The Pursuit of Signs

Jonathan Culler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134522583
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

To gain a deeper understanding of the literary movement that has dominated recent Anglo-American literary criticism, The Pursuit of Signs is a must. In a world increasingly mediated, it offers insights into our ways of consuming texts that are both brilliant and bold. Dancing through semiotics, reader-response criticism, the value of the apostrophe and much more, Jonathan Culler opens up for every reader the closed world of literary criticism. Its impact on first publication, in 1981, was immense; now, as Mieke Bal notes, 'the book has the same urgency and acuity that it had then', though today it has even wider implications: 'with the interdisciplinary turn taking hold, literary theory itself, through this book, becomes a much more widespread tool for cultural analysis'.

Part I

1

BEYOND INTERPRETATION

In the years since World War II, the New Criticism has been challenged, even vilified, but it has seldom been effectively ignored. The inability if not reluctance of its opponents simply to evade its legacy testifies to the dominant position it has come to occupy in American and British universities. Despite the many attacks on it, despite the lack of an organized and systematic defense, it seems not unfair to speak of the hegemony of New Criticism in this period and of the determining influence it has exercised on our ways of writing about and teaching literature. Whatever critical affiliations we may proclaim, we are all New Critics, in that it requires a strenuous effort to escape notions of the autonomy of the literary work, the importance of demonstrating its unity, and the requirement of ‘close reading.’

In many ways the influence of the New Criticism has been beneficent, especially on the teaching of literature. Those old enough to have experienced the transition, its emergence from an earlier mode of literary study, speak of the sense of release, the new excitement breathed into literary education by the assumption that even the meanest student who lacked the scholarly information of his betters could make valid comments on the language and structure of the text. No longer was discussion and evaluation of a work something which had to wait upon acquisition of a respectable store of literary, historical, and biographical information. No longer was the right to comment something earned by months in a library. Even the beginning student of literature was now confronted with poems, asked to read them closely, and required to discuss and evaluate their use of language and thematic organization. To make the experience of the text itself central to literary education and to relegate the accumulation of information about the text to an ancillary status was a move which gave the study of literature a new focus and justification, as well as promoting a more precise and relevant understanding of literary works.

But what is good for literary education is not necessarily good for the study of literature in general, and those very aspects of the New Criticism which ensured its success in schools and universities determined its eventual limitations as a program for literary criticism. Commitment to the autonomy of the literary text, a fundamental article of faith with positive consequences for the teaching of literature, led to a commitment to interpretation as the proper activity of criticism. If the work is an autonomous whole, then it can and should be studied in and for itself, without reference to possible external contexts, whether biographical, historical, psychoanalytic, or sociological. Distinguishing what was external from what was internal, rejecting historical and causal explanation in favor of internal analysis, the New Criticism left readers and critics with only one recourse. They must interpret the poem; they must show how its various parts contribute to a thematic unity, for this thematic unity justifies the work's status as autonomous artifact. When a poem is read in and for itself critics must fall back upon the one constant of their situation: there is a poem being read by a human being. Whatever is external to the poem, the fact that it addresses a human being means that what it says about human life is internal to it. The critic's task is to show how the interaction of the poem's parts produces a complex and ontologically privileged statement about human experience.

Though they may occasionally attempt to disguise the fact, the basic concepts of the New Critics and their followers derive from this thematic and interpretive orientation. The poem is not simply a series of sentences; it is spoken by a persona, who expresses an attitude to be defined, speaking in a particular tone which puts the attitude in one of various possible modes or degrees of commitment. Since the poem is an autonomous whole its value must lie within it, in richness of attitude, in complexity of judgment, in delicate balance of values.

Hence one finds in poems ambivalence, ambiguity, tension, irony, paradox. These are all thematic operators which permit one to translate formal features of the language into meanings so that the poem may be unified as a complex thematic structure expressing an attitude towards the world. And in place of a theory of reading which would specify how order was to be achieved, the New Criticism deployed a common humanism or, as R. S. Crane calls it, a ‘set of reduction terms’ toward which analysis of ambivalence, tension, irony, and paradox was to move: ‘life and death, good and evil, love and hate, harmony and strife, order and disorder, eternity and time, reality and appearance, truth and falsity … emotion and reason, simplicity and complexity, nature and art.’¹ A repertoire of contrasting attitudes and values relevant to the human situation served as a target language in the process of thematic translation. To analyze a poem was to show how all its parts contributed to a complex statement about human problems.

