The Limits of Pluralism

Excerpt from "'Preserving the Exemplar': or, How Not to Dig our Own Graves" by Wayne C. Booth:

At first thought, our question of the day seems to be "about the text itself." Is there, in all texts, or at least in some texts, what Abrams calls "a core of determinate meanings," "the central core of what they [the authors] undertook to communicate"? Miller has seemed to find in the texts of Nietzsche a claim that there is not, that "the same text authorizes innumerable interpretations: There is no 'correct' interpretation...reading is never the objective identifying of a sense but the importation of meaning into a text which has no meaning 'in itself.'" Abrams claims that Miller cannot report on Nietzsche's deconstructionist claims without violating them: Miller seems to claim that he has found something that Nietzsche's text really says, not something that Miller himself merely brought to it, Is this objection a quibble or a clincher?1

  • 1. See my "M.H. Abrams: Historian as Critic, Critic as Pluralist," Critical Inquiry 2 (Spring 1976): 411-45, and Abrams' reply, "Rationality and Imagination in Cultural History," pp. 447-64, esp. 456-58.

    Wayne C. Booth's other contributions to Critical Inquiry include "Kenneth Burke's Way of Knowing" (September 1974), "Irony and Pity Once Again: Thais Revisited" (Winter 1975), "CRITICAL RESPONSE: Notes and Exchanges" (Autumn 1977), "Metaphor as Rhetoric: The Problem of Evaluation" (Autumn 1978) ,"Ten Literal 'Theses" (Autumn 1978), with Wright Morris: "The Writing of Organic Fiction: A Conversation" (Autumn 1976), and with Robert E. Streeter, W.J.T. Mitchell: "EDITORS' NOTE: Sheldon Sacks 1930-1979" (Spring 1979).

    © 1977 by The University of Chicago. All excerpts appear in Critical Inquiry, Volume 3, Number 3 (Spring 1977). This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of US copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that this entire notice is carried and that the University of Chicago Press is notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or reduplication of this text in other terms, in any medium, requires both the consent of the authors and the University of Chicago Press.

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