beyond interpretation - culler

7/30/2019 Beyond Interpretation - Culler

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JONATHAN CULLER

Beyond Interpretation:The Prospects ofContemporaryriticism

IN THE YEARS since World War II, the New Criticism has beenchallenged, even vilified, but it has seldom been effectively ignored.The inability if not reluctance of its opponents simply to evade itslegacy testifies to the dominant position it has come to occupy inAmerican and British universities. Despite the many attacks on it,despite the lack of an organized and systematic defense, it seems notunfair to speak of the hegemony of New Criticism in this period andof the determining influence it has exercised on our ways of writingabout and teachingliterature.In a sense, whatever critical affiliationswemay proclaim, we are all New Critics now, in that it would require astrenuous consciousness of effort to escape notions of the autonomy ofthe literary work, the importance of demonstrating its unity, and therequirement of "close reading."In many ways the influenceof 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 earliermode of literary study, speak of the sense of release, the new excitementbreathedinto literary education by the assumption that even the mean-est student who lacked the scholarly information of his betters, couldmake valid comments on the language and structure of the text. Nolonger was discussion and evaluation of a work something which hadto wait upon acquisition of a respectablestore of literary, historical,andbiographical information. No longer was the right to comment some-thing earned by months in a library. Even the beginning student ofliterature was now confronted with poems, asked to read them closely,244

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PROSPECTS OF CRITICISM

and required to discuss and evaluate their use of language and theirthematic organization.To make the experience of the text itself centralto literary education and to relegate the accumulation of informationabout the text to an ancillary status was a move which gave the studyof literature a new focus and justification, as well as promoting a moreprecise and relevant understandingof literary works.But what is good for literary education is not necessarily good forthe study of literature in general, and those very aspects of the NewCriticism 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 fundamentalarticleof faith with beneficial consequences for the teaching of literature, ledto a commitment to interpretation as the proper activity of criticism.If the work is an autonomous whole, then it can and should be studiedin andfor itself, without referenceto possible external contexts, whetherbiographical,historical, psychoanalytic, or sociological. Distinguishingwhat was external from what was internal, rejecting historical andcausal explanation in favor of internal analysis, the New Criticism leftthe reader and critic with only one recourse. They must interpret thepoem; they must show how its various parts contribute to a thematicunity, for it is this thematic unity which justifies the work's status asautonomous artifact. When a poem is read in and for itself critics mustfall backupon the one constant of their situation: there is a poem beingread by a humanbeing. Whatever else is external to the poem, the factthat it addresses a human being means that what it says about humanlife is internal to it. The critic's task is to show how the interaction ofthe poem's parts producesa complex and ontologically privileged state-ment about human experience.Though they may occasionally attempt to disguise the fact, the basicconcepts of the New Critics and their followers derive from thisparticularthematic and interpretiveorientation.The poem is not simplya series of sentences; it is spoken by a persona, who expresses anattitude to be defined, speaking in a particular tone which puts theattitude in one of various possible modes or degrees of commitment.Since the poem is an autonomous whole its value must lie within it, inthe richness and complexity of the attitude, in the variety of the alterna-tive values or judgments it puts into the balance and relates to oneanother. Hence one finds in poems ambivalence, ambiguity, tension,irony, paradox. These are all thematic operators, which permit one totranslate formal features of the language into meanings, so that thepoem may be unified as a complex thematic structure which expressesan attitude toward the world. And in place of a theory of readingwhich would specify how order was to be achieved, the New Criticism

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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

