Wesley Morris WBÂ Structuralism and the Articulated Text $20. OO FRIDAY'S FOOTPRINT Structuralism and the Articulated Text By Wesley Morris Wesley Morris has devoted himself to no less ambitious a task than to attempt a synthesis of a large number of theoretical critical perspectives usually treated as mutually exclusive. It is the measure of his achievement that he has been able to bring theoretical unity to the work of a rich variety of recent critics and to reconcile structuralism and poststructuralism with the divergent systems of such writers as Cassirer arid Wittgenstein, the existentialist Sartre, phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty and Poulet, and the linguists Chomsk y and Jakob­ son — critics whose schools are thought to be antagonistic, not only to the structuralist and poststructuralist phenomena, but to one an­ other as well. The design of Friday's Footprint serves to guide the reader toward a theory of literary in­ terpretation, the primary issue of which is to define the literary "text" and its "context." Pro­ fessor Morris begins with a discussion of Wil­ liam Faulkner's Go Down, Moses as an example of this author's "uses" of myth in forging his novel —"uses" being a term that, he points out, must be read as ambiguous, since it is not clear to what degree Faulkner uses the "Myth of the South" and to what extent (as Claude Lévi- Strauss would insist) the myth uses him; It is clear from this discussion, however, that be­ cause the novel "belpngs to" culture, it also re­ flects the problematics of all huma n being and belonging; and insofar as the novel is an articu­ late text, the problematics of belonging poses questions of meaning, style, and self-expression that must be examined in light of both tradi­ tional romantic philosophies of language and the challenges to that tradition raised by con­ temporary structuralist and poststructuralist theory. The discussion of the philosophy of language and stylistics in succeeding sections represents an attempt to deal with these problems in a sçries of dialectical engagements with major philosophers and critics. In Plato, Wittgen­ (Continued on back flap) Friday's Footprint Wesley Morris Structuralism and the Articulated Text Ohio State University Press: Columbus Ohio The excerpt from "The Waste Land" is from Collected Poems 1909-1962 by T . S. Eliot, copyright 1936 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.; copyright © 1963, 1964 by T . S. Eliot. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Also reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. from The Waste Land by T . S. Eliot. Excerpts from Go Down, Moses, by William Faulkner, are copy­ right 1940, 1941, 1942 by William Faulkner. Copyright 1942 by The Curtis Publishing Company. Copyright renewed 1968, 1969, 1970 by Estelle Faulkner and Jill Faulkner Summers. Reprinted by permission of Rando m House, Inc. Copyright © 1979 by the Ohio State University Press All Rights Reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Morris, Wesley. Friday's footprint. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Structuralism (Literary analysis). 2. Languages—Philos­ ophy. 3. Language and languages—Style. I. Title. PN98.S7M67 808 79-14147 ISBN 0-8142-0302-7 for Barbara Alverson Morris Let the earth speak, therefore, since the men are beyond our grasp. Over and above the delights which it had given m e by the river's edge, let it at last answer up and yield the secret of its unspoiledness. Wha t lay behind those confused appearances which are everything and nothing at one and the same time? If I take any particular scene and try to isolate it, that tree, that flower could be any other tree, any other flower. Could it also be a lie, that whole which gave m e such delight, that whole whose parts vanished as soon as I tried to examine them individually? If I had to admit that it was real, I wanted at least to master it, all of it, down to the smallest detail. I turned a prosecutor's eye upon the enormous landscape, narrowing it down to a strip of clayey river-marge and a handful of grasses: nothing there to prove that when I next raised m y eyes to the world about m e I should not find the Bois de Boulogne stretched out all round that insignificant patch of ground which was trodden daily by the most authentic of savages but from which Man Friday's footprint was absent. Lévi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques Preface: A Model for the Reader xi Acknowledgments xix Part i The Pilgrimage of Being 1 The Uses of Myth 1 Belonging as Typical: Sam Fathers 12 Belonging as Archetypal: Lucas Beauchamp 19 Apocalypse and the Loss of Being: Ike McCaslin 39 Forging the Novel: A Grammatical Model 46 O n Metaphor and Metonymy: A Stylistic Analysis of "Now" and "Then" 77 Part 2 The Centrality of Language 84 A Theory of Literary Language 84 An Outline of Procedure 90 The Philosophy of Language: Wittgenstein 