THE STATE OF CRITICISM
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fied by poems, as a matter of convenient reference, but
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be found in
other forms of "symbolic action," to use Kenneth Burke's phrase.
Note that the units become larger as we move from sign to sentence to
poem; a good omen, this, for the scale of critical activity and the
freedom we should encourage in its practice.
Peter Brooks
British and American critics addressing themselves
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the
definition and evaluation of structuralism often have tended to moral–
ize the issue. They have wanted
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find a " structuralist philosophy" -a
metaphysics and particularly an ethics-and consequently have tended
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extract from structura list work certain implied tenets of belief,
metaphors of ontological and ethica l choices, which can be formulated
as a view of man and the world and hence mastered by a criticism
which is itself traditionally and deeply committed
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moral premises.
While Denis Donoghue is usually accurate and indeed acute in his
descriptions of structuralism, and I often find myself in agreement with
him, he too tends to want to discover a structuralist "doctrine" and to
motivate structuralist positions and procedures in an ethical context.
When, for instance, he says that structuralist critics "resent the privi–
lege which fiction has often accorded ... to a character," the word
"resent" suggests a bundle of desires and fears which in my view has
little to do with the
logic
of the critique of the concept of character as it
develops in the functionalist view of narrative elaborated from Propp
through Barthes. In another instance, to say that structuralism is
" hostile to the understanding" of narrative "in terms of time, sequence,
consequence" is, again, to make an ethical and psychological meta–
phor from a certain operatory principle of structural analysis (the
analytic priority of the synchronic to the diachronic), then to draw
from it general implications, which in this case happen to be inaccu–
rate: if time is a concept with which structuralism will not and cannot
deal, sequence and consequence have been much discussed in struc–
turalist work on narrative, including that of Barthes. Denis Dono–
ghue 'S doctrinal extrapolations might, I'm aware, claim a certain
justification in the fact that many critics flying various structuralist
banners have themselves been wildly metaphorical in their usage, for
instance of the Saussurian model of the sign: to call the relation of
