588
PARTISAN REVIEW
Fish can make it the occasion for a creative adventure in false surmises,
and Bloom can read it as a perverse distortion of any chosen precursor–
text. These substitute strategies in fact have an advantage which is a
principal cause of their appeal to students of literature. Our inherited
strategy, although it has shown that it can persistently discover new
meanings even in a classic text, must operate always under the
constraint of communal regularities of usage. Each new strategy, on
the other hand, is a discovery procedure which guarantees new mean–
ings. It thus provides freshness of sensation in reading old and familiar
texts-at least until we learn
to
anticipate the limited kind of new
meanings it is capable of generating; it also makes it easy for any
critical follower to say new and exciting things about a literary work
that has been again and again discussed. But we purchase this advan–
tage at a cost, and ultimately the choice between a radical Newreading
and the old way of reading is a matter of cultural cost-accounting. We
gain a guaranteed novelty, of a kind that makes any text directly
relevant
to
current interests and concerns. What we lose is access to the
inexhaustible variety of literature as determinably meaningful texts by,
for, and about human beings, as well as access to the enlightening
things that have been written about such texts by the humanists and
critics who were our precursors, from Aristotle to Lionel Trilling.
Note: Quotations from works which are not named in the text are
from the following sources. Michel Foucault:
Les Mots et les choses
(1966); "What Is an Author?"
Partisan Review
(1975). Edward Said:
"Abecedarium culturae:
structuralism, absence, writing, "
Tri–
Quarterly
(1971). Jacques Derrida:
De la grammatologie (1967),
translated Gayalri Chakravorty Spi vak (1976);
La Structure, Ie signe
et Ie jeu dans Ie discours des sciences humaines,
in
L'Ecriture et la
difference
(1967); "Positions, " Parts I and II,
Diacritics,
Winter 1971
and Spring 1973; "Differance," in
Speech and Phenomena and Other
Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs,
translated David B. Allison
(1973); "White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,"
New Literary History,
VI (1974); " Signature Event Context,"
Glyph,
I (1977); "Limited Inc abc . . .,"
Glyph,
II (1978). Stanley Fish:
"Literature in the Reader: Affecti ve Stylistics" (1970), as repri nted in
Self-Consuming Artifacts
(1972); "What Is Stylistics and Why Are
They Saying Such Terrible Things about
1t?" Approaches to Poetics,
ed. Seymour Chatman (1973); "Facts and Fictions: A Reply to Ralph
Rader,"
Critical Inquiry,
I (1975); " Interpreting the
Variorum, "
Critical Inquiry,
II (1976); "Interpreting Interpreting the
Variorum,"
Critical Inquiry,
III (1977). Harold Bloom:
The Anxiety of Influence
(1973); A Map of Misreading
(1975);
Kabbalah and Criticism (1975 );
Poetry and Repression
(1976).
