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comprehensiveness. I have implied that persons are commonly taken to
begin and end as socially constructed beings - a trivial prejudice, it seems
to me. If we are in every respect socially constructed, so much the worse
for us. Isabel Archer would now be regarded as naive in her pretention to
autonomy. And Madame Merle would be told by social scientists that she
is indeed compounded of her envelope of circumstances but that she has
exaggerated the extent to which she has chosen the envelope or added to
its contents. She is a consumer, she would be told, and what she con–
sumes she has been persuaded or coerced to consume. These are all social
considerations. No religious, theological, or metaphysical issue is deemed
to arise. Even in contemporary fiction, it is difficult to think of a character
who is presented as having, in any profound or declarative sense, a relig–
ious conviction. The tradition of the Catholic novel, in which a
character's religious belief and practice are deemed to matter, has evi–
dently lost hold of general readers. It is almost a gesture of nostalgia to
refer to the fiction of Georges Bernanos,
Fran~ois
Mauriac, Graham
Greene,
J.
F. Powers, and Andre Dubus, and to consider how special, in
an apparently limiting sense, their values are now taken to be. I don't
think Jewish fiction is in a better religious condition.
It
is difficult to discuss these questions, mainly because we are in a pe–
culiarly reductive phase of civic discourse. Many people are evidently
intent on reducing mysterious capacities and forces to simple routines.
And when their opponents try to speak up for the mysteries, they are re–
buked as self-deluded, driving discourse beyond the reach of syntax.
Those of us who teach in colleges and universities know that the reduc–
tion of "the destiny of man" to political tenns has made its sinister way
into the practice of reading and interpretation. It is almost impossible to
ask our graduate students to consider what Eliot meant by saying that if
you read literature, it is as literature that you must read it and not as
something else. I am sure he meant that literature is no more reducible to
politics than it is reducible to religion. But our students have been taught
to believe that a reading of a novel has one aim, to diagnose the author's
stance on issues of race, sex, and gender. The fact that the novel, even
after the diagnosis, remains to be read as a work of art is evidently incom–
prehensible to them. That it was written by someone and that without
the writer's lonely writing it would not exist is not supposed to count.
Why did Foucault insist on referring not to authors but to "the author
function," as if
Oedipus Rex
and
King Lear
could have been written by an
author-function? Why has it become commonplace to talk not of souls
but of selves and to reduce selves to grammatical subjects and social con–
structions? (Weare admonished to speak of "productive codes," never of
genius; as if a productive code operative at the end of the eighteenth
