Page 41 - Critical and Cultural Theory

LANGUAGE AND INTERPRETATION
people to question where the meanings they tend to take for
granted actually come from and how signs are socially produced.
Yet, Structuralism is impaired by its pursuit of a fantasy of
universality, by its determination to unite disparate forms of
knowledge and signification under the banner of language, and by
the idea that immutable principles can be detected beneath the
tangled skein of contingent cultural codes and conventions. This
has made it increasingly unsatisfactory for writers and thinkers
inclined to suspect that life is never quite so neat. In 'Structuralism
and Literary Criticism'(1964), Gerard Genette (b. 1930) argues
that the problem with Structuralism lies in its faith in the universal
explanatory power of structures. This faith does not take
adequately into account the constant displacement of meaning in
language: meaning changes across time and space. The structural-
ist model is not, Genette maintains, universally applicable to all
texts. What he proposes, as an alternative, is a critical scene in
which different approaches are adopted to suit the specific require-
ments of different types of texts, and in which the relationship
between the past and the present is assiduously taken into consid-
eration.
Genette suggests that the study of signs comprises two main
critical approaches. One possible approach hinges on the separa-
tion of the present from the past, and accordingly proposes differ-
ent reading modalities for the texts of the present and those of the
past. Living literature is the object of ongoing interpretation and
its signs are read by engaging directly with texts as experienced in
the here-and-now (hermeneutic model). Remote literature is the
object of a methodical analysis of forms, narrative systems and
sign structures (structuralist model). The second approach
described by Genette promotes a dialogue between past and
present. Its fundamental premise is that the present does not
merely encompass signs and texts produced in the present but also
past signs and texts perceived as relevant to the present. Language
and interpretation have to do with how we consume the signs of
the past no less than with the signs we construct in the present.
Structuralism, Genette intimates, is bound to fail as long as it tries
to anchor the unanchorable, to arrest the constant slippage of
signs. This slippage inevitably occurs when we realize that a word
or sentence we use always begs comparison to other words and
sentences that could have been employed in their place. The words

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