Mapping the Territory: Notes on Belsey and Common Sense
Expressive Realism/Humanist Tradition
1) Believes in single, determinate causes.
Intention/story are anterior to tex
2) Texts are unified wholes with stable, determinate meanings.
Both New Critical close readings insisting on the "words on the page" and Frye's structuralist/formalist
approach, despite their objections to expressive/realist values, ultimately participate in humanist critiques.
3) Meaning and truth are timeless (transhistorical) and universal and ultimately available only to "properly
instructed readers."
4) Human nature never changes.
5) Mimesis as a dominant characteristic of The Great Tradition denies the validity of romance mode and/or
popular texts as true Literature. (How does this affect canon formation? How is it possible to sustain this as
a measure of quality and admit Chaucer, Spencer, Shakespeare's comedies and romances into the canon?)
Critical Theory After Saussure
1) Language is not static, but always in process.
2) Meanings of individual texts are also always in process, historically constituted. Meaning is
conventional/relational/ differential, and intertextual.
3) Texts are plural, open to a range of possibilities released through the process of reading and by historical
change.
4) Truth, meaning, and even experience itself are ideologically and discursively constructed. Therefore, human
nature is not constant but perpetually in process.
5) Neither meaning, nor the story are necessarily anterior to the text. Therefore, author intent is rarely either
recoverable or knowable--or relevant to textual meaning.
"Criticism and Common Sense"
Common sense view: literary texts should be read in search for "expressive realism," for universal truths and
individual insights of perceptive authors. CS & its expressive-realist humanism presupposes "man" as the
origin and source of all meaning and truth (humanism), knowledge to be the result of empiricist experience, and
literature to be the reflection of reality expressed through discourse by an individual who reveals recognizable
truths.
--CS presents itself as the natural, unselfconscious way of reading.
--Post-Saussurean approaches dispute these concepts and argue that the "natural" itself is "ideologically and
discoursively constructed," that the natural and given are culturally produced.
--Since subjectivity itself is socially constructed, common sense assumptions about author intent as a source of
meaning and about authoritative meaning in texts are questioned.
--(4) She justifies the intentional opacity of theoretical jargon as a foregrounding of the the illusory transparency
of language and through the notion that new ideas and theories of necessity employ unfamiliar and initially
opaque discourses.
--ideology, social formation, discourse defined.
ideology--the unconscious, unquestioned conditions of our experience.
social formation--ideology, economic practices, and political practices constitute the social formation.
discourse--a domain of language use, a particular way of thinking, talking, writing, inscribed in
discourse is ideology.
--Ruskin's linking of poetry and art in his post-Romantic theories of art is tied by Belsey to the development of
expressive realism. The mimetic/expressive link also presupposes an elitist concept which makes all art
accessible to the masses through its representation of facts, but the true power of art, its sublime qualities (the
expressive) accessible only to the refined, educated minds capable of aesthetic appreciation.
She places both the New Critics and F.R. Leavis in the expressive-realist camp because both retain the
assumptions about truth, especially the "obvious" truth, inherent in successful fictions (or poems) produced by
keen and insightful authors who record the details of a presupposed "real" with force and accuracy.
--common exp-realist questions are "What is he trying to tell us?' & "What does he mean here?"
--Difficulties of exp-realist assumptions:
What is reality?
How do we achieve access to the ideas and conceptions which are held to precede expression?
(Phenomenology?)
In what sense is fiction true?
What is the relation between text & world?
Can we perceive independent of ideology?
The New Critics
--Wimsatt & the "Intentional Fallacy" (1946): ultimately exposes "meaning as prior to expression" as a position
confining the text to a single, univocal reading (meaning) located somewhere other than on the page.
--New Critics, however, do not solve the problem of meaning inherent in expressive-realism, for they, too,
reduce the text to a unitary meaning that is universal, timeless, but in their view inherent in form & the words on
the page.
Northrop Frye --Liberal Humanism
Stresses intertextual aspects of intelligibility through archetypes; searches for a poetics, a systematic framework
for elucidating intertextual intelligibility, is Neoplatonic (lit strives for potential golden world) rather than
Aristotelean (Lit imitates a common reality)--all of these feature oppose him to the New Critics.
Archetypal patterns recur because they best evoke basic human wishes and desires and not because the
"express" particular truths or meanings.
However, for Frye, "thought still takes place independently of language" and "meaning precedes expression in
words." These beliefs link him to the New Critics and to expressive realism.
Frye also assumes an essentially unchanging human nature, an idea he supports by using the texts that his theory
explains for evidence--tautology?
For post-Saussureans, language is not the expression of thought but its condition.
Frye's pluralism also seems to move beyond expressive realism and the New Critics, but ultimately, he sees the
plurality of the text, disparate readings and meanings, not as contentious forces but as elements of a larger whole
that we might see if we only step back far enough. His criticism reduces to a brand of liberal humanism that
elevates intellectual freedom to the level of "highest social value" and denies resolution of class struggle or
political strive except in the imagination, where all can be equal.
Reader Power
At best: liberates the reader from authorial tyranny and stresses reader participation in the construction of texts
and their plurality.
At worst: strives to produce a new authority: the highly trained reader as guarantor of a single, timeless,
transcendant meaning, a reader who can't be wrong or disputed.
Walter J. Slatoff's With Respect to Readers (1970) posits a notion of an "implied Author" that seems at first to
avoid the intentional fallacy and to open texts up to plural and contentious readings, but ultimately his implied
author is not the sophisticated one of narrative theory (one that serves to distinguish between character, narrator,
and author) but yet another validation of authorial intention, an implied author recognized as something less
than the true author and his intentions, but nevertheless a substitute for the same.
Fish--his informed reader produces a disarmingly singular reading of the text, thereby denying plurality. He
accounts for differentially informed readers (especially when historical considerations apply); however, he
accounts for these differences, erases them by arguing that the "informed reader" reads as if he/she is one of the
author's contemporaries.
German Reception Theory & Jauss--Denies the text as static monument, emphasizes intertextuality and
historical contexts, sees Mimesis not as a universal value but as a criterion particular to humanism.
Wolfgang Iser--his implied reader is constructed by the text in that he embodies all of those predispositions
necessary for the text to exercise its total effect. The text itself, however, and not some empirical reality creates
these predispositions. Since readings are neither "given" (text is indeterminate) nor "arbitrary" (text's formal
properties construct reader response to some extent) in his system, his readings are more sophisticated and
theoretical than Slatoff's. However, his implied reader and implied author still interact in accord with a model of
communication parallel to that of expressive realism.
The Act of Reading, then, becomes a quite accurate account of what most liberal humanists actually do do when
they read.
Criticism and Meaning
Saussurean Linguistics

