Wild, Fierce Yale

Letters

Vol. 5 No. 1 · 10 January 1983

From Earl Miner

SIR: Geoffrey Hartman’s review (LRB, Vol. 4, No 19) of Christopher Norris’s fine book Deconstruction: Theory and Practice is even more instructive than the book he reviews. Its history of the filiations between the old and the new Yale is not one I am inclined to deconstruct, any more than I am to honour the title. If the ‘Yale School’ is wild or fierce, that is the problem either of its denizens or of its enemies. My own, surely not idiosyncratic, opinion is that we would all be very much the poorer without Yale, whose intellectual range is not the worse for ranging beyond deconstruction.

Certain shadings and omissions in Hartman’s review do excite my wonder. He shows great poise, in responding to Norris’s depiction of him as an almost exclusively ludic critic. Hartman’s work belies the charge, and the forbearance is remarkable. I cannot understand, however, his omission of Norris’s casting Jonathan Culler as a villain, a kind of traitor within the walls. Is there any reason for a partisan of deconstruction like Norris to exhibit such a puritanical high tone?

Not that I have a love affair with deconstruction. It seems to me to have certain distinct limits. A local friend claims that another woman is the best Chinese cook in Princeton, and that she is the fourth best: ‘There is no second or third.’ Practically speaking, the nouvelle critique has a number of first-class cooks in New Haven (and a few elsewhere). The problem is that, unlike the old New Criticism, it produces no second or third, or perhaps fifth or sixth best, whereas ‘Formalism’ produced no end of seconds and thirds as well as firsts. In other terms, unlike a structuralist such as Harold Bloom, the deconstructionists have yet to show that the chief concerns of humankind can be dealt with by them. Good and evil, or joy and suffering, are not on their agenda. Neither is non-Western literature, or even much in the way of pre-Romantic literature. History, except the history of studies at Yale, seems not to exist. And what kind of principle is it that privileges the critic from the instability, the non-meaning attributed to writers who (many of us think) are greater than these brilliant individuals? Literary study has many margins, as well as centres, and I worry that Hartman and his gifted colleagues may have mistaken the former for the latter. Much can be forgiven for intellectual power, but the questions are how much is to be forgiven in context, and whether power is to be identified with intellect alone.

Earl Miner
Princeton University

Vol. 5 No. 4 · 3 March 1983

From Christopher Norris

SIR: Professor Earl Miner (LRB, Vol. 5, No 1) defends Jonathan Culler against what he sees as a needlessly ad hominem attack in my book Deconstruction: Theory and Practice. I have to protest that Culler is not cast as ‘villain’ of the piece, or as a ‘traitor within the gates’ of recent literary theory. My book treats his Structuralist Poetics as an exemplary case of those conceptual problems and paradoxes which deconstruction would claim to have uncovered in the structuralist project at large. Indeed, I could think of no better text by which to bring out the difference between structuralism, in its quest for some ultimate validating method, and deconstruction in its principled mistrust of all such totalising claims. This will not, I hope, seem a backhanded compliment, especially since Culler has himself moved on toward the deconstructionist standpoint obliquely essayed in The Pursuit of Signs (1981) and powerfully argued in his On Deconstruction (1983). To have ignored this development would indeed stand as a culpable omission had my book merely picked on Culler as a personalised embodiment of ‘structuralist’ thinking. In fact – as I try to make clear – deconstruction has come about very largely through the rigorous questioning of structuralist ideas, a process in which Culler’s text has played its own significant role.

Professor Miner goes on to deplore the kind of intellectual one-upmanship (including my own ‘puritanical high tone’) which he finds so offensive in the acolytes of Yale deconstruction. ‘Much may be forgiven for intellectual power,’ he writes, ‘but the questions are how much is to be forgiven in context, and whether power is to be identified with intellect alone?’ I can only reply – with good deconstructionist warrant – that critical exchange can and must be carried on without conjuring up suspicions of personal animus. Oddly enough, it is precisely his appeal to a larger, humanising context – an antidote to the rigours of Yale deconstruction – that leads Professor Miner to construct this scenario of naked ‘intellectual’ aggression. Equally odd is the fact that he selects Harold Bloom – most fiercely embattled of the critics at Yale – not only as a ‘structuralist’ (which term scarcely fits), but as a countervailing voice against his colleagues’ will-to-power over texts. Yet it is Bloom who openly proclaims the necessity of ‘strong’ (creative) misreadings and the struggle for mastery that critics – as well as poets – must face if they are to throw off their burden of ‘belatedness’ vis-à-vis their great precursors.

‘What kind of principle is it,’ Miner demands, ‘that privileges the critic from the instability, the non-meaning attributed to writers who (many of us think) are greater than these brilliant individuals?’ Not, certainly, the position of a purist deconstructor like Paul de Man, who argues precisely that criticism is deluded if it seeks a secure theoretical vantage-point outside and above the exemplary aberrations – the interplay of ‘blindness’ and ‘insight’ – that characterise literary language. What Bloom indicts as the ‘serene linguistic nihilism’ of his deconstructing colleagues is rather (in his view) a lack than a surplus of will-to-power over texts. Professor Miner is quite right in suggesting that my own account of deconstructionist criticism tends to favour conceptual rhetoricians like de Man, those whose relation to their texts, if not ‘serene’ or ‘nihilistic’, is at least capable of a certain sobriety and epistemological tact. And this has a bearing on my treatment of Culler’s Structuralist Poetics. Culler is far enough from claiming a role in the personalised agon of revisionary ratios which Bloom embraces as the critic’s elective destiny. To deconstruct Culler’s text is to take it as worth deconstructing, and not to engage in any kind of private or ritual-professional rivalry.

Christopher Norris
University of Wales, Cardiff