BOOKS
477
Scholes is not merely inviting us to consider a new intellectual
approach, he is offering a powerful new love potion, and as the
proponent of "a politics of structure (and a politics of love)," he sounds
like a latter-day Pandarus enjoining us to make love, not war. Struc–
turalism, in his account, is authorized by biology; which makes it all
the more startling that it has taken the Western mind centuries
to
come
up with it.
What does Scholes want? Order is one of his primary concerns, and
for him order in literary criticism will involve a thorough houseclean–
ing in which we junk the multiple perspectives which reading so
untidily generates.
The average interpretation in American critiCIsm runs to about
twenty pages, whether the work being considered is a poem of twenty
lines or a novel of two hundred pages. This means that our interpre–
tation of poetry is habitually expansive, extending the significations
of the poetic text in various directions, while our interpretation of
fiction is habitually reductive and highly selective. Any such 'read–
ing' of a fictional text will be insufficient and hence will require
other 'corrective' readings and interpretations. A whole critical
industry battens on this situation, culminating in anthologies which
present these various and conflicting interpretations for the edifica–
tion of students. All this is not criminal, of course, but it is mildly
ludicrous.
Implicit here (not very far from the surface) is a dream of "complete" or
"exhaustive" criticism which will take care of every literary work once
and for all. And this viewpoint governs Scholes's selection of struc–
turalists; as if he were writing a consumer's guide to the best machines
for cleaning the Augean stables of an excess of "incomplete" critical
essays, Scholes pushes the systematizers and quantifiers of
structuralism-from Propp
to
Todorov. Roland Barthes, whose two–
hundred page treatment of a thirty page text
(S / Z
on Balzac's "Sarra–
sine") can be seen as "exhaustive," is, however, too imaginative and
idiosyncratic for him. And he refrains from comment on most of the
thinkers whom he dubs "high structuralists": Michel Foucault,
Jacques Lacan, and Jacques Derrida, who have been instrumental in
exposing the gaps in every system of classification and in attempting to
understand the necessary discontinuities which vex all the dreams of
"wholeness" which Scholes cherishes.
Scholes's chatty littl e book, then, may well have been personally
satisfying in the writing- an exercise in collecting his own rumina–
tions on literature and "the profession," but his personal view that
structuralism is the biggest and best of high human isms makes the
