THE STATE OF CRITICISM
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exist before the individual subject comes to find his place in them. He
can use these codes, play with them: they are part of him. But he is also
part of them, and the space of his play is in some measure subject to
their rules.
I find a number of confusions in Denis Donoghue's discussion of
the concept of play, a term which promotes maximum ambiguity in
any case. To the extent that it refers to the limited free play of a system
(as we talk of "free play" in a mechanism), it belongs to structural
analysis; but it has been more often used to unlock and subvert the
systematic, to de-center structure and make all structuration provi–
sional, to open a limitless game of language. I agree with Denis
Donoghue that the appeal to play may ultimately trivialize, though we
could of course appeal to Freud, to Erikson, and to literature itself
to
establish a serious function for play. I am more interested, however, in
the notion of force, that energy which "provokes form and haunts
system," from which, according to Derrida, criticism feels itself separ–
ated.
If
criticism in the wake of structuralism has found itself haunted
anew by Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, it is because it has felt itself once
again in need of dynamic models (of history, politics, language, mind),
models which would not only put history into gear again, but also
suggest the transformatory function of human fictions, and their
peculiar intimacy with human temporality. There has been a renewal
of attention to the place of fiction-making as an institution and an
activity, to the dynamics of texts as they are realized in time, to the
psychic and social definitions of readership.
That it should be the role and the concept of the reader that has
survived, and reemerged from, various structural analyses and decon–
structions, seems
to
me significant and right: it is only the reader who
can activate codes and restore the intention of the force that haunts
texts. This reader is of course not so much a person-that would lead to
a discredited psychologistic criticism-as himself a text, a tissue of
codes, a product of the
dejrl-lu.
But he is also, to use Mallarme's term,
the "operator" of texts. More than the reader, it is reading that matters.
We know precious little about what reading is, but we can probably
agree that beyond decoding it brings into play both memory and desire,
and that these must then inhabit the text-as-read. Increasingly, I think
(and Ricoeur's hermeneutics offers only one possible conceptualization
of the situation), it is that transaction between text and reader that
occupies us, and we may find ourselves turning increasingly to the
model of dialogue as most pertinent to the experience of reading-a
move one finds in such diverse examples as Jiirgen Habermas, Gerard
