Literary Theory: Liberal and Otherwise
“Language is a necessary condition for my creation of this sentence, but language with all its ramifications of structure and potential meaning is not sufficient to establish the form my sentence takes.”
Recent controversies, especially in constitutional law, have shown that important points often turn on theoretical arguments regarding the proper understanding of words and texts. Accordingly, literary theory has come to attract greater attention from scholars of the law, as well as of history, economics, anthropology, and many of the other humane sciences. In this essay, Professor Stephen Cox looks at current controversies in literary theory and proposes a classical liberal theory of criticism.
—The Editors
Literary intellectuals are traditionally fond of dramatizing their own “crises,” but recently the signs of distress have become clearer and more persuasive than usual. A distinguished critic writes a series of essays against the literary “turn toward nihilism,” addressing them to those unfashionable readers “who still cherish common sense” (Frederick Crews, Skeptical Engagements [New York: Oxford University Press, 1986], pp. xviii, xix). Another prominent critic reports that colleagues urge him to battle current literary theory “head-on. That stuff is spreading like wildfire, and it’s corrupt—just plain corrupt!” (Wayne C. Booth, Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979], p. 235). A third writes a treatise on literature’s warfare “against itself”; he accuses other theorists of undermining not only literature but people’s sense of reality (Gerald Graff, Literature Against Itself: Literary Ideas in Modern Society [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979]). On the other side of the barricades, an advocate of avant-garde theory speaks of it cheerfully as a “reckless sawing, a calculated dismemberment or deconstruction of the great cathedral-like trees in which Man has taken shelter for millennia” (Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism [Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1982], p. 149. Culler’s book is an accessible introduction to the subject.).
No liberal analysis of intellectual life can be complete without an inquiry into the condition and prospects of literary study—and this is a crucial time to conduct such an inquiry. Critical ideologies of many types are engaged in defoliating the great tree of liberal thought, challenging especially liberalism’s positive view of the individual’s powers of choice, intention, and rational understanding. The assumptions that animate these ideologies are, fortunately, fragile and unlikely to survive very long in good health. They invite a reconsideration of liberal theory and practice.
The antiliberal tendencies in current theory probably exist in their purest form in the “deconstructionist” school of Jacques Derrida, his followers, and allies. Deconstruction concerns itself with the inescapably linguistic element in literature. Deconstructive speculations, however, are not addressed merely to literature; they extend to the linguistic element in all human thought. Advanced critical theories seldom confine themselves to the interpretation of literary texts; they involve philosophies of human existence, and from their ambitiousness they acquire much of their hold on the imagination.
According to the deconstructionist argument, our understanding is always mediated by language; perception and conception are always enmeshed in a web of signifiers. Everything in our world operates as a text that we can interpret only by reference to other texts, not by reference to some final reality. We cannot discover an objective, nonlinguistic “foundation” for our concepts; we cannot arrive at “presence.” Derrida refers to “a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin which is offered to an active interpretation”; he refers to his enjoyment of a text that is “simultaneously infinitely open and infinitely reflecting on itself, ‘an eye in an eye’” (Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. by Alan Bass [Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1978), pp. 292, 298). Derrida’s lively American colleague J. Hillis Miller speaks of “letting language go as far as it will take one,” so that “the prison-house of language may be a place of joy, even of expansion, in spite of remaining an enclosure and a place of suffering and deprivation” (Miller, “The Critic as Host,” Critical Inquiry, 3 [1977], pp. 443-444). The poetry and the fun of deconstruction lie in the freedom it gives people to invent a discourse that is sufficiently paradoxical to comment on the paradoxes of human language. The theory assumes, however, that what we can say and “mean” is a function of our equivocal language, not of our freedom to choose meanings or values.
Language is a necessary condition for my creation of this sentence, but language with all its ramifications of structure and potential meaning is not sufficient to establish the form my sentence is taking or to fix or unfix its actual meanings.
