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PETER
CAWS
which imitated the sciences in producing new knowledge, remains in
fact the work of the Marxist critic Lucien Goldmann on Pascal and
Racine, in the course of which he was able to reconstruct some parts
of the Jansenist movement which had been forgotten, and further–
more to find evidence that they had in fact existed (the relevant
works are of course
Le Dieu cache
and
Correspondance de Martin
de Barcos, abbe de Saint-Cyran).
I have not included Goldmann in
the list of structuralists because much of what I have taken to define
the movement does not apply to him, and his own method, which
he calls "genetic structuralism," rests very heavily on the notion of
literature as an embodiment (often in spite of the intentions of the
writer) of some collective social attitude appropriate to a class or a
period. Structuralist criticism in the wider sense does not limit itself
to collective or social or historical considerations, although it does not
ignore them either. The work
is
a structure; the critic uses it as a
point of departure. One of the striking things about this criticism, in
fact, is its habit of getting a great deal more out of a work than
the author or for that matter his historical period could possibly have
put into it. Foucault, in
Les Mots et les choses,
spends the whole
first chapter on a painting of Velasquez, "The Maids of Honor,"
from which he extracts by hindsight and free elaboration a whole
theory of the "absence of the subject" (another pivotal concept of
structuralism). And Althusser, who has applied structuralist techniques
to a "rethinking" of Marx, is said in a recent essay in
Aletheia
to
have developed a complete apparatus "for putting oneself in condi–
tion to read Marx so as to think profitably not only what Marx
wrote but also what he thought without writing."
This last claim, it should be noted,
is
not made by Althusser
himself, and was not necessarily meant kindly. The same article calls
Althusser's works
(Pour Marx; Lire Le Capital)
"limiting cases of
interpretation," and suggests that what is presented there is not just
Marx but something much more, which Marx indeed could not have
created, since he did not enjoy the advantages of the intervening
hundred years. And this is quite in keeping with the principles of
structuralist criticism. The clearest statement of these principles is to
be found in Barthes's
Critique et verite,
a response to Picard's
N ou–
velle critique ou nouvelle imposture,
in turn an attack on Barthes's
Sur Racine.
Picard, a typical humanist, had become indignant at
the way in which Barthes had, in his view, tampered with literary
