|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
EVEN TO this day humanist suppositions underlie our critical tradition, perhaps more than we would like to admit. We continue to believe in knowledge that, according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica's definition of the humanities, is “based on the common experience of men that is open and available to all” (8: 1182). Heir to the humanist's belief in the immanence of interpretation, New Criticism has successfully blocked the political interpretation of literature in the United States for many years, claiming that literary comprehension is possible only when all beliefs or doctrines exterior to the text are suspended and literary texts are read only in terms of their own norms and values. Fredric Jameson unmasks these claims by going farther than the usual Marxist attack on escapism and the repression of history. According to Dowling, Jameson questions formalism's own trump card, its claim of being free of doctrinaire beliefs, by showing that formalism too “rewrites literary works in terms of an ethical code that is the product of its historical moment” (Dowling 105).
Reader-response criticism swings the pendulum back from the text as object to the experience of reading. With its concept of “a community of readers” this critical approach seems to escape the sway of universal ideas. Reader response shows that meanings do not exist independently but are produced through a reader's interaction with the text. It also implies that all readers living in a particular place will “naturally” share certain values, rendering impossible a critical stance or oppositional reading. The question of how signification processes function in that “community” calls for another preliminary theoretical focus on the triadic relation among reader, text, and ideology.
In The German Ideology of 1848 Marx warns his readers against the sway of universal ideas, that is, the naive belief in an unproblematic access to the “real”: “the ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships … grasped as ideas … [;] the ruling class … has to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones” (65–66). Althusser's analysis of ideology goes further by including a psychological dimension that makes ideology inescapable. For Althusser, ideology is the imaginary relation to one's material existence. Institutions set this process in motion by interpellating each individual as subject. Althusser points out the ambiguity inherent in the word subject, which signifies at once “a free subjectivity: a center of initiatives, author and hence responsible for his or her actions, and … a subjected being, tied down to a superior authority, hence deprived of all freedom, except for the possibility to freely accept one's subjection.” Hence Althusser's schema of the functioning of ideology: “The individual is interpellated as a (free) subject to submit freely to the orders of the Subject, so as to accept freely his or her own subjection, so as to accomplish all by him- or herself the gestures and actions of his or her own subjection. Subjects exist only by and for their subjections” (36; my trans.).
To accept the “community of readers” as the ultimate point of reference only leaves the reader free to project uncritically on the text his or her implicit but unacknowledged ideological codings, to play the Althusserian “subject game,” an exercise that often reaches caricatural proportions in the classroom. Remedial action involves creating an awareness that the notion of “subject” is a construct rather than a given, within both the text and the individual. Constructing critical readers requires more than contextualization and an acknowledgment of the subjectivity of interpretation: the task includes challenging universal concepts such as “identity,” “authorship,” “gender,” and “difference” and clarifying the interpreter's own imaginary relation to the text.
Marxism and feminism have some common aims. They both try to lift the dominant ideological veil—although they disagree about the nature of that veil—and seek out the contradictions inherent in social and aesthetic systems. Feminism also uses Marxism's purposeful critical stance to aspire, as Macherey puts it, “to indicate a possible alternative to the given,” but it focuses more on analyzing the constitution and maintenance of gender identities than on analyzing social classes (15).
