Reply article 91

Critical Practice again Antony Easthope's reply to my article about Catherine Belsey'sCn'tical Practice does not refute the arguments I made against the book. I showed that the author's notion of what meaning is and how it is produced is inadequate, and pointed out that she offers incompatible views about literature, for she worries that 'realist' writing makes 'accepting statements about social conditions 111 the world, and at the same time promulgates the Saussurean-Demdean consensus which holds that language and literature are systems of internal reference only, which therefore cannot sa anything, presumably, about the world. Besides drawing attention to suc inconsistencies I showed that her definition of ideology is flaccid and protean, and all these points were substantiated by reference and quotation. If this isn't a systematic engagement with somebody else's arguments then what is?

More personally, I disliked the author's constant dismissal of individual experience and inventiveness, her belief that human beings can be reduced to their status and function as language users, her insistence that everything is mediated through ideology, and her desire to reduce criticism to a constant search for ideological 'contradictions'. All this seemed to me an uninteresting and predictable identikit assemblage of views. 1 am womed about the increasing use of dogmatic books like this as required reading on BA and MA courses, because I think that beneath their surface sophistication they are muddled and unthinking. That is why the article was written. I was not foolish enough to believe that its arguments would convince those whose mental horizons are bounded by Saussure, Lacan, Althusser and Derrida, but the attempt seemed worth making all the same.

To take up one or two specific points: Antony Easthope reminds us (I'm not sure why) that Saussure died in 1913, adding to his name the ritualistic, genuflecting phrase 'the founder of modern linguistics', as Structuralists always do. Why is it that their acceptance of a thinker's views must always be so uncritical and adulatory? Linguists themselves treat Saussure's insights into the nature of language much more judiciously. The original version of my article suggested some of the weaknesses in Saussure's concept of meaning, but the piece had to be shortened because of space restrictions (though I realise that this may well also be true of Easthope's reply). Anyway, Saussure's influential notion that 'in a language there are only differences' is disputable and is disputed. It is, I hope, needless to say that I do not believe that language 'consists of self-sufficient units assembled mechanistically like bricks', one of several peculiar notions which Easthope thinks are 'implied in my article.

On the question of fictionality: it isdifficult to know what to say to those who insist that literature is fictional: can they really believe that it is only that? On Behaviourism: I called the book Behaviourist in spirit because it sees simple mechanistic codes and systems at work where others see complexity and diversity. The views put forward in Critical Practice about how literature works are analogous, therefore, to reductive Behaviourist views of the mind.

Another 'implied view attributed to me by Easthope is that 'we use language in the same way that we use a hammer'. The comparison with the hammer was introduced to take issue with Demda's view that it is not the speaking subject which uses language but language which uses the speaking subject. I once compared

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92 Critical Quarterly, vol. 24, no. 4

poems to trains on the grounds that both are arrangements of linked items in linear sequence, the first item having a decisive influence on the direction taken by all the others. It would have been annoying if someone had later quoted me as saying. simply, that poems are l i e trains. Similarly in this case. But Easthope's suggestion that the true analogy is with the hand rather than a hammer is an interesting and suggestive one.

Easthope is wrong to accuse me of asserting 'implicitly' that experience always gives direct and unmediated access to reality: the point I made is that it is impossible to imagine any way of proving whether it does or not. Yet another implicit view attributed to me is a naive trust in the 'supposedly unmediated experience of reading'. I have nowhere either stated or implied - and have elsewhere explicitly denied - that the language of literature provides us with a clear window through which we view external reality. It is absurd to polarise discussion of these matters into a choice between the 'all-fact' or the 'all-fiction' view of literature. The view imputed to me that the reader merely responds passively to the 'fact' of the work is equally absurd. Why are Structuralists unable to think in anything but these silly black-versus-white polarisations? To call the reader the producer of the text, as Belsey and Easthope do, is to ignore the fact that reading and writing are different activities. At the same time, nobody imagines that we consume a novel in the same way as we eat a dinner.

But the saddest thing about the Belsey-Easthope view of language and literature is its extreme impoverishment. For them literature can only be entirely fictional, and the only alternative view they can imagine is the one which sees it as providing a 'truelfalse reflection of reality'. Why are these the only possibilities? Have they never heard of the manifold purposes for which we use language - to persuade, to express hope, love, fear, and other emotions, to offer opinions, to voice doubts, to give warnings, to fantasise, and so on? These are the ways in which language, and therefore literature, relates to the world, or, as Wittgenstein says of pictures, 'That is how a picture is attached to reality; it reaches right out to it'. It is paradoxical that while we are witnessing a major revitalisation of the novel, and an impressive extension of its technical sophistication and range of reference, Structuralists should be promulgating their sterile doctrine of the ineluctable fictionality of the novel. Their arguments are refuted by Midnight's Children, Earthly Powers, The White Hotel, The Dean's December and other exciting, ambitious, innovative, and wide-ranging novels written over the last two years - that is how literature is attached to reality; it reaches right out to it. It is a miserable fate indeed to be cut off from all this because of an ill-founded conviction that realist writing 'cannot foreground contradiction', especially as foregrounding contradictions is precisely what these novels achieve, and so much more effectively than any other medium could. I see no reason for foregroundinginstead an inflexible system of critical theory and viewing all literature through its prison bars. P E E R BARRY