deployed a common humanism or, as R. S. Crane calls it, a "set ofreductionterms" 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 andappearance, truth and falsity . . . emotion and reason, simplicity andcomplexity, nature and art."' A repertoire of contrasting attitudes andvalues relevant to the human situation served as a kind of target lan-guage in the process of thematic translation. To analyze a poem was toshow how all its parts contributedto a complex statement about humanproblems.In short, it would be possible to demonstratethat, given its premises,the New Criticism was necessarily an interpretive criticism. But infact 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 andunquestioning acceptanceof the notion that the critic's job is to interpretliterary works. Indeed, fulfillment of the interpretive task has come tobe the touchstone by which other kinds of critical writing are judged,and reviewers inevitably ask of any work of literary theory, linguisticanalysis, or historical scholarship, whether it actually assists us in ourunderstandingof particularworks. In this critical climate it is thereforeimportant,if only as a means of loosening the grip which interpretationhas on critical consciousness, to take up a tendentious position and tomaintain that, while the experience of literature may be an experienceof interpreting works, in fact the interpretation of individual works isonly tangentially related to the understanding of literature. To engagein the study of literature is not to produce yet another interpretationofKing Lear but to advance one's understanding of the conventions andoperations of an institution, a mode of discourse.Indeed, there are many tasks that confront criticism, many thingsthat we need if we are to advance our understanding of literature, butif there is one thing we do not need it is more interpretationsof literaryworks. It is not at all difficult to list in a general way critical projectswhich would be of compelling interest if carried through to somemeasure of completion; and such a list is in itself the best illustration ofthe potential fecundity of other ways of writing about literature. Wehave no convincing accountof the role or function of literaturein societyor socialconsciousness.We have only fragmentaryor anecdotalhistoriesof literatureas an institution: we need a fullerexplorationof its hisoricalrelation to the other forms of discourse through which the world isorganized and human activities are given meaning. We need a moresophisticated and apposite account of the role of literature in the psy-

1 The Languages of Criticismand the Structure of Poetry (Toronto, 1953),pp. 123-24.246



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chological economies of both writers and readers; and in particularweought to understand much more than we do about the effects of fictionaldiscourse. As Frank Kermode emphasized in his seminal work, TheSense of an Ending, criticism has made almost no progress toward acomprehensivetheory of fictions, and we still operate with rudimentarynotions of "dramatic illusion" and "identification" whose crudityproclaimstheir unacceptability.What is the status and what is the roleof fictions, or, to pose the same kind of problem in another way, whatare the relations (the historical, the psychic, the social relationships)between the real and the fictive ? What are the ways of moving betweenlife and art? What operations or figures articulate this movement?Have we in fact progressed beyond Freud's simple distinction betweenthe figures of condensation and displacement? Finally, or perhaps insum, we need a typology of discourse and a theory of the relations (bothmimetic and nonmimetic) between literature and the other modes ofdiscourse 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 andintelligence have been invested in writing about literature-is in partdue to the preeminent role accorded to interpretation. Indeed, one ofthe best ways of talking about the failures of contemporarycriticism isto look at the fate which has befallen three very intelligent and promis-ing attempts to break away from the legacy of the New Criticism. Ineach case the failure to combat the notion of interpretation itself, orrather the conscious or unconscious persistence of the notion that acritical approach must justify itself by its interpretive results, hasemasculated a highly promising mode of investigation.

My first case, and in many ways the most significant, is that ofNorthrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism. Frye's polemical introductionis, of course, a powerful indictment of contemporary criticism and anargument for a systematic poetics: criticism is in a state of "naiveinduction," trying to study individual works of literature without aproper conceptual framework. It must recognize that literature is nota simple aggregate of discrete works but a conceptual space which canbe coherentlyorganized; and it must, if it is to become a discipline,makea "leapto a new ground from which it can discover what the organizingor containingforms of its conceptualframeworkare."2Working on thisnew 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 themain principles of which are as yet unknown to us."3

