A reply to Martin Ryle

Antony Easthope

To parody a well-known saying, I shall say that a little formalism turns one away from History, but that a lot brings one back to it.

In Long Live Literature? (RP 67) Martin Ryle explores the implications of the outcome of the crisis in `English', saluting the development of a cultural studies committed to the reading of texts in a historical context but proposing nevertheless that a separate place should be maintained for a different, literary reading of literary texts (or `literary' texts). Ryle further develops in suggestive outline an account of such literary reading as based in a `humanist identification' (p. 26) of the reader with the text from which may ensue a sense of what he terms the `complex interplay between discursive construction of identity and refusal of that construction' (p. 26).

While welcoming this intervention by RP into the arena of literary/textual theory I am a bit disappointed that it has taken the expression it does, and some of that disappointment returns in what may be an over-harsh close reading of Long Live Literature? (though the title alone bodes ill). Despite important qualifications and refinements, and, I think, a certain amount of denegation (it's not enough to put some words in scare quotes), Ryle's argument tends to privilege an abstracted notion of `the literary text', to be apprehended, he says, `at once in itself' (p. 23), so that he ends up with a conservative legitimation of the aesthetic in textual studies of just the kind he - and others beside him - have hoped to avoid. To hold his position in place Ryle relies upon a series of oppositions: between literary and cultural studies; between the aesthetic and the historical; between form and content. I shall aim to show that none of these oppositions is stable in the way Ryle's main argument presumes, and that his position is seriously damaged by the degree of its adherence to an older paradigm of `the text', a view which has insufficiently taken on board the recent shift to a more radical notion of the text as always in a relation to its reader, implying a text/reader dialectic.

Ryle identifies cultural studies very much with a version of reading the text as historical, `as instances of discourse in a given social and historical conjuncture' (p. 21). Although cultural studies must be concerned with ideology and the historical conjuncture of the text, I would argue that this is not and should not be its exclusive and defining concern, and certainly not as Ryle describes it. His account of the historical takes up a number of positions which don't properly cohere. In writing of Hardy's Jude the Obscure Ryle says that our sense of the versions of feminine identity the book proposes must be rejected because of `our conviction that real women, at the time of the book's writing, could not be reduced to one or other of the available positions' (p. 26). This humanist and essentialist appeal to `real women' disregards the fact that we only have access to this reality on the basis of a historical narrative, a narrative which necessarily implicates and finds a point of address in the reader of that narrative in the present. I don't want (and for present purposes don't think I need) to get further into the complex questions around metahistory in order to register the point that here as elsewhere Ryle's argument is not firmly and unequivocally dedicated to an acknowledgement that all texts are read in a continuous present.

Ryle rightly warns against the `high theoretical discussion of literature and ideology' in which an elite, `possessed of the master-discourse of the ideological' and the `benefit of hindsight' carried out `forensic procedures' on the dead body of the text (p. 25). What I would call British Cultural Studies Phase 2 and date 1970-1980, the Althusserian-semiological moment in cultural studies, did assume it spoke from the position of a worldless subject situated outside the text within a metadiscourse which allowed it to assess precisely the degree to which a given text was - simultaneously - progressive and conservative in effect. Yet at the same time as distancing himself from it Ryle seems to wish to return to this moment, for he writes that `an overarching theorisation of the literary in relation to the social/historical is not within our grasp at present' (p. 22, my italics). Well, I would say that the lonely hour when we achieve a totalising theory of the literary in relation to the social/historical will never come because the subject as master of a historical narrative and the subject as he or she now experiences the text to be defined by that narrative can never be in the same place.

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