STATE OF CRITICISM
13
envied the broader horizons and grander ambitions of European
criticism. Writers like Auerbach, Spitzer, Lukacs, Poulet, and Bache–
lard were expected to become guides in the struggle of American critics
to pass beyond formalism, but they were far too idiosyncratic to offer
any ready new method, and they made fools of less learned and nimble
men who tried to imitate them too directly.
It
was only the arrival of
structuralism in the late -ixties and seventies that seemed to provide a
way out of the formalist impasse with new critical techniques.· For all
their formidable difficulty the work of Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Lacan,
Barthes, and Derrida collectively breached the resistance to theory
endemic among English and American critics. Sympathetic expositors
grew up at key American universities, who themselves began to provide
a body of theory which rivaled the work of the Europeans in its
daunting complexity and its elusiveness of style.
Marxism, Freudianism, structural linguistics, deconstruc–
tionism-American critics have thrown themselves into difficult and
often contradictory conceptual systems with a reckless zeal as strong as
their previous resistance. Yet the critical utopia that once seemed
promised by these theoretical breakthroughs has yet to materialize.
Americans have learned to handle big European ideas, but they have
yet to translate them into effective critical practices. The test of a critic
comes not in his ideas about art, and certainly not in his ideas about
criticism, but in the depth and intimacy of his encounter with the work
itself-not the work in isolation, but the work in its abundance of
reference, richness of texture, complexity of thought and feeling.
If
the
New Critics inhibited themselves by objectifying the text and putting it
under glass, the deconstructi ve critics display their ingenuity by
evaporating the text into an infinite variety of readings and misread–
ings. We grant that no two readers read the same book. But by scanting
the degree to which their readings may overlap, the deconstructive
critics undermine the communal basis of practical criticism, which is
grounded in the possibility of common perception and mutual assent.
The provisional (rather than definitive) character of any reading does
not therefore condemn us to an anarchy of subjective isolation. Cut off
from a text that he can manipulate at will, isolated from an audience
whose agreement he deliberately eschews, the deconstructive critic
creates an almost impenetrable barrier-his style-which repels the
·In this paper the term "structuralism" is used broadly to refer to both structuralist
criticism and certajn key post-structuralist developme11ls. The term "deconstruction ism"
refers here exclusively to this later phase.
