[...] Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, is in the phrase of one of its interpreters a 'hermeneutic of suspicion': its concern is not just to 'read the text' of the unconscious, but to uncover the processes, the dream-work, by which that text was produced. To do this, it focuses in particular on what have been called 'symptomatic' places in the dream-text--distortions, ambiguities, absences and elisions which may provide a specially valuable mode of access to the 'latent content', or unconscious drives, which have gone into its making. Literary criticism, as we saw in the case of Lawrence's novel, can do something similar: by attending to what may seem like evasions, ambivalences and points of intensity in the narrative--words which do not get spoken, words which are spoken with unusual frequency, doublings and slidings of language--it can begin to probe through the layers of secondary revision and expose something of the 'sub-text' which, like an unconscious wish, the work both conceals and reveals. It can attend, in other words, not only to what the text says, but to how it works.

[...] Some traditional critics would appear to hold that other people subscribe to theories while they prefer to read literature 'straightforwardly'. No theoretical or ideological predilections, in other words, mediate between themselves and the text: to describe George Eliot's later world as one of 'mature resignation' is not ideological, whereas to claim that it reveals evasion and compromise is. It is therefore difficult to engage such critics in debate about ideological preconceptions, since the power of ideology over them is nowhere more marked than in their honest belief that their readings are 'innocent'. It was Leavis who was being 'doctrinal' in attacking Milton, not C. S. Lewis in defending him; it is feminist critics who insist on confusing literature with politics by examining fictional images of gender, not conventional critics who are being political by arguing that Richardson's Clarissa is largely responsible for her own rape.

Another reason why literary criticism cannot justify its self-limiting to certain works by an appeal to their 'value' is that criticism is part of a literary institution which constitutes these works as valuable in the first place. [...] Shakespeare was not great literature lying conveniently to hand, which the literary institution then happily discovered: he is great literature because the institution constitutes him as such. [...]

[...] The idea that there are 'non-political' forms of criticism is simply a myth which furthers certain political uses of literature all the more effectively. [...] It is a distinction between different forms of politics--between those who subscribe to the doctrine that history, society and human reality as a whole are fragmentary, arbitrary and directionless, and those who have other interests which imply alternative views about the way the world is. There is no way of settling the question of which politics is preferable in literary critical terms. You simply have to argue about politics. It is not a question of debating whether 'literature' should be related to 'history' or not: it is a question of different readings of history itself.