FOUR

The Function of the Literary in a Time

of Cultural Studies
Sacvan Bercovitch

The signs of the times are that cultural studies is here to stay. I hope that as
it grows and flourishes it will preserve the literary in what still remains liter
ary and cultural studies. What is at stake here is not just an issue of aesthet
ics but, more important (for my present purpose), rhe prospects of open dia
logue in the humanities. I realize that my appeal to the literary in this con
text will raise objections about disciplinary distinctions. So let me say at once
that I don't believe we have yet found a vantage point beyond disciplinarity.
To recognize that disciplines are artificial is not to transcend them. Indeed,
it may reinforce our sense of limitations. For example, we know that litera
ture meant something different in fifteenth-century Italy from what it does
now, but we know it because of a discipline called history. Information
comes from institutional channels, nor from Beyond: this commonplace
holds true not only for specialists in English but also for eclectic students of
culture. Their "bricolage approach," too, is spun out of the webs of discipli
narity: a certain controversial method in sociology, Marxism; a certain
embattled method in psychology, psychoanalysis; a certain disputed mode of
philosophy, deconstruction; or most tellingly, those vacillating combina
tions of sectarian methodologies (Althusser's Marx plus Lacan's Freud plus
... ). For our time and place, metadisciplinarity is a form of nostalgia born
of ftustration with modern specialization.
I share that frustration, but I believe that the way out (if there is one)
lies through our recognition of limitation. To that end, I want to focus on
two elementary aspects of the quasi-discipline we literary critics have inher

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SACVAN BERCOVITCH

ited. One is formalist, the other political. The formalist aspect has to do with
fictionality, the as-if world we enter, as Coleridge said, through a willing sus
pension of disbelief, allowing for the temporary dissolution of common
sense barriers between fancy and hard fact, so that even events that are
empirically impossible may become a means of conveying what's humanly
probable. We might conceive of literature in this sense as a test of the cul
tural work of the imagination. The as-if text proves its worth by heightening
our understanding of the world as we know it. But the challenge may also be
turned in the other direction. We can extend the literary approach to mean
a willing suspension of belief, and we can apply it as such-as a temporary,
ludic resistance to received modes of explanation-to the disciplinary frame
works, the structures of belief, within which we learned those hard facts in
the first place. So conceived, textual criticism would be a test of the imagi
native reach of the human sciences.
This sort of interchange implies the second, political aspect of the liter
ary. I refer to the cultural foundations of textuality. What makes a work of
literature extraordinary is not that it leaves the ordinary behind, but just the
opposite. Its deep meanings and abiding values, including its aesthetic val
ues, derive from its embeddedness in the ordinary-which is to say, from
precisely the sort of everyday issues raised by cultural studies. Thus literary
criticism has a double task. It is responsible for its evidence to textual reali
ties that are uniquely here, in a world of their own, and broadly out there, in
history and society. This doubleness has issued as a variety of questionable
conjunctions. I have in mind the chronically unhappy marriage called liter
ary history; the interdisciplinary tradition that appropriates literary works
for cognitive purposes (Faulkner sociologized, theologized, psychologized);
and the recent linguistic turn, which tends, conversely, to appropriate cog
nitive projects for literary purposes (society as text, history as narrative,
Freud as storyteller). I am not forgetting the remarkable achievements of
each of these approaches. My point in stressing the difficulties they raise is
to foeus on the problematic position of the literary in our time of cultural
studies.
With that problem in view, let me suggest a fourth, counterdisciplinary
function for literary study. I call it counter- (as distinct from anti-) discipli
nary because it is meant not to discredit disciplinarity, but to test or chal
lenge it. The assumption behind the test is that the disciplines we've devel
oped to study culture have genuine cognitive value. They offer important
data about the world we live in, and in some cases they tell us what we can
reliably take to be the truth. But of course it's truth up to a point, within cer
tain boundaries. And the advantage of literary criticism is that it frees cul-

turaI critics from being bounded in that cognitive sense. It allows them to
contextualize what we know disciplinarily about culture-the truths-up-to
a-point of the human sciences-in terms of make-believe literary facts. The
purpose is not to transcend the world out there. Quite the contrary: it is to
challenge our knowledge of it in ways that rerum us more concretely, with
more searching cultural specificity, to our nontranscendent realities.
I conceive of that act of recontexrualization as a test by negation. We
might compare this to the scientist's commitment, before proposing a new
theory, to try by all means to disprove it. The difference is that for the sci
entist this test by negation is a means of progress and control. In the literary
case, negation is both means and ends. There is no new system to replace the
old if the test succeeds; no old system to keep in place if the test fails. In the
counterdisciplinary game I propose, such terms as failure and success have
to do with the limitations of systems, old and new. What's gained is a clearer,
deeper sense of those limitations, a form of knowledge that sustains tensions.
This will not solve the problem of the disciplines, but it may help us make
use of the problem itself in ways that further our understanding of culture.
My example is twO different instances of the chess analogy, one in
Faulkner's Light in August, the other in a series of remarks by Wiagenstein,
the philosopher most amenable nowadays (along with Heidegger) to cul
tural studies. The twO passages appear in the appendix to this essay; the dif
ferences between them are what we'd expect, disciplinarily: the play of the
imagination versus the rigors oflogic. Faulkner invokes a chess game only to
move, surprisingly, to a religious image. At the start, a man is compared to a
pawn-the analogy is timeless, absolute (capital-P Player and pawn)-and
at the end a man is compared to the Savior of the Christian Gospels, God
incarnate as Christ. The victim's blood rushes out and he seems "to soar into
their memories forever and ever"-clearly an allusion to the resurrection.
But the crux of the scene, its center of significance, is a vivid description of
a southern lynching: a "choked cry," a slashed loincloth, the peaceful,
unbearable eyes. That particular event is the proper interpretive frame, the
literary context, for those "broader" universalist allusions. Chess and the
cross are abstractions applicable to situations across time and place, but their
applicability in this passage depends on a specific action in a specific place
and time. By the rules of this game, Fate and Christ are explained by a local
fiction. Each of these absolutes carries various general meanings, of course
philosophical, theological-but as these generalities clash and coalesce here,
in the literalness of this text, their meanings assume a culturally distinct sub
stance, grounded in a certain make-believe figure, Joe Christmas, in Jeffer
son, Mississippi.

