BOOKS
UNCOMMON READERS
AND COMMON SENSE
THE PLEASURES OF READING IN AN IDEOLOGICAL AGE.
By Robert Alter. Simon and Schuster. $18.95.
THE ETHICS OF READING. By
J.
Hillis Miller.
Columbia University Press. $24.00.
One of the paradoxes of modern thought lies in the fact that de–
construction, a most complicated and abstruse theory, should have led to the
celebration of the "common reader." The so-called common reader has gen–
erally been the child of the left, more particularly the populist and social real–
ist left. But in this respect, as in others, deconstruction has revealed itself to
be a radical theory. There have been a number of refutations of
deconstructionist claims, especially about the nature of reading, most of them
by nonacademic critics, but somehow the idea of the common reader has
persisted. Maybe the notion of a common reader is too deeply embedded in
our culture, particularly in America, with its populist and egalitarian myths.
Two books have come out recently,
The Pleasures of Reading in an
Ideological Age
by Robert Alter and
The Ethics of Reading
by
J.
Hillis
Miller, on opposite sides of the controversy over deconstruction, whose
very titles suggest their preoccupations. Alter's book is excellently ar–
gued, I think, while Miller's leaves too many questions up in the air,
though my own biases entered into my reading of the two books.
Alter's main argument against the deconstructionists' idea of radical in–
determinacy is reasonable and thorough. There is, ofcourse, no one authori–
tative reading of a literary text, as the deconstructioni ts claim (fulsely) is the
position of traditional criticism. On the contrary, Alter makes the telling point
that interpretation has its limits, but that some interpretations are more con–
vincing than others, and that some are clearly unacceptable. Alter backs his
views with brilliant readings of a number ofworks, and comes to the sensible
conclusion that the truth lies between single interpretations and infinite ones.
In the course of his polemic Alter examines the view held by many
deconstructionists that characters in fiction are inventions more than they are
portraits drawn from "life" or "reality," and concludes that readers, on the
other hand, respond to their living more than their invented character. Alter
also discusses the nature of style, structure, form,
in
fiction and poetry, with
great ease and erudition. But his main contention is that reading is or should
be a pleasure, "high fun," as he calls it, which is something the literary theo-
