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C O N C E P T S
o f saying that this hidden Africanism is what the work is “really about.”
Our preference for interpretation over poetics, our assumption that the
payoff o f critical work should be the interpretation o f individual works,
leads us to interpret critical writing as making such claims, but readers are
scarcely to blame here, since even critics who maintain that they are not of
fering an interpretation are likely to end up suggesting that the structures
they have identified are what the work is really about. If the Africanist
presence marks darkening the skin as dangerous and sexually charged for
American literature, then the fact that this is disguised in various ways in
Hemingway’s plot is noteworthy, important for thinking about American
literature, but to stress the Africanist presence when it is displaced is likely
to seem an excessive, interested overinterpretation o f the work.
If poetics is to literature as linguistics is to language, one should not
take descriptions o f literary works, produced in a theoretical framework,
as interpretations. Since linguistics does not seek to interpret the sentences
o f a language but to reconstruct the system o f its rules, linguistic descrip
tions are not thought to be proposing new meanings o f a sentence. Often
what seems a biased critical interpretation giving excessive weight to some
factors and or structures and neglecting others should be seen, rather, as an
attempt to understand the system o f possibilities o f literature, the general
mechanisms o f narrative, o f figuration, o f ideology, and so on.
In “The Pragmatist’s Progress,” a response to Eco’s lectures, Rich
ard Rorty resists the distinction between interpretation and overinterpre
tation, seeing it as a version o f the distinction between interpreting a text
and using it for your own purposes. “This, o f course, is a distinction we
pragmatists do not wish to make. On our view, all anybody ever does with
anything is use it” {
10
, 93). There is no difference between using a text for
your own purposes and interpreting it as carefully as you can— both of
these are just ways o f putting the text to use. I will return to this disagree-
12.
A remarkable case in point is Roland Barthes, who claims in
5
/Z, the
step-by-step analysis o f a novella by Balzac, that he is not trying to assign a mean
ing to this text but to identify the different codes that make possible its intelligi
bility, but he ends by asserting that “it is fatal, the text says, to remove the paradig
matic slash mark which permits meaning to function (the wall of Antithesis), life
to reproduce (the opposition of the sexes) and property to be protected (the rule
o f contract)” (Roland Barthes,
S IZ
[New York: Farrar, Strauss, 1974], 2.15). The text
inexorably comes to be about the signifying mechanisms that are revealed.
ment between Eco and Rorty in a moment. More crucial to my mind than
this substitution o f a monism for a dualism is Rorty’s claim that we should
abandon our search for codes, our attempt to identify structural mecha
nisms, and simply enjoy “dinosaurs, peaches, babies, symbols and meta
phors without needing to cut into their smooth flanks in search of hidden
armatures” {lO , 91). At the end o f his response he returns to this claim,
arguing that there is no need for us to bother trying to find out how texts
work. “I see the idea that you can learn about ‘how the text works’ by us
ing semiotics to analyze its operations as like spelling out certain word-
processing subroutines in BASIC: you can do it i f you want to, but it is
not clear why, for most o f the purposes which motivate literary critics, you
should bother” (
70
,104). We should just use texts as we use word-process
ing programs, in an attempt to say something interesting.
But in this claim we do find a distinction between using a word-
processing program and analyzing it, understanding it, and if we shift the
analogy from the word-processing program that we might want to analyze
only in order to improve or adapt it to, say, a natural language, then we
might adduce the possibility that understanding how it works could be a
legitimate pursuit, even an essential one. Rorty’s own appeal to this dis
tinction between using your word-processing program and analyzing it
might be taken to refute his claim that all anyone ever does with a text is
to use it, or at least to indicate that there are significant differences among
ways o f using a text. Granting Rorty’s argument that for most purposes it
is not important to find out how computer programs or natural languages
or literary discourses work, we could argue that the purpose for which this
is important is precisely the academic study o f these subjects— computer
science, linguistics, and literary criticism and theory. The fact that people
can speak English perfectly well without worrying about its structure does
not mean that the attempt to describe its structure is pointless, only that
the goal o f linguistics is not to make people speak English better. Simi
larly, the goal o f poetics is neither to enable people to write better poems,
plays, and stories or to produce new interpretations o f individual literary
works, though o f course writers will often profit from learning how works
they particularly admire have been structured. For the study o f computer
science or literature it is essential to try to understand how these systems
work, what enables them to function as they do, and under what circum
stances they might function differently.
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