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Wittgenstein's passage works in the opposite way. Here the analogies

function (as he says) like an "x" in logic. They are local instances designed to
prove an ahistorical abstraction. And provocatively, both instances are make
believe. In the first case, someone decides: "Now I will make myself a queen
with very frightening eyes, she will drive everyone off the board." A patent
fiction, but it's surrounded by a series of abstractions that seem incontro
vertible. The point is: chess works like syntax, and syntax is the way that lan
guage functions. We've got to play by the rules. That "we" includes anybody,
anywhere. To emphasize the point, Wittgenstein concludes with another
analogy, this time to a hypothetical chess-planet, Mars, where theory and
practice merge so that you can win a war by proving "scientifically" that the
king will be captured in three moves. Again, a patent fiction, and again it
makes perfect sense. Those made-up specifics (an imaginary player invent
ing a chess queen; a science-fiction world governed by the laws of chess) are
contextualized by the laws of language. The implications of the fictions
themselves are an invitation to cultural studies-consider that queen with
frightening eyes-but the point of it all, the disciplinary frame of those
implications, is that this is the way language works, all human language, any
where. Wittgenstein's analogy is a thought-experiment that makes the imag
ination a vehicle of logic. The impossibility of the queen with frightening
eyes proves a conceptual truth. In this sense, his passage may stand for the
discipline at large. When Descartes says, "I think, therefore I am," he
requires me to erase the multitude of particulars that literature builds
upon-for example, all the particulars that make me different from
Descartes. To understand Heraclitus' theory of flux ("We never step into the
same river twice") requires me to banish the specific questions that literature
starts and ends with: "Which river?" "At what time of year?" "Who is 'we'?"
This mode of explanation inheres in all disciplines. We might say that ahis
to ricism is a disciplinary prerequisite, expressing an abiding human limita
tion: the urge to say it all.
By contrast, Faulkner's analogy is an image-experiment that makes the
logic of absolutes a vehicle of local description. It's a difference in the rela
tion between ends and means. Whereas philosophy uses particulars to arrive
at general abstractions-an example or two can signify the totality of all lan
guage, including that of mathematics-the literary text uses generalities and
abstractions to convey a local event. Here it is the particularities that
"explain," even when the question concerns God or Fate. The reason is not
that writers eschew totalities and absolutes. They have been absolutists more
often than not. Nor is it that literature is subversive. The concept of the sub
versive artist is one more made-up abstraction (a fairly recent one); writers

The Literary in a Time ofCultural Studies

have been just as complicit in the ways of the world as any other group of
people. Rather, it's that fictional particulars (unlike particulars in logic) bear
a volatile relation to abstractions. They challenge us to understand what we
believe in its cultural specificity. Philosophy says, "I think. therefore I am."
Literature says, "That's what you think."
The result is "The Problem of the Disciplines" cited in the appendix:
"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." Wittgenstein's
well-known dictum may be taken as professional common sense. We often
talk about what we don't know. It can make for very animated conversation.
But it's the sort of conversation that philosophy calls chatter. Disciplines tell
us what we can articulate knowingly-what makes logical sense, what we
can prove happened, what we can predict will happen. In this view, litera
ture is the realm of cognitive silence. By and large, that's what philosophers
have always told us, from Plato on; and what certain postmodern aesthetes
have retold us in their own way. Poetry doesn't do anything, and literature
doesn't teach anything beyond itself. In Roland Barthes' phrase, its truth
value lies in an infinite playfulness directed against "the fascism oflanguage"
(i.e., cognitive language of all kinds).l Wittgenstein's remark about Kafka is
typical: "Here's a man who takes a lot of trouble to tell us what's not trou
bling him."2 That rigorous disciplinary judgment applies to Faulkner as well.
Wittgenstein's image of trouble is a fly trapped in a bottle. The philosopher
shows the fly the way out. So does the economist and the psychologist.
Faulkner, like Kafka, tells us what it's like to be the trapped fly. Even as he
invokes the transcendent (God, Fate), he traps it in contrary as-if dictions
that keep recalling us to our bottled-in condition.
Suppose then that, reversing tradition-inverting the standard interdis
ciplinary relation between text and context-we reconceive Wittgenstein's
"one" in a literary context. In order to do so, we have to change the imper
sonal, transcultural, ahistorical universal "one" of philosophy (the one who
has nothing more to say) into a fictional character. And after all, isn't it a fic
tion? Wittgenstein invented it, just as he invented the chess-planet. What
does that invented person's remark about keeping silent mean? To answer
that, we have to ask for further specifics: Who is the speaker? Where and
when was this spoken? And once we've thus ventured outside the parameters
of disciplinary logic, we are free to ask for further specifications. We can
point out, for example, that the aphorism comes at the end of a work. the
Traetatus-Logico-Philosophicus, that claims to solve all the problems of phi
losophy-ail of them, once and for all. What if the author meant to ridicule
such claims? "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent": could
this be a satiric comment, intended to characterize an academic Don

