuit of the creation, one which gave the boys imagination time to naturalize itself, to direct its great but uncertain powers toward the things of this world. In short, I followed Wordsworths self-interpretations as closely as
3.3
READER-RESPONSE CRITICISM
3.3.1 Hans Robert Jauss: from Literary History As a Challenge to Literary Theory Thesis 1. A renewal of literary history demands the removal of the prejudices of historical objectivism and the grounding of the traditional aesthetics of production and representation in an aesthetics of reception and influence. The historicity of literature rests not on an organization of literary facts that is established post festum, but rather on the preceding experience of the literary work by its readers. R. G. Collingwoods postulate, posed in his critique of the prevailing ideology of objectivity in history - History is nothing but the reenactment of past thought in the historians mind - is even more valid for literary history. For the positivistic view of history as the objective description of a series of events in an isolated past neglects the artistic character as well as the specific historicity of literature. A literary work is not an object that stands by itself and that offers the same view to each reader in each period. It is not a monument that monologically reveals its timeless essence. It is much more like an orchestration that strikes ever new resonances among its readers and that frees the text from the material of the words and brings it to a contemporary existence: words
3.3.3 Stanley Fish: from Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics [...] Underlying these two analyses is a method, rather simple in concept, but complex (or at least complicated) in execution. The concept is simply the rigorous and disinterested asking of the question, what does this word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, chapter, novel, play, poem, do?; and the execution involves an analysis of the developing responses of the reader in relation to the words as they succeed one another in time . Every word in this statement bears a special emphasis. The analysis must be of the developing responses to distinguish it from the atomism of much stylistic criticism. A reader's response to the fifth word in a line or
3.3.4 Stanley Fish: from Interpreting the Variorum The Case for Reader-Response Analysis [...] Milton's twentieth sonnet - Lawrence of virtuous father virtuous son - has been the subject of relatively little commentary. In it the poet invites a friend to join him in some distinctly Horatian pleasures - a neat repast intermixed with conversation, wine, and song; a respite from labour all the more enjoyable because outside the earth is frozen and the day sullen. The only controversy the sonnet has inspired concerns its final two lines: [...] He who of those delights can judge, and spare / To interpose them
4. HISTORY, IDEOLOGY
4.1
NEO-MARXIST APPROACHES
4.1.1 Walter Benjamin: from The Author As Producer 70 You will remember how Plato, in his project for a Republic, deals with writers. In the interests of the community, he denies them the right to dwell therein. Plato had a high opinion of the power of literature. But he thought it harmful and superfluous - in a perfect community, be it understood. Since Plato, the question of the writers right to exist gas not often been raised with the same emphasis; today, however, it arises once more. Of course it only seldom arises in this form. But all of you are more or less conversant with it in a different form, that of the question of the writers autonomy: his freedom to write just what he pleases. You are not inclined to grant him this autonomy. You believe that the present social situation forces him to decide in whose service he wishes to place his activity. The bourgeois of entertainment literature does not acknowledge this choice. You prove to him that, without admitting it, he is working in the service of certain class interests. A progressive type of writer does not acknowledge this choice. His decision is made upon the basis of the class struggle: he places himself on the side of the proletariat. And thats the end of his autonomy. He directs his activity towards what will be useful to the proletariat in the class struggle. This is usually called pursuing a tendency, or commitment.
70 Address delivered at the Institute for the Study of Fascism, Paris, on 27 April
1934
do we see? It has become more and more subtle, more and more modern, and the result is that it is now incapable of photographing a tenement or a rubbish-heap without transfiguring it. Not to mention a river dam or an electric cable factory: in front of these, photography can only say, How beautiful. [...] It has succeeded in turning abject poverty itself, by handling it in a modish, technically perfect way, into an object of enjoyment. For it is an economic function of photography to supply the masses, by modish processing, with matter which previously eluded mass consumption Spring, famous people, foreign countries - then one of its political functions is to renovate the world as it is from the inside, i.e. by modish techniques. Here we have an extreme example of what it means to supply a production apparatus without changing it. Changing it would have meant bringing down one of the barriers, surmounting one of the contradictions which inhibit the productive capacity of the intelligentsia. What we must demand from the photographer is the ability to put such a caption beneath his picture as will rescue it from the ravages of modishness and confer upon it a revolutionary use value. [...] Turning to the New Objectivity as a literary movement, I must go a step further and say that it has turned the struggle against misery into an object of consumption. In many cases, indeed, its political significance has been limited to converting revolutionary reflexes, in so far as these occurred within the bourgeoisie, into themes of entertainment and amusement which can be fitted without much difficulty into the cabaret life of a large city. The characteristic feature of this literature is the way it transforms political struggle so that it ceases to be a compelling motive for decision and becomes an object of comfortable contemplation; it ceases to be a means of production and becomes an article of consumption[...]. [...] Commitment is a necessary, but never a sufficient, condition for a writers work acquiring an organizing function. For this to happen it is also necessary for the writer to have a teachers attitude. And today this is more than ever an essential demand. A writer who does not teach other
