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PARTISAN REVIEW
last chapter of
L 'Homme Nu
he attacks literary structuralists like Derrida or
Barthes, who themselves have altered their own "structuralisms ," although
he does not refer to them by name . Nor does he name all the other" deviants"
whom he dismisses out of hand, essentially because they apply structural
techniques without Levi-Strauss's' 'real' , structures . True structuralist theory,
he says, does not extrapolate from linguistic distinctions berween syntagmatic
and paradigmatic aspects of verbal communication, does not perceive narra–
tive literature as transformation by enlargement of the basic sentence struc–
ture , and does not define characters as nouns , their situations or attributes as
adjectives, and their actions as verbs . Because their structuralism is not linked
to real phenomena, he calls these "deviants " the fiction structuralists of the
philosophical literary world, who talk only to each other; and he lumps them
with the existentialists who ignore science, yet discuss it-regularly-at the
CafE Commerce (Sartre's hangout). Clearly, he has no use for this "applied
literary structuralism" which is "about as related to linguistics and to ethnog–
raphy as popular entertainment is to physics or biology: both of them are
sentimental pastimes which feed on badly-digested summary knowledge. "
They both exist only to relieve boredom. Hence he knocks literary structural–
ism , which is content with a "literal" application of structural techniques, as
a perversion of real structuralism, whose intent would be to find out why some
literary works continue to survive and why only some continue to captivate us.
Inevitably such criticism is ignored in the English departments of those
American universities where literary structuralism is in vogue, since it provides
a new theory for English teachers bored with the old approaches . And not the
least of its attractions is that it is both pragmatic and ideological. For while
structuralism's pseudoscientism satisfies the bent for empirical investigation,
its claim to have discovered the essence of all artistic activities also promises to
provide a method for solving-or bypassing-the form-content dilemma that
in one way or another has plagued modern criticism . In this respect, struc–
turalism seems to have answered some of the objections to "myth" criticism
by adding an appearance of rigor to the search for common themes. But, of
course, structuralism still could be charged with the lack of historicity-a
charge that has been leveled frequently at myth criticism.
Levi-Strauss's criticisms and comments have , to some extent, had their
effect on the literary structuralists , themselves descendants of Saussure as well
asJacobson and Troubetskoy, who see current phonology' 'as part of a broader
scientific movement." Along with Genette, they believe that "the end of
criticism is to arrive at our intimate knowledge of critical reality ," when
"critical thought becomes the thought criticized .. . [through] re-feel–
ing, re-thinking , re-imagining the thought from the inside ." But literary
structuralism's " intersubjective criticism" leaves out customary " intellectual
l
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