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Quixote driven mad by reading too much symbolic logic? Suppose that by
"one" Wittgenstein were mocking the entire enterprise of philosophy. What
if "Ludwig Wittgenstein," the apparent author of the Tractatus, is really a fig
ure of ridicule, the Obsessive Systematizer, speaking on and on about that
whereof anyone, especially philosophers, ought to be silent?
This is not perversity on my part. Narrative irony is a standard literary
device. It becomes a dominant technique in modern literature, with its
emphasis on subjectivity and point of view, but actually it's endemic to all
literary works-a feature inherent in the as-if ground of literary studies
and as such it offers a direct contrast with disciplinarity in its use ofevidence.
Narrative irony specifies the abstractions in the text as the expression of a
certain individual, in a certain time and place, and thereby opens those
abstractions to questions of culture. The disciplinary approach, on the con
trary, specifies in order to abstract. For example, we could not teach Being
and Time as a mockery of Heideggerian thought or Gibbon's Fall of the
Roman Empire as a parody of historiography. If we did, we would be teach
ing a course in literature. Of course, philosophers and historians have some
times written in this literary way, just as writers have sometimes written phi
losophy and history, but to say that is to reaffirm disciplinary boundaries.
And the same boundaries apply in the matter of interpretation. We could
dismiss Blake's claim concerning Paradise Lost-that Milton was of the
devil's party without knowing it-by recourse to Calvinist exegesis; but that
would be a theological argument. And conversely: we could read Marx's
Capital from an ironic narrative perspective as a hymn to the irresistible
powers of capitalism, but that would be mainly of literary interest. Discipli
narily-e.g., for purposes of economic theory-that interpretation would
not matter.
At the risk of stating the obvious, let me stress that I am not arguing
against abstractions. Rather, I'm proposing that we can regard those abstrac
tions-without denying their general explanatory power-with the kind of
cultural specificity that we apply to Christ and Fate in Faulkner's text. We
can insist that, considered from a literary perspective, those abstractions have
a specific textual habitation and a name. That is, we can set them in open
dialogue with the particulars they explain (or explain away) in terms of ratio
nal abstractions. Thus we can interpret particulars and abstractions recipro
cally, within a context that is at once rational and dissonant, systemic and
make-believe, generally applicable and distinctive to this special set of cir
cumstances. It is a context within which we may contest disciplinary bound
aries, without pretending to transcend them (as Barthes does), and without
denying their cognitive value. According to a famous dictum in statistical

The Literary in a Time ofCultural Studies

science, a founding principle of the insurance industry, "Nothing is more

uncertain than the life of a man; nothing is more certain than the life span
of a thousand men."3 Disciplines depend upon such abstractions. Literary
study can challenge the certainties they offer by considering the abstractions
themselves in the same culture-specific terms we would apply to the uncer
tain life of a man.
Do we need literary criticism for this task? Alas, we do. Experience has
shown all too often the arrogance of power/knowledge on the part of disci
plines. Once we set disciplines loose on culture, they tend sui generis toward
absolutes, closure, and solutions. Disciplines are control freaks. They psy
choanalyze history, they philosophize aesthetics, they stage ideas as examples
in economic theory, they make teleologies out of everyday situations. They
are incurable cognitive imperialists, even when they champion humility,
even when they come bearing the gifts of process and tolerance. This has
been true from Plato's monologic dialogues to Derrida's predetermined inde
termInaCIes.
All disciplinary roads lead to Wittgenstein's chess analogy. Can you will
fully reinvent the queen? The disciplinary answer is No, in thunder:
absolutely not. It's no accident that chess has become a commonplace of
modern disciplines. For the sociologist Georg Simmel, it's a paradigm of the
way that people think and behave. For Ferdinand de Saussure, it's the single
best image of the science of linguistics. Others use it to describe the laws of
history, institutional structures, and the rules of cultural coherence. Most
directly, chess has served philosophically as the model of disciplinary cogni
tion. Wittgenstein tells us that it represents "the nature of all propositions,"
"the basic relation between words and the world." We describe the world, he
declares, "as we would talk about the rules of chess."4
For purposes of literary and cultural studies, Faulkner has a better idea.
He talks about the rules of chess as we might describe a particular part of the
world. His analogy comes in a climactic scene in the novel. The protagonist,
Joe Christmas, who embodies the southern race problem (is he black or
white?), has murdered his benefactor, Joanna Burden, and set fire to her
house. The hunt for the killer is a major plot-frame of the novel. Faulkner
underlines its significance by allusions to Paradise Lost and Oedipus Rex. The
lynch mob is led by Percy Grimm, a patriot-fanatic who's driven (we're told)
by "a belief that the white race is superior to any and all other races and that
the American uniform is superior to all men." As the chase draws to a close
the townspeople gather in a kind of outraged festivity, almost a holiday
mood. One aspect of that context may be gleaned from a newspaper descrip
tion of July Fourth in a southern town: "the birth of the nation was cele