Deconstructionists are capable, like everyone else, of quarreling over the proper interpretation of an author’s choices and intentions. But the fixed statements of value that authors intend to make are easily deconstructed so as to show that their chosen and “privileged” terms necessarily imply the very terms meant to be excluded or devalued. An author may attach great value to the concept of freedom, but “freedom” is meaningless except in its relation to such terms as “unfreedom.” The first term, and the grand hierarchy of values erected on it, would have no meaning except by relation to other terms. Only a self-blinding “logocentrism,” a faith in exclusivist reason and in language with objective reference, could hope to create a discourse in which one term could be definitely and permanently positioned above others. This logocentrism presents itself for deconstructive demystification, for exposure of its paradoxes and futilities.
I have described some of the rudiments of deconstruction. When they are stated briefly and bluntly, deprived of the subtleties with which they are invested by their highly cultured exponents, these principles may sound absurd. But there is truth in them. It is true that organized conceptual thought is made possible by language. It is true that language is a system of signs, not of realities, and that these signs become agents of meaning (if meaning there is) because of their differences from and therefore relations to other signs, not because of their likenesses to the objective realities they are thought to signify. It is true that the great web of language is not the voluntary, intentional creation of individual writers.
The problem, as Gerald Graff argues in his powerful critique of current theory, lies in a confusion between necessary conditions and sufficient conditions (Graff, pp. 196-198). Language is a necessary condition for my creation of this sentence, but language with all its ramifications of structure and potential meaning is not sufficient to establish the form my sentence is taking or to fix or unfix its actual meanings. The sufficient condition is not language but my choice of language. Perhaps I could not choose to meditate upon “freedom” if no concepts of “unfreedom” were available to me (and quite a number are available: “slavery,” “bondage,” “coercion,” “duress,” “determinism,” etc.). But the contrast and relation of terms, such as it is, need imply nothing about my particular choice of a privileged concept or about my audience’s ability to discover a particular meaning in my text and to assess its relation to fact. So far from denying me the ability to choose and to privilege precisely and significantly, the existence of language equips me to do these things. And the existence of a common language equips my readers to assess my chosen meanings, even to the extent of deconstructing them, if that is their choice.
The logical defect in deconstruction—its failure to distinguish the necessary and the general from the sufficient and the particular—makes it of little use in assessing specific choices of individual writers or readers. But the critical avant-garde has not turned to deconstruction because the theory is supported by an unanswerable logic or because it offers a superior means of understanding the diction of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Deconstruction is chosen because it offers a way to undermine the “logocentric” authority of the humanist tradition and the “canon” of literature endorsed by it. Yet the avant-garde has its tradition too, a tradition associated, like that of its humanist adversaries, with a familiar canon of Great Books. Friend and foe alike trace deconstruction’s roots to Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche; deconstruction is in some respects a self-conscious continuation of their campaign to demystify the supposedly rational and objective values of nineteenth-century civilization.
6 Humane Studies Review
Literary Alliances
Although orthodox Marxists and Freudians harbor justifiable suspicions about deconstruction’s obsession with language, the most vigorous elements of both schools have tried to come to terms with it. Marxism’s alliance with deconstruction is particularly noteworthy, and particularly convenient; it allows a hypercerebral linguistic theory to acquire a body of speculation about material forces, and it allows materialism to avoid embarrassment by transcending what sophisticated Marxists call its crude economism. Frederick Crews, in a determined attack on the new “dialectical immaterialism,” has charged that recent syntheses of Marxism with advanced critical theory result from an attempt to evade the consequences of Marxism’s disconfirmation by economic and political history: “If a theorist finds himself on the brink of admitting that his doctrine is flatly contrary to available evidence, as a last resort he can even deny that ‘evidence’ and ‘truth’ are epistemologically applicable notions.” (Crews, p. 142)
Crews’s charge of evasion is supported by the evidence of such works as Michael Ryan’s Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Articulation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982). Ryan argues on deconstructionist grounds that all science has an “undecidable” relationship to reality: Marxism therefore need not be fatally embarrassed when historical developments reveal that its “science” is fallible. He argues further that there is a natural alliance between the Derridean demystification of cultural authority and the Marxist demystification of such institutions of Western society as private property. But if Marxist discourse is “undecidable,” why should it not be demystified just as thoroughly as capitalist discourse? Ryan provides no adequate response to this question. He is content to let one nineteenth-century ideology retain its privileged status, so that he can continue to use its precepts to undermine those of other ideologies.