In short, it would be possible to demonstrate that, given its premises, the New Criticism was necessarily an interpretive criticism. But in fact this is scarcely necessary since the most important and insidious legacy of the New Criticism is the wide-spread and unquestioning acceptance of the notion that the critic's job is to interpret literary works. Fulfillment of the interpretive task has come to be the touchstone by which other kinds of critical writing are judged, and reviewers inevitably ask of any work of literary theory, linguistic analysis, or historical scholarship, whether it actually assists us in our understanding of particular works. In this critical climate it is therefore important, if only as a means of loosening the grip which interpretation has on critical consciousness, to take up a tendentious position and to maintain that, while the experience of literature may be an experience of interpreting works, in fact the interpretation of individual works is only tangentially related to the understanding of literature. To engage in the study of literature is not to produce yet another interpretation of King Lear but to advance one's understanding of the conventions and operations of an institution, a mode of discourse.

There are many tasks that confront criticism, many things we need to advance our understanding of literature, but one thing we do not need is more interpretations of literary works. It is not at all difficult to list in a general way critical projects which would be of compelling interest if carried through to some measure of completion; and such a list is in itself the best illustration of the potential fecundity of other ways of writing about literature. We have no convincing account of the role or function of literature in society or social consciousness. We have only fragmentary or anecdotal histories of literature as an institution: we need a fuller exploration of its historical relation to the other forms of discourse through which the world is organized and human activities are given meaning. We need a more sophisticated and apposite account of the role of literature in the psychological economies of both writers and readers; and in particular we ought to understand much more than we do about the effects of fictional discourse. As Frank Kermode emphasized in his seminal work, The Sense of an Ending, criticism has made almost no progress toward a comprehensive theory of fictions, and we still operate with rudimentary notions of ‘dramatic illusion’ and ‘identification’ whose crudity proclaims their unacceptability. What is the status and what is the role of fictions, or, to pose the same kind of problem in another way, what are the relations (the historical, the psychic, the social relationships) between the real and the fictive? What are the ways of moving between life and art? What operations or figures articulate this movement? Have we in fact progressed beyond Freud's simple distinction between the figures of condensation and displacement? Finally, or perhaps in sum, we need a typology of discourse and a theory of the relations (both mimetic and nonmimetic) between literature and the other modes of discourse which make up the text of intersubjective experience.

The fact that we are so far from possessing these things in what is, after all, an age of criticism—an age where unparalleled industry and intelligence have been invested in writing about literature—is in part due to the preeminent role accorded to interpretation. Indeed, one of the best ways of talking about the failures of contemporary criticism is to look at the fate which has befallen three very intelligent and promising attempts to break away from the legacy of the New Criticism. In each case the failure to combat the notion of interpretation itself, or rather the conscious or unconscious persistence of the notion that a critical approach must justify itself by its interpretive results, has emasculated a highly promising mode of investigation.

My first case, in many ways the most significant, is that of Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism. Frye's polemical introduction is, of course, a powerful indictment of contemporary criticism and an argument for a systematic poetics: criticism is in a state of ‘naïve induction,’ trying to study individual works of literature without a proper conceptual framework. It must recognize that literature is not a simple aggregate of discrete works but a conceptual space which can be coherently organized; and it must, if it is to become a discipline, make a ‘leap to a new ground from which it can discover what the organizing or containing forms of its conceptual framework are.’² Working on this new ground involves assuming the possibility of ‘a coherent and comprehensive theory of literature, logically and scientifically organized, some of which the student unconsciously learns as he goes on, but the main principles of which are as yet unknown to us.’³

This is certainly a direct attack on the atomism of the New Criticism and the assumption that one should approach each individual work with as few preconceptions as possible in order to experience directly the words on the page, but Frye does not realize the importance of attacking interpretation itself. He hovers on the edge of the problem, characterizing as ‘one of the many slovenly illiteracies that the absence of systematic criticism has allowed to grow up’ the notion that ‘the critic should confine himself to “getting out” of a poem exactly what the poet may vaguely be assumed to have been aware of “putting in”’; but the function of this argument in his overall enterprise is anything but clear. It is wrongly assumed, he continues, that the critic needs no conceptual framework and that his job is simply ‘to take a poem into which a poet has diligently stuffed a specific number of beauties or effects, and complacently to extract them one by one, like his prototype Little Jack Horner.’⁴

One might take this sentence as a general attack on interpretation, especially interpretation of a complacent and fundamentally tautological kind, but in fact, as the earlier sentence makes clear, Frye's real target is interpretation of an intentionalist kind. Joining the New Critics in rejecting criticism which is guilty of the intentional fallacy, Frye has picked the wrong enemy and opened the door to a trivialization of his enterprise. The systematic poetics for which he calls and to which he makes a substantial contribution can thus be seen as a prelude to interpretation. Approaching the text with a conceptual framework—the theories of Modes, Symbols, Myths, and Genres as outlined in the Anatomy—the critic can interpret the work not by pulling out what the poet was aware of putting in but by extracting the elements of the various modes, genres, symbols, and myths which may have been put in without the author's explicit knowledge. In this case, interpretation would still be the test of a critical method, and the value of Frye's approach would be that it enabled one to perceive meanings which hitherto had been obscure.