4.1.2 Walter Benjamin: from The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction [...] The presence of the original is the prerequisite of the concept of authenticity. Chemical analyses of the patina of a bronze can help to establish this, as does the proof that a given manuscript of the Middle Ages stems from an archive of the fifteenth century. The whole sphere of authenticity is outside technical - and, of course, not only technical reproducibility [...] The situations into which the product of mechanical reproduction can be brought may not touch the actual work of art, yet the quality of its presence is always depreciated. This holds not only for the art work but also, for instance, for a landscape which passes in review before the spectator in a movie. In the case of the art object, a most sensitive nucleus - namely, its authenticity - is interfered with whereas no natural object is vulnerable on that score. The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced. Since the historical testimony rests on the authenticity, the former, too, is jeopardized by reproduction when substantive duration ceases to matter. And what is really jeopardized when the historical testimony is affected is the authority of the object. One might subsume the eliminated element in the term aura and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art. This is a symptomatic process whose significance points beyond the realm of art. One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to
4.1.3 Terry Eagleton: from Criticism and Ideology [...] In what sense is it correct to maintain that ideology, rather than history, is the object of the text? Or, to pose the question slightly differently: In what sense, if any, do elements of the historically real enter the text ? Georg Lukcs, in his Studies in European Realism, argues that Balzacs greatness lies in the fact that the inexorable veracity of his art drives him to transcend his reactionary ideology and perceive the real
4.1.6 Terry Eagleton: from The Rise of English TO SPEAK OF LITERATURE AND IDEOLOGY as two separate phenomena which can be interrelated is, as I hope to have shown, in one sense quite unnecessary. Literature, in the meaning of the word we have inherited, is an ideology. It has the most intimate relations to questions of social power. But if the reader is still unconvinced, the narrative of what happened to literature in the later nineteenth century might prove a little more persuasive. If one were asked to provide a single explanation for the growth of
Criterion, articulate these views with force, contrasting the moral responsibility of the masterpieces and monuments of classical modernism with the fundamental irresponsibility and superficiality of a postmodernism associated with camp and with the facetiousness of which the Wolfe style is a ripe and obvious example. What is more paradoxical is that politically Wolfe and Kramer have much in common; and there would seem to be a certain inconsistency in the way in which Kramer must seek to eradicate from the high seriousness of the classics of the modern their fundamentally antimiddle-class stance and the protopolitical passion which informs the repudiation, by great modernists, of Victorian taboos and family life, of commodification and of the increasing asphyxiation of a desacralizing capitalism, from Ibsen to Lawrence, from Van Gogh to Jackson Pollock. Kramers ingenious attempt to assimilate this ostensibly anti-bourgeois stance of the great modernists to a loyal opposition secretly nourished, by way of foundation and grants, the bourgeoisie itself - while the most unconvincing indeed - is surely itself enabled by the contradictions of the cultural politics of modernism proper, whose negations depend on the persistence of what they repudiate and entertain - when they do not, very rarely indeed (as in Brecht), attain some genuine political selfconsciousness - a symbolic relationship with capital. It is, however, easier to understand Kramers move here when the political project of The New Criterion is clarified: for the mission of the journal is clearly to eradicate the 1960s and what remains of that legacy, to consign that whole period to the kind of oblivion which the 1950s were able to devise for the 1930s or the 1920s for the rich political culture of the pre-World-War-I era. The New Criterion therefore inscribes itself in the effort, on-going and at work everywhere today, to construct some new conservative cultural counter-revolution, whose terms range from the aesthetic to the ultimate defence of the family and of religion. [] It will not be surprising, in the light of what has been shown for an earlier set of positions on modernism and postmodernism, that in spite of the openly conservative ideology of this second evaluation of the contemporary cultural scene, the latter can also be appropriated for what
to a contemporary or postcontemporary cultural production now widely characterized as postmodern, be grasped as part and parcel of a reaffirmation of the authentic older higher modernisms very much in Adornos spirit. The ingenious twist or swerve in his own proposal involves the proposition that something called postmodernism does not follow high modernism proper, as the latters waste product, but rather very precisely precedes and prepares it, so that the contemporary postmodernisms all around us may be seen as the promise of the return and the reinvention, the triumphant reappearance, of some new high modernism endowed with all its older power and with fresh life. This is a prophetic stance, whose analyses turn on the anti-representational thrust of modernism and postmodernism; Lyotards aesthetic positions, however, cannot be adequately evaluated in aesthetic terms, since what informs them is an essentially social and political conception of a new social system beyond classical capitalism (our old friend, postindustrial society): the vision of a regenerated modernism is in that sense inseparable from a certain prophetic faith in the possibilities and the promise of the new society itself in full emergence. The negative inversion of this position will then clearly involve an ideological repudiation of modernism of a type which might conceivably range from Lukcs older analysis of modernist forms as the replication of the reification of capitalist social life all the way to some of the more articulated critiques of high modernisms of the present day. What distinguished this final position from the antimodernisms outlined above is, however, that it does not speak from the security of an affirmation of some new postmodernist culture, but rather sees even the latter itself as a mere degeneration of the already stigmatized impulses in high modernism proper. This particular position, perhaps the bleakest of all and the most implacably negative, can be vividly confronted in the works of the Venetian architecture historian Manfredo Tafuri, whose extensive analyses constitute a powerful indictment of what we have termed the protopolitical impulses in high modernism (the Utopian substitution of cultural politics for politics proper, the vocation to transform the world by transforming its forms, space or language). []
