Beyond Interpretation - Culler

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|Sunnev, 1976), pp. 244-256
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JONATHAN
CULLER
Beyond Interpretation:
The Prospects of
Contemporary Criticism
IN
THE YEARS since World War
II,
the New Criticism has been
challenged,
even
vilified,
but it has seldom been
effectively ignored.
The
inability
if not reluctance of its
opponents simply
to evade its
legacy
testifies to the dominant
position
it has come to
occupy
in
American and British universities.
Despite
the
many
attacks on
it,
despite
the lack of an
organized
and
systematic defense,
it seems not
unfair to
speak
of the
hegemony
of New Criticism in this
period
and
of the
determining
influence it has exercised on our
ways
of
writing
about and
teaching
literature. In a
sense,
whatever critical affiliations we
may proclaim,
we are all New Critics
now,
in that it would
require
a
strenuous consciousness of effort to
escape
notions of the
autonomy
of
the
literary
work,
the
importance
of
demonstrating
its
unity,
and the
requirement
of "close
reading."
In
many ways
the influence of the New Criticism has been
beneficent,
especially
on the
teaching
of literature. Those old
enough
to have ex-
perienced
the rite de
passage,
the
gradual emergence
from an earlier
mode of
literary study, speak
of the sense of
release,
the new excitement
breathed into
literary
education
by
the
assumption
that even the mean-
est student who lacked the
scholarly
information of his
betters,
could
make valid comments on the
language
and structure of the text. No
longer
was discussion and evaluation of a work
something
which had
to wait
upon acquisition
of a
respectable
store of
literary, historical,
and
biographical
information. No
longer
was the
right
to comment some-
thing
earned
by
months in a
library.
Even the
beginning
student of
literature was now confronted with
poems,
asked to read them
closely,
244
PROSPECTS OF CRITICISM
and
required
to discuss and evaluate their use of
language
and their
thematic
organization.
To make the
experience
of the text itself central
to
literary
education and to
relegate
the accumulation of information
about the text to an
ancillary
status was a move which
gave
the
study
of literature a new focus and
justification,
as well as
promoting
a more
precise
and relevant
understanding
of
literary
works.
But what is
good
for
literary
education is not
necessarily good
for
the
study
of literature in
general,
and those
very aspects
of the New
Criticism which ensured its success in schools and universities deter-
mined its eventual limitations as a
program
for
literary
criticism.
Commitment to the
autonomy
of the
literary
text,
a fundamental article
of faith with beneficial
consequences
for the
teaching
of
literature,
led
to a commitment to
interpretation
as the
proper activity
of criticism.
If the work is an autonomous
whole,
then it can and should be studied
in and for
itself,
without reference to
possible
external
contexts,
whether
biographical, historical,
psychoanalytic,
or
sociological. Distinguishing
what was external from what was
internal,
rejecting
historical and
causal
explanation
in favor of internal
analysis,
the New Criticism left
the reader and critic with
only
one recourse.
They
must
interpret
the
poem; they
must show how its various
parts
contribute to a thematic
unity,
for it is this thematic
unity
which
justifies
the work's status as
autonomous artifact. When a
poem
is read in and for itself critics must
fall back
upon
the one constant of their situation: there is a
poem being
read
by
a human
being.
Whatever else is external to the
poem,
the fact
that it addresses a human
being
means that what it
says
about human
life is internal to it. The critic's task is to show how the interaction of
the
poem's parts produces
a
complex
and
ontologically privileged
state-
ment about human
experience.
Though they may occasionally attempt
to
disguise
the
fact,
the basic
concepts
of the New Critics and their followers derive from this
particular
thematic and
interpretive
orientation. The
poem
is not
simply
a series of
sentences;
it is
spoken by
a
persona,
who
expresses
an
attitude to be
defined, speaking
in a
particular
tone which
puts
the
attitude in one of various
possible
modes or
degrees
of commitment.
Since the
poem
is an autonomous whole its value must lie within
it,
in
the richness and
complexity
of the
attitude,
in the
variety
of the alterna-
tive values or
judgments
it
puts
into the balance and relates to one
another. Hence one finds in
poems
ambivalence, ambiguity, tension,
irony, paradox.
