The Fourth Dimension of a Poem

by M H Abrams

  In a parallel way, traditional readers find the theory world of all-out poststructural critics to be a blatant mismatch to the world in which we live, write, and read works of literature, and also to the world we find represented in the works we read. For in reading literature, we, like the myriads of recorded readers before us, commonly discover characters who, although fictive, are recognizably like ourselves, in whose perceptions, responses, and fortunes we find ourselves involved, sometimes passionately, sometimes more distantly, in accordance with how these have been rendered by an author.45 When Keats, for example, “on sitting down to read King Lear once again,” tells us that he must “burn through” the “dispute / Betwixt damnation and impassion’d clay,” we know from experience what it is to read Shakespeare’s drama of human tragedy in this intensely responsive way. And when Byron, on looking into his comic poem Don Juan, cries elatedly to his friend Douglas Kinnaird, “Confess—confess, you dog, and be candid. . . . It may be profligate, but is it not life, is it not the thing?”46 we recognize what it is for a represented literary world to seem no less actual and vital than the life we live. On the other hand, when Roland Barthes asserts that “what goes on in a narrative is, from the referential (real) point of view, strictly nothing,” but “what does ‘happen’ is language per se, the adventure of language,” it is grossly inapposite to the common reader’s engagement with the experiences of the purposive, fallible, perplexed, and feelingful persons that a literary narrative—“stubbornly referential” as Clara Claiborne Park has said47—often compels.

  In a recent interview Derrida remarked that, although interested by “fictionality,” “I must confess that deep down I have probably never drawn great enjoyment from fiction, from reading novels for example, beyond the pleasure taken in analyzing the play of writing, or else certain naïve movements of identification. . . . Telling or inventing stories is something that deep down (or rather on the surface!) does not interest me particularly.”48 As an autobiographical fact, fair enough; but in critical commentaries on literature, to deal with a text solely as a “play of writing,” exclusive of the “story”—exclusive, that is, of the characters, actions, thoughts, and feelings, in the distinctive way these matters are signified and rendered in the particular instance—is to strip the text of its human dimension and its potent source of human interest and involvement. It is interesting to speculate what Chaucer, or Molière, or Tolstoy might have said, if confronted by the recommendation of some writers who have translated Derrida’s deconstructive theory into an applied criticism, that the unillusioned way to read their literary texts is to follow the action of the warring internal forces as they contort into aporias without solutions and open out a semantic regress into abysses without bottoms.

  I find unrecognizable, and also off-putting, the world projected in the latter-day critical writings of Paul de Man, in which the human subject is so entirely textualized that all the “subjectivities” of human experience are reduced—or more precisely redacted, by intricate interpretive maneuvers—to the possibility that they are generated by the machine-like functioning and arbitrary violences of language in itself, to the extent that death itself can be described as “a displaced name for a linguistic predicament.”49 A telling example is provided by de Man’s reading of Rousseau’s Confessions. At the end of a tortuous—and in its early stages, illuminating—analysis of the relation between feeling guilt and offering excuses for the action that has provoked the guilt, de Man concludes: “It is no longer certain that language, as excuse, exists because of a prior guilt but just as possible that since language, as a machine, performs anyway, we have to produce guilt (and all its train of psychic consequences) in order to make the excuse meaningful. Excuses generate the very guilt they exonerate, though always in excess or by default.”50 Bleakly inhuman also, although reached by a different conceptual route, is the theory world in the writings of Michel Foucault and some of his critical followers—when presented not as a speculative standpoint but as an undeluded view of the way things really are—in which people are bodies whose subjectivities are no more than functions of the subject-positions imposed by the discourse of their era; a world not only without effective human purposes but also without feelings, whether of love and sympathy or of contempt and hate, traversed only by an impersonal and unpersoned “power.” From the viewpoint of ordinary human engagement, some way-out poststructural writings in the critical journals seem not only abstract but alien, as though written by extraterrestrials who have somehow learned to deploy a human vocabulary without participating in the forms of life with which the vocabulary is integral.

  As described by J. Hillis Miller, “the deconstructive critic seeks to find . . . the element in the system studied which is alogical, the thread in the text in question which will unravel it all, or the loose stone which will pull down the whole building.”51 Such a statement highlights a feature shared by some deconstructive critics with exponents of other poststructural modes with whom they are often in conflict. That is, they concur in the theoretical predetermination that no author can say what he really means and that no text can mean what it seems to say—not merely in this or that instance, but universally, überhaupt, whether (as in Paul de Man’s version of this view) because of a duplicity that is “a necessity dictated or controlled by the very nature of all critical language,”52 or else because of subversive motives and desires that are inscribed in the unconscious of all authors and readers, or because of distortive ideological or cultural formations that saturate all discourse, or because of the irreparable incapacity of the “historical unconscious” to come to expression, or (in the writings of some eclectic theorists) because of all the above. In this last instance, the result can be a hermeneutics of suspicion so relentless that it approximates a hermeneutics of paranoia. Instead of engaging with what an author’s imagination has set forth, the reader looks askance at a literary work, with the interpretive attitude: What’s this text trying to put over on me?