4.1.9 Frederic Jameson: from On Interpretation: Literature As a Socially Symbolic Act This book will argue the priority of the political interpretation of literary texts. It conceives of the political perspective not as some supplementary method, not as an optional auxiliary to other interpretive methods, current today - the psychoanalytic or the myth-critical, the stylistic, the ethical, the structural - but rather as the absolute horizon of all reading andall interpretation. This is evidently a much more extreme position than the modest claim, surely acceptable to everyone, that certain texts have social and historicalsometimes even political-resonance. Traditional literary history has, of course, never prohibited the investigation of such topics as the Florentine political background in Dante, Miltons relationship to the schismatics, or Irish historical allusions in Joyce. I would argue, however, that such information - even where it is not recontained, as it is in most instances, by an idealistic conception of the history of ideas - does not yield
interpretive codes whose insights are strategically limited as much by their own situational origins as by the narrow or local ways in which they construe or construct their objects of study. Still, to describe the readings and analyses contained in the present work as so many interpretations, to present them as so many exhibits in the construction of a new hermeneutic, is already to announce a whole polemic program, which must necessarily come to terms with a critical and theoretical climate variously hostile to these slogans. It is, for instance, increasingly clear that hermeneutic or interpretive activity has become one of the basic polemic targets of contemporary poststructuralism in France, which - powerfully buttressed by the authority of Nietzsche - has tended to identify such operations with historicism, and in particular with the dialectic and its valorization of absence and the negative, its assertion of the necessity and priority of totalizing thought. I will agree with this identification, with this description of the ideological affinities and implications of the ideal of the interpretive of hermeneutic act; but I will argue that the critique is misplaced. [...] [...] Leaving aside for the moment the possibility of any genuinely immanent criticism, we will assume that a criticism which asks the question What does it mean? constitutes something like an allegorical operation in which a text is systematically rewritten in terms of some fundamental master code or ultimately determining instance. On this view, all interpretation in the narrower sense demands the forcible or imperceptible transformation of a given text into an allegory of its particular master code or transcendental signified : the discredit into which interpretation has fallen is thus at one with the disrepute visited on allegory itself. Yet to see interpretation this way is to acquire the instruments by which we can force a given interpretive practice to stand and yield up its name, to blurt out its master code and thereby reveal its metaphysical and ideological underpinnings. It should not, in the present intellectual atmosphere, be necessary laboriously to argue the position that every form of practice, including the literary-critical kind, implies and presupposes a form of theory; that empiricism, the mirage of an utterly
4.2.1 Friedrich Nietzsche: from The Will to Power 481 (1883-1888) Against positivism, which halts at phenomena - There are only facts - I would say: No, facts is precisely what there is not, only interpretations. We cannot establish any fact in itself : perhaps it is folly to want to do such a thing. Everything is subjective, you say; but even this is interpretation. The subject is not something given, it is something added and invented and projected behind what there is. - Finally, is it necessary to posit an interpreter behind the interpretation? Even this is invention, hypothesis. In so far as the word knowledge has any meaning, the world is knowable; but it is interpretable otherwise, it has no meaning behind it, but countless meanings. - Perspectivism. It is our needs that interpret the world; our drives and their For and Against. Every drive is a kind of lust to rule; each one has its perspective that it would like to compel all the other drives to accept as a norm. [...] 600 (1885-1886) No limit to the ways in which the world can be interpreted; every interpretation a symptom of growth or of decline. Inertia needs unity (monism); plurality of interpretations a sign of strength. Not to desire to deprive the world of its disturbing and enigmatic character! [...] 604 (1885-1886) Interpretation, the introduction of meaning - not explanation (in most
4.2.2 M. Foucault: from Why Study Power? The Question of the Subject [...] I would like to say, first of all, what has been the goal of my work during the last twenty years. It has not been to analyse the phenomena of power, nor to elaborate the foundations of such an analysis. My objective, instead, has been to create a history of different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects. My work has
4.2.4 Michel Foucault: from The Order of Things:An Archaeology of the Human Sciences
Chap. 10: THE HUMAN SCIENCES [...] There is formed the theme of a pure theory of language which would provide the ethnology and the psychoanalysis thus conceived with their formal model. There would thus be a discipline that could cover in a single movement both the dimension of ethnology that relates the human sciences to the positivities in which they are framed and the dimension of psychoanalysis that relates the knowledge of man to the finitude that
4.3
4.3.1 Stephen Greenblatt: from Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation Of Social Energy in Renaissance England THE CIRCULATION OF SOCIAL ENERGY I began with the desire to speak with the dead. This desire is a familiar, if unvoiced, motive in literary studies, a motive organized, professionalized, buried beneath thick layers of bureaucratic decorum: literature professors are salaried, middle-class shamans. If I never believed that the dead could hear me, and if I knew that the dead could not speak, I was nonetheless certain that I could recreate a conversation with them. Even when I came to understand that in my most intense moments of straining to listen all I could hear was my own voice, even then I did not abandon my desire. It was true that I could hear only my own voice, but my own voice was the voice of the dead, for the dead had contrived to leave textual traces of themselves, and those traces make themselves heard in the voices of the living. Many of the traces have little resonance, though every one, even the most trivial or tedious, contains some fragment of lost life; others seem uncannily full of the will to be heard. It is paradoxical, of course, to seek the living will of the dead in fictions, in places where there was no live bodily being to begin with. But those who love literature tend to find more intensity in simulations -in the formal, self-conscious miming of life than in any of the other