These are all thematic
operators,
which
permit
one to
translate formal features of the
language
into
meanings,
so that the
poem may
be unified as a
complex
thematic structure which
expresses
an attitude toward the world. And in
place
of a
theory
of
reading
which would
specify
how order was to be
achieved,
the New Criticism
245
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
deployed
a common humanism
or,
as R. S. Crane calls
it,
a "set of
reduction terms" toward which
analysis
of
ambivalence, tension,
irony,
and
paradox
was to move: "life and
death,
good
and
evil,
love and
hate,
harmony
and
strife,
order and
disorder, eternity
and
time,
reality
and
appearance,
truth and
falsity
. . . emotion and
reason,
simplicity
and
complexity,
nature and art."' A
repertoire
of
contrasting
attitudes and
values relevant to the human situation served as a kind of
target
lan-
guage
in the
process
of thematic translation. To
analyze
a
poem
was to
show how all its
parts
contributed to a
complex
statement about human
problems.
In
short,
it would be
possible
to demonstrate
that, given
its
premises,
the New Criticism was
necessarily
an
interpretive
criticism. But in
fact it is
scarcely necessary
to make out such a
case,
for the most
impor-
tant and insidious
legacy
of the New Criticism is the
widespread
and
unquestioning acceptance
of the notion that the critic's
job
is to
interpret
literary
works.
Indeed,
fulfillment of the
interpretive
task has come to
be the touchstone
by
which other kinds of critical
writing
are
judged,
and reviewers
inevitably
ask of
any
work of
literary theory, linguistic
analysis,
or historical
scholarship,
whether it
actually
assists us in our
understanding
of
particular
works. In this critical climate it is therefore
important,
if
only
as a means of
loosening
the
grip
which
interpretation
has on critical
consciousness,
to take
up
a tendentious
position
and to
maintain
that,
while the
experience
of literature
may
be an
experience
of
interpreting
works,
in fact the
interpretation
of individual works is
only tangentially
related to the
understanding
of literature. To
engage
in the
study
of literature is not to
produce yet
another
interpretation
of
King
Lear but to advance one's
understanding
of the conventions and
operations
of an
institution,
a mode of discourse.
Indeed,
there are
many
tasks that confront
criticism,
many things
that we need if we are to advance our
understanding
of
literature,
but
if there is one
thing
we do not need it is more
interpretations
of
literary
works. It is not at all difficult to list in a
general way
critical
projects
which would be of
compelling
interest if carried
through
to some
measure of
completion;
and such a list is in itself the best illustration of
the
potential fecundity
of other
ways
of
writing
about literature. We
have no
convincing
account of the role or function of literature in
society
or social consciousness. We have
only fragmentary
or anecdotal histories
of literature as an institution: we need a fuller
exploration
of its hisorical
relation to the other forms of discourse
through
which the world is
organized
and human activities are
given meaning.
We need a more
sophisticated
and
apposite
account of the role of literature in the
psy-
1
The
Languages of
Criticism and the Structure
of Poetry (Toronto, 1953),
pp.
123-24.
246
chological
economies of both writers and
readers;
and in
particular
we
ought
to understand much more than we do about the effects of
fictional
discourse. As Frank Kermode
emphasized
in his seminal
work,
The
Sense
of
an
Ending,
criticism has made almost no
progress
toward a
comprehensive theory
of
fictions,
and we still
operate
with
rudimentary
notions of "dramatic illusion" and "identification" whose
crudity
proclaims
their
unacceptability.
What is the status and what is the role
of
fictions, or,
to
pose
the same kind of
problem
in another
way,
what
are the relations
(the historical,
the
psychic,
the social
relationships)
between the real and the fictive ? What are the
ways
of
moving
between
life and art? What
operations
or
figures
articulate this movement?
Have we in fact
progressed beyond
Freud's
simple
distinction between
the
figures
of condensation and
displacement?
Finally,
or
perhaps
in
sum,
we need a
typology
of discourse and a
theory
of the relations
(both
mimetic and
nonmimetic)
between literature and the other modes of
discourse which make
up
the text of
intersubjective experience.
The fact that we are so far from
possessing
these
things
in what
is,
after
all,
an
age
of criticism-an
age
where
unparalleled industry
and
intelligence
have been invested in
writing
about literature-is in
part
due to the
preeminent
role accorded to
interpretation.
