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PARTISAN REVIEW
erotics of the text, who engages with a
nouveau roman
is in for a
disappointment.
My concern, however, is with the strategy and the rhetorical tactics
of structuralist criticism only as a background for considering three
current writers who put forward radical new ways of reading texts.
One, Jacques Derrida, is a French philosopher with an increasing
following among American critics of literature; by pressing to .an
extreme the tendencies of structuralism, Derrida proposes a mode of
reading which undermines not only the grounds of structuralism itself,
but the possibility of understanding language as a medium of decid–
able meanings. The other two, Stanley Fish and Harold Bloom, are
Americans who set their theories of reading in opposition to what they
decry as the antihumanism of structuralist procedures. All three are
erudite, formidable, and influential innovators who found their strate–
gies of reading on an insight into a neglected aspect of what enters into
the interpretation of a text. These theorists differ, we shall see, in
essential respects, but they share important features which are distinc–
tive of current radicalism in interpretation.
In
each, the theory doesn't
undertake simply to explain how we in fact read, but to propagate a
new way of reading that subverts accepted interpretations and replaces
them with unexpected alternatives. Each theory eventuates in a radical
scepticism about our ability to achieve a correct interpretation, propos–
ing instead that reading should free itself from illusory linguistic
constraints in order to become liberated, creative, producing the
meanings that it makes rather than discovers. And all three theories are
suicidal; for as the theorist is aware, his views are self-reflexive, in that
his subversive process destroys the possibility that a reader can interpret
correctly either the expression of his theory or the textual interpreta–
tions to which it is applied.
It
is worth noting that such Newreading-by which I denote a
principled procedure for replacing standard meanings by new
meanings-is by no means recent, but had many precedents in Western
hermeneutics. We find such a procedure, for example, in ancient Greek
and Roman attempts to uncover the deep truths hidden within Ho–
mer's surface myths and fictions, and to moralize the immoral tales of
Ovid; we find it also in the reinterpretations of the Old Testament by
writers of the New Testament, as well as by Jewish Kabbalists; we find
a similar procedure in medieval and later exegetes of the many-leveled
allegorical meanings in the entire biblical canon. These old reinterpre–
tive enterprises, however diverse, all manifest three procedural mo–
men ts, or aspects: (I) The interpreter indicates that he understands the
