In this essay, Paul de Man is concerned with the reluctance of narratologists to stress the importance of the paradigmatic or metaphorical axis in the production of meaning in a given utterance. (To study this axis is in effect to study what De Man terms the "rhetoric" [390] of an utterance which involves the "study of tropes and figures" [390].) Narratologists tend, by contrast, to place emphasis on the syntagmatic or metonymic axis (that is, the grammar) of any utterance, arguing that without syntax there would be no clarity of meaning in any utterance.

De Man questions whether "this reduction of figure to grammar is legitimate" (391) and, in order to test the claims of narratologists, he considers the case, not insignificantly, of the rhetorical question (i.e one in which the answer is implied by the very question). Drawing upon a popular American sit-com (All in the Family), his example is ‘What’s the difference?’ Archie Bunker’s wife asks him whether he wants his bowling shoes laced over or under to which he replies ‘what’s the difference?’ She interprets his response literally and replies, somewhat naively, by taking the time to explain the difference between lacing a shoe ‘over’ and lacing it ‘under’, a response which provokes his ire. As De Man put it,

"What’s the difference?’ did not ask for difference but meant instead ‘I don’t give damn what the difference is.’ The same grammatical pattern engenders two different meanings that are mutually exclusive: the literal meaning asks for the concept difference whose existence is denied by the figurative meaning. . . . [G]rammar allows us to ask the question, but the sentence by means of which we ask it may deny the very possibility of asking. . . . A perfectly clear syntactical paradigm (the question) engenders a sentence that has at least two meanings, one which asserts and the other which denies its own illocutionary mode. (392-3)

Another way of thinking about what De Man is saying is to consider what Derrida has to say about ‘signifying play’ or the ‘play of difference’ (two synonyms for différance). The problem with Mrs. Bunker’s question is that this particular sequence of signs is a particularly good example of the way in which the principle of différance which informs the paradigmatic axis operates to generate more than one meaning. There is, consequently, a surplus of signification which makes for indeterminacy and impedes understanding. As a result, a certain tension is set up between the paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes, between the rhetoric and the grammar of the utterance the consequence of which is that the former undermines the latter.

The "confusion" (393), De Man tells us, "can be cleared up only by the intervention of an extratextual intention" (393). In this case, Bunker can set his wife straight but, unfortunately, we do not always benefit from such a luxury when it comes to dealing with literary texts whose authors are long dead. Bunker’s anger may be due, as De Man puts it, to "despair when confronted with a structure of linguistic meaning that he cannot control and that holds the discouraging prospect of an infinity of similar future confusions" (393). If the speaker or writer is not there to clarify in person what s/he meant by such a question, the result is radical indeterminacy or what J. Hillis Miller, another prominent Deconstructionist, terms unreadability:

it is impossible to decide by grammatical or other linguistic devices which of the two meanings (that can be entirely contradictory) prevails. Rhetoric radically suspends [the] logic [of grammar] and opens up vertiginous possibilities of referential aberration. (393)

It is the différance intrinsic to the metaphoric axis which suspends the logic of the syntax.

STANLEY FISH "IS THERE A TEXT IN THIS CLASS?"

Stanley Fish considers a similar example in "Is There a Text In This Class?" Fish is a Harvard Professor who was intrigued by a seemingly trivial question put to him by a student one day at the start of semester, the question indicated by the title. What strikes Fish is the infinity of possible significations that could arise therefrom were it not for the fact that both teacher and student share the same context. He knows what she intends because of the common share situation which they share and in which the utterance was made: the first day of class. Contextualisation is what arrests the play of signification and prevents communication from lapsing into babelian anarchy.

Another example of signifying play, this time an utterance with tragic consequences, is to be found in a film called Let Him Have It, based upon a true story. The chief protagonist is a mentally subnormal man who finds himself misled by bad company. One night, while breaking into a business house, the police surround him and a partner on the roof. He surrenders peacefully but his partner, younger and less mature, keeps the police at bay by firing his gun indiscriminately. In an effort to support the call by one of the policemen, he tells his partner to lay down his weapon: ‘let him have it,’ he says. Shortly after, a policeman is killed by one of the partner’s shots. Later, at their trial, the Prosecutor convinces the jury that the chief protagonist meant that his partner should shoot. He is subsequently hanged, despite a great public outcry. His partner in crime is alive to this day because, at the time of the crime, he was underage.