4.3.2 Hayden White: from Tropics of Discourse The Historical Text as Literary Artifact There is one problem that neither philosophers nor historians have looked at very seriously and to which literary theorists have given only passing attention. This question has to do with the status of the historical narrative considered purely as a verbal artifact purporting to be a model of structures and processes long past and therefore not subject to either experimental or observational controls. This is not to say that historians and philosophers of histroy have failed to take notice of the essentially provisional and contingent nature of historical representations and of their susceptibility to infinite revision in the light of new evidence for more sophisticated
4.3.3 Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield: from History and Ideology: The Instance of Henry V [...] Perhaps the most fundamental error in [the] accounts of the role of ideology is falsely to unify history and/or the individual human subject. In one, history is identified by a teleological principle conferring meaningful order (Tillyard), in another by the inverse of this - Kotts implacable roller. And Sanderss emphasis on moral or subjective integrity implies a different though related notion of unity: an experience of subjective autonomy, of an essential self uncontaminated by the corruption of worldly process; individual integrity implies in the
4.4
4.4.1 Simone De Beauvoir: from The Second Sex [...] If her functioning as a female is not enough to define woman, if we decline also to explain her through the eternal feminine, and if nevertheless we admit, provisionally, that women do exist, then we must face the question: what is a woman? To state the question is, to me, to suggest, at once, a preliminary answer. The fact that I ask it is in itself significant. A man would never set out to write a book on the peculiar situation of the human male. But if I wish to define myself, I must first of all say: I am a woman ; on this truth must be based all further discussion. A man never begins by presenting himself as an individual of a certain sex; it goes without saying that he is a man. The terms masculine and feminine are used symmetrically only as a matter of form, as on legal papers. In actuality the relation of the two sexes is not quite like that of two electrical poles, for man represents both the positive and the neutral, as is indicated by the common use of man to designate human beings in general; whereas woman represents only the negative, defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity. In the midst of an abstract discussion it is vexing to hear a man say: You think thus and so because you are a woman ; but I know that my only defence is to reply: I think thus and so because it is true, thereby removing my subjective self from the argument. It would be out of the question to reply: And you think the contrary because you are a man, for it is understood that the fact of being a man is no peculiarity. A man is in the right in being a man; it is the woman who is in the wrong. It amounts to this: just as for the ancients there was an absolute with reference to which the oblique was defined, so there is an absolute human type, the
4.4.2 Julia Kristeva: from Womens Time The terror of power or the power of terrorism First in socialist countries (such as the USSR and China) and increasingly in Western democracies, under pressure from feminist movements, women
4.4.3 Hlne Cixous: from The Laugh of the Medusa I write this as a woman, toward women. When I say woman, Im speaking of woman in her inevitable struggle against conventional man; and of a universal woman subject who must bring women to their senses and to their meaning in history. But first it must said that in spite of the enormity of the repression that has kept them in the dark - that dark which people have been trying to make them accept as their attribute there is, at this time, no general woman, no one typical woman. What they have in common I will say. But what strikes me is the infinite richness of their individual constitutions: you cant talk about a female sexuality, uniform, homogeneous, classifiable into codes - any more than you can talk about one unconscious resembling another. Womens imaginary is inexhaustible, like music, painting, writing: their stream of phantasms is incredible. I have been amazed more than once by a description a woman gave me of a world all her own which she had been secretly haunting since early childhood. A world of searching, the elaboration of a knowledge, on the basis of a systematic experimentation with the bodily functions, a passionate and precise interrogation of her erotogeneity. This practice,
4.4.4 Elaine Showalter: from Towards a Feminist Poetics Feminist criticism can be divided into two distinct varieties. The first type is concerned with woman as reader - with woman as the consumer of male-produced literature, and with the way in which the hypothesis of a female reader changes our apprehension of a given text, awakening us to the significance of its sexual codes. I shall call this kind of analysis the feminist critique, and like other kinds of critique it is a historically grounded inquiry which probes the ideological assumptions of literary phenomena. Its subjects include the images and stereotypes of women in literature, the omissions and misconceptions about women in criticism, and the fissures in male-constructed literary history. It is also concerned
rational, marginal and grateful; and sisters in a new womens movement which engenders another kind of awareness and commitment, which demands that we renounce the pseudo-success of token womanhood, and the ironic masks of academic debate. How much easier, how less lonely it is, not to awaken - to continue to be critics and teachers of male literature, anthropologists of male culture, and psychologists of male literary response, claiming all the while to be universal. Yet we cannot will ourselves to go back to sleep. As women scholars in the 1970s we have been given a great opportunity, a great intellectual challenge. The anatomy, the rhetoric, the poetics, the history, await our writing. [...] The task of feminist critics is to find a new language, a new way of reading that can integrate our intelligence and our experience, our reason and our suffering, our scepticism and our vision. This enterprise should not be confined to women; I invite Criticus, Poeticus and Plutarchus to share it with us. One thing is certain: feminist criticism is not visiting. It is here to stay, and we must make it a permanent home.
4.4.5 Elaine Showalter: from Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism (1985) AS A SORT of a come - on, I announced that I would speak today about that piece of bait named Ophelia, and Ill be as good as my word. These are the words which begin the psychoanalytic seminar on Hamlet presented in Paris in 1959 by Jacques Lacan. But despite his promising come - on, Lacan was not as good as his word. He goes on for some 41 pages to speak about Hamlet, and when he does mention Ophelia, she is merely what Lacan calls the object Ophelia - that is, the object of Hamlets male desire. The etymology of Ophelia, Lacan asserts, is O phallus, and her role in the drama can only be to function as the exteriorized figuration of what Lacan predictably and, in view of his own early work with psychotic women, disappointingly suggests is the phallus
Mass., 1977).