Indeed,
one of
the best
ways
of
talking
about the failures of
contemporary
criticism is
to look at the fate which has befallen three
very intelligent
and
promis-
ing attempts
to break
away
from the
legacy
of the New Criticism. In
each case the failure to combat the notion of
interpretation
itself,
or
rather the conscious or unconscious
persistence
of the notion that a
critical
approach
must
justify
itself
by
its
interpretive
results,
has
emasculated a
highly promising
mode of
investigation.
My
first
case,
and in
many ways
the most
significant,
is that of
Northrop
Frye's Anatomy of
Criticism.
Frye's polemical
introduction
is,
of
course,
a
powerful
indictment of
contemporary
criticism and an
argument
for a
systematic poetics:
criticism is in a state of "naive
induction,"
trying
to
study
individual works of literature without a
proper conceptual
framework. It must
recognize
that literature is not
a
simple
aggregate
of discrete works but a
conceptual space
which can
be
coherently organized;
and it
must,
if it is to become a
discipline,
make
a
"leap
to a new
ground
from which it can discover what the
organizing
or
containing
forms of its
conceptual
framework are."2
Working
on this
new
ground
involves
assuming
the
possibility
of "a coherent and com-
prehensive theory
of
literature, logically
and
scientifically
organized,
some of which the student
unconsciously
learns as he
goes
on,
but the
main
principles
of which are as
yet
unknown to us."3
2
natomy of
Criticism
(New York, 1965), p.
16.
3
Ibid., p.
11.
247
This is
certainly
a direct attack on the atomism of the New Criticism
and the
assumption
that one should
approach
each individual work
with as few
preconceptions
as
possible
in order to
experience directly
the words on the
page,
but
Frye
does not realize the
importance
of
attacking interpretation
itself. He hovers on the
edge
of the
problem,
characterizing
as "one of the
many slovenly
illiteracies that the absence
of
systematic
criticism has allowed to
grow up"
the notion that "the
critic should confine himself to
'getting
out' of a
poem exactly
what
the
poet may vaguely
be asumed to have been aware of
'putting
in'
";
but the function of this
argument
in his overall
enterprise
is
anything
but clear. It is
wrongly
assumed,
he
continues,
that the critic needs
no
conceptual
framework and that his
job
is
simply
"to take a
poem
into which a
poet
has
diligently
stuffed a
specific
number of beauties or
effects,
and
complacently
to extract them one
by one,
like his
prototype
Little
Jack
Horner."4
One
might conceivably
take this sentence as a
general
attack on
interpretation, especially interpretation
of a
complacent
and funda-
mentally tautological kind,
but in
fact,
as the earlier sentence makes
clear,
Frye's
real
target
is
interpretation
of an intentionalist kind. Join-
ing
the New Critics in
rejecting
criticism which is
guilty
of the inten-
tional
fallacy, Frye
has
picked
the
wrong enemy
and
opened
the door
to a trivialization of his
enterprise.
The
systematic poetics
for which
he calls and to which he makes a substantial contribution can thus be
seen as a
simple prelude
to
interpretation. Approaching
the text with
a
conceptual framework,
which consists of the theories of
Modes,
Symbols, Myths,
and Genres as outlined in the
Anatomy,
the critic can
interpret
the work-not
by pulling
out what the
poet
was aware of
putting
in but
by extracting
the elements of the various
modes, genres,
symbols,
and
myths
which were
put
in with or without the author's
explicit knowledge.
In this
case,
interpretation
would still be the test
of a critical
method,
and the value of
Frye's approach
would be that it
enabled one to
perceive meanings
which hitherto had been obscure.
Certainly
this is not the
justification Frye
would wish to
give
his
project.
His
repeated
assertions that criticism must seek a
comprehen-
sive view of what it is
doing,
that it must
try
to attain an
understanding
of the fundamental
principles
which make it a
discipline
and mode of
knowledge,
show that he has other
goals
in mind. But his failure to
question interpretation
as a
goal
creates a fundamental
ambiguity
about
the status of his
categories
and schemas. In
identifying Spring, Summer,
Autumn,
and Winter as the four
mythic categories,
what
exactly
is
Frye
claiming?
He
might
be
suggesting
that these
categories
form a
4
Ibid., pp.
17-18.
248
general conceptual map
which we have assimilated
through
our
experi-
ence of literature and which
helps
to
explain
the fact that we
interpret
literature as we do. In other
words,
he
might
be
claiming
that in order
to account for the
meanings
and effects of
literary
works one must
bring
to
light
these fundamental distinctions which are
constantly
at
work in our
reading
of literature.