  I can bring to bear a second consideration against radical poststructural theories; namely, that the theory world, in addition to being unbelievable, is uninhabitable by the theorist himself. In the everyday conduct of life, when something turns up that engages a theorist’s moral or political or personal concerns, he abandons theory talk for the ordinary human-centered talk about intentional persons, what they say and mean, and their intellectual and moral responsibility for what they have said. The divergence between a theorist’s general claims and his engaged discursive practice is especially evident when his theory itself is contested by a theorist of an alternative persuasion. In such instances—an example is the published controversy between Derrida and Foucault—the reports that the subject is only a linguistic effect, or that the author is dead, turn out to have been exaggerated; for the author-subject revives, rescued from the half-life of the sous rature, divested of quotation marks and other disclaimers, and reinvested with such logocentric, or else bourgeois, attributes as an initiating purpose, a decidable intention to mean what he says, and very human motives and feelings. Or rather, two authors revive. One is the indignant theorist whose views have been described and challenged, and the other is the opponent theorist, whom he charges with having misread the obvious meanings of his texts, out of carelessness, or obtuseness, or (it is often implied) for less reputable reasons. Whatever the theoretical bearings of the radical questioning, in Derrida’s writings, of such concepts as truth, the binary opposition true/false, and the decidability of an intention to mean something, he makes it clear that such theoretical considerations are entirely compatible with his own downright uses of the problematic concepts in the give-and-take of actual discourse. In a recent dispute with Jürgen Habermas, for example, he asserts: “That is false. I say false as opposed to true, and I defy Habermas to prove the presence in my work of that ‘primacy of rhetoric’ which he attributes to me.”53

  In an extensive response to a question about “the practical implica
tions for interpretation” of his general views about language, Derrida explains his readiness, in particular discursive occasions such as his response to Habermas, to interpret decidably and to assert the truth of what someone has said or written. He relies, he says, on “a relative stability of the dominant interpretation,” and on “a very solid zone of implicit ‘conventions’ or ‘contracts’ ” that allows him to count on “a very strong probability of consensus concerning the intelligibility of a text.” He makes the further point that within such “interpretive contexts . . . that are relatively stable, sometimes apparently almost unshakable, it should be possible to invoke rules of competence, criteria of discussion and of consensus, good faith,” and the other values “associated with” the “value of truth.” In explaining the assurance of his own interpretive practice in an essay attacking South African apartheid and in a later defense of that essay, Derrida points out that even though “there is no stability that is absolute, eternal, intangible, natural, etc.,” yet “I consider the context of [a] discussion, like that of this one, to be very stable and very determined.” Thus it

  constitutes the object of agreements sufficiently confirmed so that one might count [tabler] on ties that are stable, and hence demonstrable, linking words, concepts and things, as well as on the difference between the true and the false. And hence one is able, in this context, to denounce errors, and even dishonesty and confusions. . . . [But] the context is only relatively stable. The ties between words, concepts, and things, truth and reference, are not absolutely and purely guaranteed by some metacontextuality or metadiscursivity.54

  In these passages I take Derrida to assert, among other things, the following: In the engaged practice of language, the possibility for an assured interpretive decision is provided by the existence of a stable context, shared by writer and interpreters, of linguistic, institutional, and other conventions and agreements; this stability, however, is never entirely and unalterably fixed, nor can we guarantee the certainty and truth of any interpretation by reference to an absolute and eternal criterion beyond the regularities of our shared linguistic practice; hence one’s assurance about an interpretation and its truth is never an absolute certainty, since it always remains possible (although in some instances exceedingly unlikely) that one has got it wrong. And if I interpret Derrida rightly, then—on this matter of how, in actual practice, we are able to accomplish and to justify decidable interpretations—I agree with him; and I would hazard that no current philosopher of language who takes his theoretical stand in the paradigm of language as interpersonal communication would, in any essential way, disagree with him. But if so, the question arises: What is the import for our linguistic practice of Derrida’s theoretical claim that the differential constitution of language “a priori, always and already,” as I quoted him, “leaves us no choice” but to say something other than what we meant to say, and to understand something other than what was said?—except, perhaps, as a salutary admonition to remember that it is always possible that we are mistaken.

  J. Hillis Miller, notable among the critics who have converted Derrida’s grammatology into a method of reading literature, exemplifies the conspicuous disparity between the way a deconstructor interprets literary texts and the way he or she practices interpretation in the exigencies of everyday life. In Miller’s presidential address to the Modern Language Association in 1986, he countered what he called “attacks” on deconstruction in texts written both by conservative critics on the right and by neo-Marxists and new historians on the left. Someone coming to Miller’s address directly from reading his essays in literary criticism might reasonably suppose that he would respond by teasing out the loose thread in an opponent’s text that will unravel, and so render both self-conflicting and undecidable, what the opponent mistakenly thinks he is decidably saying against deconstruction. Instead, however, Miller responded by the unqualified assertion that the many representatives of “the left and right are often united . . . in their misrepresentation, their shallow understanding, and their failure to have read what they denounce or their apparent inability to make out its plain sense.” Miller then went on, in a disabling tactic often used in the defense of deconstruction, to attribute the real motivation of such “misreadings” not to disagreements in principle, but to “the anxiety of the accusers” who “need to point the finger of blame against theory to avoid thinking through the challenge theory poses to their own ideologies.”55