In short, the implication of both De Man’s and Fish’s essays is that all users of language certainly set out to say something. That is, they undoubtedly have an intention. However, E.D. Hirsch’s advice that the listener/reader should seek the user’s intention if s/he wants to interpret an utterance correctly is a course of action fraught with difficulties. Signs, because of différance, signifying play or the play of difference, that is, because of the fact that signs ceaselessly gesture beyond themselves to a myriad other signs from which they are with difficulty distinguished, always mean more than we want them to mean. The number of possible meanings explode or, to use Derrida’s sexual metaphor, they disseminate potentially in a zillion directions. There is always an excess or surplus of signification which undermines the user’s intention, in short.

For a successful act of communication to occur, both the sender and the recipient of the message must perform what is tantamount to a Procrustean act. (The name comes from a figure drawn from Greek mythology who, to make tall people fit into a bed, would lop off their feet.) All speakers and writers do this: to intend a particular meaning is in effect to arrest signifying play and delimit the number of possible meanings of a given sequence of signs. In this way, the utterance is forced into a specific context. Stanley Fish tells us that the listener/reader does the same thing. S/he reduces the vast array of possible meanings inherent in a particular utterance to what s/he believes the speaker or writer intended. Successful communications occur when the speaker’s/writer’s Procrustean act coincides with the listener’s/reader’s equally Procrustean act. Potentially, however, any utterance is indeterminate or unreadable. In terms of literature, it is ultimately the reader who decides the meaning of a literary text. This is especially the case if the author is not around to give an account of his intentions. Fish goes so far as to assert that it is the reader’s intention (to be precise, how s/he arrests the play of signification and what s/he reads into the utterance in question), rather than the speaker’s/writer’s intention, which is paramount.

Deconstructionist critics always read a text by paying close attention to the surplus of meaning which functions to undermine the writer’s intention. Since sign-systems operate by means of différance, this intention is usually conveyed or structured on the basis of binary oppositions which, however, undo themselves. Deconstructionists usually seek to trace how the figurative excess of the writer’s own language, the so-called play of difference, which has the effect of undoing the binary oppositions implicit in his or her argument and which, thus, dissolves the writer’s intention. For example, a writer may set out to write something in which male is explicitly or implicitly privileged over female. However, his very words used in so doing almost always undermine this intent as result of which the very qualities predicated of the female are seen to come to inhere in the male and vice versa. To put this another way, the boundary between male and female becomes blurred.

STANLEY FISH "WHAT MAKES AND INTERPRETATION ACCEPTABLE?"

By addressing the conditions by which all truth-claims are articulated, no one has responded better than Fish to the absolutism which has dominated literary criticism. He begins the process of demolishing the possibility of all absolute truth-claims by proposing that for those who believe "in determinate meaning" (338), therefore "disagreement can only be a theological error" (338). Fish points out that for those who believe in absolute determinacy, the ‘truth’ is empirically ascertainable, lying "plainly in view, available to any who has the eyes to see" (338). In this scheme of things, those who do not agree with this putatively self-evident ‘truth’ are thought to "perversely substitute their own meanings for the meanings that texts obviously bear" (338). Arguing, by contrast, that it is what he calls ‘interpretive communities’ which "constitute the objects upon which its members . . . can then agree" (338), Fish contends that it is an illusion to believe that "facts exist in their own evident shape and that disagreements are to be resolved by referring the respective parties to the facts as they really are" (338). Disagreements cannot be resolved by reference to the ‘facts’ "because the facts emerge only in the context of some point of view" (338). As a result, disagreements as to the ‘truth’ "must occur between those who hold (or are held by) different points of view" (338). Consequently, what is at stake in a disagreement is the "right to specify what the facts can hereafter be said to be" (338).

