8 Deconstructive criticism

The rule of metaphorical coherence is the requirement that the two components of a metaphor (the vehicle, or metaphorical term, and the tenor, or subject to which the metaphor is applied) have a consistent relationship within the con‑ text of the work. Imagine, for example, a story about the plight of a penniless, aging, Native American drifter who, at the close of the tale, falls asleep forever under a freezing sky. In this context, the description of a pale, winter sunset could be a metaphor for the death of the character and perhaps for the end of an era, but it couldn’t very well be a metaphor for the restful sleep that precedes the hopeful beginning of a bright new life. The rule of thematic unity is the chief reason why there is a rule of metaphorical coherence, for the rule of thematic unity is our expectation that the literary work has a unified, coherent theme, or main point. In fact, it is because we expect a literary work to have thematic unity that we almost always manage to find it or, more precisely, construct it when we interpret the text. We tend to create thematic unity, Culler observes, by means of certain procedures, which include, among others, (1) theme as a binary opposition (good versus evil), (2) theme as the resolution of a binary opposition (good conquers evil), and (3) theme as the displacement of a binary opposition by a third term (good‑versus‑evil is absorbed by an all‑encompassing Nature, as we see in Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” 1855). It’s not difficult to see why Culler’s structuralist approach is of interest to reader‑ response theorists. Like the social reader‑response theory of Stanley Fish dis‑ cussed in chapter 6, Culler’s approach asserts that our understanding of literature is based on the interpretive strategies we bring to the text. As we noted earlier, structuralists believe that we “create” the world we see by projecting onto it our structures of consciousness. Apply this belief to literature, and the result is the same as the reader‑response notion that we “create” the literary text as we read it. But the structuralist move Culler makes is his question, “What is the struc‑ ture that underlies the surface phenomena of our interpretations?” And to find the answer, he examines interpretation as a structural system. Unlike reader‑ response theorists, Culler examines the langue, the structural system of rules and codes, that operate (consciously or unconsciously) when authors write and readers interpret within the Western literary tradition. Even the small sampling of approaches offered here illustrates the wide range of structuralist methodologies, both in terms of the kinds of theoretical frameworks structuralists use and the kinds of texts, literary and otherwise, they analyze.