STRUCTURALISM
89
and historical objectivity, with the "facts" about Racine. (Another
common element in structuralist thought is its distrust, in the so–
called
sciences humaines,
of the flat empiricism of the natural sciences,
principally because in the human context a great deal of interpreta–
tion goes into deciding what the facts are.) Barthes points out that
there could be a "science" of literature only
if
we would be content
to regard the work simply as a "written object," disregarding its sense
in favor of
all
its possible senses, disregarding its author in favor of
its more generalized linguistic origins - treating it,
in
fact, as the
ethnologist treats a myth. What criticism does, by contrast, is to
produce
one
of the possible senses of the work, to construct along–
side it, as it were, another work (the interpretation) as a hypothesis
in the light of which the details of the original become intelligible.
"The book is a world," says Barthes. "The critic confronted by the
book
is
subject to the same conditions of utterance as the writer con–
fronted by the world." But the critic can never replace the reader;
the individual also confronts the book at a particular time, in a par–
ticular context; it becomes part of his experience, presents itself to
him with a certain intelligibility, as a message (from whom?);
it
engages him in another episode of the structuring activity which
makes him what he is. An old book is not (unless the reader takes
pains to make it so) a bit of antiquity, it is a bit of the present;
consequently Racine can still be read, and new critical views about
Racine, possible only in the light of contemporary events, can find
in him without distortion meanings which he and
his
contemporaries
could not even have understood. Similarly Althusser is justified in his
rethinking of Marx; indeed all works have constantly to be rethought
if they are to be more than archaeological curiosities.
The consideration of structuralist criticism brings us back to
Levi-Strauss. The critic never says all there is to be said about a
book; his reading is always an approximation which we know to be
inadequate, even if we do not know what would constitute an ade–
quate reading - even if it makes no sense to imagine such a read–
ing. Similarly language never formulates the world adequately; nor
does myth; nor does science, in spite of its (now abandoned) aspira–
tion to completability in principle; nor does history. These structures
change in time (they can, to use structuralist jargon, be considered
in diachronic as well as in synchronic aspects) ; also, which is not the
same thing, they are dynamic, having complex interrelations among