2 natomy of Criticism (New York, 1965), p. 16.3 Ibid., p. 11.247



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This is certainlya direct attack on the atomism of the New Criticismand the assumption that one should approach each individual workwith as few preconceptions as possible in order to experience directlythe words on the page, but Frye does not realize the importance ofattacking interpretation itself. He hovers on the edge of the problem,characterizingas "one of the many slovenly illiteracies that the absenceof systematic criticism has allowed to grow up" the notion that "thecritic should confine himself to 'getting out' of a poem exactly whatthe poet may vaguely be asumed to have been aware of 'putting in' ";but the function of this argument in his overall enterprise is anythingbut clear. It is wrongly assumed, he continues, that the critic needsno conceptual framework and that his job is simply "to take a poeminto which a poet has diligently stuffed a specific number of beauties oreffects, and complacentlyto extract them one by one, like his prototypeLittle Jack Horner."4One might conceivably take this sentence as a general attack oninterpretation, especially interpretation of a complacent and funda-mentally tautological kind, but in fact, as the earlier sentence makesclear, Frye's real target is interpretationof 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 doorto a trivialization of his enterprise. The systematic poetics for whichhe calls and to which he makes a substantial contribution can thus beseen as a simple prelude to interpretation. Approaching the text witha conceptual framework, which consists of the theories of Modes,Symbols, Myths, and Genres as outlined in the Anatomy, the critic caninterpret the work-not by pulling out what the poet was aware ofputting in but by extracting the elements of the various modes, genres,symbols, and myths which were put in with or without the author'sexplicit knowledge. In this case, interpretation would still be the testof a critical method, and the value of Frye's approachwould be that itenabledone to perceive meanings which hitherto had been obscure.Certainly this is not the justification Frye would wish to give hisproject. His repeated assertions that criticism must seek a comprehen-sive view of what it is doing, that it must try to attain an understandingof the fundamentalprinciples which make it a discipline and mode ofknowledge, show that he has other goals in mind. But his failure toquestion interpretationas a goal creates a fundamentalambiguity aboutthe status of his categoriesand schemas. In identifying Spring, Summer,Autumn, and Winter as the four mythic categories, what exactly isFrye claiming? He might be suggesting that these categories form a

4 Ibid.,pp. 17-18.248



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general conceptual map which we have assimilatedthrough our experi-ence of literature and which helps to explain the fact that we interpretliterature as we do. In other words, he might be claiming that in orderto account for the meanings and effects of literary works one mustbring to light these fundamental distinctions which are constantly atwork in our reading of literature. Alternatively, he might be claimingthat he has discovered categories of experience basic to the humanpsyche and that in order to discover the true or deepest meaning ofliterary works we must apply to them these categories, as hermeneuticdevices.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 isclaiming to have discovered distinctions which serve as a method ofinterpretation: which enable one to produce new and better readings ofliterary works. In the first case one is not offering a method of interpre-tation but is claiming to have made some progress toward explainingwhy we interpret literary works as we do. In terms of the polemicalintroduction and the suggestion that we should try to make explicit theimplicit theory of literature which students unconsciously acquire intheir literary education, the first interpretation would certainly bepreferable; but in terms of the traditional tasks and preoccupationsofcriticism, which Frye has not had the self-consciousness to reject, thesecond interpretation is more likely to prevail.In fact, this is exactly what has happened.Though it began as a pleafor a systematic poetics, Frye's work has done less to promote work inpoetics than to stimulate a mode of interpretationwhich has come to beknown as "myth-criticism" or archetypal criticism. The assumptionthat the critic's task is to interpretindividual works remains unchanged,only now, on the theory that the deepest meanings of a work are to besought in the archetypal symbols or patterns which it deploys, Frye'scategories are used as a set of labeling devices. Frye failed to recognizethat the enemy of poetics is not just atomism but the interpretiveproject to which atomism ministers, and this led not only to deflectionof systematic energy but to the promotion of a rather anodyne modeof interpretation. Labeling the archetypal elements of literary worksdoes not get one very far, especially since it is possible to argue thatthese archetypesare designed to help explain why it is that we interpretworks in the way we do. Generally,one can only deplorethe founderingof an exciting enterprise. Frye complained that poetics had advancedvery little since Aristotle; we can now complain that, in America atleast, poetics has advanced very little since the A4natomyof Criticism.The second example of a potentially revolutionary movement whichhas not succeeded in freeing itself from the shackles of interpretation

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is psychoanalytic criticism. Although, as I have already suggested,there are many central problems concerning the status and effects offictions which might be elucidatedby a psychological or psychoanalyticapproach, the best criticism of this kind seems, almost unconsciously,to have adoptedinterpretationas its goal, as if a psychological approachto literature could only prove itself by demonstrating its superiority asan 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 manypowerful and puzzling elements in Hawthorne's work. Oddities of plot,character,and fantasy become more interesting and their force is mademore intelligible when they are analyzed as representationsof 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."5It would be unjust to criticize The Sins of the Fathers for being aninterpretive study, since in so being it demonstrates the efficacy of thepsychoanalytic approachto the dominant task of criticism. But it is sadthat the most accomplished work of psychoanalytic criticism shouldaddress 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 ofcharacter and event. This would indeed be to surrenderto the demandsof interpretation.My third case is the "affective stylistics" of Stanley Fish, whichbegins with a determined attempt to break away from the assumptionsand procedures of the New Criticism but which, again, fails to identifyinterpretationas the real enemy and so nullifies the theoretical insightson which it was originally based. Fish starts by rejecting the notionthat the work may be treated as an object completein itself and suggeststhat 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 maintainedthat if one concentrateson the psychological effects or experience of a poem, "the poem itself,as an object of specificallycritical judgment, tends to disappear."6Fishreplies that "the objectivity of the text is an illusion, and moreover, adangerous illusion ... A line of print or a page of a book is so obviouslythere that it seems to be the sole repository of whatever value andmeaning we associate with it."7 But in fact the text acquires meaningonly 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



