ABSTRACT
When modem critics think they are demystifying literature, they are in fact being demystified by it; but since this necessarily occurs in the form of a crisis, they are blind to what takes place within themselves. At the moment that they claim to do away with literature, literature is everywhere; what they call anthropology, linguistics, psychoanalysis is nothing but literature reappearing, like the Hydra's head, in the very spot where it had supposedly been suppressed. The human mind will go through amazing feats of distortion to avoid facing "the nothingness of human matters." (paul de Man, Blindness and Insight, 18)
Unjustifiably negative and absolute theoretical formulations of ideology have created several problems in the area of literary theory, and given rise to interesting responses to these problems. I pointed out earlier, while discussing the problems of the classical Marxist statements about ideology, that their inconsistencies became particularly striking when one considered such valued "ideological" institutions as science and art. In the case of science, as we have seen, the usual response to the problem of reconciling the contradiction between the illusory and classdependent character of all ideological formations with the objective and universal character of scientific truth has been either to exclude all science from the arena of ideological battle between the classes or to use the term science to denote one's own view, claiming a status above ideologies by virtue of offering a critique of them. We have also seen that neither strategy is totally consistent and successful.