These Pre - Raphaelite images were part of a new and intricate traffic between images of women and madness in late nineteenth - century literature, psychiatry, drama, and art. First of all, superintendents of Victorian lunatic asylums were also enthusiasts of Shakespeare, who turned to his dramas for models of mental aberration that could be applied to their clinical practice. The case study of Ophelia was one that seemed particularly useful as an account of hysteria or mental breakdown in adolescence, a period of instability which the Victorians regarded as risky for womens mental health. [...] And where the women themselves did not willingly throw themselves into Ophelia - like postures, asylum superintendents, armed with the new technology of photography, imposed the costume, gesture, props, and expression of Ophelia upon them. In England, the camera was introduced to
In terms of effect on the theater, the most radical application of these ideas was probably realized in Melissa Murrays agitprop play Ophelia, written in 1979 for the English womens theater group Hermone Imbalance. In this blank verse retelling of the Hamlet story, Ophelia becomes a lesbian and runs off with a woman servant to join a guerilla commune.46 When feminist criticism chooses to deal with representation, rather than with womens writing, it must aim for a maximum interdisciplinary contextualism, in which the complexity of attitudes towards the feminine can be analyzed in their fullest cultural and historical frame. The alternation of strong and weak Ophelias on the stage, virginal and seductive Ophelias in art, inadequate or oppressed Ophelias in criticism, tells us how these representations have overflowed the text, and how they have reflected the ideological character of their times, erupting as debates between dominant and feminist views in periods of gender crisis and redefinition. The representation of Ophelia changes independently of theories of the meaning of the play or the Prince, for it depends on attitudes towards women and madness. The decorous and pious Ophelia of the Augustan age and the postmodern schizophrenic heroine who might have stepped from the pages of Laing can be derived from the same figure; they are both contradictory and complementary images of female sexuality in which madness seems to act as the switching - point, the concept which allows the co-existence of both sides of the representation. 47 There is no true Ophelia for whom feminist criticism must unambiguously speak, but perhaps only a cubist Ophelia of multiple perspectives, more than the sum of all her parts. But in exposing the ideology of representation, feminist critics have also the responsibility to acknewledge and to examine the boundaries of our own ideological positions as products of our gender and our time. A degree of humility in an age of critical hubris can be our greatest strength, for it is by occupying this position of historical self - consciousness in both feminism and criticism that we maintain our credibility in representing Ophelia, and that unlike Lacan, when we promise to speak about her, we make good our word.
4.4.8 Lillian S. Robinson: from Treason Our Text Feminist Challenges to the Literary Canon The lofty seat of canonized bards (Pollok, 1827) AS WITH MANY OTHER restrictive institutions, we are hardly aware of it until we come into conflict with it; the elements of the literary canon are simply absorbed by the apprentice scholar and critic in the normal
4.5
ETHNO-CRITICISM
In the light of all this, consider Napoleon and Lesseps 81. Everything they knew, more or less, about the Orient, came from books written in the tradition of Orientalism, placed in its library of ides reues; for them the Orient, like the fierce lion, was something to be encountered and dealt with to a certain extent because the texts made that Orient possible. Such an Orient was silent, available to Europe for the realization of projects that involved but were never directly responsible to the native inhabitants, and unable to resist the projects, images, or mere descriptions devised for it. Earlier I called such a relation between Western writing (and its consequences) and Oriental silence the result of and the sign of the Wests great cultural strength, its will to power over the Orient. But there is another side to the strength, a side whose existence depends on the pressures of the Orientalist tradition and its textual attitude to the Orient; this side lives its own life, as books about fierce lions will do until lions can talk back. The perspective rarely drawn on Napoleon and de Lesseps - to take two among the many projectors who hatched plans for the Orient - is the one that sees them carrying on in the dimensionless silence of the Orients mainly because the discourse of Orientalism, over and above the Orients powerlessness to do anything about them, suffused their activity with meaning, intelligibility, and reality. The discourse of Orientalism and what made it possible - in Napoleons case, a West far more powerful militarily than the Orient - gave them Orientals who could be described in such works as the Description de l Egypte and an Orient that could be cut across as de Lesseps cut across Suez. Moreover, Orientalism gave them their success - at least from their point of view, which had nothing to do with that of the Oriental. [] Yet - and here we must be very clear - Orientalism overrode the Orient.
Gustave Faluberts novel Bouvard et Pcuchet, published posthumously in 1881. 81 Napoleon Bonaparte led a military expedition to Egypt in 1798 and initiated an academic study of that country whose findings were published in twentythree volumes between 1809 and 1828 under the title Description de l Egypte. Ferdinand de Lesseps (1805-94) was a French diplomat and engineer who designed and supervised the construction of the Suez canal in 1859-69.
