WRITERS' CHOICE
RONALD CHRIST: I've been
looking over three books published
in 1974 . Three subversive books I
take it, because while they are well
known , no experts I know in their
respective fields will tell me that
they are good books-charging
them instead with superficiality,
inhumanity or heresy. Having
never finished any of the three be–
cause each time I pick one up I'm.
impelled
to
reconsider some por–
tion of what I've already read,
I recommend them for their faults .
Robert Scholes ' s wonder–
fully superficial introduction to
Structuralism In Literature
(Yale)
makes a different kind of .. rich
noise" from the one he finds in
Barthes, and it doeS what few intro–
ductions have the grace
to
do: in–
troduce us to known and not-so–
known texts, explaining away
nothing and leaving us to carry on
our own conversation. " Any book
such as this one, which is to some
extent about other books that are
about still other' books" and still
never loses its focus on those inter–
mediacy books, never sinks be–
neath the surface and drowns in a
tangle of footnotes and point–
chopping is a rarity .
Among those intermediary
books, I would put Christian
Metz's
A Semiotics
0/
the Cinema
(Oxford). Even though Scholes
makes no mention of Metz that I
recall, he does say that ' 'For a stu–
dent of the film these days to be
ignorant of semiology is to be sim–
ply illiterate. " While that simple
illiteracy is often to be preferred to
the complex illiteracy found
among the semiologists , Metz 's
book is surely indispensable to any
one who cares about either
language or film . A hard book:
if
Byron were looking for a subject to
break his brain on today , I'd sug–
gest structuralism, not Arabic. Metz
offers all the pleasures and pains of
the structuralists . The pleasures:
excitement, yes, at the discoveries
and the fantastic reasonableness of
the system; the pains: weariness
with the new vocabulary describing
the old reality , revulsion at the
almost mechanical (read "in–
human " ?) rationality. Though
cursed by a gentle colleague for
having praised this "unreadable,
$11.
00 book." I still experience
the same excitement at a new ap–
proach to the subject when I
dawdle in Metz .that I once felt
turning the pages of Percy
Lubbock's
Craft O/Fiction .
Because of course there is no
such thing as "unreadability."
You have
to
read the thing
to
dis–
cover that it is "unreadable" and
that's where Richard Lanham's
Style: An Anti-textbook
(Yale)
comes in. A below-the-belt attack
on the teaching (and therefore on
