many sorts o f approaches, based on methods and categories that need to
be defended theoretically. If such views are widely accepted, this ought to
theory, o f comparative literature, or o f literature “itself.” Is the uncertainty
about whether to claim victory or a crisis a necessary feature o f our cultural
1
The Literary in Theory
When in the 1960s I first became involved with what has come to be
called simply “theory,” this term— so very odd, theory o f what?— made a
good deal more sense than it does today. In the structurahst moment there
was a growing body o f theory— essentially the generalization of the model
o f structural linguistics— ^which, it was claimed, would apply everywhere,
to all domains o f culture. Theory meant a particular body o f structuralist
theory that would elucidate diverse sorts o f material and be the key to un
derstanding language, social behavior, literature, popular culture, societies
with and without writing, and the structures of the human psyche. Theory
meant the specific interdisciplinary body o f theory that animated struc
turalist linguistics, anthropology, Marxism, semiotics, psychoanalysis, and
literary criticism.
But despite the broad interdisciplinary ambitions of theory in those
heady days, the question of literature lay at the heart of the theoretical
project: for Russian Formalism, for Prague structuralism, and for French
structuralism— especially for Roman Jakobson, who introduced Claude
Lévi-Strauss to the phonological model that was decisive for the develop
ment o f structuralism— the question o f the literariness o f literature was the
animating question. Theory sought to treat the objects and events o f cul
ture as elements o f so many “languages,” so it was concerned above all with
the nature o f language; and literature was what language was when it was
most deliberately and most ludically, most freely and most self-reflectively,
being language. Literature was the place where the structures and the func-
24
T H E O R Y
tioning o f language were most explicitly and revealingly foregrounded. To
investigate the crucial aspects o f language, you had to think about litera
ture. Thus, amid the array o f functions o f language defined by Roman Ja
kobson— the referential, the emotive, the phatic, the conative, the meta-
lingual, and the poetic, which involve, respectively, the foregrounding of
or stress on the context, the speaker, the contact, the addressee, the code,
and the message itself—it is the poetic function o f language that, in Jako-
bson’s famous phrase, brings “the focus on the message for its own sake”
(where “message” means the utterance itself).' And, in a formula that all of
us relics o f theory knew by heart, Jakobson declared, “The poetic function
o f language projects the principle o f equivalence from the axis o f selection
into the axis o f combination.”^ The poetic function o f language involves
the superimposition of the two fundamental axes o f language.
Now even at that time, when the nature o f the literariness o f litera
ture was a question that every good theorist had to address, it was clear
that in some sense theory was displacing the literary— clear, at least to all
those who attacked theory, accusing us o f forswearing literary values and
undermining the prestige or the special character o f literature. Narratolo-
gists studied the narrative structures o f James Joyce and James Bond with
equal assiduousness. Roman Jakobson, notoriously, took as his key exam
ple o f the poetic function o f language not Baudelaire’s sonnet “Les Chats,”
which he and Lévi-Strauss had exhaustively analyzed, but the political slo
gan “I like Ike,” where the object liked (Ike) and the liking subject (I) are
embraced in and contained by the act, like, so that the necessity o f my lik
ing Ike seems inscribed in the very structure o f the language.^ The special
status o f literature as privileged object of study was in an important sense
undermined, but the effect o f this sort o f study (and this is important) was
to locate a “literariness” in cultural objects o f all sorts and thus to retain a
certain centrality o f the literary.
The attempt to theorize the distinctiveness o f literary language or the
1. Roman Jakobson, “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics,” in .
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