DAVID
J.
GORDON
99
Critics did seem to say that a norm could be deduced from the work
itself.
Much of what has been happening in Anglo-American literary
theory during the last thirty years is clearly a reaction to the strictness
of New Critical doctrine. I am not referring particularly to Northrop
Frye, important and influential as his work was in the fifties and
sixties. Frye certainly did expand our notion of a text but did not
address himself to the dilemma of relativism or even the problems of
distortion and misreading. The current fascination with these topics
seems to owe most to the influence of French structuralists, especially
Barthes and Derrida. But the attempts to assimilate their extreme
relativism into the mainstream of Anglo-American literary theory have
led to arguments whose radical pretensions are not wholly earned.
There is, I should say first, an unproblematic and quite effective
use by contemporary theorists of the current interest in indeterminacy.
It studies the temporary uncertainty imposed on the reader by the
work's narrative and rhetorical strategies. One impressi ve example is
Barbara Smith's
Poetic Closure,
a study of how poems end, i.e., how
the reader is manipulated in the process of understanding. Another is
Martin Price's fine essay, "The Irrelevant Detail and the Emergence of
Form" (in The English Institute's
Aspects of Narrative).
Price points to
the tendency in some realistic fiction toward loose coordination of
detail, the presence at the circumference of the design of detail that
approaches irrelevance. But, demurring from Barthes's attempt to
isolate quite irrelevant detail (and thus to prove that a linguistic
structure will undermine the presence in the work of a controlling
designer), he shows how the seemingly irrelevant detail can be under–
stood as a marginal case, making the reader aware that the writer is
aware of creating a fiction. Form, for Price, is a dynamic conception,
gradually emerging for the reader.
The concept of indeterminacy becomes problematic when it is
applied to literary art
au fond,
when the critic interprets even works of
high thematic stress as epistemological puzzles or "self-consuming
artifacts." The last phrase is the title of a book by Stanley Fish, who
with excessive literalness applies the insight that sense is made by a
reader rather than a printed page. Fish's reader stops every few words to
respond to a different signal from the text until he is thoroughly
" decertainized." This willful foreshortening (which ignores the
broader signals of genre, the assuring continuity of style, and the
reader's tolerance of temporary uncertainty) is, for him, the common
experience of reading: any standing back to take in a spatial whole