low Orientals was widely diffused in European culture. But nowhere else, unless it be later in the nineteenth century among Darwinian anthropologists and phrenologists, was it made the basis of a scientific subject matter as it was in comparative linguistics or philology. Language and race seemed inextricably tied, and the good Orient was invariably a classical period somewhere in a long-gone India, whereas the bad Orient lingered in present-day Asia, parts of North Africa, and Islam everywhere. Aryans were confined to Europe and the ancient Orient, as Lon Poliakov has shown (without once remarking, however, that Semites were not only the Jews but the Muslims as well 86), the Aryan myth dominated historical and cultural anthropology at the expense of the lesser peoples. The official intellectual genealogy of Orientalism would certainly include Gobineau, Renan, Humboldt, Steinthal, Burnouf, Remusat, Palmer, Weil, Dozy, Muir, to mention a few famous names almost at random from the nineteents century. It would also include the diffusive capacity of learned societies: the Socit asiatique, founded in 1822; the Royal Asiatic Society, founded in 1823; the American Oriental Society, founded in 1842; and so on. But it might perforce neglect the great contribution of imaginative and travel literature, which strengthened the divisions established by Orientalists between the various geographical, temporal, and racial departments of the Orient. Such neglect would be incorrect, since for the Islamic Orient this literature is especially rich and makes a significant contribution to building the Orientalist discourse. It include work by Goethe, Hugo, Lamartine, Chateaubriand, Kinglake, Nerval, Flaubert, Lane, Burton, Scott, Byron, Vigny, Disraeli, George Eliot, Gautier. Later, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we could add Doughty, Barrs, Loti, T. E. Lawrence, Forster. All these writers give a bolder outline to Disraelis great Asiatic mystery. In this enterprise there is considerable support not only from the unearthing of dead Oriental civilizations (by European excavators) in Mesopotamia,
86 Lon Poliakov, The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Nationalist Ideas
charming meaning in the Orient. This meaning cannot be reproduced; it can only be enjoyed on the spot and brought back very approximately. The Orient is watched, since its almost (but never quite) offensive behaviour issues out a reservoir of infinite peculiarity; the European, whose sensibility tours the Orient, is a watcher, never involved, always detached, always ready for new examples of what the Description de l Egypte called bizarre jouissamce. The Orient becomes a living tableau of queerness. [] As a judge of the Orient, the modern Orientalist does not, as he believes and even says, stand apart from it objectively. His human detachment, whose sign is the absence of sympathy covered by professional knowledge, is weighted heavily with all the orthodox attitudes, perspectives and moods of Orientalism that I have been describing. His Orient is not the Orient as it is, but the Orient as it has been Orientalized. An unbroken arc of knowledge and power connects the European or Western statesman and the Western Orientalists; it forms the rim of the stage containing the Orient. By the end of World War I both Africa and the Orient formed not so much an intellectual spectacle for the West as a privileged terrain for it. The scope of Orientalism exactly matched the scope of empire, and it was this absolute unanimity between the two that provoked the only crisis in the history of Western thought about and dealings with the Orient. And this crisis continues now. Beginning in the twenties and from one end of the Third World to the other, the response to empire and imperialism has been dialectical. By the time of the Bandung conference in 195588 the entire Orient had gained its political independence from the Western empires and confronted a new configuration of imperial powers, the United States and the Soviet Union. Unable to recognize its Orient in the new Third World, Orientalism now faced a challenging and politically armed Orient. Two alternatives opened before Orientalism. One was to carry on as if nothing had happened. The
88 At this conference, held in Bandung, Indonesia, twenty-nine nations of Africa and Asia (including Communist China) planned economic and cultural co-operation, and opposed colonialism.
texts. However, along with such academic security-blankets as history, literature or the humanities, and despite its overarching aspirations, Orientalism is involved in worldly, historical circumstances which it has tried to conceal behind an often pompous scientism and appeals to rationalism. The contemporary intellectual can learn from Orientalism how, on the one hand, either to limit or to enlarge realistically the scope of his disciplines claims, and on the other, to see the human ground (the foul-rag-and-bone shop of the heart, Yeats called it) in which texts, visions, methods, and disciplines begin, grow, thrive, and degenerate. To investigate Orientalism is also to propose intellectual ways for handling the methodological problems that history has brought forward, so to speak, in its subject matter, the Orient. But before that we must virtually see the humanistic values that Orientalism, by its scope, experiences, and structures, has all but eliminated.
4.5.2 Edward W. Said: from The Politics of Knowledge [...] At the heart of the imperial cultural entreprise I analyzed in Orientalism and also in my new book, was a politics of identity. That politics has needed to assume, indeed needed firmly to believe, that what was true for Orientals or Africans was not however true about or for Europeans. When a French or German scholar tried to identify the main characteristics of, for instance, the Chinese mind, the work was only partly intended to do that; it was also intended to show how different the Chinese mind was from the Western mind. Such constructed things - they have only an elusive reality - as the Chinese mind or the Greek spirit have always been with us; they are at the source of a great deal that goes into the making of individual cultures, nations, traditions, and peoples. But in the modern world considerably greater attention has generally been given to such identities than was ever
