TWO BECOME ONE:

It was in this environment of material abundance that the French invasion occurred. The legendary conference on structuralism at Johns Hopkins in October 1966 under the title "The Languages of Criticism & the Sciences of Man" could only have happened in a field in high-growth mode. Funding came from the Ford Foundation, and the host was the Humanities Center, which had been founded at Hopkins that very year. Without the money used to create the theory journals mentioned above, the subsequent importation of deconstruction, French feminism, and the rest would have proceeded much more slowly. Only if a department had healthy undergraduate enrollments and graduate school applications, along with expectations of generous outside funding, could it afford to bring in European VIPs, as Hopkins did Derrida a few years after the conference, and SUNY-Buffalo did Michel Foucault in 1970-72.

The recondite discourse of French theory relied upon this solid base of popular interest in literary studies. The theory idiom was esoteric, the lexicon novel, so that it had little undergraduate recruitment value. But nobody needed to worry about that, as long as enrollments were steady. The popularity of English was a luxury enabling American disciples to be almost mischievous in their admiration of the ­difficulty of the new theorists. Derrida's dense ­dialectical presentation in Of Grammatology wasn't going to make many wavering sophomores decide to major in ­English or French. Foucault's treatment of torture and prison wouldn't lead parents and alumni to become donors. The new theorists wrote sentences such as this, from the first page of S/Z (trans. 1974), where Roland Barthes ponders how to develop a universal model of narrative:

A choice must then be made: either to place all texts in a demonstrative oscillation, equalizing them under the scrutiny of an in-different science, forcing them to rejoin, inductively, the Copy from which we will then make them derive; or else to restore each text, not to its individuality, but to its function, making it cohere, even before we talk about it, by the infinite paradigm of difference, subjecting it from the outset to a basic typology, to an evaluation.

This was a whole other language, addressed only to experts. The old critics used familiar terms of analysis--irony, structure, symbol . . . The new theorists traded in logocentrism, "the Other," undecidability, "infinite paradigm of difference." Their vocabulary reduced the audience for academic criticism. American undergraduates couldn't understand it, but so what? The obscurity wouldn't be a problem as long as resources and students were pouring in. If classes were full, the American scholars who embraced the new theorists could welcome a foreign discourse steeped in Hegel, Freud, Heidegger, and European linguists that only a few sub-sub-specialists had mastered. Why bother with reader-friendly prose if research funds and outlets are plentiful?

It didn't matter that the intellectual thrust of French theory ran against the dispositions of most students and faculty. It could still prevail. Bloom, Hirsch, and nearly everyone else in literary studies before 1966 were passionate about getting to the truth of great novels, poems, and plays. Students majored in English because they'd read ­Shakespeare in a freshman course or Hemingway on their own and found in these and other works satisfying ­reflections of themselves and their lives. They identified with Odysseus and Nick Adams, and they wanted their classes to help them refine their enthusiasm and appreciation for works of literature. Yes, New Criticism and its variants could be bloodless and scientistic, but not enough to drain John Donne and Blake's chimney-sweeper of their human appeal. The drama of Gatsby's green light and the oblique metaphors of Emily ­Dickinson, which brought most of the students to class, were not undone by Cleanth Brooks's analysis of paradox in poetic language.

French theorists judged this approach naive. They challenged any presumption of stable significance in the literary object. Derrida pushed a radical skepticism that targeted the very idea of core meaning, original intention, or truth in or behind or before or under the work itself. The one-million-times-cited sentences on decentering in "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," the paper Derrida had read at the Hopkins conference, were taken by first-generation American theorists as a decisive subversion of any interpretation that claimed to get it "right." Claims to true interpretation, Derrida said, rested upon a "center," something outside the work that explained constituents of it--an author's psychology, his religion, his class relations, and so on. Freud interprets Hamlet by invoking the Oedipal triangle, Marx takes ­Robinson Crusoe as capitalism in its fundamental form. Here's the problem, Derrida insisted. This center is taken for granted--it has to be, in order to determine what the phenomenon means. Conventional criticism uses the center to interpret a work, but it does not interpret the center itself. God explains the Bible--we don't explain God. The center determines the significance of the work but is not implicated in the work. The center is in the work and, at the same time, outside it.

Derrida found in this within/without center an insurmountable contradiction, one that set criticism on a different path. His followers caught the direction instantly. The new theory demanded that the "center" undergo interpretation as well. It, too, should be understood as a text to be analyzed in its turn, not a ground to be presupposed. One had to presuppose something, the Derrideans admitted, or else one could not say anything. But one could get through the impasse by being super self-conscious about it. Hence the endless qualifiers, scare-quotes, parenthetical remarks, and circling-backwards in deconstructive discourse. In this theory of reading, self-reflexivity would never stop. Interpretation must go on! This embrace of the heroic role of the endless interpreter swept everyone away. The search for the central truth of a literary work was over. The rehearsal of the forever-deferred and "problematized" truth of the work took its place. No more truth, only "reading."

This model was never going to attract very many American sophomores, who thrill to literature for its love and hate, intrigue and action, conflict and lyricism. It did not impress the literary reading public, either, the individuals who had season tickets to local theaters and subscribed to the Book-of-the-Month Club. I was drawn into theory in those years, and I can attest that we didn't care. We thought those sorts of people were in the wrong state of mind, the "natural attitude." They hadn't undergone the deconstructive turn. They still affirmed that literature had a truth all its own. When it comes to masterpieces, they take the stance of appreciation, not a hermeneutic of suspicion--big mistake, and we knew better. Our game of endless interpretation aimed to kill those very joys of immersion and identification.

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