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brated in the most sacred and festive manner, with firecrackers, rockets,
Negroes, and whiskey in all its forms."5 Faulkner's scene might be read as a
commentary on that catalogue:
[Grimm] was moving again almost before he had stopped, with that
lean, swift, blind obedience to whatever Player moved him on the
Board. . . . He seemed indefatigable, not flesh and blood, as if the
Player who moved him for pawn likewise found him breath....
But the Player was nor done yet. When the others reached the
kitchen they saw ... Grimm stooping over the body ... and when they
saw what Grimm was doing one of the men gave a choked cry and
stumbled back into the wall and began to vomit. Then Grimm too
sprang back. ... "Now you'll let white women alone, even in hell," he
said. But the man on the floor had not moved. He just lay there, with
his eyes empty of everything save consciousness ... [looking] up at
them with peaceful and unfathomable and unbearable eyes. Then his
face, body, all, seemed to collapse ... and from the slashed garments
about his hips and loins the pent black blood seemed to rush like a
released breath. It seemed to rush out of his pale body like the rush of
sparks from a rising rocket; upon that black blast the man seemed to
rise soaring into their memories forever and ever.
Imagine this passage as a move in a chess game. An abstract player, like a god
in a Greek tragedy-like the Fate that drives Oedipus to Thebes-moves a
white piece into position to capture what appears to be its black counterpart.
The capture itself, however, turns into a surprising reversal. Metaphorically,
it's the black pawn that wins, or seems to; it captures our imagination by
emerging as the crucified Jesus, a triumphant black king.
Now, this transformation calls the logic of chess as we know it into ques
tion, but-and this is crucial to literary function-it does not dissolve or
even blur the analogy itself. It may actually be said to enforce the truism that
the analogy implies (life is a game of chess) since the passage as a whole
expands the scope of the game to include religion, race, politics, and sexual
ity. And yet the game, so expanded, depends on a set of make-believe par
ticulars. What's the relation of Oedipus to Percy Grimm and Joe Christmas?
Is this relevant to the castration that follows, and does castration point us
toward racist concepts of black manhood (as in Grimm's cry about white
women)? Does Faulkner's pun on "rising rocket" connect sexual and
national layers of meaning? What bearing does all this have on the intertex
tual allusions to Paradise Lost and Oedipus Rex, the Fall and self-knowledge?
Such queries are raised by the entire narrative, and to answer them leads us

The Literary in a Time a/Cultural Studies

necessarily to disciplinary sources and rational explanations. The search for

fictional significance is a matter of coherent configurations, like a strategy in
chess. We bring pawn, queen, and king together into a certain logical juxta
position, and we proceed to play out the interpretation according to the
rules of the game.
From a literary perspective, this entire systematic, rational procedure is
disciplined by the fictions of Light in August. And as we've seen, this "disci
pline"-our literary concern with the fictional particular-entails a double
set of concerns, political and formalist, worldly and as-if. In the first case, we
are required to interpret the fictions through their cultural connections.
Faulkner's Christ figure means (among other things) a tradition of southern
lynching, a sexual mythology of blackness, a patriotic ritual, and a history of
class antagonism against blacks on the part of poor whites like Percy Grimm.
To explicate the scene without reference to issues of sex, race, gender, and
American violence would be to drain the passage of its aesthetic force (ambi
guity, complexity, defamiliarization, chiasmus, etc.). Formalist explication
itself requires us here to draw on disciplines called history, sociology, etc. But
we need not authorize these as textual explanations. Instead, we can see them
in the as-if light of the text. They are abstractions whose meaning depends
on the facts of this fiction. Our task as literary critics is to make sense of those
disciplinary insights in terms of certain literary-cultural specifics. To do so,
let me suggest, would be to address a troubling issue for literary critics
engaged in cultural studies: What can we contribute in our dialogue with the
human sciences? For example, what can we say about matters that concern
(say) sociology that sociologists can't say as well, or better? Answer: a liter
ary-cultural perspective can open up sociology as a cognitive system by
investing its abstractions with the malleability, the ungroundedness of liter
ary evidence. For this analytic occasion, suspending sociology's beliefs, we
take the fictive for our measure of truth. The insights we gain thereby about
race, sexuality, class, and national rituals function as a mode of inquiry. We
prove disciplinary norms (in the primal double sense of "prove," as affirma
tion and as doubt) by the as-if terms of fiction.
The challenge is as demanding in its way as the leap of faith. The norms
involved are part of our cultural inheritance. We entrust our lives to them.
They represent the certainties by which we act, our categories of value and
thought. And these certainties, be it noted, are not only logically "necessary"
but humanly desirable, necessary to our sense of well-being. We want
philosophers to give us Answers (or at least the Right Questions). We want
economists to figure things out once and for all. How could we not value the
achievements of the culture through which, after all is said and done-after