Jameson's basic definition of the task to be performed in the undergraduate classroom can apply to a feminist as well as to a Marxist pedagogy:
The presupposition here is that undergraduates … bring to [the text] a whole set of previously acquired and culturally sanctioned interpretive schemes. … The task is to make these interpretations visible, as an object, as an obstacle rather than a transparency, and thereby to encourage the student's self-consciousness as to the operative power of such unwitting schemes, which our tradition calls ideologies. (73)
In seeming contradiction to Jameson, Macherey denounces the “interpretive fallacy,” which he sees as a reduction of the apparent diversity of the work to a single signification. The point, however, is not to achieve the correct interpretation but, first, to point out the underlying presuppositions of various interpretations and, second, to construct the interpretation most likely to give reward and even pleasure to the reader. In contrast to the formalists or the “community of interpreters,” for whom there is a “natural” apprehension of the text, here one is self-consciously aware of constructing the text. Instead of considering the text in its totality, the reader explores its tensions, contradictions, and silences as the sites of significance. Instead of treating Diderot's text as mystifying in its contradictions, inconclusiveness, and lack of determinacy, or positing a harmony that does justice to the critic's presuppositions but not to textual complexities, contemporary theoretical tools give us the means to evaluate the text as the product of an interactive process that can shape and be shaped rather than as “factually given, existing to be received, described and assimilated” (16). This approach presumes the unsettling notion not only of a “free” text but also of a “free” identity, by which I mean amenable to change, to seeing new possibilities and configurations. Thus, in the effort to train readers to be critical, “teaching, like analysis, has to deal not so much with lack of knowledge as with resistances to knowledge” (Mohanty 150).
Rameau's Nephew seems to have been written to defy the critics' desire for interpretive mastery while at the same time trying “to engage a carefully designated public into action” (Sherman 21). Almost as fluid as the Rorschach test, it affords a favorable ground for exploring the reductive tendencies of interpretation as well as the opportunity for choosing one's own. I therefore propose that students not be given carte blanche in choosing their reading strategies but be assigned specific interpretations as a reading grid, both to focus their reading and to help them discover that each interpretive move is value-loaded.
The following interpretations are representative if not exhaustive. In their varied and often contradictory assessments, they share an unstated belief in the individual as the cornerstone of consciousness, whether located in the author's intention or in the characters' functions, and the concomitant belief in textual unity. 1 All the interpretations seem to view difference as fixed polar opposites that should spin toward a specific resolution.
In the Moi thesis “Diderot invites his audience to join in Moi's condemnation of Lui, but at the same time offers the opportunity of understanding that individual and the forces that combine to cause his guilt and failure” (Sherman 107). 2 Here the reader is asked to identify with Moi's universal voice, to see the difference between Moi and Lui in hierarchical terms, but nevertheless to be “sympathetic” to Lui's plight. What is not said but needs to be shown is that this interpretation encourages the reader to eat the cake and have it too, that is, to identify intellectually with authoritative discourse and to sympathize emotionally with the marginal elements excluded by that discourse. This is a very popular mode of interpretation, as proved by the success of the Hollywood film industry.
Doolittle, by contrast, sees Lui as society's ferment, confining Moi to the conservative guard. While definitely more appealing to the feminist reader, this thesis requires that one character win out over the other in order to justify the text. The same movement toward the elimination of difference is apparent in the so-called Hegelian interpretation, where Moi and Lui represent Diderot's alter egos, and their opposition represents the metaphorical expression of the “art-morality” or of the “philosopher-and-his-time” conflict. In the call for unity Jean Fabre's thesis goes even further by eliminating textual awareness of difference. In his introduction to Le Neveu de Rameau, Fabre states that “themes intercut, balance and harmonize one with another” (viii). Finding the necessary textual unity lacking in Le Neveu, Michel Launey concludes that the text has failed: “The work stops because the author has not been able to synthesize the two theses he has elaborately opposed” (4). Goldmann “sublimates” the problem of difference by situating it in a normative context, that of the essay as a literary genre and that of the author's intention: Diderot “is looking for theoretical answers to a series of questions fundamental to human existence which can have no prospect of ever being answered from his point of view” (46). Jay Caplan comes closest to accepting difference as a self-motivating force in Diderot's text, but he frames difference within another universal dichotomy, that between the conceptual and the nonconceptual: “If dialogue is the only instrument suited to seek out and probe reality, it can really ‘touch’ its object when it has lost its instrumentality—when it is no longer quite a concept” (7).
In an article on Diderot's Encyclopedia, James Creech acknowledges both Diderot's desire for unity and his awareness of having failed, quoting Diderot's words on the subject: “if we could define [words] according to unchanging nature, and not according to human conventions and prejudices which change continually, such definitions would become seeds for discovery” (185). The point, however, is that if Diderot fascinates us today, it is not because of what he intended to do but because of the gap between what he intended and what he actually accomplished and how that relates to our own present.
