THE STATE OF CRITICISM
407
the living energy of meaning," is neutralized; like a city no longer
inhabited "not simply left behind, but haunted by meaning and
culture." Hence the structuralist consciousness is a catastrophic
consciousness, at once destroyed and destructive, destructuring. Der–
rida leaves the notion of force at that point, but we are not required to
do the same; because what is force if not that endless play of the world
which Derrida's later books constantly exalt?
Most
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the cntiques I have recited are pointing beyond struc–
turalism, beckoning us with terminologies of play, pleasure, sexuality,
process, force, violence, and so forth. But we should take care not to
replace one form of intimidation by another, or by several. A termi–
nology tends to be coercive, because it pretends to be universal while
it is partial through and through. But I am reluctant to leave the
subject before bringing forward two questions which seem to me
especially close to our concerns. I find the first in Harold Bloom, a
critic whose work bears even more than it overbears. In
Kabbalah and
Criticism
Bloom refers briefly to structuralists who constantly write
about "language" and "structure," and he maintains that both words
are almost wholly figurative. And then he has this beautiful and
movmg passage:
To say that the thinking subject is a fiction, and that the manipula–
tion of language by that subject merely extends a fiction, is no more
enlightening in itself than it would be
to
say that "language" is the
thinking subject, and the human psyche the object of discourse.
Language is hardly in itself a privileged kind of explanation, and
linguistic models are useful only for linguistic problems. The
obsession with "language" is one of the clearest instances of a
defensive trope in modern literary discourse, from Nietzsche
to
the
present moment.
It
is a latecomer's defense, since it seeks to make of
"language" a perpetual earliness, or a freshness, rather than a
medium always aged by the shadows of anteriority. Shelley thought
that language was the remnant of abandoned fragmented cyclic
poems, and Emerson saw language as fossil poetry. Is this less
persuasive than currently modish views that literature is merely a
special form of language?
I take the second question from Paul Ricoeur. It is well known that
Ricoeur has dealt gently with the fundamental tenets of structuralism,
but he is dissatisfied with them for several reasons. First: structuralism
excludes from its consideration the act of speaking, either as individ–
ual performance or as producing new utterances. Second: it excludes
history, not merely in the diachronic sense, that is, the passage from
one system to another, "but rather the generation ... of the work of
