Splendors and Miseries of Textual Intercourse

Abstract

rT _HE HONOR being invited to write a commentary on an issue this distinguished journal is one that I cannot resist. I must, however, put a few cards on the table. I am not by inclination or professional training greatly devoted to the theoretical discussion literature, and for me the Problems Literary Theory are as nothing to the one problem why there is so much it about. I am also one those who, as Robert Alter put it in the Preface to Art Biblical Narrative, cling to the belief that it is possible to discuss complex literary matters in a language understandable to all educated people.1 This makes it difficult for me to write sympathetically essays on The 'Meaning' a Literary Work which talk, as Professor Olsen does, of a sequence signs concatenated in accordance with the combinatorial conventions defining the system. As to essays with subtitles like Toward a Generative Typology the Text, they almost always end up with sentences like: It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that the line unit's segmentation syntagmaticity in poetry cuts across the signifier continuum so as to achieve an interpenetration sense between signifiers in different lines, whereas narrative discourse's 'spread-eagling' paradigmaticity reinforces the signifier continuum so strongly as to allow linkups even at a distance, and this favors the production a sustained differentiation and evolution sense between signifiers in different word sequences-which similarly defeat me. general argument that literary discourse is different from morbid aphasia seemed to me roughly on the right lines, though aphasia was what I found myself uncharitably wishing on Professor Johnson-not literally, course, but within the fictive situation the story which he was the narrator. By now my prejudices will be evident to all.