Fish argues that what goes on in the field of literary criticism is a variation upon this scenario. It is here that

everyone’s claim is that his interpretation more perfectly accords with the facts, but where everyone’s purpose is to persuade the rest of us to the version of the facts he espouses by persuading us to the interpretive principles in the light of which those facts will seem indisputable. (339)

The text is a "consequence of the interpretation for which it is supposedly evidence" (340) as a result of which a word "will be seen to obviously have one meaning or another" (340) only "in the light of an already assumed interpretation" (my emphasis; 340). Whenever a critic makes adamant assertions of the sort ‘without a doubt . . .’ or ‘there can be no disputing the fact that . . .,’ "you can be sure that you are within hailing distance of the interpretive principles which produce the facts that he presents as obvious" (341). Consequently, it follows that "when one interpretation wins out over another, it is not because the first has been shown to be in accordance with the fact but because it from the perspective of its assumptions that the facts are now being specified" (340).

Fish goes so far as to argue, in opposition to the pluralists, that there is nothing in the text itself which rules out some readings and allows others. Given that the text "is always a function of interpretation, then the text cannot be the location of the core of agreement by means of which we reject interpretations" (342). This rejection is, rather, "determined by the literary institution which at any one time will authorise only a finite number of interpretative strategies" (342), that is, by a "core of agreement" or "canons of acceptability" (348) concerning the "ways of producing the text" (342). This does not mean that these rules are "monolithic or stable" (343). Rather, the "boundaries of the acceptable are continually being redrawn" (343). An easily dismissed reading does not mean that the text excludes it but that there is as yet no elaborated interpretive procedure for producing that text" (345), "no way of ‘looking’ or reading (and remember, all acts of looking or reading are ways) that would result in the emergence" (346) of meanings of the sort that has been easily dismissed.

Fish proceeds to argue persuasively that what is transformed when emergent canons of acceptability permit a new way of looking at the same text is not the text per se. The object of transformation is, rather, the text(s) produced by the prior interpretive strategies which the new strategies will in turn dislodge. To put this another way, ‘getting back to the text itself’ is a gesture frequently lauded but it is "not a move one can perform because the text one gets back to will be the text demanded by some other interpretation" (354). Indeed, Fish contends that the best way to conceptualise the relationship between dominant and emergent strategies is in terms of displacement: a

new interpretive strategy always makes its way in some relationship of opposition to the old, which has often marked out a negative space (of things that aren’t done) from which it can emerge into respectability. . . . Rhetorically the new position announces itself as a break from the old, but in fact it is radically dependent on the old, because it is only in the context of some differential relationship that it can be perceived as new or, for that matter, perceived at all. (349)

In other words, the "discovery of the ‘real point’ is always what is claimed whenever a new interpretation is advanced, but the claim makes sense only in relation to a point (or points) that had previously been considered the real one" (350). The reason for this that the "space in which a critic works has been marked out for him by his predecessors, even though he is obliged by the conventions of the institution to dislodge them" (350). That is, "it is because something has already been said" (350) that the critic "can now say something different" (350) which is reflected in what Fish describes as the "unwritten requirement that an interpretation present itself as remedying a deficiency in the interpretations that have come before it" (350).

In short, Fish contends, the basic gesture involved in all criticism is

to disavow interpretation in favour of simply presenting the text; but it is actually a gesture in which one set of interpretive principles is replaced by another that happens to claim for itself the virtue of not being an interpretation at all. The claim, however, is an impossible one since in order ‘simply to present’ the text, one must at the very least describe it . . . and description can occur only within a stipulative understanding of what there is to be described, an understanding that will produce the object of its attention. (353)

The announcement that one is ‘returning to the text’ or to the ‘facts themselves’ will be a powerful rhetorical ploy as long as it is predicated on the assumption that criticism is secondary to the text in the same way that interpretation is secondary to the facts themselves. As Fish puts it, "there are no moves that are not moves in the game, and this includes even the move by which one claims" (355) not to be part of the game.

For all these reasons, a truly radical interpretation (of the ‘world’ or of literary ‘texts’) is an impossibility because "in order to be wholesale, it would have to be made in terms wholly outside" (354-355) the dominant conventions in place and by which it could not therefore be recognised as such.