Less welcome news, for people who care about genuine social progress, is the spread of self-subverting theories of meaning among feminists, whom one might expect to hold out at all costs for the capacity of dissenting individuals to break with ingrained ideology and define their own meanings.
One of the best-known Marxist critics, Terry Eagleton, has recently published a brief introduction to literary theory that provides an excellent outline of twentieth-century speculations. It also provides an indication of the willingness of a hard-sell and hard-shell Marxism to adapt itself to linguistic skepticism about meanings and foundations. Although Eagleton is deeply worried about what he regards as a deconstructionist tendency to reject significant meanings and retreat from historical struggle into mere contemplation of words, he himself believes that “meanings are . . . the products of language, which always has something slippery about it.” He sympathizes with deconstruction for seeing that there is no rigid boundary between “truth and falsity, sense and nonsense, reason and madness, central and marginal, surface and depth.” (Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction [Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1983), pp. 69, 133). He hopes that this insight will be useful in demystifying reactionary “truths,” although of course it might just as easily be used to demystify the truth-claims of Marxism.
When the intellectual vanguard of Marxism resorts to this sort of speculation, it is easy to imagine that Marxism’s days are numbered. Less welcome news, for people who care about genuine social progress, is the spread of self-subverting theories of meaning among feminists, whom one might expect to hold out at all costs for the capacity of dissenting individuals to break with ingrained ideology and define their own meanings. Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak represents the views of a good number of other feminist critics when she rejects the idea that human subjects are the “sovereign” controllers of meaning; she accepts as a given the premise that “one cannot of course ‘choose’ to step out of ideology” (Spivak, “The Politics of Interpretations,” in W. J. T. Mitchell, ed., The Politics of Interpretation [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983] pp. 366, 351). She still wants people to “work to change” ideology; she is not concerned that choiceless prisoners of ideology might manage to intensify its worst features.
Legal Studies
Even legal studies have been deeply affected by the idea that meaning is not determined by authorial choices and intentions. An argument typical of what has become a common academic tendency is advanced by Ronald Dworkin in the same useful volume as that in which Spivak’s essay appears. Dworkin displays, indeed, a more than common scrupulousness in developing his argument; he allows that “no plausible theory of interpretation holds that the intention of the author is always irrelevant,” and that “a judge’s duty is to interpret the legal history he finds, not to invent a better history” (“Law as Interpretation,” in Mitchell, ed., The Politics of Interpretation, pp. 259, 264-65). But Dworkin’s major thesis is that the meaning of texts is not adequately fixed by authorial intentions, and that interpreters of legal texts therefore have the right to find in them the morally and politically “best” patterns of meaning they can. He believes that interpreters will be constrained from merely inventing meanings by their “conception of the integrity and coherence of law as an institution” (p. 265). Dworkin’s is a “progressive” view of interpretation—or is it really a conservative, organicist view? Labels aside, how trustworthy are the interpretive conceptions to which he refers? Interpretations of a general “integrity” and “coherence” in the law would seem to be much chancier and much more assailable than interpretations of intentions that authors have tried to realize with some precision in their texts. And what if Dworkin’s idea of a “best” pattern conflicts with mine? As we debate the issue, will we be active as interpreters, or will we be using interpretation merely as an occasion for our clash of political values?