Alternatively,
he
might
be
claiming
that he has discovered
categories
of
experience
basic to the human
psyche
and that in order to discover the true or
deepest meaning
of
literary
works we must
apply
to them these
categories,
as hermeneutic
devices.
Though
the difference between these alternatives
may
seem
slight,
it is in fact crucial to the
project
of a
poetics.
In the second case one is
claiming
to have discovered distinctions which serve as a method of
interpretation:
which enable one to
produce
new and better
readings
of
literary
works. In the first case one is not
offering
a method of
interpre-
tation but is
claiming
to have made some
progress
toward
explaining
why
we
interpret literary
works as we do. In terms of the
polemical
introduction and the
suggestion
that we should
try
to make
explicit
the
implicit theory
of literature which students
unconsciously acquire
in
their
literary education,
the first
interpretation
would
certainly
be
preferable;
but in terms of the traditional tasks and
preoccupations
of
criticism,
which
Frye
has not had the self-consciousness to
reject,
the
second
interpretation
is more
likely
to
prevail.
In
fact,
this is
exactly
what has
happened. Though
it
began
as a
plea
for a
systematic poetics, Frye's
work has done less to
promote
work in
poetics
than to stimulate a mode of
interpretation
which has come to be
known as
"myth-criticism"
or
archetypal
criticism. The
assumption
that the critic's task is to
interpret
individual works remains
unchanged,
only
now,
on the
theory
that the
deepest meanings
of a work are to be
sought
in the
archetypal symbols
or
patterns
which it
deploys, Frye's
categories
are used as a set of
labeling
devices.
Frye
failed to
recognize
that the
enemy
of
poetics
is not
just
atomism but the
interpretive
project
to which atomism
ministers,
and this led not
only
to deflection
of
systematic energy
but to the
promotion
of a rather
anodyne
mode
of
interpretation. Labeling
the
archetypal
elements of
literary
works
does not
get
one
very far, especially
since it is
possible
to
argue
that
these
archetypes
are
designed
to
help explain why
it is that we
interpret
works in the
way
we do.
Generally,
one can
only deplore
the
foundering
of an
exciting enterprise. Frye complained
that
poetics
had advanced
very
little since
Aristotle;
we can now
complain that,
in America at
least, poetics
has advanced
very
little since the
A4natomy of
Criticism.
The second
example
of a
potentially revolutionary
movement which
has not succeeded in
freeing
itself from the shackles of
interpretation
249
is
psychoanalytic
criticism.
Although,
as I have
already suggested,
there are
many
central
problems concerning
the status and effects of
fictions which
might
be elucidated
by
a
psychological
or
psychoanalytic
approach,
the best criticism of this kind
seems,
almost
unconsciously,
to have
adopted interpretation
as its
goal,
as if a
psychological approach
to literature could
only prove
itself
by demonstrating
its
superiority
as
an
interpretive
method. Frederick Crews's The Sins
of
the Fathers:
Hawthorne's
Psychological
Themes
certainly
demonstrates the
ap-
propriateness
of a
psychoanalytic
method for
making
sense of
many
powerful
and
puzzling
elements in Hawthorne's work. Oddities of
plot,
character,
and
fantasy
become more
interesting
and their force is made
more
intelligible
when
they
are
analyzed
as
representations
of the con-
sequences
of unresolved
Oedipal
conflicts: the works "rest on
fantasy,
but on the shared
fantasy
of
mankind,
and this makes for a more
pene-
trating
fiction than would
any
illusionistic slice of life."5
It would be
unjust
to criticize The Sins
of
the Fathers for
being
an
interpretive study,
since in so
being
it demonstrates the
efficacy
of the
psychoanalytic approach
to the dominant task of criticism. But it is sad
that the most
accomplished
work of
psychoanalytic
criticism should
address itself to this
task,
for there is
always
the
danger
that
psycho-
analytic
criticism will define itself in these terms: as a method of inter-
pretation
for texts which contain
special
oddities or discontinuities of
character and event. This would indeed be to surrender to the demands
of
interpretation.
My
third case is the "affective
stylistics"
of
Stanley Fish,
which
begins
with a determined
attempt
to break
away
from the
assumptions
and
procedures
of the New Criticism but
which,
again,
fails to
identify
interpretation
as the real
enemy
and so nullifies the theoretical
insights
on which it was
originally
based. Fish starts
by rejecting
the notion
that the work
may
be treated as an
object
complete
in itself and
suggests
that the "affective
fallacy"
is not in fact a
fallacy.
