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Chapter 3, ‘Intention’, addresses some of the implications of taking seriously the unsustainable deference given to reason in our critical languages, and presents arguments against the notion that an author’s mind can be assembled from those texts which s/he has left us.
The fourth chapter, ‘Metre, Rhyme, and Other Mind Forg’d Manacles’, is built around the perception that the conventional relation between metre and rhythm is differential, even antagonistic, rather than complementary.
In chapter 6, the philosophical as a mode of reading literature is considered under four headings: either as belonging to a class whose imperative is to resolve difference; or to explain away difference, or to sublimate differences, or to argue for the absoluteness of difference.
The seventh chapter, ‘Translation’, proposes translation as an activity which depends upon a sequence of re-envisagings, re-writings, and deviations from any possible ‘original’. The very fact of translation, its existence and necessity, it is suggested, reveals originality to be a post-hoc construct.
A single axiomatic belief runs throughout. This is the notion that critics, pedagogues, and common readers alike have a natural, perhaps a genetically inscribed, tendency to mistake the bases of their interpretative practices in specifiable ways. In particular, there appears to be a powerful compulsion to place language at the centre of attempts to capture meaning which eliminates even the possibility that it might operate as an auxiliary to thought. Some of the major assumptions of orthodox criticism, including criticism under a modernist or postmodern aegis, still at this point in the history of reading ground their talk about literature in an idea of language as transparent, whole, and complete in itself. Four decades after the death of the author, the notion persists of ‘the’ originator of a text as single and discoverable by analysis, with the author as a sort of tamed familiar who keeps us company as we read, usurping the place of the nearby mystery he really is. This idea of the author as a limitable object remains the founding presupposition of many seminar discussions about literary texts, and of much writing about literature.2