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the container of a meaning falsify the situation, which is always one ofa temporaland sequential experience. The meaning of a word or otherelement of a text is what it does in the work, and to specify what it doesis to show how it is received, organized, and generally processed bythe 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 objectif 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 thewords as they succeed one another in time."8This is a fruitful reorientation, and one should be clear about thevarious things it does. First of all, by stressing the importance ofanalyzing 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,"9whereas if one tries to treat the text as an autonomous objectand describe its properties one has no particularway of distinguishingbetween significant properties and insignificantones. One can continue,almost ad infinitum, counting elements, noting their distribution, andgenerally producing facts about the text as object which have littlerelevanceto what we would be willing to recognize as the meaning andvalue of the text. If one begins by analyzing interpretive acts, on theother hand, the significant properties of the text are those which haveprovoked or are deployed in the interpretive experience.But secondly, and this is perhapsa more significant point, in rejectingthe notion of work as object Fish prepares to accord literary theory itstrue role. If a work were an autonomous entity which contained itsown meaning, then literary theory would consist only of ex post factogeneralizations about the properties of such entities. It would be verymuch an ancillary activity, with no necessary place in the study ofliterature. (Indeed, for the New Critics literary theory was largely anegative 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 ofliterary works can only be studied by analyzing the reader's response,then the task of literary theory becomes central: it must account forresponses by analyzing the norms, conventions, and mental operationswhich make these responses and interpretations possible. If a givensentence can have different meanings in a novel and in a lyric poem, it

8Ibid.,pp.387-88.9 Fish, "What Is Stylistics and Why Are They Saying Such Terrible ThingsAbout It?," in Approachesto Poetics, ed. SeymourChatman(New York, 1973),p. 149.251



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is because the conventions of verse and prose lead one to respond to itdifferently, and to explain the meaning or response is to set out theconventions on which it is based. Or again, if a work can be read eitheras literature or as history, biography, and so forth, the differences inmeaning and response are to be explained in terms of conventions andexpectations which produce them.If the meaning of each text were inherent to it, then there would belittle need for a general theory, except to point out this fact and to listsome possibleheuristic strategies which might, on occasion, help readersto discover this inherent meaning. But if the meaning of a work lies inthe function of its elements in a sequential interpretive experience, thenthe task of literary theory is to explicate the notion of the "reader"inand through whom the combination and sequential interaction of ele-ments takes place. What is it to be a skilled or informed reader ofliterature? We presume to test students' progress towards this goal,but we have few explicit ideas of what they are supposed to learn, andhave made scant progress towards setting out the conventions, norms,and operationswhich they are supposedto 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 ofunderstanding literary texts but of studying the activity of interpreta-tion so as to makeexplicit the vast sum of tacit knowledge which enablesworks to have meaning and which we may label "literarycompetence."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 asto offer a comprehensive theory of the way in which we go aboutmaking sense of texts. But, sadly, this is a step which Fish himselfdoes 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 notionthat the critic's job is to interpret. He raises the question of a generaltheory of reading only once, and then to beg it: the informed reader,he says, is assumed to be "sufficientlyexperienced as a reader to haveinternalized the properties of literary discourse, including everythingfrom the most local of devices (figures of speech, etc.) to wholegenres."10To insist that meaning and value lie not in the text itselfbut in the activity of reading, and then to turn around and tell us thatwe 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 betterconceived as temporal experiences than as spatial configurations orstructures and that literature is thus "didacticin a special sense; it does

10Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts, p. 406. For further discussionof what thisinvolves, see JonathanCuller,StructuralistPoetics (Ithaca, 1975).252



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not preach the truth but asks its readers to discover the truth forthemselves."'1 He sees his task as that of showing us what truths arediscovered by the experience of reading particular works. And so inSelf-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-CenturyLiterature he leads us through a series of works, showing how, in eachcase, propositions, categories, and distinctions are proposed as if theywere going to be developedand 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 whichremains is that of the experience of reading. To define this value ineach case, to show what results from the interaction of the parts, is ofcourse to retreat to the traditional tasks of thematic interpretation.Commitmentto interpretive criticism is particularly ironic in Fish'scase since, as he repeatedlytells us, this is simply a matter of describinghis experience of reading. His theory has radically reduced the spaceof interpretive play and worked the analyst into a tight corner.To claimsimultaneously that one is simply describing the experience of readersand that one is producing new and striking interpretations is indeed adifficultact, and Fish's energies are devoted to maintainingthis stancein difficultconditions. How long he can maintainit is, of course, anotherquestion: there is clearly not much future in the enterprise of offeringever more interpretations by recounting the reader's experience oftexts. The future lies, on the contrary, in the theoretical enterprisewhich Fish sketches and then flees.12These three cases, though very different in the content of theirproposalsand results, suggest in their formal and strategic convergencea gloomy prognostic: the principle of interpretation is so strong anunexamined postulate of American criticism that it subsumes andneutralizes even the most forceful and intelligent acts of revolt. "Lamusique savante manque a notre desir." The desire to find new waysof writing about literature has been frustrated for want of knowledge-able accompaniment. But there are now signs that the increasinginfluence of European criticism will prevent other possibilities, nowbeing bruited about, from slipping back into an interpretive mode: atheoretical sophistication will prevent them from falling prey to un-examined assumptions.

Briefly put, the lesson of contemporary European criticism, in itsmost vital moments, is this: that the New Criticism's dream of a freshand unprejudiced approach to each autonomous artifact is not onlyimpossible but fundamentallymisconceived, even as an ideal. To read11Ibid.,p. 1.12 For furtherdiscussion,see JonathanCuller, "StanleyFish and the Rightingof the Reader,"Diacritics, 5:1 (1975).

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a work as literature is inevitably and necessarily to read it in relationto other texts, past and present. And even if literary genres and theconcept of literature itself be bracketed,to read is still to engage in anintertextual encounter.Reading is never a naturaland innocent activity.The condition of the reader is to come after, to be constituted as readerby the repertoire of other texts, both literary and nonliterary, whichare always already in place and waiting to be displaced by a criticalreading. 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' whichapproacheshe text is itselfalreadya plurality f othertexts,ofinfiniteor, more precisely,lost codes (whose origins are lost) . . . Subjectivityisgenerallyhoughtof as a plenitudewith whichI encumberhe text, butin factthis fakedplenitudes onlythewashor wakeof all the codeswhichmakeupthe'I,' so thatfinallymy subjectivityasthegenerality f stereotypes.13

Given the intertextual nature of reading and readers, the literarywork participates in a variety of systems, plays among a series oflanguages: 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 andcondensation, the various modes of discourse which make up a culture(the formal and informal ways of assigning meaning to things), andthe various literary forms or languages which at a given moment canbe 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 whichit plays. It is a tenuous intertextual construct, and the critical task is todisperse it, to move through it toward an understandingof the systemsand semiotic processes which make it possible.Criticism which accords with this way of thinking can take manyguises. In addition to the kind of formal and systematic poetics en-visaged by Frye and now being developed especially in France, onemight cite Fredric Jameson's attempt, particularly in Marxism andForm, to work toward a dialectical criticism which would attempt notso much to resolve difficultiesand offer interpretations as to take theresistance of a work as the object of attention and to define the natureof a work's opacity or otherness by moving outwards towards otherexamples of opacity and the historical ground of this type of opacity."Thus our thought no longer takes official problems at face value butwalks behind the screen to assess the very origin of the subject-object

