THE STATE OF CRITICISM
187
the idea that any word might be essentially a rhythmic or lexical
convenience signifying nothing at all is fairly unobjectionable. As a
counsel of caution they are even salutary; they restore to literature a
welcome sense of mystery by promising that interpretation is always
incomplete, even that it can scarcely be said to begin. Indeed, it may be
argued that the governing ideas of deconstruction spell the defeat of
any attempt to found a practical criticism upon them. They leave the
critic with nothing at all
to
say about his text that is not immediately
suspect of being a picture of his own intentions. But, in spite of that,
deconstruction, like the other theories of the hour, strikes me as
anything but a counsel of modesty.
It
is, I rather suspect, a positiv–
ism of a new sort, a methodology of the negative, which provides
its adherents with novel and spectacu lar ways of being cocksure of
themselves.
I sense the presence of forces at work within the culture that
produces and consumes critical theories that are far more corrosive
than anything that can be supplied by kibbitzing spectators like myself.
The accelerated rhythm of avant-garde succession is doing far more
to
undermine whatever critical theory is now in the ascendant than all the
broadside attacks that issue periodically from champions of critical
realism, the most celebrated at the moment being Gerald Graff in his
Literature Against Itself.
(Things move so swiftly. In recent years I
have seen the dominant trends in applied psychoanalysis go from
orthodox Freudianism to a modified "object relations" theory to
"subjective reading" to "transactive reading"
to
a breathless syncretism
of French Freud and identity theory in which Freud, Jacques Lacan,
Jacques Derrida, Heinz Lichtenstein and D.W. Winnicott all play
starring roles as advanced theoreticians. You need roller skates to keep
up .) In addition, the difficulty of applying certain theories, as opposed
to celebrating them, is bound to place a limit on their continued
growth. A reading of so recent an example of theory in action as the
collection of essays by the Yale critics (Bloom, Hartman, de Man,
Miller and Derrida),
Deconstruction and Criticism,
might lead one to
conclude that the rousing polemics with which certain revolutionary
ideas promote themselves may be unmatched by anyone's efforts to
lurn them to practical effect. Indeed, a reader of that anthology might
well remark the discrepancy in those essays between the excitement
stirred up by their styles of assertion and the relative banality of their
findings. The unsympathetic reader may be forgiven for suspecting
thal the greater part of the appeal of some critics lies, not in their power
