Misguided Search for Truth

Richard E. Higgason
Blue River Community College, Blue Springs, Missouri, USA
Email: rich.higgason@kcmetro.edu Web site: http://www.kcmetro.edu/blueriver/humanities/english/higgason
Key features: References; Author Details

All the nodes in this issue:

Editorial
Bibliography of Hypertext Criticism

Mez Breeze

Julianne Chatelain Richard E. Higgason Deena Larsen Bill Marsh Adrian Miles Jenny Weight

Barthes (1994) suggests that the attempt to discover truth with criticism is misguided. He states:

One can say that the critical task (and this is the sole guarantee of its universality) is purely formal: not to 'discover' in the work or author something 'hidden', 'profound', 'secret', which hitherto passed unnoticed (by what miracle? Are we more perspicacious than our predecessors?) but only to adjust the language his period affords him [. . .] to the language, i.e. the formal system of logical constraints elaborated by the author according to his own time period. The 'proof' of a criticism is not an 'alethic' order (it does not proceed from truth), for critical discourse--like logical discourse, moreover--is never anything but tautological. (p. 49)
We are not able to achieve the sort of objectivity to describe "the object as in itself it really is" (Arnold 1865). Instead, Barthes (1994) would seem to agree with Fish (1980: p. 338) when he states: "the facts [about a text] only emerge in the context of some point of view". According to Fish, we start off with a set of interpretative assumptions that guide us to consider certain aspects of a text more worthy or important than others. As a result, it is never the facts of a text that are in dispute but the assumptions or strategies that underlie the interpretation. Because interpretations are always products of individual interpretative perspectives, we are never actually getting closer to the "truth" of the text. Instead, we are simply providing other perspectives. Fish goes so far as to state that "no reading, however outlandish it might appear, is inherently an impossible one". (p. 347) What makes an interpretation acceptable is having a strategy that supports such an interpretation. If the strategy is deemed acceptable, then interpretations that apply that strategy to other works will also be deemed acceptable.

As a result, Barthes (1994) suggests that we should forgo the whole search for truth in the text. Instead, he states that criticism can be better served not in the "decipherment of the work's meaning but the reconstruction of the rules and constraints of that meaning's elaboration". (p. 49) This means instead of providing interpretations, or critical readings, about what the work means, a critic should analyze the structures with the text that make any meaning possible. For a hypertext critic, such a process could seem daunting. After all, any particular lexia could have multiple contexts. The meanings could easily shift, making any attempt at an objective look at the "rules and constraints" a subjective elaboration of an individual performance of the text. How can critics illuminate the structure of works that do not present an illusion of sameness?

References

Arnold, M. (1865) "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time". University of Toronto Libraries, 1996
www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/rp/criticism/funct_il.html

Barthes, R. (1994) "What is Criticism?" In Contemporary Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies, 3rd edition, edited by R. C. Davis and R. Schleifer (New York: Longman), pp. 46-50

Fish, S. (1980) Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press)