STEVEN MARCUS
81
Critics and the structuralists work with methods that do not "provide
the means for judging how good or bad a poem" is or was, and he
raises questions about any literary critical "method that does not
contain within itself the mechanism for making literary judgments."
The problem of judgment, of normative substances, and of normative
references is, ,in my view, central to any large discussion of the nature
and fate of literary criticism. And here I have to differ with William
, Phillips, for I do not think that it can figure centrally
on the level of
method.
It seems
to
me that there is an impassable disjunction between
analytic method on the one hand and qualities of judgment on the
other. To this Kantian distinction (which I find myself to my own
surprise putting forth) I would add the idea of Coders proof as an apt
or negative metaphor. Coders proof in mathematical logic holds that
the various branches of mathematics are founded upon propositions or
axioms that are not within the systems themselves, or founded upon
them or immanent with them. Coders proof is directed against the
intellectual tyranny of the idea that the systems of mathematics are self–
enclosed and self-supporting autonomous languages, and that all of
them can be reduced
to
a series of numerical procedures.
It
is not
directed against the ideas of proofs or determinations in themselves-it
does not substitute a pluralism so broad as to be powerless if not
anarchic for a monolithic single system.
It
is, as I have remarked, a
metaphor, but it is, I believe, a pertinent one for some of the considera–
tions we have to confront.
In point of fact, William Phillips seems
to
contradict himself on
this matter, for having made his statement about methods containing a
means or mechanism for making judgments, he then indicates that
judgments cannot be based upon formal considerations. I believe
this to be the case. Judgments in literature do involve one's entire
experience, they refer from the experience of life
to
the experiences of a
text and back and forth. They are deeply personal without being
entirely subjective. They are deeply personal in the sense that in fixing
a critical judgment and bringing it forward one is putting one's own
most full and highly wrought experience up for the judgment of
others. And to avoid the work of judgment is to avoid the risk-taking
that putting oneself up for the judgment of others inescapably entails.
(In this sense do I understand William Phillips's ambivalent remarks
about Marcuse-but I do not have time to elaborate upon this.)
The questions of judgment entail as well questions of meaning.
When Phillips quotes Roland Barthes as asserting that "the object of
structuralism is not man endowed with meanings, but man fabricating