Bakhtin, reversing Diderot's formula, sees in heteroglossia the hedge against the reductive powers of mythology. For Macherey the multiplicity of the text's meanings can be accepted once the text is perceived as produced by specific conditions rather than by authorial intention. To step out of the circle of critical fallacies, Macherey proposes the following hypothesis:
The necessity of the work is founded on the multiplicity of its meanings; to explain the work is to recognize and differentiate the principle of this diversity. The postulated unity of the work which, more or less explicitly, has always haunted the enterprise of criticism, must now be denounced: the work is not created by an intention (objective or subjective); it is produced under determinate conditions. (78)
One of the ways in which Macherey's position can be presented to undergraduates is through dialogues from one of Godard's films, Masculin/Féminin. Not only will this method make his position more concrete, it also breaks down the exclusive monopoly literature has in the curriculum. As Hirzel and other literary historians have noticed, the dialogue is especially popular in periods of radical social change (Hirzel 2: 443–44; Sherman 21). Like Diderot, Godard uses the dialogue to bring to the surface issues considered taboo at the time they are being uttered and to confront the reader/spectator not so much with these issues as with, in Diderot's text, the complexity of the “real” and, in Godard's film, the pre-Foucault awareness that the characters' discourses reflect their specific conditions of existence rather than the expression of some psychological insight. 3
The analytical exercise involved in the uncovering of heteroglossia should help students become critical readers. The feminist reader, however, must go beyond the detached intellectual exercise and address the text's relation to her or his own position as a gendered subject living in the Western world at the end of the twentieth century. Diderot's dialogue can be treated as variations on the theme of a difference that plays on but does not submit to the two patterns of thought on which gender depends, that is, binarism and teleologicalism. 4 The dialogue constantly undermines the oppositions it sets up, and it does not aim at a final reconciliation, that is, the submission of the one or the domination of the other. From the collection of interpretations quoted above, one can see how unsettling this indeterminacy is to most readers and how adamantly they tend to revert to a gendered interpretation. Catharine Stimpson puts it this way:
Cultural laws of gender demand that feminine and masculine must play off against each other in the great drama of binary opposition. They must struggle against each other, or complement each other, or collapse into each other in the momentary, illusory relief of the androgynous embrace. In patriarchal cultures, the struggle must end in the victory of the masculine; complementarity must arrange itself hierarchically; androgyny must be a mythic fiction. (1)
For the purpose of our exercise, Rameau's complexity will be reframed in terms of his androgyny. The student can list characteristics of Rameau that have historically been ascribed to female characters (e.g., the financial dependency, the need to wear a “mask,” to appear stupid, to use his body as a spectacle and as a means to earn a living, the difficulties of being creative) as well a characteristics that would make the dialogue extremely “unrealistic” were Rameau a Ramelle (the crude language, the individualism and physical independence, the assertiveness, the craftiness, the rejection of sentimentality, the fact that Moi does listen to and respect Rameau as a musical expert).
The magazine Art and Antiques recently reported that the Mona Lisa mystery has been solved. According to Lilian Schwartz, who made the discovery, “Of all the celebrated riddles, none has been pursued more relentlessly than that of the model's identity. Yet the enigma remained … until now. With the help of a computer-based image-processing technique that scaled and juxtaposed the painting with the artist's only existing drawing of himself, the sphinx-like riddle posed by the Mona Lisa's smile has been solved. … The Mona Lisa is Leonardo da Vinci's portrait of himself” (50). Earlier writings, unable to displace the gender codes, could only speak of the painting's mystery: Leonardo had “gone beyond the capabilities of Art” (53). Schwartz remains within that tradition, failing to mention that Dali, who used the Mona Lisa to paint his self-portrait, and Freud, who proposed a theory of bisexuality as early as 1905, seem not to have been that puzzled by the riddle. Art historians seem to have been immune from any such influence—either because their insights were relegated to their “specialized field” or because they lacked a computer or because they were threatened by any tampering with gender.
