Saving the Text: Reference and Belief

Abstract

One of the few problems in literary theory which Anglo-American critics can with some justice claim as our own is the problem of belief. Which is not say that we have recently manifested much inclination enforce that claim. Rather, the debates over the relation between literature and belief which were once the staple of theoretical discourse in this country seem more-or-less have passed from the scene. And, in the wake of phenomenology, structuralism, and now deconstruction, attempt once again raise the question of belief may seem like a singularly gratuitous act of logocentric nostalgia. Nevertheless, I would like in this essay return this perhaps too-familiar question and begin justifying this return by noting that the seemingly obsolete topic of belief was from the very start associated with a topic whose contemporary relevance can hardly be questioned, the supposed nonreferentiality of literary language. The question of belief in poetry and the question of reference in poetry are in fact the same question, and our answer that question, despite the turnover in critical approaches and vocabularies, has also remained pretty much the same. The purpose of this essay is thus examine not only that answer but the fact of its persistence and explore some of the possibilities for and consequences of a different answer. The terms in which the problem of belief was first conceived were more-or-less these-on the one hand, some critics maintained that beliefs have nothing do with literature and that literary language is non-referential. Different critics had, of course, different versions of non-referentiality, but I think we can get at the essence of this position by noting that it was primarily motivated by what one of its adherents, Cleanth Brooks, called the desire to take poetry out of ruinous competition with science and philosophy,'