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LEO BERSANI
describing a biographical Racine. The "man" he portrays is nothing
more than a certain type of structural coherence. Racinian psycho–
logy is a by-product of the peculiarly Racinian way of creating intel–
ligibility.
There is, then, no "life" which is given and which Racine
copies and formalizes. The parallelism between literature and life
is in the act of creating meanings and not in the content of meanings.
The immediate and most radical consequence of this view is the
breakdown of the presumed differences of function between critical
language and creative language. Both the critic and the poet are
engaged in the fabrication of meaning. Criticism, as Barthes writes in
his essay on structuralism, has the same mimetic and reconstituting
role as art; as the artist makes the structures of natural objects intel–
ligible, so the critic, in his "imitations" of the work, makes the struc–
tures of art intelligible. Now this clearly does not mean that the
critic tries to sound like the writer he is discussing; a similarity of
function is not an identity of styles. The failure to make this distinc–
tion undoubtedly accounts for works of modern literature in which
the treatment of boredom, for example, is naively executed as an
effort to be boring. The refusal in modern thought to consider dis–
cursive language as a privileged instrument which excavates "truth"
from reality is more important than the frequently confused ways
in which this refusal has been expressed. And the French have of
course not been the only ones to insist that systems of communication
participate in and perhaps even create the phenomena they describe.
More specifically, their simultaneous reevaluation of both literature
and criticism has led to a deliberate confusion between the two, and
to a body of work which has very little that is "critical" in the
sense in which we have usually understood that word.
These general remarks should help to explain what may seem
the most peculiar and objectionable aspects of contemporary French
criticism: its neglect of the literary contexts of literary texts and its
indifference to judgments of literary value. Perhaps the most im–
portant early example of this kind of criticism is the work of Gaston
Bachelard. Bachelard would be rather exotic fare for Anglo-Saxon
readers. I can hardly hope, in a few lines, to convince you to look
into a writer who reads in order "to vibrate phenomenologically,"
for whom "the reading of poets is essentially reverie," and who
measures a poet's success by his ability "to induce the reader into
