218
LEO BERSANI
strategies of resistance. Furthennore, some of the attacks on the new
critics surely express intellectual insecurity more than ideological hos–
tility: Barthes, Blanchot and Richard are by no means always easy
to read, and they are at least as much a threat to intellectual vanity
as they are to bourgeois institutions. Perhaps profoundly indifferent
to politics, the French (as we see in their comments on the United
States)
immediately
see political intrigue everywhere; and nothing
is more politically frivolous and ineffectual than the strident cry of
"Right-wing plot!" at the drop of a reviewer's cliche. There can be
a certain pleasure in that cry, and in Paris it is often part of a self–
exciting and self-promoting game. American intellectuals, who tend,
if
anything, to be masochistically self-critical, would do well to
remember this French aversion to self-criticism before they anxiously
agree with the typically unexamined French view that America is
the most conformist country in the world.
There is, happily, a much brighter side to the picture. The im–
portance of what has been done in French criticism since the war can
perhaps best be approached by a brief look at some of the assump–
tions it rejects. The central piety of traditional criticism is a belief in
the existence of an analyzable literary object. Picard, in his anti-new–
critical pamphlet,
Nouvelle critique ou nouvelle imposture,
at least has
the merit of explicitly,
if
somewhat simplemindedly, defending this
belief. We can't, he argues, say just anything about Racine's plays:
"There is a truth about Racine on which we can all agree." You
wonder why this exegetic Utopia had not been reached before the
new critics. Never mind; the objective aspects of literature which will
lead us directly to interpretive unanimity are the certainties of lan–
guage, the implications of psychological coherence and the structural
imperatives of the tragic genre.
I won't insist on the obviously simplistic notions of linguistic
meaning and psychological coherence which are the most glaring
defects of this critical credo. More interesting, as Barthes points out
in his answer to Picard
(Critique et verite),
is the question of the
kind
of interpretations sanctioned by an appeal to the supposedly ob–
jective criteria of a text's language and structure. It's a shame that
Barthes didn't have a better reader of Racine to deal with. Picard's
prejudices are so transparent, he is so anxious to save literature from
what he fears are the incoherent obscenities of the unconscious, that
he is continually closing his eyes to precisely the kind of evidence he
