THE STATE OF CRITICISM
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the almost exclusive concern with texts, the crowning of the reader,
the rejection of history as a context or a continuum, the slurring of
the question of judgment, except as something to be assumed-all
these aspects of structuralism seem to be extensions, as well as
reversals, of the basic principles of the earlier textualists. But the idea
that there is no one enterprise, or position, or interpretation more
valid than any other, including that of literature itself, that the reader
devises ever new interpretations, that, as Barthes said, "the object of
structuralism is not man endowed with meanings, but man fabricat–
ing meanings ... "-all this emphasis on change and process, on a
world being constantly recreated, represents a radical shift, as the
structuralists themselves claim, and as critics like M.H. Abrams and
Gerald Graff recently have argued. Like the Marxists, by whom they
have been influenced, the structuralists are intent on demystifying–
and deconstructing-the existing order of ideas and institutions.
(It
should be pointed out that the Marxist influence has been large,
particularly on the French structuralists, both in terminology and in
the attitude toward "bourgeois society," although structuralism,
itself, is not a politically radical doctrine.)
Behind the structuralist rhetoric, one can discern some of the
antihistorical and antitraditional moods that dominate the current
scene. What I have in mind is the pseudo-democratic ethos, in which
all ideas are regarded as arbitrary, and equally valid. The premises of
the structuralists may not have their source in, but do seem to parallel
the current widespread feeling that there are no accepted ideas nor any
limits defining acceptable thinking or behavior. In such a situation,
process, which Barthes indicated was the essence of structuralism,
becomes supreme. Writing itself,
ecrire,
is for Barthes an intransitive
verb, that is to say, it has no object-or subject; it is the system of
signs, the signifier, that makes up the text. Very much in the spirit of
the
Zeitgeist,
too, is the structuralist claim to liberation, that ideal of
all those who already are or feel themselves liberated. And if the
structuralists may be said to have any links to the ethos of contempo–
rary literature, it would be to the fiction of the French objectivists,
which reproduces the process and objects of existence, and
to
current
experimental fiction, which dispenses with orderly narrative and the
unfolding of destiny.
Lest I be accused of being reductive in my picture of structuralism,
let me make some observations about its method and its value in
illuminating textual and critical problems. To begin with, the notion
of an ordinary or an ideal reader strikes me as a myth, and not a very
useful one, for there are only trained and untrained readers. The latter
