ABSTRACT
I have suggested that the reader whose perspective is orientated towards Mallarmé’s special kind of meaning will fail to see syntagmatic effects when they are present in literature. Such blindness is doubtless unfortunate. But far more unfortunate is the case of a reader managing to see Mallarméan effects even when they are not present. This is the danger with certain techniques of textual interpretation. As I remarked at the end of the ‘Limits of twentieth-century literary criticism’ section above, the deconstruction technique of the Poststructuralists can convert any kind of text into a Poststructuralist text. And similarly with the binary-polarization technique of the Structuralists. (As for the New Critics, their interpretative methods may reasonably be regarded as an earlier and less systematic version of binary-polarization technique.) These techniques are not to be condemned merely for blindness-but for false vision.