As this example illustrates, ideology has far-reaching epistemological implications, and texts must be analyzed with an awareness of the framework we bring to them. Godard's film can help us—teachers and students—to confront the way identity is socially and linguistically constructed in today's world of consumerism and sexism and to understand the ambiguity inherent in the notion of “character” and “subject.” Then we can ask why we resist certain elements in Diderot's work. We might discover that by relinquishing the notion of a fixed identity (subject) or of a fixed textual meaning (author), we also dispense with the gender-definition game that polarizes and immobilizes the complexity of life and text into the black-and-white of myth.
The author is an independent scholar currently working on a book on French cinema. This article is based on a paper presented at the MLA convention, 27–30 December 1986, in New York.
1 Roland Barthes relates the poststructuralist attack on the “subject” to the concept of authorship: “Once the Author is distanced, the claim to decipher a text becomes entirely futile. To assign an author to a text is to impose a brake on it, to furnish it with a final signification, to close writing” (53).
2 In a footnote on the same page, Sherman summarizes the main interpretations of Diderot's text. O'Gorman gives a similar account in a footnote on page 37.
3 Foucault defined the goal of his work thus: “My objective has been to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects” (208).
4 Catharine R. Stimpson defines binarism as “splitting the world into mutually reinforcing sets of dualistic categories” and teleologicalism as “believing that the world, and its narratives, spin towards certain ends, including the triumph of the willful masculine over the feminine” (4).
Althusser, Louis. “Idéologies et appareils idéologiques d'Etat.” Pensée 151 (June 1970): 3–38.
Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” The Rustle of Language. New York: Hill, 1986. 49–55.
Caplan, Jay. Framed Narratives. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985.
Creech, James. “Chasing after Advances: Diderot's Article 'Encyclopedia.'” Yale French Studies 63 (1982): 183–97.
Doolittle, James. Rameau's Nephew: A Study of Diderot's “Second Satire.” Geneva: Droz, 1960.
Dowling, William C. Jameson, Althusser, Marx: An Introduction to the Political Unconscious. Ithaca: Cornell UP 1984.
Fabre, Jean. Introduction. Le Neveu de Rameau. By Diderot. Geneva: Droz, 1950. vii–xcv.
Foucault, Michel. “Afterword: The Subject and Power.” Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Ed. H. L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinowe. 2nd ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982. 208–26.
Goldmann, Lucien. The Philosophy of the Enlightenment. London: Routledge, 1973.
Hirzel, Rudolf. Der Dialog: Ein literarihistorischer Versuch. 2 vols. Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1895.
“Humanities.” Encyclopaedia Britannica: Macropaedia. 1984.
Jameson, Fredric. Interview. Diacritics 13.3 (1982): 72–91.
Launey, Michel. Entretiens sur Le Neveu de Rameau. Ed. Michéle Duchet et Michel Launey. Paris: Nizet, 1967.
Macherey, Pierre. Theory of Literary Production. Trans. Geoffrey Wall. London: Routledge, 1980.
Marx, Karl. The German Ideology. 1848. New York: International, 1981.
Mohanty, S. P. “Radical Teaching, Radical Theory: The Ambiguous Politics of Meaning.” Theory in the Classroom. Ed. Cary Nelson. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1986. 149–76.
O'Gorman, Donal. Diderot the Satirist. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1971.
Schwartz, Lilian. 'A Startling Discovery: On a Computer Screen in New Jersey Appears the Answer to the Riddle of the World's Most Enigmatic Smile.” Art and Antiques Jan. 1987: 50–55.
Sherman, Carol. Diderot and the Art of Dialogue. Geneva: Droz, 1976.
Stimpson, Catharine R. “Gertrude Stein and the Transposition of Gender.” The Poetics of Gender. Ed. Nancy K. Miller. New York: Columbia UP, 1986. 1–18.
© 1988 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
|
|---|
|
|
|