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we've recognized the tentative nature of its truths and exposed its deficien
cies and traps-we define ourselves, make decisions, and formulate alterna
tives? And yet, against all this, there's the as-if truth of the literary. Now, for
this moment, in this interpretive interval, we are invited to suspend norma
tive cultural frames of reference. To play this game, we have to recognize that
the truth is-we don't know. We are dealing by definition with truth beyond
the point of organized knowledge but within the scope of culture. For now,
these un-disciplined specifics provide our framework for cultural analysis.
Imagine a version of chess created in that counterdisciplinary spirit: for
example, a game that (by a willing suspension of belief) could accommodate
Wittgenstein's queen with frightening eyes. We're asked to explain the chess
rules through a newfangled figure that suddenly drives everyone off the
board. What sort of game could permit that and still be chess, as we played
it yesterday, or as someone played it, say, 500 years ago, at the end of the fif
teenth century?
In order to reply, we would have to imagine two quite different ways to
play chess. One of these is the game we know. We follow the rules by which
a chess piece is an x in logic, a particular that stands for an abstraction. We
could think of it as a kind of Weberian Ideal Type, a cultural representation
that, cognitively, transcends the varieties of cultural experience. The queen
on this board stands for the queen ahistorically. That's a pure example of the
sort of database that disciplines work with: case histories, statistics, hard facts
that support regulatory generalizations. That dream you had last night sup
ports the Oedipal theory, ahistorically. These economic statistics prove the
general rule of class struggle. As Wittgenstein remarks:
Every syntax ... [is] a system of rules .... Chess does not consist in my
pushing wooden figures around a board. If I say "Now I will make
myself a queen with very frightening eyes, she will drive everyone off
the board" you will laugh ... [because] the totaliry of the game deter
mines the [piece's] logical place. A pawn is ... like the "x" in logic. ...
[And so too, by extension, any particular chess strategy] must be con
sidered a scientific question, [similar to the question of] whether the
king could be mated ... in three moves.
"Totality," "the game determines": the picture at which (by contrast) we are
asked to laugh-a player suddenly, willfully, reconceiving the queen
implies the impotence of radical innovation, the absurdity of "my pushing"
against the object's "logical place," my impudence in talking about that of
which we cannot speak.

Ofcourse that's not what Wittgemtein means to say, here or elsewhere in

The Literary in a Time a/Cultural Studies

his later thought. And it's the later Wittgenstein I mean to invoke, the res
olutely anti-abstractionist, anti-absolutist author of Philosophical Investiga
tions. That's precisely why I chose him for my exemplary antagonist. I might
more comfortably have settled on a systematizer like Hegel, who believed
that philosophy is the thoughts of God before creation; or a social scientist
like Durkheim, for whom "only the universal is rational" and only the ratio
nal counts ("the particulars and the concrete baffle understanding," he
explains; they belong exclusively to "poets and literary people who describe
things as they seem to be without any rational method").!> But my point is:
even Wittgenstein shares this approach-as does the great modern tradition
he represents of the antisystemic in philosophy, from Kierkegaard and Niet
zsche through Heidegger. Disciplinarily, the antisystemic is also a form of
systematicity. It is antisystemic in relation to other approaches in philoso
phy; but in relation to literature and literary study it remains bound to the
cognitive principles implicit in Wittgenstein's x in logic. A Wittgensteinian
literary critic will make the literary a text-proof of (his or her) Wittgenstein;
we can virtually predict the result of any such analysis.
I believe that Wittgenstein expresses the frustrations of philosophy qua
philosophy, the discipline that requires us to know logically, cognitively,
what we're talking about. They are the frustrations of a professional thinker
who is a philosopher, like it or not, and accordingly saddled with the restric
tions of disciplinarity. I've found that these are more or less the same restric
tions that confine cultural critics who come with any systemic answer or
configuration of answers, implicit or explicit, to problems of culture. Their
answers make sense, to be sure, and like Wittgenstein's analogy they per
suade us insofar as they correspond to the rules of the game as we play it. But
that's only one way to describe the game of chess.
The other way is inscribed in Faulkner's questionable analogy. And the
first thing to say about it is that it does not contradict Wittgenstein. On the
contrary, it compels inquiry by its groundedness in accepted generalizations,
and it derives its aesthetic meanings from the familiar game of chess.
Nonetheless, it defies systemic inquiry. For example, it requires us to analyze
Fate as an American legionnaire, Percy Grimm, in an act of terror marked by
"black blood" and lit up by a festive "rush of sparks." What does Fate mean
in these fictive terms? How could such an analysis proceed?
To begin with, we would be dealing in layers, not levels, of meaning.
Levels imply an up-to-date, state-of-the-discipline answer. They demand
closure, at least for the time being, like the answer to the last house on the
block. Other houses may eventually spring up, but until they do, that last
house is the right answer. And it's a valuable answer. It allows us to get some

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where, rather than running in hermeneutic circles. Nonetheless, the right

answer forms a hermeneutic circle of its own. The last-house-on-the-block
answer is always the same. Once the house has been identified, we can always
predict-wherever we're coming from, however we frame the question,
whatever the occasion-where we'll arrive at the end. The last house on the
block is sexuality for Freud, class for Marx, Christ for Christians, pragma
tism for pragmatists, power for Foucauldians, and Wittgenstein for Wittgen
steinians. And so t~lr as they are concerned it was fundamentally the same at
the end of the fifteenth century as it is now.
By contrast, the layers I speak of are reversible, interchangeable.
Faulkner introduces the chess analogy in a highly specialized way (player and
pawn) to explain the lynching of Joe Christmas. But in the course of work
ing out the fiction-as Faulkner plays out that as-if situation-he develops
the analogy into a multilayered configuration (sex-Christ-Fate-race), any
layer of which could serve as the deep one, depending on which perspective
you prefer (psychology, theology, philosophy, sociology). Thus, considered
as a whole, this literary configuration suggests that levels of meaning are not
hierarchies (as in scriptural exegesis or in social science). They are made up,
even if we find them to be true in any given situation, or under certain con
ditions. They are as-if meanings tlS well as true or false meanings, and as a
result they are inherently subject to interchangeability. They can comple
ment each other, expand or circumscribe each other, question or contradict
each other. And the more particulars they force us to account for in the
process, the better. Any analysis of meaning here must presuppose the limi
tationsofhuman knowledge. It must confront the possibilities within culture
that lie beyond the point of received truth. Disciplines also acknowledge
those limitations, of course; they always remind us how far we have yet to
go. But they do so in order to tell us how far we've come, and to urge us for
ward. The literary voice comes to us from the other side of the divide-the
side that, although demonstrably in this world, is not (yet) cognitively ofit.
This counterdisciplinary perspective entails a counterconventional use
of the language of interpretation. I've indicated this by my distinction
between levels and layers of meaning. Literary depth, as I understand it,
involves common questions rather than revelatory answers. It is a depth
measured by the capacity of cultural specifics in the text to resist disciplinary
appropriation. Let me add to that the distinction between positive vis-a-vis
negative universals-we might call them disciplinary vis-a-vis literary uni
versals. By negative or literary universals I mean limitations: our universal
human limitations of will, reason, imagination, and endurance. These are
the universals that bind the cultural specifics of the literary text. And by pos-

