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tion of myths of interiority. The trouble with Anglo-American forma–
lism-that of the New Criticism-may have been, as Geoffrey Hartman
once complained, that it was never formalist enough.
It
lacked the
semiotic models that it needed to go beyond brilliant instances of
interpretation, to the poetics it was often striving to formulate , and
which might have closely resembled the "functionalist" view of
structuralism-which was indeed adumbrated prior to New Criticism
by the Russian Formalists. Most valuable in the structuralist hygiene–
and again, I take semiotics to be the relevant branch of structuralism
when we are talking about literary criticism-may have been a general
foregrounding of the concept and the elements of semiosis, the produc–
tion of meaning in signs. There is a valuable ascesis in the semioti–
cian's insistence upon denaturalizing signs: it is his standard operating
procedure to take artifacts that appear natural and to analyze them in
terms of the cultural codes of which they are part, or to which they
refer. I find here a healthy attitude of suspicion; a refusal to be duped
by appearances of motivation and natural analogy, by metaphors of
organic form, and by the tendency of culture surreptitiously to "natu–
ralize" its messages. Barthes's
Mythologies
were an early and still
persuasive example of the uses of such a semiotic suspicion directed at
the everyday messages of the contemporary landscape.
It
is as part of
that paradigmatic move from entity to function that we have learned
increasingly in our century (and here structuralism is merely conso–
nant with much that preceded it) to see human art and behavior as
coded, indeed
to
see "the human" as in part defined by code–
production.
To call structuralism hygienic is of course
to
suggest that one
needs to recognize the limits of its pertinence, and to acknowledge that
there are valid acts of criticism outside these limits. But this does not
mean that the questions raised by structuralism can validly be met by
"indifference," an attitude which Denis Donoghue seems at one point
to endorse, and which has been distressingly prevalent in some
branches of the literary-critical establishment.
If
the work of structural–
ism should not limit our attention to one set of questions , or one set of
procedures, it may nonetheless be allowed to show up some questions
and some procedures as semiotically naive or even invalid. To put it in
another way, we can at least ask of our students, and of responsible
participants in cultural dialogue, that they have read Saussure and
Jakobson along with their other master thinkers. It is at least valuable
to be aware-especially, for the student of literature to be aware-that a
number of systems and codes, among which language is preeminent,