Wimsatt and Beards-
ley
had
argued
that one must not confuse the
poem
and its results
("what
it is and what it
does")
and maintained that if one concentrates
on the
psychological
effects or
experience
of a
poem,
"the
poem
itself,
as an
object
of
specifically
critical
judgment,
tends to
disappear."6
Fish
replies
that "the
objectivity
of the text is an
illusion,
and
moreover,
a
dangerous
illusion ... A line of
print
or a
page
of a book is so
obviously
there that it seems to be the sole
repository
of whatever value and
meaning
we associate with it."7 But in fact the text
acquires
meaning
only
in the
activity
of
reading. Spatial metaphors
which make the text
5
The Sins
of
the Fathers
(New York, 1966), p.
263.
6
W. K.
Wimsatt,
The Verbal Icon
(Lexington, Ky., 1954), p.
21.
7
Stanley Fish, Self-Consuming
Artifacts
(Berkeley, 1972), p.
400.
250
the container of a
meaning falsify
the
situation,
which is
always
one of
a
temporal
and
sequential experience.
The
meaning
of a word or other
element of a text is what it does in the
work,
and to
specify
what it does
is to show how it is received,
organized,
and
generally processed by
the reader as he moves from left to
right
and from line to line of a text.
The
meaning
of a work is not
something
it
contains,
in
spatial
fashion,
but the
experience
which results from the linear and
temporal process-
ing
of its
components.
One must
analyze
an event rather than an
object
if one would discuss the
meaning
and value of a
text,
and this involves
"an
analysis
of the
developing responses
of the reader in relation to the
words as
they
succeed one another in time."8
This is a fruitful
reorientation,
and one should be clear about the
various
things
it does. First of
all, by stressing
the
importance
of
analyzing
an act rather than an
object,
Fish's
approach
is,
as he
says,
"from the
very beginning organizing
itself in terms of what is
sig-
nificant,"9
whereas if one tries to treat the text as an autonomous
object
and describe its
properties
one has no
particular way
of
distinguishing
between
significant properties
and
insignificant
ones. One can
continue,
almost ad
infinitum, counting
elements, noting
their
distribution,
and
generally producing
facts about the text as
object
which have little
relevance to what we would be
willing
to
recognize
as the
meaning
and
value of the text. If one
begins by analyzing interpretive
acts,
on the
other
hand,
the
significant properties
of the text are those which have
provoked
or are
deployed
in the
interpretive experience.
But
secondly,
and this is
perhaps
a more
significant point,
in
rejecting
the notion of work as
object
Fish
prepares
to accord
literary theory
its
true role. If a work were an autonomous
entity
which contained its
own
meaning,
then
literary theory
would consist
only
of ex
post
facto
generalizations
about the
properties
of such entities. It would be
very
much an
ancillary activity,
with no
necessary place
in the
study
of
literature.
(Indeed,
for the New Critics
literary theory
was
largely
a
negative activity: designed
to rule out of
court, by labeling
as
fallacies,
approaches
which
might prevent
an innocent and direct contact with
"the words on the
page.")
If, however,
one claims that the
qualities
of
literary
works can
only
be studied
by analyzing
the reader's
response,
then the task of
literary theory
becomes central: it must account for
responses by analyzing
the
norms, conventions,
and mental
operations
which make these
responses
and
interpretations possible.
If a
given
sentence can have different
meanings
in a novel and in a
lyric poem,
it
8
Ibid., pp.
387-88.
9
Fish,
"What Is
Stylistics
and
Why
Are
They Saying
Such Terrible
Things
About
It?,"
in
Approaches
to
Poetics,
ed.
Seymour
Chatman
(New York, 1973),
p.
149.
251
is because the conventions of verse and
prose
lead one to
respond
to it
differently,
and to
explain
the
meaning
or
response
is to set out the
conventions on which it is based. Or
again,
if a work can be read either
as literature or as
history, biography,
and so
forth,
the differences in
meaning
and
response
are to be
explained
in terms of conventions and
expectations
which
produce
them.
If the
meaning
of each text were inherent to
it,
then there would be
little need for a
general theory, except
to
point
out this fact and to list
some
possible
heuristic
strategies
which
might,
on
occasion, help
readers
to discover this inherent
meaning.
