Page 70 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes moment as "walking into the trap"), my colleague said, "Yes, it's the Norton Anthology of Literature,"
whereupon the trap (set not by the student but by the infinite capacity of language for being
appropriated) was sprung: "No, no," she said, "I mean in this class do we believe in poems and
things, or is it just us?" Now it is possible (and for many tempting) to read this anecdote as an
illustration of the dangers that follow upon listening to people like me who preach the instability
of the text and the unavailability of determinate meanings; but in what follows I will try to read
it as an illustration of how baseless the fear of these dangers finally is.
Of the charges levied against what Meyer Abrams has recently called the New Readers (Jacques
Derrida, Harold Bloom, Stanley Fish) the most persistent is that these apostles of indeterminacy
and undecidability ignore, even as they rely upon, the "norms and possibilities" embedded in
language, the "linguistic meanings" words undeniably have, and thereby invite us to abandon
"our ordinary realm of experience in speaking, hearing, reading and understanding," for a world
in which "no text can mean anything in particular" and where "we can never say just what anyone
means by anything he writes." The charge is that literal or normative meanings are overriden by
the actions of willful interpreters. Suppose we examine this indictment in the context of the
present example. What, exactly, is the normative or literal or linguistic meaning of "Is there a text
in this class?"
Within the framework of contemporary critical debate (as it is reflected in the pages, say, of Critical
Inquiry) there would seem to be only two ways of answering this question: either there is a literal
meaning of the utterance and we should be able to say what it is, or there are as many meanings as
there are readers and no one of them is literal. But the answer suggested by my little story is that the
utterance has two literal meanings: within the circumstances assumed by my colleague (I don't mean
that he took the step of assuming them, but that he was already stepping within them) the utterance
is obviously a question about whether or not here is a required textbook in this particular course; but
within the circumstances to which he was alerted by his student's corrective response, the utterance
is just as obviously a question about the instructor's position (within the range of positions available
in contemporary literary theory) on the status of the text.
Notice that we do not have here a case of indeterminacy or undecidability but a determinacy and
decidability that do not always have the same shape and that can, and in this instance do, change.
My colleague was not hesitating between two (or more) possible meanings of the utterance; rather,
he immediately apprehended what seemed to be an inescapable meaning, given his prestructured
understanding of the situation, and then he immediately apprehended another inescapable meaning
when that understanding was altered. Neither meaning was imposed (a favorite word in the anti-
new- reader polemics) on a more normal one by a private, idiosyncratic interpretive act; both
interpretations were a function of precisely the public and constituting norms (of language and
understanding) invoked by Abrams. It is just that these norms are not embedded in the language
(where they may be read out by anyone with sufficiently clear, that is, unbiased, eyes) but inhere in
all institutional structure within which one hears utterances as already organized with reference to
certain assumed purposes and goals. Because both my colleague and his student are situated in that
institution, their interpretive activities are not free, but what constrains them are the understood
practices and assumptions of the institution and not the rules and fixed meanings of a language
system.
Another way to put this would be to say that neither reading of the question-which we might for
convenience sake label as "Is there a text in this class?" and "Is there a text in this class?"-would be
immediately available to any native speaker of the language. "Is there a text in this class?" is
interpretable or readable only by someone who already knows what is included under the general
rubric "first day of class" what concerns animate students, what bureaucratic matters must be
attended to before instruction begins) and who therefore hears the utterances under the aegis of
that knowledge, which is not applied after the fact but is responsible for the shape the fact
immediately has. To someone whose consciousness is not already informed by that knowledge, "is
there a text in this class?", would be just as unavailable as "is there a text in this class?" would be
to someone who was not already aware of he disputed issues in contemporary literary theory.
I am not saying that for some readers or hearers the question would be wholly unintelligible

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