After Strange Texts: The Role Of Theory in the Study of Literature ed. by Gregory Jay and David Miller (review)

Book Reviews105 GREGORY JAY and DAVID MILLER, eds. After Strange Texts: The Role Of Theory in the Study ofLiterature. University, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1984. 194 p. There is abundant evidence of a paradigm shift in the field of literary theory. The sense of crisis can be felt in the number and the intensity of debates between representatives of different schools, the evolution of multiple critical languages, and the cleavages between theory and practice. We seem to be between paradigms at the moment, and since the primary function of a paradigm is to provide models for practice, it is the practitioner who mourns the interregnum most deeply. The theorist at least has the compensation of trumping a foe, complicating a notion, or introducing a neologism at some "higher" level of interfield dispute. But the practitioner can only muddle through an uncertain application of some dimly understood theory, or else guiltily and covertly practice what's generally regarded by those in the know as a vestigial form of scholarship. Hence the potential interest in a book like After Strange Texts, which promises to give practitioners a clear sense of what to do with all this new theory. According to Jay and Miller, they have approached contemporary literary theory not by way of an overview (booklength overviews appear to be overwhelming views at the moment in a university press parody of deconstructionist "excess") but by "outlining] a problem common to all the schools for interpretive scandal: How does the choice of a particular theoretical perspective alter the practice of reading, and, reciprocally how do altered practices of reading open new theoretical perspectives" (1). Putting aside the question of whether reading practices are ever altered without a prior alteration of theory, the book's focus on the relationship between theory and reading practices yields much that's useful for the lowly practitioner. Before one can make good use of the eight essays in this book, however, one must critically examine what counts as practice. Specifically, the tendency to equate practice and interpretation has to be called into question. While interpretation may be an element of deconstructive practice, it's a means to an end and not an end in itself. Here the editors cite Derrida in support of the notion that the "effort (always necessary) to marshall textuality into understandable concepts" has to be recognized and respected: " 'without this recognition and this respect, critical production would risk developing in any direction at all and authorize itself to say almost anything. But this indispensable guardrail has always only protected, it has never opened, a reading' " (10). So, interpretive practice or "decipherment" is a guardrail on the deconstructionist fast track, a track which leads inexorably to openness, instability, and "undecidability" rather than stability or some chimerical "originary signified." This hermeneutic guardrail contrasts interestingly with the editors' metaphor of the deconstructionist "frame." It's as elusive as the guardrail is pedestrian. Instead of limiting and protecting its subject, the frame "allowsfor representation , for the appearance of what practice is and what it understands." Like a picture frame, the critical frame is resolutely peripheral. It organizes perception without designating meaning. And just as it's futile to try to "frame a frame," it's impossible to know theory directly, apart from practice. "What we call theory and practice borrow from each other in an economy that neither can comprehend" (6). And not only is the frame a marginal concept, it's oxymoronic as well. The practitioner is called upon to deconstruct it during use. Derrida calls this prac- 106Rocky Mountain Review tice "double writing," which, according to the editors "both participates in the frameup and squeals on the perpetrators" (9). Like the Cretan who punctuates a long and mazy tale with the periodic announcement that all Cretans are liars, the deconstructionist critic must forever deny the efficacy of the theory she's forever bound to. Not all of the essayists represented in After Strange Texts are thoroughly Promethean in their commitment to the program outlined in the introduction. Probably the most exemplary essay in terms of its fidelity to that program is Andrew Parker's "Between Dialectics and Deconstruction," a sometimes daunting analysis of the relationship...