The Literary ill a Time olCultural Studies

itive or disciplinary universals I mean the particular solutions we devise to

overcome those limitations, or at least to make do with them. These are the
abstractions common to the human sciences. As solutions, they differ from
one society to another, one century to the next: a theory of justice, a stan
dard of excellence, an explanation for violence. Cognitively, they lead
upward from fact to concept, from the representative particular to the gen
eral solution. And as I said, literature builds upon those positive universals
it thrives on concepts and solutions-but as literary critics we have the
license to recontextualize these as expressions of negative universals. We can
see them-Christ, Fate, Dialectical Materialism, Oedipal Sexuality-as
clusters of cultural specifics, grounded in the volatile materials of textuality.
That is to say, we can interpret them from the same perspective we use in
understanding what the lynching of Joe Christmas "really" means.
The sort of information this provides does not constitute knowledge in
any disciplinary sense. It does not offer control, not even on the secondary
level that Aristotle posited in defining the aesthetic as the realm of the prob
able, since what I'm suggesting calls that very concept into question. (What
is the probable in any given text but a cultural specific?) Certainly it does not
offer us instruments of progress. Marxists think they know more about his
tory than empiricists or idealists. Psychoanalysts are certain that pre-modern
theories of the dream are as outmoded as the Ptolemaic system. Wittgen
steinians think that they can reason better than Platonists, not just differ
ently but more clearly. But no Faulknerian will claim that Light in August
teaches us more about society, psychology, or philosophy than Milton does,
or Sophocles, and certainly not more about literature.
What we have, then, are two models of analysis, two ways of playing
chess-one systemic, the other countersystemic. The literary model as I con
ceive it is different, not superior. I believe in the disciplinary quest for truth.
We should want to find answers (the best way to organize society, the high
est moral principles). The language games we play would become less
human, less than human, if we gave up on positive universals. It would be
scandalous to revise the past without believing in some sense in historical
truth, or to institute social change without believing in some sense in
progress. When I suggested just now that the probable in any given text is a
cultural specific-a certain notion of greatness, a particular ideal of man
hood-I assumed the viability of the concept itself of the probable (not only
to disciplinary discourse but also to aesthetic appreciation). My point is the
challenge, the test by negation. It's the job of cognitive disciplines to try to
get us closer to answers, however distant the answer remains. And the job of
literary study is to keep the game going. Literary particulars offer a context

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BERCOV1TCH

for an inquiry into rhe probabiliries we live wirh. That inquiry can teach us
more about ourselves, perhaps more about others, certainly more about the
dynamics between language and culture. Indeed, we might say that negation
in this context has a dimension of progress in its own right. Counterdisci
plinarity, as I conceive it, can contribute to the overall project of cultural
studies by insisting through negation that we are always already more than
our culture tells us we are, just as a language is more than a discipline and
just as a literary text is more than the sum of the explanations, solutions,
probabilities, and abstractions that it accumulates as it travels across time
and space.
Suppose we tried to reconstruct the game of chess in these counterdis
ciplinary terms. What would a game look like? Answer one: it would look
like Faulkner's text. Answer two: it would look like a lor of literary texts.
Answer three: it would look a lot like the world we live in. Answer four: it
would look just like the game of chess. We think of any given chess match
(Fischer versus Spassky, Kasparov versus Deep Blue) as the epitome of the
arbitrary (a game) as the systemic (universal law). But in the long view a
chess match, any match, is a story of continual transition, involving the
zigzag histories of cultures, a shifting configuration of the most unlikely rec
iprocities between rules governing different areas of life, the ancient, multi
lingual, transnational "game of games." The origins of chess remain a mat
ter of dispute, but we know that in Malaya the rules changed with successive
religious influences (Hindu, Shintoist, Islamic); that in India, China, and
the Middle East chess moves were directly linked to large-scale war games;
and that the original Near Eastern and Arabic names for chess (chatr{lng,
sharztranJ) reflect variations in political hierarchy, as do early Korean forms
of the game. We know further that, during the Renaissance, chess was played
at tournaments with human "pieces" on enormous fields; that the meanings
of chess pieces have fluctuated with the fates of empires; and that fluctuation
has brought with it constant crisscrossings of institutional, conceptual, and
even technological structures-in our day-for instance, the radical changes
introduced by the Fischer timeclock. A contemporary match could be con
textualized through the overlappings of feudal Spanish knight and caste
bound Indian pawn with our space-age timer at a courtly Renaissance tour
nament'?
Think of what it would mean to describe a chess match in this context!
It would be like explaining the castration of Joe Christmas through allusions
to Fate and the crucifixion, to Oedipw Rex and Pm-adise Lost, to southern his
tory, national holidays, and race-class-gender. We would have to account for
the most unlikely trans historical correspondences, transpositions, transgres-

