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PARTISAN REVIEW
When meaning does occur in literature, more often than not it is
meaning pitted against meaning, new meaning moving away from old
meamng.
I intend nothing terribly profound with the preceding observations.
I am simply summarizing a few of the most basic qualities of literary ex–
perience. Yet, as astonishing as it may sound, one can read cover to
cover in
The Johns Hopkins GHide
and find no acknowledgment of these
obvious realities. (Off the top of my head, I can't remember a single
reference in the entire volume to voice, tone, sensory effects, sound
effects, emotions, the eccentricity of style, the uniqueness of authorial
performances, the obliquities of syntax, or the time it takes
to
write or
to
read a book.) The overwhelming majority of the twentieth-century
critics featured in the entries, as well as the critics writing them, treat lit–
erature (and the act of explicating it) as if a text could simply be trans–
lated into a series of historical or ideological generalizations - but fail to
realize that, in that translation, almost everything that makes it literature
is lost.
One of the critical positions that figures prominently in
The Johl1s
Hopkins Guide,
the Derridean deconstructive stance, is an apparent
exception to these comments, since Derrida and his followers obviously
have a more complex view of language than most ideological critics do.
Deconstructionists understand that language is less like a piece of glass
through which underpinning historical, philosophical, or political
structures can be viewed, than a colored lens that inevitably distorts and
filters the little it allows us to see. But what links all of these critics
together is that they all practice what Paul Ricoeur called the
hermeneutics of suspicion. As different as they may be in other respects,
the Marxists and the Derrideans, the feminists and the formalists, the new
historians and the structuralists are all engaged in a fundamentally
debunking project. They want to unmask the text, to demystifY, to
demythologize it. (With a utopianism touchingly American in its naivete,
many of them hope to break mankind free of literature's spells and
seductions by revealing language's deceits.) They are skeptics, and their
skepticism commits them to a strategy of unremitting textual resistance.
They hold themselves outside of the text and fight its emotional
blandishments. They resist its intellectual designs by executing their own
counterdesigns upon it. They master it to prevent being mastered by it.
Ricoeur also had a name for the alternative position. He called it
the hermeneutics of faith, taking his metaphor from the great tradition
of biblical study and exegesis .
In
this tradition, rather than holding
himself outside of the text and resisting its language by imposing his
language upon it, the critic allows the text its own unique and alien way
