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LEO BERSANI
most intriguing form, modem French criticism would seem to en–
visage the perfectly sympathetic critical act as the consecration (and
murder) of literature by an uninterrupted silence.
The perfect anonymity of the ideal critical act also makes it
perfectly negligible, and in conclusion I would like to return from
Blanchot's rarefied thought to the more livable achievements of recent
French criticism. First of all, what disappears from criticism when
it assumes a similarity of function between the critical and the crea–
tive acts, when it places itself alongside of literature rather than at a
"critical" distance from it, are
all
judgments about the work's value.
Now while I think that the refusal to judge implies a limited view
of
all
meaningful activities, it is perhaps a healthy subversion of
literature's falsely privileged status to assert that, in one sense, there
are no bad books. More precisely, we can never judge art on the
"truth" it supposedly contains; perhaps the most insidious form of
censorship in criticism is an appeal to life as a sacred (and inhibiting)
model for those operations by which all languages
invent
life. Any
supposed statement about life is partial or distorting only in reference
to other partial and distorting statements; and the interest of a lan–
guage is more in its capacity for
conveying
meanings than in the
hypothetical validity of the meanings it conveys. Furthermore, if the
quality of life represented in a literary work is an essentially irrelevant
basis of judgment, the best French critics remind us that, far from
being indifferent to value, criticism in fact creates the work's value.
The greatness of literature has, after all, never been anything more
than an inference from the critical performances it inspires. By
choosing to follow the writer's itinerary of signification, French
critics have implicitly located the appeal of great literature not in the
range of reality it covers or includes, but in a total intelligibility and
structural coherence which allow us-and especially the critic of
literature-to experience the exhilarating power of
making sense.
But the structuralist view of meaning is, to say the least, ex–
tremely debatable.
It
is, I agree, important to point out that the
"events'~
of all signifying systems are largely motivated by the patterns
of intelligibility which those systems create. Form and content are
not merely inseparable, as we have now been told
aid nauseam;
more
exactly, form and structure can determine content, for the way in
which a language is elaborated and constructed may actually es–
tablish the phenomena it describes. Thus, the determinations- and