The Literary in a Time ofCultural Studies

sions, inversions. The point of analysis would be to explain why we are not
bound to systems, including those we play by. Why (to recall Faulkner's Oedi
pal-Miltonic chess game) did the wisdom of the Greeks fail to solve our moral
problems? Why did the triumph of Christianity turn into the world of Joe
Christmas? And conversely, why, as Light in August also testifies, did Chris
tianity and the wisdom of the Greeks prevail in spite of those de facto failures?
Why, in spite of all we've learned, do we still invoke Fate? How does chess,
with its antique, mixed-up hierarchy, persist in our democratic world? And
how can we account, except by negation, for the metamorphoses that consti
tute the mix-as for example in medieval Rome, when the Persian vizier or
counselor was replaced by the queen: or several centuries later, when the
queen assumed what we now consider to be her lawful place on the board?
That last moment is significant enough to stand as a paradigm for chess
in general. It inaugurated the rules of modern chess, the game as we now
play it. Evidently, half a millennium ago, in the last quarter of the fifteenth
century, somewhere in Spain, Portugal, or Italy, the game of chess changed
qualitatively. The significant developments centered on speed of contact and
scope of personal initiative. The main innovation lay in the expanded pow
ers of the queen, which, from being the weakest player, weaker than the
pawn, suddenly became the strongest single unit on the board. By the
149 os - the decade when America was instated as a global player-chess had
begun anew. According to experts, the game then developed a coherent new
system with a complete theory of its own, widely known as the theory of the
Mad Queen, esches de La dame enragee. {zla rabiosa. Chess historians have
made the predictable Renaissance correspondences: expanded mobility, the
new individualism, the invention of the printing press, and the great queens
of empire, from Isabella of Spain to Elizabeth of England. And indeed
Isabella herself is directly implicated: the first published treatise on the New
Chess was dedicated to her in 1496 by the author, the courtier-poet Luis de
Lucena, who had it bound together with a group of Petrarehan sonnets and
entitled it all The Game ofLove.
Lucena's Mad Queen is an emblem of literary context. She is a fit oppo
nent for the queen with frightening eyes, emblem of the disciplinary taboo:
"Thou shalt not violate the rules of the game." Wirrgenstein's queen is imag
inary, as-if, but she enforces actual restrictions; Lucena's Mad Queen is an
actual historical figure, but she proves that systemic logic can be malleable,
susceptible to agency and cultural change. And in doing so, she brings
together the games of technology, imperialism, and social hierarchy, of
courtly love and the sonnet. Each of these games invites an x-in-logic proce
dure, but taken together, as an overlapping configuration of different game

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SAC VAN BERCOVITCH

rules-the conflicting rules of what Wittgenstein would call a family of

games-they require explanations that are countersystemic. Such explana
tions are based on the silences that underlie our systems of knowledge. And
they work cognitively by opening up the possibilities available to analysis
under the rules. Under, as in subject to the rules, but also within them, at
once undergirding the rules and undermining them; under as in underlie,
involving possibilities that in some sense these absolutes really do speak the
truth-possibilities too of an unsettling kind, prospects that have been
declared out of bounds, or that have not yet been explored-variations,
transformations, or innovations that may affect the rules themselves, and so
alter the nature of the game. Under, as in the volatile layers of literary depth.
Now, let me translate all this into the terms ofliterary and cultural stud
les.

The Literary in a Time ofCultural Studies

I take that last, surprising, willful, overdetermined, and arbitrary figure to
represent the function of the literary in our time of cultural studies. It opens
up a language game that requires us to play for keeps (win, lose, or draw) in
a counterdisciplinary match that we expect will leave us, wherever we end,
in the midst of things, professionally and humanly.

APPENDIX
A.

The Problem ofthe Disciplines

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent (Wovon man
nicht sprechen kann, daruber mill; man schweigen).
-LUDWIG WITTCENSTEIN,

I.

At any given time, culture is relatively coherent, a system of dis

parate but interlinked areas of life (religious, economic, moral,
etc.), each of which might be compared to the game of chess. Liter
ary analysis can help mediate among them.

2. Culture

is a countersystemic cluster of interlinked but disparate

areas of life, the rules of which, considered together, resemble the
game of chess. The best single model of the game for our time and
place is a literary text.

}. The literary text simultaneously engages, embraces, and disclaims

the rules that frame the rhetorics of culture, and it does so in pre
cisely the area, language, that bears the most responsibility for the
ways we understand the world. We can extend our counterdiscipli
nary outlook, accordingly, to the rhetorics from which it came,
from which it's made, and through which it appeals.
4 Literature is a testament to the power of cultural systems; but liter
ary analysis requires us to see cultural systems as testaments to the
power of textual transvaluation, and to recognize that the abstrac
tions on which those systems build may in time become specific
points of departure, perhaps points from which to reconceive the
game at large. So reconceived, the game of culture, while systemic
at any given moment, remains universally subject to intervention
as when the thousand-year-old doctrine of the king's divine right
became a key player in the language game of American individual
ism: Jefferson's "kingly commons," Whitman's "divine average,"
Faulkner's pawn-become-king, the black and/or white king with
unbearable eyes.

