The Locus of Meaning: Six Hyperdimensional Fictions by Herbert F. Smith (review)

HUMANITIES 161 Moreover, Wihl's argument in favour of the ethical contribution made by certain modes of reading - based on the choices they force upon us, and their ability to support a 'reconciliation of the language of individuality and community' - is not fully satisfying. Borrowing Taylor'S notion of our capability to define an identity 'through our acquisition of rich human languages,' Wihl pays too little attention to Taylor'S interest in the way we are - in Taylor'S words - 'inducted into these in exchange with others.' By choosing as his site of ethical action the moment of choice between 'highly determined vocabularies ... which shape an agent's stance amidst' plurality, Wihl distances us from the ethical demand of acknowledging the other, and focuses instead on the more inward drama of an individual's confrontation with large and abstract bodies of knowledge and language. Wihl has an even-handed way of gleaning what is useful to his argument in the works of Taylor, Cavell, Stanley Fish, Fredric Jameson, and Paul de Man, and in this sense, his book is true to its stated goal of overcoming the tendency for 'controversies and debates about deconstruction , pragmatism, modernity, historicism, and skepticism' ... to be fought out at a nonproductive level of inaccurate, occasionally superficial , expression.' The Contingency of Theory might be said to propose an ethical model for intellectual debate, in which divergent ideas and vocabularies shape one another. But on a deeper level, Wihl's constant focus on the self, and on personal development through interpretive decisions, is discomforting. Ultimately, .such views do not call for any direct contact with others. And a strong ethics, in the words of Emmanuel Levinas, must be defined as 'the relationship between two.' (NORMAN RAVVIN) Herbert F. Smith. The Locus of Meaning: Six Hyperdimensional Fictions University of Toronto Press. 189. $49.95 cloth In The Locus ofMeaning, Herbert Smith invites his readers into a dizzying world of 'topographical isomorphisms,' 'lemniscates,' and 'quincunxes' which he claims can help clarify complex problems of literary interpretation . He begins his journey by referring to an epigraph from Roland Barthes's 'L'Activite Structuraliste': 'If Barthes is correct and criticism, ever resembling more and more the literature it criticizes, is to "speak the locus of meaning, and not to name it," the modern critic would be wise to recall some of the sign systems that have served in other disciplines, at other times. One of those is the ancient relationship between quantities and shapes best illustrated by the well-known isomorphisms between numbers and geometry.' In order to justify the use of this 'ancient relationship,' Smith produces a theoretical discussion which includes metaphor and metonymy (using the theories of Roman Jakobson and 162 LETTERS IN CANADA 1994 Umberto Eco and the theoretical abridgments of David Lodge), Northrop Frye and his 'modes, symbols, myths and genres,' and Roland Barthes's 'five semiotic codes' from 5/Z. Smith also uses scientific termin~logy: he refers to Rene Thorn's catastrophe theory, to 'popular' science writers such as Douglas Hofstadter, and to laboratory experiments on 'Robert the Ram,' all in order to show how the 'locus of meaning' is always 'hyperdimensional.' The book is divided into three parts, the first of which proposes'a theory of hyperdimensional isomorphisms,' while the second contains readings of 'three nineteenth-century texts' (Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym, Melvilleis The Confidence-Man, and Twain's A Connecticut Yankee) and the third analyses 'three postmodern texts' (Nabokov's Pale Fire, Barth's Chimera, and Pynchon's The Crying ofLot 49). Smith contends that his theory of hyperdimensional isomorphisms is helpful forinterpreting a variety of different fictional texts which have presented problems for traditional methods of analysis. Two significant problems in The Locus ofMeaning are its portrayal of the reading act, and the use of the term 'dimension.' Smith's first textual example is a set of instructions for assembling a bicycle (adapted from Zen and the Art ofMotorcycle Maintenance), and he represents the reading of this along two axes of a graph. Smith uses a 'sign' where the instructions are the 'signifiers examined' (along the vertical axis) and the actual assembly corresponds to the 'signifieds manipulated' (along the horizontal axis...