THE STATE OF CRITICISM
395
STEVEN MARCUS:
All
right, I take the qualification. Now I want to
respond briefly to what William Phillips said about his psychoana–
lytic critic who brought the entire psychoanalytic machinery of
terms and devices of interpretation
to
bear upon
Death of a Sales–
man,
which obviously cannot stand up beneath it. It seems to me
that that doesn't make the point, or doesn't answer the point in some
sense, because I don't think that psychoanalysis contains within
.itself-any more than any particular literary critic or any other
method does-the means for making judgments of quality, either. I
have never heard, or I don't think anybody has ever heard, a
psychoanalyst say that's a good or a bad dream. Heaven knows they
may think that at certain points. I would say that it's characteristic of
both Freud and what happens in psychoanalysis that he can move
without any sense of shifting gears intellectually from a discussion of
Hamlet or Oedipus to a discussion of Gradiva, that is to sayan
absolutely third-rate popular novel, and treat it as if it were as
complex, as interesting, and as important in many ways as the other,
because he's doing something else. He's not interested in the good–
ness or badness of a work of literature as a work of literature. He's
interested in kinds of complexities and a process of thinking which
show up in texts sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes indif–
ferent, but they're there for his purpose really.
WILLIAM PHILLIPS: What about a literary critic who uses the same
method of analysis for
Hamlet
as he does for
Death of a Salesman?
STEVEN MARCUS: I don't follow you.
WILLIAM PHILLIPS: There have been literary critics, I can't think of an
example at the moment, who have trained the same machinery on
inferior works.
STEVEN MARCUS: Yes, that's true. What about it?
WILLIAM PHILLIPS: It's not a psychoanalyst's business to have judg–
ment. That's why I want to shift the discussion to literary critics.
STEVEN MARCUS: It is a literary critic's business.
All
I've been saying is
there's nothing inherent in any literary method that I know which
leads to judgments of quality.
WILLIAM PHILLIPS: I agree with that.
MORRIS DICKSTEIN: There's an interesting remark, an amusing and
revealing remark in Roland Barthes's essay on the Eiffel Tower, in
which he at one point compares the view that you get from the top
of the Eiffel Tower
to
the view of a structuralist critic. That is
to
say, the city is laid out before that view as a kind of grid, and what
he doesn't say is that there's really no interference from immediate
experience. Jameson says that structuralism is essentially the con-