Traaatus Logi(()Philosophicus, rrans. C. K. Ogden

(London: Rourledge, 1989), 189.

B.

The Literary Text

[Grimm] was moving again almost before he had stopped, with that
lean, swift, blind obedience to wharever Player moved him on the
board. He seemed indefatigable, not flesh and blood, as if the Player
who moved him for pawn likewise found him breath....
But the Player was not done yeI. When rhe others reached the
kitchen they saw Grimm stooping over the body ... and when they
saw what Grimm was doing one of the men gave a choked cry and
srumbled back inro the wall and began to vomit. Then Grimm too
sprang back. "Now you'll let white women alone, even in hell," he
said. But the man on the floor had not moved. He just lay there, with
his eyes empry of everyrhing save consciousness ... [looking] up ar
them wirh peaceful and unfathomable and unbearable eyes. Then his
face, body, all, seemed to collapse ... and from rhe slashed garments
about his hips and loins the penr black blood seemed to rush like a
released breath. Ir seemed to rush out of his pale body like the rush of
sparks from a rising rocket; upon thar black blast the man seemed to
rise soaring into their memories forever and ever.
-WILLIAM FAULKNER,

Light in AugusdNew York: Random House, 1932). 439-40.

c. The DiJCiplinary Text

Every syntax can be regarded as a system of rules for a game. I have
been reflecring on what ... [it] can mean [to say] ... that a formalist

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BERCOVITCl-I

regards the axioms of mathematics as similar to the rules of chess. I

would like to say: not on the axioms of mathematics, but the whole
syntax is arbitrary.
I was asked in Cambridge whether I think that mathematics con
cerns ink marks on paper [as does literature]. I reply: in just the same
sense in which chess concerns wooden figures. Chess, I mean, does nor
consist in my pushing wooden figures around a board. If I say, "Now

FI V E

Discipline and Distraction:

Psycho, Visual Culture, and Postmodern Cinema
Linda Williams

I will make myself a queen with very frightening eyes, she will drive
everyone off the board," you will laugh. It does nor matter what a
pawn looks like. What is rather the case is that the totality of rules of
the game determines the logical place of a pawn. A pawn is a variable,
like the "x" in logic. ...
If you ask me: where lies the difference between chess and the syn
tax of a language, I reply: solely in their application.... If there were
men on Mars who made war like the chess pieces, then the generals
would use the rules of chess for prediction. It would then be a scien
tific question whether the king could be mated by a certain deploy
ment of pieces in three moves, and so on.

Whatever the pictorial turn is .

it is not a return to naive mimetiC theories of

representation, or a renewed metaphysics of pictorial presence: It is, rather, a

-WITTGENSTEIN AND THE VIENNA CIRCLE: CONVERSATIONS RECORDED BY

postllngulstic, postsemiotlc rediscovery of the picture as a complex interplay

ed. Brian McGuiness. trans. Joachim Schulte and Brian

between vlsuality, apparatus, discourse, bodies, and figurallty It is the realiza

FRIEDRICH W AISMANN,

McGuiness (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1979). 10,-4.

tion that spectatorshlp (the look, the gaze, the glance, the practices of obser
vation, surveillance, and visual pleasure) may be as deep a problem as various

NOTES

forms of reading (deCipherment, decoding, interpretation, etc.) and that visual

experience or "visual literacy" might not be fully explicable on the model of tex

Roland Banhes, "Inaugural Lecture, College de France,"' in Susan Sontag, ed.. A

Barthes Reader (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982),461-62. This paper is a revised version
of a talk I gave at the Critical Theoty Institute of the University of Cali fomi a, Irvine. My
thanks to John Carlos Rowe and the members of the Institute for their hospitality and
their intellectual generosity.
2. Quote in Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty o/Genius (New York: Viking
Penguin, 1990), 498.
3 Elizur White, 1856, quoted in Susan L. Mizruchi, The Science o/Sacrifice: Ameri
can Literature and Modern Social Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 199 8).
4 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophiml Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe
(New York: Macmillan, 1953), 46e-47e (no. 108).
5 Quoted in Stephen James's forthcoming doctoral dissertation (Harvard Univer
sity) on July Fourth rituals.
6. Quoted in Mizruchi, Science o/Sacrifice.
7 Richard Eales, Chess: The HistOlJ o/the Game (New York: Oxford University Press,
1985), 18-38. My references to chess histoty are drawn from a variety of sources, the best of
which remains H. J. R. Murray, A History o/Chess (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 19 13).
l.

tuality. Most important, it IS the realization that while the problem of pictorial
representation has always been with us, It presses inescapably now, and with
unprecedented force, on eveny level of culture, from the most refined philo
sophical speculations to the most vulgar productions of the mass media.
-W. J. T MITCHELL

If you've deSigned a picture correctly, In terms of its emotional impact, the

Japanese audience would scream at the same time as the Indian audience.
-ALfRED

HITCHCOCK

You might think that the disci pline of film studies would be one of the first
to welcome the idea of a pictorial turn-that it might even be ideally suited
to envision what Mitchell in the passage quoted above calls a "global critique
of visual culture." In fact, however, because film studies achieved its first aca
demic legitimacy through appropriations of linguistic models of textuality,
and because its highly influential feminist strain has achieved its greatest