The New Paradigm: Subjective or Transactive?

Abstract

AM MOST GRATEFUL to the editor for asking me to comment on Professor David Bleich's bold, wide-ranging paper. And thank you, David Bleich, for laying it on the line to literary critics in general as you laid it on the line in June 1971 to this literary critic in particular. As you know, the shift in perspective you then proposed led me to a profound turn in my own thinking about objectivity. 1 I hope it does the same now for other critics and theorists of literature, for, as a group, we have a way to go before we can say we have fully absorbed the world view established by developments in early twentieth-century physics, mid-century biology, the philosophical statements that have accompanied them or, I would add, the growth of the social (human) sciences since the late nineteenth century. I am thinking of psychoanalysis, of course, but also of the relativism implicit in cultural anthropology, the linguistic demonstrations (by Whorf and Sapir) that language shapes our perceptions, and, in particular, the nearly-a-century of powerful research by psychologists of (transactional psychology), all leading to an overwhelming demonstration that perception is a constructive act. At the moment, however, my impression is that many, perhaps most, literary critics clutch the old paradigm and the illusion of objectivity like a security cloth. Is it our fig leaf that we hang onto it so tightly and so obviously? The experimental psychologists show the same tenacity for a nineteenth-century model of science, but they need that supposed respectability, I suspect, more than we do-now. I think once we required New or formalist criticism as a corrective to a long period of critical selfindulgence in impressionism and naive applications of history. Now, however, we can afford to recognize that even the strictest textual criticism expresses, willy-nilly, the critic's characteristic style. We can go on to the next steps, like learning how to think and write in this new mode or evaluating structuralist and semiotic developments as to the degree to which they accommodate the omnipresence of individual styles of creation and re-creation.