The No-Man's Land of Competing Patterns

Abstract

Professor Kincaid's Coherent Readers, Incoherent Texts (Critical Inquiry 3 [Summer 1977]: 781-802) sets out effect a reconciliation between the claims of some critics that literary works have a core of determinate and the counterclaims of others that determinate is an illusion. In the first group, Kincaid places four critics with neo-Aristotelian leanings-M. H. Abrams, Wayne Booth, Ralph Rader, and Sheldon Sacks. The opposing forces are represented by the deconstructionists, including Roland Barthes and Hillis Miller, and by the affective stylistics of Stanley Fish. Kincaid's aim is find some middle ground between the two groups, satisfactory perhaps neither, he says, but incorporating both some freedom and some solidity (p. 783). I wish stand, he concludes, somewhere between the two camps (p. 789), to mediate ... between the arguments for a universal coherence and those for indeterminacy (p. 802). The opposites which Kincaid proposes reconcile take a variety of forms depending on whether the locus of his discussion is the text, the author, or the reader. Thus we find such opposing categories as determinate vs. indeterminate meaning, solid vs. insubstantial texts, single vs. multiple intentions, straightforward vs. duplicitous works, single vs. multiple organizing patterns, coherent vs. incoherent structures, and univocal products vs. equivocal processes. Although Kincaid slides rather easily from topic topic, moving, for example, from intention structure or from meaning form with hardly a clue as how we get from one the other, it is clear that he wants effect some compromise between the opposite categories within whatever his topic at