3S/Z (Paris,1970),pp.16-17.254



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relationship in the first place."'4 The product or result of dialecticalcriticism is not an interpretation of the work itself but a broader his-torical account of why interpretationshould be necessary and what theneed for interpretationsof various kinds signifies.Jameson's enterprisewould lead,among other things, to a "dialecticalrhetoric, in which the various mental operations are understood notabsolutely, but as moments and figures, tropes, syntactical paradigms,of our relationship to the real itself, as, altering irrevocably in time, itnonetheless obeys a logic that like the logic of a language can never befully distinguished from its object."15A Marxist criticism conceivedin this spirit would demonstrate that the relationshipbetween a literarywork and a social and historical reality is one not of reflected contentbut of a play of forms. Social reality is composed of paradigms of orga-nization, figuresof our relationshipto the real,and the interplaybetweena literarywork and its historical ground lies in the way that the work'sform andformal devices assimilate,transform,or supplementa culture'sways of producing meaning.Jameson's work may be seen as part of the larger, liberating projectof reinventing literary history, which is perhaps most easily and perti-nently observed in the pages of New Literary History.16 Once onerejects the view that the critic's task is to interpret autonomous andatemporal monuments, one is led to produce a theory of literature as aconceptual space, and since even a minimal degree of self-consciousnesswould makeone aware that the way in which one does this is necessarilyhistorical (caught up in a historical process), one's project becomesthat of literary history, broadly conceived. One's relationship to pastworks, and to present works also, is a historical relationship, and theconcepts one uses to formulate and to analyze these relationships arethemselves historical constructs. But history, especially in the realmof literature,is not something given: not a chronologicalseries to whichone can appeal, as if this would ground one's enterprise. History iswhat one must construct in order to be able to talk about literature andto give oneself a place to stand in relation to it. This is no doubt why,after several decadeswhen literaryhistory was abandonedto positivisticscholarship, it has once again become the principal terrain of creativeand agile criticism.

This observation is perhaps less a claim to be substantiated than aprediction about the sources of energy in American criticism in thecoming years; but one might note, as an exemplary case, the way in14Marxism and Form (Princeton, 1971), p. 341.15 Ibid., p. 374.16In additionto other works mentionedbelow, see Nez Directions in LiteraryHistctry,ed Ralph Cohen (Baltimore, 1974).

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which the Yale "Formalists" have been succeeded, as the cutting edgeof criticism, by those whom one might baptizethe "Yale Deformalists":Geoffrey Hartman, Harold Bloom, Paul de Man. Drawing sus-tenance from a historically conceived romantic poetry rather thanan ahistoricalmetaphysicalor Augustan verse, invoking as the stimulusof repeatedquest and failure the impossiblecalling of high romanticism,they treat literature and the readingof literatureas a perpetualhistoricalerror and deformation. "History," writes Geoffrey Hartman, "is thewake of a mobile mind falling in and out of love with the things itdetaches by its attachment."'7 This becomes the temporal scheme ofHarold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence: each poet must slay thefather, must slay his predecessors through revisionary misreadings, soas to create a historical space in which poetry, as manifested anew inhim, can take place. The hidden order of historical continuity is basedon a negative and dialectical principal,of poetic misprision, which alsofigures the relationshipbetween reader and text: in the historical econ-omy of literature the reader, like the new poet, is the latecomer whomust misconstrue the text so as to leave a space in which he can writeit himself; he must create an absence through his own reading so thathe may, in his own name but also in the name of the Father, invoke andimagine what is absent. That the greatest insights result from thisprocess of necessary misreading is the claim of another subtle theoristof deformation, Paul de Man, for whom interpretationis always in factliterary history: an error which assumes a historical categorizationandconceals its own historical status.18Criticismof this kind may not seem to make interpretationthe enemyand to take arms against it, but that is only because it recognizes thesuasive efficacy of subtler evasive strategies. Concerned with ways ofopening 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 concernedwith finding out why; and if we study the conditions of interpretiveerror we become involved in a historical and theoretical enterprisewhich probes those wider and more interesting questions about theways of literatureand of readingwhich have been repressedor displacedduring the reign of interpretation.

Brasenose College, Oxford University17"History-Writing as Answerable Style," in New Directions in LiteraryHistory, p. 100. See also his BeyondFormalism (New Haven, 1970).8 Blindness andInsight (New York, 1971), p. 165.

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