THE STATE OF CRITICISM
429
person 's feeling of importance and power in an era of bureaucracy and
vast, impersonal forces. Here at last is someone who takes me seriously,
and it turns out to be my English teacher. This is not just a cynical
calculation that an economically sinking profession can gain fresh
infusions of capital by merging with the flourishing new industry of
psychotherapy. The subjective critic is sincerely convinced that he is
helping liberate the student and put him in touch with his experiences.
Moreover, subjectivism hopes
to
reduce the rancor among teachers of
literature that seems only to be exacerbated by rational debate. For
professional status and rewards are now the exclusive privilege of those
with authority, and argument is the weapon for seizing and holding
the power of authority. Instead of competing by means of argument to
push my reading into the place yours holds, we can all share the wealth
in a spirit of tolerance. One learns to say, "Well, I can hear where
you're coming from , but personally I feel I can't assimilate your
reading into my recreation of my invariant identity theme."
New Criticism liberated classroom discussion by setting aside the
authority of the poet and the authority of the scholar. What prevented
anarchy was an explicitly moral submission to the public objectivity of
meaning. In practice, meaning was a flexible, organic unity that
embraced and reconciled opposites: the compensation for self-restraint
was that even the humblest reader could add his mite to the endlessly
unfolding objective meaning of a poem. Subjective criticism asserts
that "objective meaning" is a mystification, a factitious unity imposed
under the authority of a teacher who disciplines his students into the
alienated consciousness called "irony." Liberated from the burden of
meaning, subjective criticism falls back on introspection and the
seeming certitude of private experience. Since objective meaning is
always a silent partner in the dialogue of the classroom, subjective
criticism exorcises this ghost and calls for free conversation among the
persons actually present, rejecting any appeal
to
a higher, absent
authority or any responsibility to outside persons or institutions. You
may hear in this, as I do, a voice from the sixties and a fresh proof that
like philosophy, literary theory always comes after the feast. The shock
is to hear a broad prophecy of social and personal liberation dwindle
into this subjectivist jargon.
Deconstruction attacks the claims of "objective meaning" from the
opposite side, that is, from the perspective of a sophisticated theory of
language. I have neither the space nor the intention to describe this
complex theory in detail. In practice, the deconstructor begins by
positing a naive conception of meaning: a text states something, and