Certainly this is not the justification Frye would wish to give his project. His repeated assertions that criticism must seek a comprehensive view of what it is doing, that it must try to attain an understanding of the fundamental principles which make it a discipline and mode of knowledge, show that he has other goals in mind. But his failure to question interpretation as a goal creates a fundamental ambiguity about the status of his categories and schemas. In identifying Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter as the four mythic categories, what exactly is Frye claiming? He might be suggesting that these categories form a general conceptual map which we have assimilated through our experience of literature and which lead us to interpret literature as we do. In other words, he might be claiming that in order to account for the meanings and effects of literary works one must bring to light these fundamental distinctions which are constantly at work in our reading of literature. Alternatively, he might be claiming that he has discovered categories of experience basic to the human psyche and that in order to discover the true or deepest meaning of literary works we must apply to them these categories, as hermeneutic devices.

Though the difference between these alternatives may seem slight, it is in fact crucial to the project of a poetics. In the second case one is claiming to have discovered distinctions which serve as a method of interpretation: which enable one to produce new and better readings of literary works. In the first case one is not offering a method of interpretation but is claiming to explain why we interpret literary works as we do. In the context of the polemical introduction and the suggestion that we should try to make explicit the implicit theory of literature which students unconsciously acquire in their literary education, the first interpretation would certainly be preferable; but in terms of the traditional tasks and preoccupations of criticism, which Frye has not thought to reject, the second interpretation is more likely to prevail.

In fact, this is exactly what has happened. Though it began as a plea for a systematic poetics, Frye's work has done less to promote work in poetics than to stimulate a mode of interpretation which has come to be known as ‘myth-criticism’ or archetypal criticism. The assumption that the critic's task is to interpret individual works remains unchanged, only now, on the theory that the deepest meanings of a work are to be sought in the archetypal symbols or patterns which it deploys, Frye's categories are used as a set of labeling devices. Frye failed to recognize that the enemy of poetics is not just atomism but the interpretive project to which atomism ministers, and this led not only to deflection of systematic energy but to the promotion of a rather anodyne mode of interpretation.

The second example of a potentially powerful theoretical mode that had adopted the project of interpreting works is psychoanalytic criticism. In the 1960s the best works of psychoanalytic criticism avoided the questions concerning the status and effects of fiction which might have been elucidated by a psychoanalytic approach and concentrated on interpretation, as if they could only prove themselves by demonstrating their interpretive prowess. In The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne's Psychological Themes Frederick Crews demonstrates the appropriateness of a psychoanalytic method for making sense of many powerful and puzzling elements in Hawthorne's work. Oddities of plot, character, and fantasy become more interesting and their force more intelligible when they are analyzed as representations of the consequences of unresolved Oedipal conflicts: the works ‘rest on fantasy, but on the shared fantasy of mankind, and this makes for a more interesting fiction than would any illusionistic slice of life.’⁵

The Sins of the Fathers is admirable, except in its implication that the goal of the psychoanalytic critic is to identify and interpret what the subtitle calls ‘psychological themes.’ If critics devote themselves to identifying in literary works the forces and elements described by psychoanalytic theory, if they make psychoanalysis a source of themes, they restrict the impact of potentially valuable theoretical developments, such as the insights that have emerged from recent French rereadings of Freud. This body of work provides, among other things, an account of processes of textual transference by which critics find themselves uncannily repeating a displaced version of the narrative they are supposed to be comprehending —just as the psychoanalyst, through the process of transference and counter-transference, finds himself caught up in the reenactment of the analysand's drama.⁶ Contemporary psychoanalytic theory might have much to teach us about the logic of our interaction with texts but it is impoverished when it is treated as a repository of themes—themes to be identified when interpreting literary works. Leo Bersani's perceptive and original Baudelaire and Freud slides into this perspective in treating Les Fleurs du Mal as a drama of the struggle between what Lacan calls the Symbolic and the Imaginary.⁷ In Lacan these are two modes of representation. Interpretive criticism makes them two psychic conditions, one good and the other bad, and translates events of the narrative into a struggle between them, thus producing something like an updated version of the hunt for Oedipus complexes and phallic symbols.

My third case is the ‘Affective Stylistics’ of Stanley Fish, which begins with a determined attempt to break away from the assumptions and procedures of the New Criticism but which, again, fails to identify interpretation as the real enemy and so compromises the theoretical insights on which it is based. Wimsatt and Beardsley had argued that one must not confuse the poem and its effects (‘what it is and what it does’), lest ‘the poem itself, as an object of specifically critical judgment … disappear.’⁸ This is pr...