THE STATE OF CRITICISM
411
and useful than attempts
to
find its "doctrine, " or to conceptualize its
fundamental positions as "the death of the author" or "the abolition of
time."
The attempt to find a structuralist doctrine of literary criticism
meets with frustration at least in part because one finds very few pure
and true examples of the type: some of the work of Barthes and
Greimas in the mid-sixties, and, more consistently, the work of
Todorov, who more than anyone else could make legitimate claim to
being the only "hard" structuralist critic, though I would want to
argue that this is because he continues in so many respects the tradition
of
Rus~i;jn
and Prague formalisms. Much of the criticism that Denis
Donoghue cites-especially Derrida and the Barthes of S /Z and
Pleasure of the Text-usually
bears the label "POStStructuralist," and
with some reason : it takes off from structuralism, and derives much of
its power from its impatience with the closures and limitations which
the "true" structuralist voluntarily accepts, indeed cannot do without.
It
seems clear by now that the refuge, or the Valhalla, of true structural–
ists interested in literature and language must be in semiotics, that is,
in the general theory of signs, including sign-function and sign–
production : work that can provide a disciplined grounding and
framework for literary criticism, but which is not itself literary criti–
cism because it does not, or should not, have a direct applicability to
the interpretation of texts. I would argue, in the manner of Jonathan
Culler, that structuralism in its semiotic branch can provide elements
of a poetics of literature, but should not be construed as itself
hermeneutic-as, unfortunately, it sometimes has been . The linguistic
model, as Culler says, does not constitute a "discovery procedure": it
does not in and of itself produce pertinent readings of texts, but rather a
ground on which to test and discuss the procedures used in various
readings. Linguistics in interpretive criticism generally is less model
than metaphor, a means of access to literature's ways of talking about
its own medium. There is nothing wrong with reading literature
through the optic of its reflection on language; on the contrary, I
would see this as at least a necessary step in any criticism, but one must
not confuse it with a privileged, or "scientific," view of literature. That
way terrorism lies
At the very least, I would argue that structuralism has allowed us
to
work with a more serious understanding of the linguistic medium of
literature, of what is at stake in the functioning of sign-systems, than
was normally the case before its advent.
It
has, if you will, been one
stage in our protracted post-Romantic housecleaning, a finalliquida-