Much of the current questioning of objective, intentionalist interpretation is inspired by the hermeneutical theory of Hans-Georg Gadamer, whose formidable Wahrheit und Methode appeared in 1960 (available in English as Truth and Method [New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1982]).3 Gadamer, a more careful thinker than the deconstructionists, does not slight the role of literature as a conveyer of substantial values. In fact, he pays it eloquent tribute. But what is primary for him is the historical process in which works are interpreted and reinterpreted; his focus is on the reshaping of meaning as texts and readers encounter one another, sharing language and participating in tradition. He believes that such concepts as the intention of the author “are not adequate to what is most essential to the process of understanding to the extent that it is a process of communication.... We are continually shaping a common perspective when we speak a common language and so are active participants in the communality of our experience of the world.” (Gadamer, Reason in the Age of Science, trans. by Frederick G. Lawrence [Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1984], p. 110).4 Gadamer allows his concern with the basic conditions of communication to become a hostile interrogation of the possibility of “free decision,” which he tends to equate, as Marxist critics do, with the impossible dream of “a neutral, completely objective concern.” (ibid., p.106)
But whoever took this dream for reality? Whoever equated objectivity with neutrality, or stipulated that objectivity must be total to exist at all? Whoever denied that writers and readers are influenced by prevailing cultural assumptions and concerns, just as these assumptions and concerns are influenced by what people do as writers and readers? As Gadamer indicates, interpretation necessarily takes place in some cultural context. The point at issue is whether assumptions, perspectives, and concerns can bear the weight that Gadamer assigns them in determining the meaning of texts, and whether a reliance on them establishes a body of literary knowledge, not just a body of subjective views.
Stanley Fish believes that he has found a way to solve the subjectivism problem without taking refuge in objective intentionalism. Meanings, according to Fish, are produced by “interpretive communities,” the members of which share interpretive assumptions and conventions. These assumptions and conventions are “community property,” as Fish puts it, rather than products of any individual; they’re not just subjective. But the problem of necessity versus sufficiency returns. Shared conventions are necessary for the education of the members of a community for their work as interpreters, but one would be hard pressed to find an interpretation that was directly produced and determined by a community’s conventions. Individual choice still determines the way in which conventions are applied; in the interpretation of a substantial work of literature, thousands of choices of application are made, many of them between conflicting conventions. By what standards shall we assess these choices? Fish concedes that a reliance on conventions cannot establish “a correct way of reading” texts. He further concedes that his theory envisions a politicization of literary discourse. Because “disinterested evidence” cannot be used to indicate from what “perspective” a text should be interpreted, critics can address the question only “by political and persuasive means (they are the same thing).” (Fish, Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980], pp. 13-16) The consolidation of ideology in current literary theory takes the shape of a challenge, advanced by critics of many different persuasions, to the intellectual basis of progressive liberalism—to the idea that individuals have the capacity for a significant degree of objective knowledge and a significant quality of choice and intention, to the idea that the humane studies can increase objective knowledge and thereby enhance the quality of choice. There are rich ironies in the fact that opposition is directed against intentionalism as well as “positivist” objectivism. One of the most obvious—and, if you will, objectively ascertainable—reasons why culture cannot be studied in the same way as the objects of “positivist” science is precisely the unpredictable responsiveness to human choices and intentions that is found in literature and literary interpretation, in the whole enterprise of communication. Literary study that proceeds without reference to the fact of choice is often as reductive, as lacking in humanity or even variety, as any positivist project. Reductive theory performs the unenviable task of making the unpredictable look predictable, and in this way distorts the objective contours of literature.
But whoever took this dream for reality? Whoever equated objectivity with neutrality, or stipulated that objectivity must be total to exist at all?
Much of current theory begins in lively iconoclasm but ends in stupefying dullness. Dullness of this degree cannot long be endured, even in an academic environment.