But if the
meaning
of a work lies in
the function of its elements in a
sequential interpretive experience,
then
the task of
literary theory
is to
explicate
the notion of the "reader" in
and
through
whom the combination and
sequential
interaction of ele-
ments takes
place.
What is it to be a skilled or informed reader of
literature? We
presume
to test students'
progress
towards this
goal,
but we have few
explicit
ideas of what
they
are
supposed
to
learn,
and
have made scant
progress
towards
setting
out the
conventions, norms,
and
operations
which
they
are
supposed
to master if
they
are to become
"readers." Fish's focus on
response places
this
question
in the fore-
ground
of
literary study. Understanding
literature is not a matter of
understanding literary
texts but of
studying
the
activity
of
interpreta-
tion so as to make
explicit
the vast sum of tacit
knowledge
which enables
works to have
meaning
and which we
may
label
"literary competence."
The task of the
critic,
as it seems to
emerge
from Fish's
enterprise,
would be to describe the
procedures
and conventions of
reading
so as
to offer a
comprehensive theory
of the
way
in which we
go
about
making
sense of texts.
But, sadly,
this is a
step
which Fish himself
does not
take;
nor does he seem even to
recognize
that this is an
impli-
cation of his theoretical
reorientation,
so blinded is he
by
the notion
that the critic's
job
is to
interpret.
He raises the
question
of a
general
theory
of
reading only
once,
and then to
beg
it: the informed
reader,
he
says,
is assumed to be
"sufficiently experienced
as a reader to have
internalized the
properties
of
literary
discourse, including everything
from the most local of devices
(figures
of
speech, etc.)
to whole
genres."10
To insist that
meaning
and value lie not in the text itself
but in the
activity
of
reading,
and then to turn around and tell us that
we need not
inquire
what this
activity
involves,
is a scandalous derelic-
tion of
duty.
And the fault seems to lie with
interpretive
commitment.
Fish wants to illustrate his claim that
meaning
and value are better
conceived as
temporal experiences
than as
spatial configurations
or
structures and that literature is thus "didactic in a
special
sense;
it does
10
Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts, p.
406. For further discussion of what this
involves,
see
Jonathan Culler,
Structuralist Poetics
(Ithaca, 1975).
252
not
preach
the truth but asks its readers to discover the truth for
themselves."'1 He sees his task as that of
showing
us what truths are
discovered
by
the
experience
of
reading
particular
works. And so in
Self-Consuming Artifacts:
The
Experience of
Seventeenth-Century
Literature he leads us
through
a series of
works, showing
how,
in each
case,
propositions, categories,
and distinctions are
proposed
as if
they
were
going
to be
developed
and made essential but then are
questioned,
undermined,
and
generally displaced by
what follows. The works them-
selves thus become
"self-consuming
artifacts" and the value which
remains is that of the
experience
of
reading.
To define this value in
each
case,
to show what results from the interaction of the
parts,
is of
course to retreat to the traditional tasks of thematic
interpretation.
Commitment to
interpretive
criticism is
particularly
ironic in Fish's
case
since,
as he
repeatedly
tells
us,
this is
simply
a matter of
describing
his
experience
of
reading.
His
theory
has
radically
reduced the
space
of
interpretive play
and worked the
analyst
into a
tight
corner. To claim
simultaneously
that one is
simply describing
the
experience
of readers
and that one is
producing
new and
striking interpretations
is indeed a
difficult
act,
and Fish's
energies
are devoted to
maintaining
this stance
in difficult conditions. How
long
he can maintain it
is,
of
course,
another
question:
there is
clearly
not much future in the
enterprise
of
offering
ever more
interpretations by recounting
the reader's
experience
of
texts. The future
lies,
on the
contrary,
in the theoretical
enterprise
which Fish sketches and then flees.12
These three
cases,
though very
different in the content of their
proposals
and
results,
suggest
in their formal and
strategic convergence
a
gloomy prognostic:
the
principle
of
interpretation
is so
strong
an
unexamined
postulate
of American criticism that it subsumes and
neutralizes even the most forceful and
intelligent
acts of revolt. "La
musique
savante
manque
a notre desir." The desire to find new
ways
of
writing
about literature has been frustrated for want of knowledge-
able
accompaniment.
