Eliminating some of the facts with wich one set out,adding others,and modifying the initial hypothesis; one

repeats this operation by successive appromations until one arrives (this, at least, is the ideal,which is reached to a greater or lesser degree according to the case)at a structural hypothesis that can account for perfectly coherent set of facts. When studying cultural creation,one finds oneself,it is true,in a privileged situation as far as the initial hypothesis is concerned. It is,in effect, highly probable that great literary,artistic,or philosophical works constitute coherent significatory structures. Tht firstcarving upof the object is therefore,as it were, given at the outset. However,it is important to guard against the temptation to place too absolute a trust in this presupposition. The work may, in effect,contain heterogeneous elements that should be distinguished from its essential unity. Furthermore,although the hypothesis of the unity of the works taken in isolation,this probability diminishes considerably when we are dealing with all the writing of one and the same writer. That is why,in concrete research, we must begin with the analysis of each of the writers works,studying them as far as possiblein the order in wich they were written. Such a study will enable us to make provisional grouping of writings on the basis of wich we can seek in the intellectual,political,social,and economic life of the period,structured social grouping,in whichone can integrate,as partial elements,the works being studied,by establishing between them and the whole intelligible relations and,hopefully,homologies. The progress of a piece of genetic-structuralist research consists in the fact of delimiting groups of empirical data that constitute structures,relative totalities,in which they can later be inserted as elements in other larger,but similar structures,and so on. This method has ,among others,the double advantage first of conceiving of the whole set of human facts in a unitary manner and,then ,of being both comprehensive and explanatory, for the elucidation af a significatory structure constitutes a process of comprehension,whereas its insertion into a larger structure is, in relation to it, a process of explanation. Let us take an example; to elucidate the tragic structure of pascals Penses and Racines tragedies is a process of comprehension; to insert them into extremist Jansenism by uncovering the structure of this school of thought is a process of explanation in relation to the writings of Pascal and Racine; to insert extremist Jansenism into the over-all history of Jansenism is to explain the first and to understand the second. To insert Jansenism,as a movement of ideological expression,into the history of the seventeenth-century noblesse de robe is to explain Jansenism and to understand the noblesse de robe. To insert the history of the noblesse de robe into the over-all history of French society is to explain it by understanding the latter,and so on. Expalnationan

understanding are not therefore two different intellectual processes,but one and the same processapplied to two frames of reference. Lastly ,I should like to stress that from this viewpoint in which empirical datum to its concrete,objective signify cation is brought about by the insertion into relative,structured, and significatory totalities-every human fact may,and even must,posses a certain number of significations,differing according to the number of structures into which it can be inserted in a positive and effective way. Thus for example,if Jansenism must be inserted,throught the mediations already indicated, into seventeenth- century French society ,in which it represents a retrograde and reactionary ideological current opposed to the progressive historical forces represented above all by the bourgeoisie and the monarchy and,on the ideological plane,by Cartesian rasionalism,it is just as legitimate and necessary to insert it into the over-all structure of Western society as it has develoved up to our own time,in which case it becomes progressive in the sense that it constitutes one of the first steps in the direction of superseding Cartesian rasionalism towards dialectical thingking;and,of course, these two significations,are neither exlusive nor contradictory. To end, I should like to say something about two particulary important problems in the present state of literary criticism: A) That of the insertion of literary works into two real and complementary totalities,which may provide elements of understanding and explanation, namely, the individual and the group and B) On this basis,that of function of cultural creation in the life of men On the first point we have today two scientific school of a genetic strukturalist type corresponding to the attempts to insert works into collective structures and into individual biography: Marxism and psychoanalysis. Leaving to one side the difficulties already referred to,the difficulties of uncovering individual structures, let us begin by considering these two school on the methodological plane. Both offer to understand and explain human facts by insertion into the structured totalities respectively of the collective life and the individual biography. They thus constitute related and complementary methods and the results of each of them ought,to all appearances at least,strengthen and complement those of the other. Unfortunately ,qua genetic structuralism, psychoanalysis,at least in the form elaborated by Freud,is not sufficiently consistent and is much too tainted with the scientism that dominated university life at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. This becomes abundantly apparent on two most important points.

Firstly, in Freudian explanations, the temporal dimension of the influence of the determinist scientism of his time, Freud entirely neglects the positive forces of equilibration that act in every human structure,whether individual or collective;for him,to explain is to go back to the experiences of childhood to repressed instinctive forces,while he entirely neglects the positive assumption that consciousness and the relation with reality might have. Secondly,the individual is, for Freud an absolute subject for whom other men only be objects of satisfaction or frustration ;this fact is perhaps the basis of the absence of future that I have just mentioned. It would no doubt be false to reduce,in too narrow a way ,the Freudian libido to the sexsual domain; nevertheless,it is always individual and,in Freuds view of mankind,the collective subject and the satisfaction that collective action may bring to the individual and entirely lacking. One might develop at length with the aid of many concrete examples, the distortions that this perspectives create in Freudian analyses of cultural and historical facts. From this point of view,integrates noy only the future as an explanatory factor but also the individual signification of human facts side by side with their collective signification. Lastly,on the level that concerns us here,that of cultural works and particulary literary works,it seems to me incontestable that these works may be validly integrated into significatory structures of an individual type and of a collective type. Only and this goes without saying,the real and valid signification that these two intergrations may uncover are at the same time of a different and complementary nature. The integration of works into individual biography can in effect reveal only their individual signification and their relation with the biographical and psychical problems of the author. That is to say,whatever the validity and scientific rigour of researches of this type might be, they must necessarily situate the works outside its own cultural and proper aesthetic context,and place it at the same level as all the individual symptoms of a particular patient treated by the psychoanalyst. Supposing-and I would not concede this-that one may validly relate on the individual plane Pascals writings to his relations with his sister or those of Kleist to the relations with his sister and this father,on would have brought out an affective and biographical signification in these writings,but one would not have dealt with,or even approached,their philosophical or literary signification. Thousands and tens of thousands of individuals have certainly had similar relations with members of their family and I cannot see how a psychoanalytical study of these symptoms