The Death of Deconstruction and the Liberal Alternative
Literary historian Meyer Abrams has justly observed that certain contemporary critical procedures have “nothing whatever to do with our common experience of the uniqueness, the rich variety, and the passionate human concerns in works of literature, philosophy, or criticism.” By depriving literature of its human context, these procedures reduce it to “ghostly non-presences emanating from no voice, intended by no one, referring to nothing, bombinating in a void.” (Abrams, “The Deconstructive Angel,” Critical Inquiry, 3 [1977], pp. 435, 431). Much of current theory begins in lively iconoclasm but ends in stupefying dullness. Dullness of this degree cannot long be endured, even in an academic environment. The death of deconstruction has, for this reason, been rumored for some time, even among its proponents. The inquest is likely to discover that it died of its own assumptions and that other theories have been ingesting nearly lethal doses of similar substances. William Blake seems to describe the role of current critical fashions when he speaks of “giving a body to Fals[e]hood that it may be cast off.”⁵
The death of deconstruction may well entail an increased interest in the liberal ideas against which it struggled. It may also direct increased attention toward the liberal tradition of literary theory, in which highly sophisticated work has been done in recent decades. The critics engaged in this work have not necessarily been classical liberals; they have not necessarily been favorable to political or economic liberalism. Graff, for instance, analyzes the present reaction against objectivity as a reflection of capitalist society’s fluidity and consumerist instability of values. (And his argument is well worth considering, even though it pays insufficient attention to the system of values implicit in the market economy.) Yet despite his critique of the market society, Graff does not deny that authors are free to choose objective analytical methods and promote objective values, as he attempts to do. Like the other critics I am calling liberal, he makes no absurd attempt to isolate society from literature, but he is careful to avoid the reductive approach that obscures the difference between a political (or historical or linguistic) context and an author’s textual choices.
Graff’s Literature Against Itself and Crews’s Skeptical Engagements are two of the most important recent works of liberal criticism. Both offer learned analysis of current literary theories and attempt to account historically for their antirationalist and anti-intentionalist tendencies. Crews is particularly concerned with explaining the way in which the academy, “a kind of heaven for concepts that have slipped their earthly moorings,” has perpetuated Marxist and Freudian dogmas by combining them with ethereal epistemological and linguistic theories (Crews, p. 142). His analysis is in itself good evidence for the existence of significant authorial choice: he began his career as a Freudian critic, and in Skeptical Engagements he repudiates his former views and explores the reasons for their continued attractiveness to others.⁶
The liberal polemic in modern literary studies originated during the last generation, in the works of the so-called Chicago critics. These critics defined themselves in opposition to the once-dominant, now-moribund school of New Criticism, which resembled deconstruction in its overemphasis on the linguistic materials of literary art. The New Critics sometimes regarded literary works as patterns of language that could be assessed without reference to authorial intentions. Such Chicago critics as R. S. Crane (The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1953] and The Idea of the Humanities and Other Essays Critical and Historical [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967], 2 volumes) and Elder Olson (On Value Judgements in the Arts and Other Essays [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976]) opposed reductive, a priori assumptions about language and literature; they held that rational analysis required attention to the specific type of work one is studying, to the literary and intellectual problems confronted by individual authors, and to their chosen strategies for dealing with these problems. The Chicago critics’ defense of “pluralistic,” as opposed to reductive or dogmatic, literary methods is continued in the work of Wayne Booth, whose recent Critical Understanding offers a careful analysis of the issues involved in choices of method—for critics are authors too, and must choose their strategies, rather than pretending that every text and every problem must inevitably be approached in the same way.
However various their methods, theories of criticism that respect authorial intentions risk the charge of naive intuitionism. Is it merely intuition that enlightens us about a long-dead author’s choices and intentions? How secure is our conviction that authors’ intentions are accessible to us? Do texts provide us with sufficient evidence to distinguish authorial intention from our own hermeneutical assumptions? E. D. Hirsch, Jr., has provided cogent answers to these questions in two important books that combine extensive research in the tradition of interpretive theory with a profound analysis of the interpretive process (Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967] and The Aims of Interpretation [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976]). His distinction between authors’ intended meanings and the significance that readers may choose to attach to these meanings provides a basis for sound study of the historical processes in which authorial choices acquire new types of relevance to their readers, in which canons of literature are made, transformed, and broken. Hirsch’s vindication of the importance and accessibility of authorial intention is the one most likely to hold the field in the foreseeable future.
