ABSTRACT
In the general scepticism about meaning and truth which has been the major bequest of deconstructive theory, the suggestion that there might occasionally, even so, be a ‘right’ reading of a text as opposed to a variety of misled ones, has a touch of heresy about it. Such a suggestion would imply that, somewhere, there is still an absolute in place. It would imply that it is possible to avoid the multiple traps of the ironic, self-referential and deceptive text, and take us back to those naïve efforts of I.A.Richards to force his students to recognize the one, right, true meaning of the poem in front of them. Yet for every insight that literary theory achieves, it incurs a blindness, and the very act of insight is itself the act of shutting off a corresponding vision. Or, as Marshall McLuhan has recently argued,1 every discovery, as it retrieves, also obsolesces. It is what literary theory has obsolesced that interests me in what follows.