But there are now
signs
that the
increasing
influence of
European
criticism will
prevent
other
possibilities,
now
being
bruited
about,
from
slipping
back into an
interpretive
mode: a
theoretical
sophistication
will
prevent
them from
falling prey
to un-
examined
assumptions.
Briefly put,
the lesson of
contemporary European criticism,
in its
most vital
moments,
is this: that the New Criticism's dream of a fresh
and
unprejudiced approach
to each autonomous artifact is not
only
impossible
but
fundamentally
misconceived,
even as an ideal. To read
11
Ibid., p.
1.
12
For further
discussion,
see
Jonathan Culler, "Stanley
Fish and the
Righting
of the
Reader," Diacritics,
5:1
(1975).
253
a work as literature is
inevitably
and
necessarily
to read it in relation
to other
texts,
past
and
present.
And even if
literary genres
and the
concept
of literature itself be
bracketed,
to read is still to
engage
in an
intertextual encounter.
Reading
is never a natural and innocent
activity.
The condition of the reader is to come
after,
to be constituted as reader
by
the
repertoire
of other
texts,
both
literary
and
nonliterary,
which
are
always already
in
place
and
waiting
to be
displaced by
a critical
reading.
When the individual
subject
reads he becomes an intersub-
jectivity:
the track or furrow left
by
an
experience
of texts of all
kinds,
of a
range
of
organizing
discourses. As Roland Barthes writes:
The 'I' which
approaches
the text is itself
already
a
plurality
of other
texts,
of
infinite
or,
more
precisely,
lost codes
(whose origins
are
lost)
. . .
Subjectivity
is
generally thought
of as a
plenitude
with which I encumber the
text,
but in fact
this faked
plenitude
is
only
the wash or wake of all the codes which make
up
the
'I,' so that
finally my subjectivity
has the
generality
of
stereotypes.13
Given the intertextual nature of
reading
and
readers,
the
literary
work
participates
in a
variety
of
systems, plays among
a series of
languages:
the
languages
of various
literary genres (systems
of con-
vention and
expectation),
the
logics
of
story
and
teleologies
of
emplot-
ment,
the
language
of desire with its
strategies
of
displacement
and
condensation,
the various modes of discourse which make
up
a culture
(the
formal and informal
ways
of
assigning meaning
to
things),
and
the various
literary
forms or
languages
which at a
given
moment can
be codified as tradition. Situated
among
other texts which it
cites,
parodies,
refuses,
and
transforms,
the work is made
possible
or con-
stituted
by
these various discursive
systems
or
languages among
which
it
plays.
It is a tenuous intertextual
construct,
and the critical task is to
disperse it,
to move
through
it toward an
understanding
of the
systems
and semiotic
processes
which make it
possible.
Criticism which accords with this
way
of
thinking
can take
many
guises.
In addition to the kind of formal and
systematic poetics
en-
visaged by Frye
and now
being developed especially
in
France,
one
might
cite Fredric
Jameson's attempt, particularly
in Marxism and
Form,
to work toward a dialectical criticism which would
attempt
not
so much to resolve difficulties and offer
interpretations
as to take the
resistance of a work as the
object
of attention and to define the nature
of a work's
opacity
or otherness
by moving
outwards towards other
examples
of
opacity
and the historical
ground
of this
type
of
opacity.
"Thus our
thought
no
longer
takes official
problems
at face value but
walks behind the screen to assess the
very origin
of the
subject-object
3 S/Z
(Paris, 1970), pp.
16-17.
254
relationship
in the first
place."'4
The
product
or result of dialectical
criticism is not an
interpretation
of the work itself but a broader his-
torical account of
why interpretation
should be
necessary
and what the
need for
interpretations
of various kinds
signifies.
Jameson's enterprise
would
lead,
among
other
things,
to a "dialectical
rhetoric,
in which the various mental
operations
are understood not
absolutely,
but as moments and
figures, tropes, syntactical paradigms,
of our
relationship
to the real
itself, as, altering irrevocably
in
time,
it
nonetheless
obeys
a
logic
that like the
logic
of a
language
can never be
fully distinguished
from its
object."15
A Marxist criticism conceived
in this
spirit
would demonstrate that the
relationship
between a
literary
work and a social and historical
reality
is one not of reflected content
but of a
play
of forms. Social
reality
is
composed
of
paradigms
of
orga-
nization,
figures
of our
relationship
to the
real,
and the
interplay
between
a
literary
work and its historical
ground
lies in the
way
that the work's
form and formal devices
assimilate, transform,
or
supplement
a culture's
ways
of
producing meaning.