91 The Philosophy of Language: Cassirer 102 The Methodology of Linguistics: Chomsky 114 A Psychoanalytic Model 121 The Possibility of History: Piaget 129 Part 3 Stylistics 147 Style as Existential Projection: The Author 151 Style as Dynamic Meaning Structure: The Text 163 Style as the "Affective" Structure of Meaning: The Reader 168 History as Existential 185 Part 4 Toward a Literary Hermeneutics 188 History and Interpretation: First View 189 History and Interpretation: Second View 192 The Hermeneutics of Verstehen: Consciousness 196 A Further Note on Language 198 The "Text" as Interpretation: In Defense of Romanticism 201 Text and Context in Interpretation 212 Notes 226 Index 247 Preface: A Mode l for the Reader The writing of this book has been accomplished over a four-year period and not in strictly chronological order. Th e subjects of language and style first presented themselves to m e and emerged as independent texts, but I found I could not long remain in the rarified air of pure theory. Parts 2 and 3, then, lay dormant while I rushed to test m y original impulses against the recalcitrance of literature itself, and slowly Parts 1 and 4 arose, more or less simultaneously, to round off my essay. It was not until this latter stage of development that I discovered precisely (or at least vividly) what I was writing about, and this discovery convinced me , more terribly than could any abstract conjectures, of the impossibility of formulating a complete statement on the inter­ pretation of literary works. I have awakened at times to the frantic urgency with which I was writing, to a feeling of frustration juxtaposed with exhilaration. Yet this intensity of feeling did not arise because I was on the brink of formulating truly new and original ideas; rather I found myself confronting a crisis of consciousness, a disruptive momen t of revolutionary transition both professional and cultural. The insignificance of this present work in the face of such grand feelings should be obvious to any reader; but if I have not been adequate to it, the following pages must reveal that I have been faithful. This short preface reflects both m y unwillingness to stop writing, m y fear that I have not finished, and m y doubt about what I have done that must be explained at least another time. The occasion for m y writing comes from what seems to m e an instructive division in the world of literary criticism. This division is not the same as the often-noted fragmentation of modern theory in our post-romantic world, not the same as our comfortable play with multiple perspectivisms. Ou r century in XI xii Preface Western society has been dominated by a multitude of romanticisms, but romanticisms nonetheless. W e have engaged in endless debates over the adequacy of various interpretive methodologies, battles between Ne w Critical formalism and historicism, between symbolism and realism, between phenom ­ enology and explication de texte, between existentialism and aestheticism. W e have supported countless volumes of quibbles between subgroups of larger groups; w e have spawned schools within schools, and countermovements to countermovements. Each fragmented system proclaims its newness, its achievement of greater insight, and its inviolable integrity. But all of this conflict has been no more than internecine war; the context has always been romanticism, and even the self-proclaimed classicists of the early twentieth-century Anglo-American literary world were, on some reflection, merely extensions of post-Kantian aesthetics. I do not mean to say that this extended romantic period renders all of these schools identical; I do claim, however, that they have all been trapped within the fundamental problematics of romantic philosophy. It is perhaps not much more than the tyranny of a specific terminology, the ubiquity of a vocabulary sustained by words like "becoming," "organicism," "symbol," "metaphor," "experience," "humanism," "time," "pastness," "subject," and a host of others too numerous to list. No w in the nineteen sixties and seventies one must be blind indeed not to sense the presence of a truly "other" movement, what I here will call (for lack of a better term) a ne w classicism, which seems bent on the total destruction of romantic meanings and values. It is no wonder that we, who are so steeped in the agony of our post- Kantian universe that it has become familiar and safe, tend to lash out against this encroachment on our sacred territory. W e reject, condemn, engage in ad hominem attacks, even try to ignore the penetrating questions leveled at our cherished beliefs, although we do so to little avail. It is particularly the specter of a many-headed giant called "structuralism" that disturbs us; its several mouths shout anti­ humanism, antisubjectivism, antihistoricism with belligerent forcefulness, and we respond somewhat quixotically with cries of our own well-worn phrases.