  Now, let’s suppose that by the considerations I have expounded (heightened, as my exposition obviously has been, by persuasive rhetoric) I were to convince a poststructural critic that his theory not only implicates an unrecognizable world but implies a linguistic practice that is conspicuously at odds with his own usage in everyday life. It would be a mistake to assume that, in such an event, a confirmed poststructuralist would consider himself compelled to give up, or even drastically to alter, his theory. There is the exemplary instance of David Hume that I alluded to earlier. Hume finds that the skeptical theory world of his solitary speculations is utterly incongruent with the ordinary world in which he plays backgammon and converses with his friends; also, that he cannot live his skepticism, while he cannot but live in the human world. These findings, however, don’t lead him to abandon his theory; instead he asserts that he lives, and also recommends to his readers, a double life. “Here then I find myself absolutely and necessarily determin’d to live, and talk, and act like other people in the common affairs of life.” Yet “in all the incidents of [that] life we ought still to preserve our skepticism. If we believe, that fire warms, or water refreshes, ’tis only because it costs us too much pain to think otherwise.”56 In a comparable way Jacques Derrida—asseverating that iterability, as the necessary condition that makes language possible, thereby renders it impossible, and that deconstruction can neither escape nor replace the logocentrism it subverts, nor supersede the built-in humanism of Western thought it tries to go beyond, nor dispense with reading determinately even while affirming the essential undecidability of meaning—describes deconstruction as “a double gesture, a double science, a double writing,” in which the term “double” designates “a sort of irreducible divisibility” that must “inevitably . . . continue (up to a certain point) to respect the rules of that which it deconstructs.”57 In an alternative figure Derrida, like Hume, represents the deconstructive interpreter as living a double life: there are today “two interpretations of interpretation—which are absolutely irreconcilable even if we live them simultaneously and reconcile them in an obscure economy”; and between these “I do not believe that today there is any question of choosing.”58 Against this view that the condition of language makes it self-deconstruct even as it constructs, so that a “rigorous” reading cannot but deconstruct even as it construes, I can, in the last resort, only reassert the alternative view from the world of language-in-use and then go on to affirm the kind of literary criticism that is positioned in this setting of human engagement.

  This brings me, at the close, to put forward this answer to the question posed in my title: A humanistic literary criticism is one that deals with a work of literature as composed by a human being, for human beings, and about human beings and matters of human concern.

  To guard against misunderstanding, I add three brief comments. This proposal is not meant to be in any way novel, but simply to epitomize the frame of reference shared by the critics who, historically, have mattered most, in the broad temporal and cultural range from Aristotle and Horace to Edmund Wilson and Northrop Frye. Furthermore, to identify a critical procedure as humanistic is not to warrant either its validity or its value. There is good humanistic criticism and bad humanistic criticism, to the extent, among other things, that it is perceptive, cogent, enlightening, and responsible, as against routine, pointless, obfuscative, and irresponsible. Finally, the criteria I propose are minimal, in the sense that they leave everything of substance still to be said in the unceasing, diverse, and unpredi
ctable dialogue, without finality, of readers with literary works and of readers with each other that has constituted criticism in the civilized past, and, I am confident, will do so in the future.

  NOTES

  1. Claude Lévi-Strauss, La Pensée sauvage (Paris, 1962), p. 326. Eugenio Donato, “Of Structuralism and Literature,” Modern Language Notes 82 (1967): 556. Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (Paris, 1975), pp. 60, 82. Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Many, edited by Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore and London, 1970), p. 264, and “Afterword,” in Limited Inc., edited by Gerald Graff (Evanston, Ill., 1988), p. 134. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (London, 1970), pp. xxiii, 342–43.

  2. William V. Spanos, The End of Education: Toward Posthumanism (Minneapolis and London, 1993); see the “Introduction,” pp. xiii–xxiv.

  3. Paul de Man, “Shelley Disfigured,” in The Rhetoric of Humanism (New York, 1984), p. 116. Another theorist of deconstruction, Hillis Miller, described “theory” as “an orientation to language as such” (“The Triumph of Theory, the Resistance to Reading, and the Question of the Material Base,” PMLA 102 [1987]: 283).

  4. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author (1968),” in Image/Music/Text, translated by Stephen Heath (New York, 1977), pp. 145–47. The hand of the “scriptor,” Barthes remarks, “borne by a pure gesture of inscription . . . traces a field” which “has no other origin than language itself” (p. 46).

  5. Derrida in The Languages of Criticism, pp. 271–72; Positions, translated by Alan Bass (Chicago, 1981), pp. 28–29; Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London, 1976), p. 99. Paul de Man proposes that we “free ourselves of all false questions of intent and rightfully reduce the narrator to the status of a mere grammatical pronoun, without which the narrative could not come into being” (Allegories of Reading [New Haven and London, 1979], p. 18).