Jameson's
work
may
be seen as
part
of the
larger, liberating project
of
reinventing literary history,
which is
perhaps
most
easily
and
perti-
nently
observed in the
pages
of New
Literary History.16
Once one
rejects
the view that the critic's task is to
interpret
autonomous and
atemporal
monuments,
one is led to
produce
a
theory
of literature as a
conceptual space,
and since even a minimal
degree
of self-consciousness
would make one aware that the
way
in which one does this is
necessarily
historical
(caught up
in a historical
process),
one's
project
becomes
that of
literary history, broadly
conceived. One's
relationship
to
past
works,
and to
present
works
also,
is a historical
relationship,
and the
concepts
one uses to formulate and to
analyze
these
relationships
are
themselves historical constructs. But
history, especially
in the realm
of
literature,
is not
something given:
not a
chronological
series to which
one can
appeal,
as if this would
ground
one's
enterprise. History
is
what one must construct in order to be able to talk about literature and
to
give
oneself a
place
to stand in relation to it. This is no doubt
why,
after several decades when
literary history
was abandoned to
positivistic
scholarship,
it has once
again
become the
principal
terrain of creative
and
agile
criticism.
This observation is
perhaps
less a claim to be substantiated than a
prediction
about the sources of
energy
in American criticism in the
coming years;
but one
might note,
as an
exemplary
case,
the
way
in
14
Marxism and Form
(Princeton, 1971), p.
341.
15
Ibid., p. 374.
16
In addition to other works mentioned
below,
see Nez Directions in
Literary
Histctry,
ed
Ralph
Cohen
(Baltimore, 1974).
255
which the Yale "Formalists" have been
succeeded,
as the
cutting edge
of
criticism,
by
those whom one
might baptize
the "Yale Deformalists":
Geoffrey Hartman,
Harold
Bloom,
Paul de Man.
Drawing
sus-
tenance from a
historically
conceived romantic
poetry
rather than
an ahistorical
metaphysical
or
Augustan
verse,
invoking
as the stimulus
of
repeated quest
and failure the
impossible calling
of
high
romanticism,
they
treat literature and the
reading
of literature as a
perpetual
historical
error and deformation.
"History,"
writes
Geoffrey Hartman,
"is the
wake of a mobile mind
falling
in and out of love with the
things
it
detaches
by
its attachment."'7 This becomes the
temporal
scheme of
Harold Bloom's The
Anxiety of Influence:
each
poet
must
slay
the
father,
must
slay
his
predecessors through revisionary misreadings,
so
as to create a historical
space
in which
poetry,
as manifested anew in
him,
can take
place.
The hidden order of historical
continuity
is based
on a
negative
and dialectical
principal,
of
poetic misprision,
which also
figures
the
relationship
between reader and text: in the historical econ-
omy
of literature the
reader,
like the new
poet,
is the latecomer who
must misconstrue the text so as to leave a
space
in which he can write
it
himself;
he must create an absence
through
his own
reading
so that
he
may,
in his own name but also in the name of the
Father,
invoke and
imagine
what is absent. That the
greatest insights
result from this
process
of
necessary misreading
is the claim of another subtle theorist
of
deformation,
Paul de
Man,
for whom
interpretation
is
always
in fact
literary history:
an error which assumes a historical
categorization
and
conceals its own historical status.18
Criticism of this kind
may
not seem to make
interpretation
the
enemy
and to take arms
against
it,
but that is
only
because it
recognizes
the
suasive
efficacy
of subtler evasive
strategies.
Concerned with
ways
of
opening
and
dispersing
the
text,
of
questioning
the schema of
interpre-
tation,
it has come
happily
to describe
interpretation
as error. If in-
terpretation
is
always necessary
error,
then we shall become concerned
with
finding
out
why;
and if we
study
the conditions of
interpretive
error we become involved in a historical and theoretical
enterprise
which
probes
those wider and more
interesting questions
about the
ways
of literature and of
reading
which have been
repressed
or
displaced
during
the
reign
of
interpretation.
Brasenose
College,
Oxford
University
17
"History-Writing
as Answerable
Style,"
in New Directions in
Literary
History, p.
100. See also his
Beyond
Formalism
(New Haven, 1970).
8
Blindness and
Insight (New York, 1971), p.
165.
256

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