THE STATE OF CRITICISM
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am aware of having entered the proverbial lion's den. Hence I am
approaching the subject from a sociological perspective, which means
that I will stress structuralism's principles more than its literary
application, and its relation to French culture and politics. I too was
fascinated with the structuralist promise when I first read lkvi–
Strauss-fascinated enough to spend the last couple of years examining
its assumptions, techniques, achievements, and meanings, in history,
psychoanalysis, Marxism,
and
literature. Thus I found not only that its
cross-disciplinary claims were justified, but that structuralism pro–
duced similar reactions and adaptations in a variety of disciplines. As
we all know, structural linguistics, in France, provided a system and a
method for Parisian intellectuals, replacing Sartrean existentialism.
In
America, of course, intellectual currents always tend to become more
academicized, so structuralism did not immediately catch on. Given its
complexities, and its difficulties, structuralism can be of interest only
to academics with wide-ranging interests, and can be taught only in the
better universities-whatever discipline it invades. Now that it pro–
mises to become an industry, as William Phillips also has argued,
sociologists have suggested, recently, that its linguistic qualities may
be used even to bridge the gap between Marxist, phenomenological,
functionalist, and other breeds of sociologists. (In my opinion, this
suggestion speaks not so much for the viability of structuralism, as for
our knack of recognizing a new academic opportunity.)
But I want to return to its place in literary criticism or to its
application
to
literature for its own ends-ends which have been
changing as each structuralism evolved and rejected some of the former
premises. For all the so-called structuralists, such as Levi-Strauss,
Althusser, Foucault, Lacan, and Barthes, in very different fashion, have
put literature to the service of their own structuralisms. And that is the
main reason why both William Phillips and Denis Donoghue have
found that structuralists beg the larger, nonlinguistic questions literary
critics tend to be concerned with. I would add that the very job of
systematizing all the conscious and unconscious connections between
the writer and the reader, connections that are made at each reading,
etc., puts the emphasis on the system, losing what have been considered
the literary qualities of, for instance,
Sarrasine
or
The Purloined
Letter.
It
may not be accidental that Denis Donoghue found structuralist
literary critics are, for the most part, philosophers, philosophical
historians, and linguists: these are the people equipped to deal with
macro-questions, and technical ones, in at least a quasi-systematic way.