Effects practice of confronting and questioning one’s own assumptions and presuppositions

Signs function through their relative positions in a system (differences) and have no intrinsic meaning or
value. As a result, language creates reality in part by creating perceptible divisions among concepts or
signs. River/stream & color examples. Inseparability of signifier and signified create “the illusions of
transparency of language,” as well as the seemingly “natural” divisions of categories or even
understandings.

Language is a social fact, a matter of arbitrarily established conventions. Perceived differences (gender,
race, etc...) are themselves products of social organization.

Different cultural and linguistic groups articulate the world differently, creating different views of what is
“natural” or “real.”

Since meaning is largely socially constructed, whatever is considered “common sense” or “natural” needs to
be questioned: ideological myths are naturalized to form common sense in our society while ideology
itself functions to suppress contradictions and preserve existing social formations.

The resistance to theory and to neologisms presumes that we already know everything that we need to
know, that our current language and its existing terms are complete. Tied to the notion that language
directly and naturally references/stands in for reality, we adopt realism as a standard of literary value. This
is revealed to be a tautological argument.

Realism is the re-presentation of what we already know; it presents us with the familiar. (CP: Shklovsky on
Defamiliarization, roughened rhythm, etc...)
The Construction of Meaning

Literary realism is coded as advertisements are coded: it is only “natural” to view characters--not as
constructs within a narative structure serving purposeful ends--but as real human beings. This “naturalizes”
the content/perspective/political viewpoints of the writer, conceals ideological meaning.

Consider other advertising than the somewhat outdated ads that she cites. Lenin
statue falling and the selling of copy machines? The caption “Second Place in
the Cold War”?

Belsey presents Barthes’ notion of “codes of reference” to help understand how characters
(Dorothea Brooke) are constructed and referenced, expands this to definition of Classic
Realism as a reassuring mode that confirms our world view.

Realism, like language, creates the illusion of transparency, conceals its ideology.
Plurality of Meaning

Indeterminate meaning of “democracy will ensure that we extend the boundaries of civilization.”

Location, context, position within the social formation determine the “meaning”
of any seemingly declarative statement. Language is only determinable within a
specific discourse. She redefines the expressive realist and reader theories by
establishing incomplete emphases on either the speaker or the hearer. This once
more establishes language as social fact and emphasizes plurality of meaning,
but does not argue that these contradictory meanings are merely subjective views.
Subjectivity itself is a discursive construct.