Literary Meaning: Reclaiming The Study Of Literature

LITERARY MEANING: RECLAIMING THE STUDY OF LITERATURE by Wendell V. Harris. New York: New York University Press, 1996. 240 pages. $40.

As everyone knows, schools of literary criticism are bewildering in their number and diversity, and theoretical debate has often become heated and complex. Wendell V. Harris tries to devise a usable grammar for this Babel. His effort is, truly, a valuable one for two reasons: it does survey a breadth of critical theory and strategy, but also attempts to unclutter the field by applying some common-sense principles of organization.

While such a program is estimable, there is a hint in the subtitle as to the tone the investigation will take. There is this fin de siecle sentiment in the book, a Cavalier nostalgia, that becomes not just corrective but polemic and, hence, distorting in its zeal. Harris speaks as one of the casualties of the culture wars, so a good deal of his analysis of the multivocality of criticism tends to be univocally hostile and poutish: "Pluralism is one thing," he says in his section entitled "Terminological Promiscuity," [but]

   not only is much of what has been published in the last ten years
   unintelligible to the amateur of literature ... but often pretty much so to
   professors of literature who happen to have a different set of interests
   from those of a particular set of critics and theorists or who have not
   been reading a particular journal.

Conveniently, then, Harris breaks down the field of literary criticism into a taxonomy of two: the hermetic and the hermeneutic. These two views of discourse are concerned with the curiously yoked issues of authorial intentionality and literary referentiality. Harris's hermetic critics don't accept the relevance and/or possibility of either while his hermeneutic theorists do. These two camps have developed, according to Harris, without substantive interaction over the last three decades. Although it might appear inconceivable how structuralism, say, or reader-response theory (= hermetic) evolved without resource to formalism and the New Criticism (= hermeneutic), Harris unapologetically identifies his targets as the major errors, fallacies, and absurdities of hermetic theory and leaves his reductivism aside. It is, perhaps, for this reason that there is rather scant treatment of feminist theory, Marxism, or New Historicism and their obvious prominence in cross-pollinating contemporary literary theories.

Unfortunately, most of what remains often amounts merely to caricature:

   The more one looks at figures like Derrida, de Man, or Lacan, the more they
   come to look like Lucifers who, having chosen to expel themselves from the
   realm of certainty in which they no longer believe, must go about the earth
   denying the human ability to make valid judgments about anything.

Derrida is especially singled out for Harris's opprobrium as a distinctively notorious misreader of Saussure; by means of this tactical indictment Harris is able to invalidate most post-structuralism or any theory, for that matter, influenced by semiology. Similarly, he also bemoans the overcomplication in psychoanalytic theory--"the competition goes on ... between Freud, Jung, Lacan, Rogers, and Horney"--and in Marxist theory--"the literary Marxist can choose, for starters, between Lukacs, Goldmann, Althusser, Macherey, Eagleton, Jameson, and Ryan." Multiplicity, relativism, and indeterminacy, obviously, are the problems for Harris here: the world has just become too complex.

Although he decries the headlong rush to absolutism he sees epitomized in postmodernism, Harris's own pilgrimage toward truth and determinate meaning is no less single-minded. As David Copperfield says, "We talk about the tyranny of words, but we like to tyrannize over them too." Literary criticism has always benefited from pluralism; pluralism and heterogeneity in literary study aren't the problem as long as critical tolerance is observed. Even though it would be hard to find any compromise between the politics of deconstruction, for example, and the moralism of formalist theory, denying the multiplicity of truth by univocally privileging an accepted canon of ideologies is tyrannical. There is something to be said about the implacable authoritarianism of much postmodernist subjectivity. The practice of theory and criticism has become dogmatic, shrill, pre-emptive, and proscriptive, as Harris suggests, but what Literary Meaning seems to do is substitute for the Utopia of hermetic theory a hermeneutic quest for the Holy Grail that is just as illusory.

GARY R. GRUND Rhode Island College

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