DAVID
J.
GORDON
107
criticism is nothing other than poetry by a different name. All writers
are poets, either strong or weak, and invite the same kind of interpreta–
tion. Bloom's hostility to the idea of objective interpretation, then,
derives not so much from the strength of his skepticism as from the
strength of his belief in the universality of poetry.
It
should seem strange that theories so subversive of the institu–
tional teaching of literature should prove fascinating enough to the
academic community to bring into being within the last few years more
than half a dozen heady but substantially produced new journals. Part
of this fascination, no doubt, is that they offer an alternative to the
limitations-often the boredom-of explication. Then too, they pro–
vide a release from the restraint of attending to someone else's vision;
they appeal to a frustrated creative urge in critics who feel, sometimes
not without reason, that their own intellectual powers are equal to
those of the writers whom they teach-although their own habits of
thinking may be too governed by concepts to enable them to succeed in
the more plastic and concrete uses of language.
There may also be an element of snobbery in the current fascina–
tion with theorists who boast that they have dared to look into the
abyss. They rather enjoy the abyss and enjoy their contempt for
intellectuals who ignore it. But the neglect of ultimate philosophical
questions is not necessarily naive. Theory is not dogma for any
scientist or critic worth his salt, and there is plenty of opportunity for
sophistication, even philosophical sophistication, without invoking
an abyss.
Yet it is true that a prolonged reliance on a framework may lead us
to take it for granted. And if we need a philosophic reminder at that
point, I think that Wittgenstein's work provides a more allfactive form
of it than Derrida's because it is less contemptuous, more purely
imaginative. The reference theory of meaning, beyond a certain point,
does
get us all into trouble, and Wittgenstein's idea thal the meaning of
a concept depends on its use can, when skillfull y applied (as it is by
John M. Ellis in
Theory of Literary Criticism: A Logical Analysis),
resolve the difficulties we encounter when we take literally such
dichotomies as connotation versus denotation or style versus content.
There is, in other words, an ultimate indeterminacy about any quest
for knowledge. Facts are constituted by a theory which is itself not
absolute. But this questioning of the reality of facts is based on a very
rarified insight. For those who till one or another field of knowledge, a
logic that suspends all knowledge is not recommended for daily use.
We conclude that the idea of indeterminacy, when applied with
