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Susanne Kappeler. Writing and Reading In Henry James. Foreword by Tony Tanner. New York: Columbia UnIv. Press, 1980. 242 pp. $22.50. Susanne Kappeler's Writing and Reading In Henry James repeats In Its own critical development Kappeler's Interpretation of the narrator's education In The Sacred Fount. Appropriately enough, this critical study concludes with Kappeler's reading of this much maligned novella—In Itself a critical preface to James's Major Phase—as the most explicit expression of James's modern poetic, In which the active powers of the artist and the reactive judgment of the critic are combined dialectical Iy In the Identity of the wrlter-as-reader/the reader-as-wrIter. In order to accomplish this marriage of Imagination and observation, expression and reflection, Kappeler must undergo her own repetition of the narrator's progress from scientific analyst through the protective defenses of the artist to his ultimate possibility as readerly writer. Unlike James's narrator, who never quite knows where he Is headed, Kappeler (like James) Is well aware of the ways In which she has allegorized fiction to serve her own theoretical alms. James himself used The Sacred Fount to work through the epistemológica I and onto log! cal problems that would shape the dramas of The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl. Kappeler actively opens a path for a post-structuralist Rezeptlontheorle by working her own way through versions of structuralism ranging from the "scientific" theories of Saussure, Vladimir Propp, and Max Bense to the more "poetic" approaches of Roland Berthes, Tzvetan Todorov, and Jacques Lacan. For American critics, Kappeler's book has special value in Its careful demonstration of the limitations of structuralist theories of narrative when applied to literary texts as "writerly" as James's. Many of the recent critical debates In American journals continue as a consequence of our Ignorance regarding the varieties of Continental structuralism and the way In which such theoretical diversity reveals internal contradictions in the basic linguistic models that would produce the alternative paradigms of Derrldean "dl fferance" or Lacan's discourse of the Other. Because American critics have been so intent on rationalizing structuralism as the best alternative to a native New Criticism (for better or for worse) or in such a hurry to move beyond such formalism to deconstructive freedom (thus misreading "deconstruction"), we have neglected the valuable lessons to be learned from the Impasses of structuralism and its Ideal discipline: semiology. Kappeler discovers these limitations In the course of her own reading of Henry James, trying out folkloric theories of narrative and structural linguistics In relation to a text as undecldable as The Aspern Papers. Rather than simply pointing out the blindness of Saussure, Propp, Olrlk, and others, Kappeler finds her own critical direction from what their methods ignore. Morphological analysis of The Aspern Papers, Kappeler argues, tells us a great deal about the narrator's "vested interest in presenting his story in the true form of a folktale" (22). In short, our structural analysis of The Aspern Papers tends to replicate the narrator's defensive efforts to rationalize his own failure by giving his story a recognizable, even an epic, strain. The folkloric reading of the novel tends to reinforce, as most folktales do, a Manlchean struggle In which the Misses Bordereau are daemonlzed for the sake of the narrator's respectability. If the code of The Aspern Papers is, like so many of James's données, a sort of popular romance or modern fairy-tale, then our analysis of such a deep-structure can be made only at the expense of James's characteristic move to Ironlze the conventional narrative for the sake of his social criticism and his own artistic originality. As Kappeler makes clear, such a reduction of the Jameslan text Is a consequence of the now faml liar structuralist error: separating the formal code of the slgnlflers from Its semant|c actualization (that Is, the performative relation of signifier and signified). Even Saussure acknowledged that the study of the signifier apart from Its conceptual referent is a process of abstraction that must be checked by recourse to the integral relation of signifier and signified...

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