An Enormity for Flaubert

Gerard Genette, influenced by Levi-Strauss, has suggested that the literary critic is a bricoleur,1 a jack-of-all-trades, who draws from all disciplines to perform his selfstyled work upon a text. This tinkering is the pre-production of as a second level activity based on an already produced text in its junction with a vast array of tools for intellectual problem solving. While the aim of criticism has generally been to select and to elucidate valuable pieces of writing, the act of has its neglected, yet essential, foreplay. Our present preoccupation with foreplay removes us, for the moment, from the irreversible passage to a criticism, the same irreversible process variously labeled production by the Marxists, genesis by Lacan, transformation by Chomsky, construction by Piaget ..... Foreplay is reversible, non-committal. In this domain of bricolage, hypothesis is the byword. It is the growth and diminution of interrelated hypotheses tending toward a system, which, once formed, grows from simple to complex to hypercomplex, finally ushering us over the threshold to a criticism. Avoiding a serious inductive class (e.g., axioms, premises, or postulates), let us begin with what Charles Sanders Peirce has called abduction.2 This is not a formal induction because it lacks sufficient proof or verification. It is an interrogative hypothesis. Such a notion is much better suited to the process of discovery, to the looseness of play. We should notice, however, that abduction is not merely intuition. It is a formalization with low stakes, the beginning of a system which may be discarded or developed in measure of its capacity to map the object of analysis. Instead of the global and quasi-comprehensive categorial schemes of an Aristotle, a Kant or a Whitehead, a more modest critical abduction will suggest a partial categorial scheme having some construed relation with the text under consideration. It is important to note that our abducted scheme will be partial, that it may be altered, and that it may be replaced. We shall state only two basic definitions

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