Metacommentary

Abstract

Although instinctively formalistic, modern criticism has avoided the basic problem of interpretation: not what a universally valid method should be, but why there should have to be any interpretation in the first place. Whence the first principle of metacommentary: each interpretation must account for the necessity of its own existence. Russian Formalism is the model of a criticism which refuses to interpret: it is unable, however, to deal with diachrony, and in particular with the novel as a form. The second principle of metacommentary: the fact that a work needs no interpretation (as in the novel of plot) is itself something to be explained. Thus, the possibility of plot reveals a wholeness in the society that produces it. To the evolution of the plotless novel corresponds the structuralist hermeneutic, with its reading of the work as a single sentence or as a system of binary oppositions. Structuralism can be transcended by the realization that its abstract mental categories are in reality historical moments. The ultimate model of metacommentary is one which, distinguishing the manifest and latent contents of the work, then seeks to account for this distinction (or repression). Since the latent content is an experience, the elaboration of the work corresponds to a question about the possibilities of Experience itself, and the disguises of the content to an attempt to conceal the causes of the limitation of experience in the social situation.

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