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PARTISAN REVIEW
what some of you believe and practice. And I recognize a certain
paradox in my favoring a more traditional type of criticism, which
Hayden White called "normal" or "ordinary" criticism, over the
presumably more advanced and more systematic modes, which White
referred
to
as "absurdist" criticism. But I think that the more
advanced theories represent an advance in specialization and in
textual investigation and manipulation, which has taken them fur–
ther and further from the experience of literature, and its relation to
the rest of the culture. As Blackmur once said, "No amount of
linguistic analysis can explain the
feeling
or existence of a poem."
One could resolve many of these questions about the function of
criticism as Denis Donoghue suggests, by acknowledging that there
are many types of criticism, each with its own territorial rights, each
having something
to
offer readers and students. The trouble with this
kind of catholicity is that it is based on the belief that all positions are
equally "privileged" or "unprivileged"-which is precisely what is
being questioned. Resolutions of this type elevate eclecticism and
tolerance into critical principles.
We have come a long way from the New Criticism. Since then
everything seems to have become not only more specialized but more
chaotic.
It
is probably asking too much of literary criticism to expect
it to be less chaotic than the rest of our thinking. But it should at least
recognize the limitations of textual constructions and deconstructions.
Unfortunately the generalizing power of criticism appears to be in
inverse proportion to its capacity for specialization.
I said that structuralists have put too much emphasis on disconti–
nuity. There is one area, however, in literature-not in criticism–
where continuity has been exaggerated. And it is here that structural–
ists, in suggesting that texts are not made up of tightly woven,
logically connected meanings, have corrected the overzealous modes
of interpretation of earlier criticism. The truth is that not everything
in a novel or poem fits into a coherent pattern, as we usually assume,
being the heirs of a tradition in which all experience is organized into
an organic whole. Hence the ingenuity of critics has been employed
to make a perfect fit out of acts and statements that are random,
gratuitous, and disconnected, and come out of those corners of the
writer's mind that are not coordinated with its center. The enterprise
of interpretation rests on the notion that everything has to be
explained and creates the illusion that everything can be explained.
Perhaps the history of modern criticism could be summed up
briefly as the decline of the man of letters and the rise of the literary