Here, Bloom offers us here a way of thinking about the concept of intertextuality (the synchronic relationship which binds texts to all other texts) rather than literary history (the diachronic relationship linking the succession of literary texts). He begins by repeating Derrida’s question in "Freud and the Scene of Writing": "what is a text, and what must the psyche be if it can be represented by a text?" (209). Bloom, concerned more narrowly with poetry, asks by contrast: "What is a psyche, and what must a text be if it can be represented by a psyche?" (209).

Bloom’s framework of thinking in earlier studies such as The Anxiety of Influence and "The Dialectic of Poetic Tradition" is demonstrably Freudian and diachronic. There he compares texts to psyches in order to argue that the relationship of succession which links the emergence of a given writer to his precursor is an analogous to the process by which Oedipal rivalry between son and father is replaced by a relationship of identification. From this point of view, in order to carve a niche for themselves, writers reject the influence of their predecessors ultimately only to unconsciously reflect those influences in their own works. Texts, like our psyches, bear in themselves at the latent level, rather than the manifest level, the traces of this process. As with dreams, the evidence of this repressed relationship emerges at symptomatic moments in the text, moments analogous the devices of condensation and displacement utilised by the dream-work, according to Freud. This model of literary history has proved a very influential and suggestive one.

Bloom argues that it is important, in the wake of Lacan and his view that the unconscious is not the repository of repressed instincts but is, rather, structured like a language as a result of its insertion into the langue of culture, to rethink the precise nature of the relationship between the text and the psyche. Lacan, you might recall, contends that human existence is comparable to an utterance. We exist at the intersection of the paradigmatic axis / metaphoric pole (the synchronic langue of culture) and the syntagmatic axis / metonymic pole (the diachronic succession of events which comprise our lives). From this point of view, by analogy, every literary text finds itself located at the intersection of both paradigmatic axes and syntagmatic axes. Along the syntagmatic axis, the emergence of a given text is one event in a diachronic sequence of similar emergences. Along the paradigmatic axis, each text forms part of a synchronic system (this can be both the system of texts which exist at a given moment of history--such as Renaissance literature--and the system formed by literature as a whole). Any text is thus linked to other texts by the principle of différance: that is, both deferral, the principle of metonymic contiguity which is operative along the syntagmatic axis, and displacement, the principle of difference along the paradigmatic axis.

This is why Bloom argues that poems are not "self-contained" (210), that is, they do not have an "ascertainable meaning or meaning without reference to other texts" (210). Synchronically-speaking, poems

are not things but only words that refer to other words, and those words refer still to other words. . . . Any poem is an inter-poem, and any reading of a poem is an inter-reading. A poem is not a writing, but rewriting. (210)

As a result, for Bloom, the poem’s "true subject is its repression of the precursor poem" (212). The result is that he

strives for a selection, through repression, out of the traces of the language of poetry; that is, he represses some of the traces, and remembers others. This remembering is a misprision, or creative misreading, but no matter how strong a misprision, it cannot achieve an autonomy of meaning, or a meaning fully present, that is, free from all literary context. Even the strongest poet must take up his stance within literary language. (my emphases; 211)

Poetic strength (Bloom’s synonym for the poet’s finding of a voice that is seemingly distinctive) is, in short, an act of "usurpation" (211) designed to dethrone a strong predecessor. The relationship linking texts along this axis is, evidently, a metaphorical one: poetry is a "dance of substitutions, a constant breaking-of-the-vessels, as one limitation undoes a representation, only to be restituted in turn by a fresh representation" (213).

Diachronically-speaking, he argues, poems are "not psyches [Freud], nor things [the New Critics], nor are they renewable archetypes in a verbal universe [Frye]" (213). They are tantamount, rather, to "acts of reading" (213) of previous readings of previous readings, ad infinitum, that is, poems are always already in "debate with . . . precursor poems" (213). No poet writes in a vacuum but, rather, always does so in the wake (or in the shadow) of previous poetry as a result of which his "art" (211) is necessarily an "aftering" (211), as Bloom puts it. The relationship linking texts along this axis is, evidently, a metonymic one:

Every strong poem, at least since Petrarch, has known implicitly what Nietzsche taught us to know explicitly: that there is only interpretation, and that every interpretation answers an earlier interpretation, and then must yield to a later one. (213)