4.5.3 Edward W. Said: from The Problem of Textuality The pages that follow work through two powerful, contemporary ways of considering, describing, analyzing, and dealing theoretically with the problem of textuality, a manifestly central problem for anyone concerned with criticism and theory. These ways - with only the slightest allusion to Prousts ways intended - are Foucaults and Derridas. My analysis of these two theories is part of an attempt to characterize an exemplary critical consciousness as situated between, and ultimately refusing both, the hegemony of the dominant culture and what I call the sovereignty of systematic method. Moreover, I will argue that for both these critics, critical work is a cognitive activity, a way of discovery, not by any means a purely contemplative activity; indeed, I will go so far as to say that in our present circumstances criticism is an adversary, or oppositional activity. Finally - and I am depressingly aware that these prefatory comments are far too schematic - I will discuss Derridas mise en abyme and Foucaults mise en discours1 as typifying the contrast between a criticism claiming that il n y a pas d hors texte and one discussing textuality as having to do with a plurality of texts, and with history, power, knowledge and society. Far from mediating or reconciling these vividly contrasting theses about textuality, whose protagonists serve me as but two instances of a very wide theoretical divergence polarizing contemporary criticism, my position uses both in what it is own best interest since both strike me as indispensable to any cogent critical position. Derrida and Foucault are opposed to each other on a number of
4.5.4 Edward W. Said: from Secular Criticism Literary criticism is practiced today in four major forms. One is the practical criticism to be found in book reviewing and literary journalism. Second is academic literary history, which is a descendant of such nineteenth-century specialties as classical scholarship, philology, and cultural history. Third is literary appreciation and interpretation, principally academic but, unlike the other two, not confined to professionals and regularly appearing authors. Appreciation is what is taught and performed by teachers of literature in the university and its beneficiaries in a literal sense are all those millions of people who have learned in a classroom how to read a poem, how to enjoy the complexity of a metaphysical conceit, how to think of literature and figurative language as having characteristics that are unique and not reducible to a
4.5.5 Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: from The Signifying Monkey (1988) The Trope of the Talking Book I THE LITERATURE of the slave, published in English between 1760 and 1865, is the most obvious site to excavate the origins of the AfroAmerican literary tradition. Whether our definition of tradition is based on the rather narrow lines of race or nationality of authors, upon shared themes and narrated stances, or upon repeated and revised tropes, it is to the literature of the black slave that the critic must turn to identify the beginning of the Afro-American literary tradition. The literature of the slave is an ironic phrase, at the very least, and is an oxymoron at its most literal level of meaning. Literature, as Samuel Johnson used the term, denoted an aquaintance with letters or books, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. It also connoted polite or humane learning and literary culture. While it is self-evident that the ex-slave who managed (as Frederick Douglas put it) to steal some learning from his or her master and the masters texts, was bent on demonstrating to a skeptical public an acquaintance with letters or books, we cannot honestly conclude that slave literature was meant to exemplify either polite or humane learning or the presence in the author of literary culture. Indeed, it is more accurate to argue that the literature of the slave consisted of texts that represent impolite learning and that these texts collectively railed against the arbitrary and inhumane learning which masters foisted upon slaves to reinforce a perverse fiction of the natural order of things. The slave, by definition, possessed at most a liminal ststus within the human community. To read and to write was to transgress this nebulous realm of liminality. The slaves texts, then, could
4.5.6 Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: from From the Seen to the Told Canon-Formation, Literary History, and the Afro-American Tradition THE WESTERN CRITICAL TRADITION has a canon, as the Western literary tradition does, I once thought it our most important geature to master the canon of criticism, to imitate and apply it, but I now believe that we must turn to the black tradition itself to develop theories of criticism indigenous to our literatures. Alice Walkers revision of Rebecca Cox Jacksons parable of white interpretation (written in 1836) makes the point most tellingly. Jackson, a Shaker eldress and black visionary, claimed like John Jea to have been taught to read by the Lord. She writes in her autobiography that she dreamed a white man came to her house to teach her how to interpret and understand the word of God, now that God had taught her to read: A white man took me by my right hand and led me on the north side of the room, where sat a square table. On it lay a book open. And he said to me: Thou shall be instructed in this book, from Genesis to Revelations. And then he took me to the west side, where stood a table. And it looked like the first. And said, Yea, thou shall be instructed from the beginning of creation to the end of time. And then he took me to the east side of the
5.2.1 Preface and Prelude With most of these twenty-six writers, I have tried to confront greatness directly: to ask what makes the author and the works canonical. The answer, more often than not, has turned out to be strangeness, a mode of originality that either cannot be assimilated, or that so assimilates us that we cease to see it as strange. Walter Pater defined Romanticism as adding strangeness to beauty, but I think he characterized all canonical writing rather than the Romantics as such. The cycle of achievement goes from the Divine Comedy to Endgame, from strangeness to strangeness. When you read a canonical work for a first time you encounter a stranger, an uncanny startlement rather than a fulfillment of expectations. Read freshly, all that The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, Faust Part Two, Hadji Murad, Peer Gynt, Ulysses, and Canto general have in common is their uncanniness, their ability to make you feel strange at home. Shakespeare, the largest writer we ever will know, frequently gives the opposite impression: of making us at home out of doors, foreign, abroad. His powers of assimilation and of contamination are unique and constitute a perpetual challenge to universal performance and to criticism. I find it absurd and regrettable that the current criticism of Shakespeare cultural materialist (Neo-Marxist); New Historicist (Foucault); Feminist - has abandoned the quest from his aesthetic supremacy and works at reducing him to the social energies of the English Renaissance, as though there were no authentic difference in aesthetic merit between the
5.3 Harold Bloom: from Bloom and Doom Harold Bloom writes in The Western Canon that he hopes his book does not turn out to be an elegy. Yet Bloom, 64, Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale and Berg Professor of English at New York University, now doubts that literary studies will survive. The elegiac tone creeps into both his book and his conversation - only to chased off by his indignation. [...]