Practice
I have been considering efforts of liberal theory and polemic. But what does a liberal criticism look like in practice? One answer to that question might be: Liberal criticism seeks to reveal authorial intentions as they are manifested in textual choices; it seeks to develop a rhetoric of choice. Liberal criticism pays special attention to those features of texts that authors select to delimit an area of intended meaning and to mark it off from unintended implications. Study of the marks of intention in a text is vital to the critical enterprise—not because they automatically establish literary value (even a comic book displays intention) but because they help us to understand what kind of object it is that we are interpreting and evaluating. At the end of To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf makes allusions to the New Testament and associates the crisis of her characters with the passion of Christ. By these choices of allusion and association she opens an area of special meaning within her text. But at the same time she closes off that area from orthodox Christian meanings. She represents her chief character as “leaping into space” (not into heaven), “as if he were saying ‘There is no God.’” The Christianity of her allusions is thereby marked as symbolic, not literal. An image, a character, a trick of syntax, a manipulation of point of view—these may all be used as control devices, as methods chosen from the author’s linguistic and cultural on resources to stabilize meaning and direct its interpretation.
Theories of criticism that respect authorial intentions risk the charge of naive intuitionism.
Study of such control devices establishes a relationship between textual exegesis, on the one hand, and theories of communication and composition, on the other. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a theory of composition that is not grounded on the liberal assumption that authors can communicate intentions by means of conscious choices. Some of the most interesting work in modern criticism has been done by liberal theorists who have tried to assess the degree to which control devices succeed in directing communication of meaning. (For the rhetoric of choice in large-scale application, see Wayne C. Booth’s two seminal studies, The Rhetoric of Fiction, 2nd ed. [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983] and A Rhetoric of Irony [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974]. The latter work is especially important for its demonstration of the way in which real communication of authorial intentions takes place even across barriers of historical periods and in the midst of slippery linguistic situations.)
A single method may—I do not know—be useful in the study of geology; but if so, it is only because rocks have few choices to make.
Liberal criticism may involve an intrinsic, “technical” assessment of literary achievement. It may also involve an extrinsic assessment. One answer to the question, What is liberal criticism? might be: Liberal criticism is a type of cultural critique; it seeks to determine the degree to which literary choices imply liberal cultural values. Such a critique can lead to a fuller historical understanding of the liberal tradition. But there is danger. If liberal criticism begins to view works of literature simply as political documents, ransacking them for examples of individualist or anti-individualist ideas, it will succumb to the reductiveness that its theory seeks to avoid.
Certainly we understand something about Joseph Conrad’s cultural enterprise when we observe that his novel The Secret Agent embodies a polemic against socialism. But Conrad’s political views represent only one type of authorial choice and solicit only one type of cultural assessment. What of the other qualities of Conrad’s work? Does it achieve subtlety as well as clarity? How well does it develop its characters’ psychologies? What is deemphasized that politics may be emphasized? Liberals know—or else should know—that there is no choice without costs. A novel that labors to sustain a liberal argument about politics may do so at the cost of neglecting richness and variety of feeling (though this is not, I think, the particular cost that Conrad’s great novel incurs). A critical method that proceeds as if ideological choices were cost-free, so long as they are liberal, incurs its own costs; it will pay for its “liberalism” at the price of an intolerable narrowness.
Liberal criticism must not, then, be content with asking just one kind of question about literature, constructing or deconstructing texts according to one type of criterion. A third answer to the question of what liberal criticism looks like might be: It doesn’t look like anything; “it” is really an indefinite number of theys; “it” is irreducibly pluralistic. There is no reason to assume, a priori, that the method one uses to analyze a novelist’s choices of metaphor ought to be the method one uses to analyze her commentary on the political developments of her time. And—to answer the obvious question—there is no reason to assume, a priori, that the method will not be applicable to both problems; her choice of metaphors may, in fact, be directed by the structure of her political analysis. Liberal criticism must be pluralistic enough to avoid a priori exclusion of any of the forms in which authorial choices may possibly manifest themselves. A single method may—I do not know—be useful in the study of geology; but if so, it is only because rocks have few choices to make.