5.5 E. D. Hirsch Jr.: from Faulty perspectives The main intellectual (and emotional) sanction for dogmatic skepticism in present-day literary theory is its assumption that all knowledge is relative. This cognitive atheism, as I call it, is based mainly on the idea that everybody sees literature from his own angle of vision, and responds emotionally to literature through his own system of values and associations. Individualized in this way, cognitive atheism is straightforward subjectivism. But other closely related forms in literary theory and practice are cultural relativism, historical relativism, and methodological relativism. All exhibit the same structure; all of them make truth and reality relative to a spiritual perspective. That this doctrine of critical relativity should itself be the single doctrine exempt from an otherwise universal skepticism rarely strikes its adherents as a damaging
partly accurate for modern historicism (or cultural perspectivism) in its uncritical forms. Literary history often stresses the individuality of a period without placing a correspondent stress on discordant individualities within a period. And this is odd, since those who understand the sameness of individuals within a period do not very often perceive sameness among individuals across different periods. Meinecke is himself an historian, a distinguished one, who avoids this inconsistency. History of any sort, including literary history, he asserts, would be impossible on the assumption that mans perspective changes radically in history; and it would be empty if it assumed that human nature remained everywhere the same. Uncritical dogma in either direction deserves to be called a fallacy. It is not, of course, a logical fallacy, only an offence against experience and common sense. The first historical fallacy on my list of three I call the fallacy of the inscrutable past, since under it, one regards persons of the past in the way Englishmen in novels used to regard inscrutable Orientals. Literary historians of this style infer from the past a state of mind so different from our own that its texts can be understood only by an initiated few, from whom an act of historical sympathy is required to understand a distant era that seems to be populated by beings who might have come from Mars. [] Theorists like Gadamer94, for instance, or like Barthes, rightly object to the cultural narcosis induced by such reconstructions of the past.95 But as an antidote they recommend that we vitalize the inscrutable texts of the past by distorting them to our own perspective. In other words, they accept the fallacy of the inscrutable past as the premise on which they base their skeptical counterproposal. It is far better to distort the past in an interesting and relevant way than to distort and deaden it under the pretense of historical reconstruction. [] My second fallacy of historicism is the fallacy of the homogeneous past. Obviously, it is often accompanied by the fallacy of the inscrutable past,
94 Hans-Georg Gadamer, German philosopher, author of Truth and Method (1960). 95 H. G. Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode (Tbingen, 1960), esp. p. 290-324, and Roland Barthes, Sur Racine (Paris 1960).
another is not to deny that a man can understand someone with a perspective very different from his own. Vicos conception, later elaborated by Dilthey98, was that men share a common potential to be other than they are99. The distance between one culture and another may not in every instance be bridgeable, but the same is true between persons who inhabit the same culture. Cultural perspectivism, of the sort I have been attacking, forgets that the distance between one historical period and another is a very small step in comparison to the huge metaphysical gap we must leap to understand the perspective of another person in any time or place. III. What is an approach? Diltheys psychological model for our potential ability to understand the past is persuasive and balanced. But Dilthey himself did not always manage to preserve this balance in his writings. It is mainly to him that we owe the word Weltanschauung, that is, the spiritual perspective of a person or a culture. In the domain of literary criticism, the critics Weltanschauung is sometimes called his approach, a term first used in this perspectival sense in the twentieth century. The critics interpretation of literature depends on his approach. What the scholar discovers depends on his approach. The term implies a methodological prspectivism. Dilthey tells the story of a nightmare that visited him sometime after he had begun to use the term Weltanschauung. As a guest in a friends house, he had seen assigned a bed near a reproduction of Raphaels School of Athens, and as he slept he dreamt that the picture had come to life. All the famous thinkers of antiquity began to rearrange themselves in group according to their Weltanschauungen. Slowly into the dream composition came later thinkers: Kant, Schiller, Carlyle, Ranke, Guizot - each of
98 Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), German philosopher and social scientist. 99 W. Dilthey, Zergliedende und Beschrebende Psychologie , vol. 5 in
correctness with the presumably meaningful criterion of authenticity. [] But what, after all, is a perspective? The metaphor is spatial and visual, while the matter at hand is neither. If we were required momentarily to abandon the metaphor in favour of more descriptive terms, we would be forced to the realization that the visual metaphor refers to Kants Copernican revolution in philosophy. Perspectivism is a version of the Kantian insight that mans experience is preaccomodated to his categories of experience. The contribution to modern thought of Dilthey and others was in extending the Kantian insight beyond the abstract, universal realms of science and mathematics into their richer, more complex domains of cultural experience. Conscious of his debt to Kant, Dilthey conceived his theoretical work on interpretation as part of a larger program which he called the Critique of Historical Reason. [] Kant postulated a universal structure in human subjectivity which constitutes experience, and which thereby guarantees the possibility of scientific knowledge. Dilthey and others postulated that, beyond this universal subjectivity, there exists a cultural subjectivity, structured by further categories which are analogously constitutive of all cultural experience. Since Dilthey and his fellow theorists were intimately aware that, under this conception, verbal meaning is entirely relative to cultural subjectivity, it may be instructive to ask more particularly how they managed to eschew the skeptical conclusions of Diltheys nightmare. The problem is certainly a grave one. If all interpretation is constituted by the interpreters own cultural categories, how can he possibly understand meanings that are constituted by different cultural categories? Diltheys answer was straightforward and perfectly within the sponsoring Kantian tradition. We can understand culturally alien meanings because we are able to adopt culturally alien categories. Admittedly, we can understand Racine only through those alien categories that are constitutive of his meaning - only through his perspective. Yet we can adopt his categories; for cultural subjectivity is not an epistemological ultimate, comparable to Kants universal system of categories. Cultural subjectivity is not innate, but acquired; it derives from a potential, present in every man, that is capable of sponsoring an indefinite number of
101 Ch. Balley, Linguistique gnrale at liguistique franaise (Bern, 1944), p. 37. See also P. F. Strawson, Intention and Convention in Speech Acts, Philosophical Review 73 (1964): 439-60.