One of the major costs of liberal criticism is its inability to constitute itself as a body of constantly reliable methods for the study of regular, predictable events. One of the major benefits is its ability to discover complex connections between literary study and the other humane sciences. The search for connections has been a cause of reductiveness in literary theories that refer all intellectual activity to such gross categories as “language,” “history,” or “class.” Liberal theory can make better allowance for the variety of human experience because it can discover its interdisciplinary connections in the element of choice that transforms linguistic and historical contexts into the rich and delicate variety of economic, political, and literary “texts.” Literary study resembles economic or historical study to the extent to which both the humanities and the social sciences are interpretations of the choices that human agents make from the resources provided by their context.
A literary text, from this point of view, is a record of its creator’s ordered scale of preferences, of what he or she appropriates from the context of alternatives and (speaking of absences as well as presences) of what he or she decides against, sacrifices in order to achieve some higher preference. One source of my speculations here is Gadamer’s observation that systems of preference are distinctive of human life; another is, of course, Ludwig von Mises’s praxeology or general theory of human action—a theory that will be useful to literary study when it is purged of Mises’s romantic mystification of creative genius as something remote from normal praxeological analysis. Praxeological theory cannot be used to make a priori rules about the forms that literature must take. It can suggest some approaches to the study of literature. It can help us to see literature and literary history not just as structures but as changing formations of preferences.
One way to analyze Samuel Richardson’s early novel Clarissa is to ask if it has either the structure of a bourgeois tragedy or the structure of a Christian “comedy.” Another, perhaps a more sensitive, method would be to analyze the way in which these elements shift their positions in Richardson’s scale of preferences as one or the other of them fulfills its immediate rhetorical or homiletic purpose. One way to analyze the transition between the romantic and the Victorian periods of literature—periods that despite their obvious differences seem remarkably similar in certain aesthetic and ethical values—is to reduce “the Victorian structure of thought” to its essentials (painfully excising from it all apparently romantic features) and then investigate the means by which this structure replaced an essentialized romantic structure. Another method would be to analyze movements in nineteenth-century systems of preferences and priorities, movements in which values might be preserved while their relationships were transformed.
Changes in literary preferences can be studied for possible links with changes in social and economic preferences. In this way, different types of human action can be shown to reflect upon and provide contexts for one another. The point is not, however, to aggrandize an abstract liberal theory-of-everything, but to use liberal principles to enlarge our understanding of human action and decision in its concrete forms. For the liberal student of human choice, literature offers a virtually inexhaustible field of research.
For the liberal student of human choice, literature offers a virtually inexhaustible field of research.
Notes
¹See, for instance, Derrida’s quarrel with Michel Foucault over Descartes’s intentions: Writing and Difference, pp. 31-63.
²This volume contains a wide and exemplary range of current attitudes on the relation of criticism to political theory.
³For a many-sided critique of Gadamer’s interpretive theory, see E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Validity In Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), pp. 245-264.
⁴For Gadamer’s view of authorial intention, see also Truth and Method, pp. 263-64, 482-89, and “Aesthetics and Hermeneutics,” in Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. and ed. by David E. Linge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 95-104.
⁵Blake, Jerusalem 12.13, in The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, rev. ed., ed. David V. Erdman (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1982), p. 155.
⁶Crew’s analysis of Freud relies in large part on Adolf Grünbaum’s rigorous study, The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), which should be considered by anyone interested in the origins and truth-claims of the Freudian method.
⁷Gadamer, Reason, pp. 90-91; Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), pp. 138-40, 240n.
Professor Stephen Cox teaches in the Department of Literature at the University of California, La Jolla.