vol6num3cov290x435.jpg] Elizabeth Abel Redefining the Sister Arts: Baudelaire's Response to the_Art_of Delacroix Baudelaire's response to Delacroix's art and theories provides a particularly fruitful focus for a study of the new rapport between the former sister arts. There is little similarity between Delacroix's action-filled exotic subjects and Baudelaire's more intimate and private poetry; their arts must therefore be related in some domain apart from content. We are aided in deciphering this domain by Baudelaire's extensive commentary on Delacroix. Moreover, perhaps because of its subtlety, the relationship between these arts has not received the attention it deserves.1 Yet no sooner is the possibility for such a study recognized than the problems it entails become apparent. Without the focus of common subjects, where does one begin? The dangers of impressionistic comparisons of study are readily apparent in the tendency of Geistesgeschichte studies to transfer stylistic terms from one art form to another, creating such bizarre transpositions as "the visible chamber music of the bent furniture" or the "Titian style of the madrigal" in Spengler's Decline of the West or Wylie Sypher's suggestion that a Shakespearean play is like a Renaissance painting because it makes use of "perspective" to create a real and believable world.2 And indeed it would be misleading to look for particular stylistic similarities between Delacroix and Baudelaire. Delacroix's dissolution of solid color masses into separate strokes of different colors, for example, would appear to be closer to Rimbaud's disjointed language than to Baudelaire's carefully interwoven sentences. Only by viewing the two art forms as interconnected systems can we determine their relationship. If the new affiliation of poetry and painting in the Romantic period derives from the expression of imaginative unity, a critical approach to their relationship must be attuned to different ways of expressing unity. The theoretical framework that accounts most completely for the kind of relationship existing between Delacroix and Baudelaire is provided by the structuralists, although, as we shall see, even this approach has limitations.   ·  1. There are several studies of Baudelaire's aesthetics and criticism, such as André Ferran's L'Esthétique de Baudelaire (Paris, 1968), Margaret Gilman's Baudelaire the Critic (New York, 1943), and Jean Prévost's Baudelaire: essai sur l'inspiration et la création poétiques (Paris, 1953), which contain sections on the influence of Delacroix but do not extend their analysis into Baudelaire's poetry as a whole. More specific works, such as Lucie Horner's Baudelaire critique de Delacroix (Paris, 1973), provides a detailed study of their relationship based on their correspondence and references to one another, but no analysis of the relationship between their two art forms. Some studies of Baudelaire's poetry, such as Lloyd James Austin's L'Univers poétique de Baudelaire: symbolisme et symbolique (Paris, 1956) and Martin Turnell's Baudelaire: A Study of His Poetry (London, 1953), point out aspects of Baudelaire's poems that appear relevant to the relationship with Delacroix, but they do not make these connections themselves. Most commentary on the relationship of Delacroix to Baudelaire's poetry is limited to those few poems that Baudelaire wrote on Delacroix's paintings. ·  2. Wellek and Warren quote the comments on Spengler in Theory of Literature, p. 131. Sypher's comments are in Four Ages of Renaissance Style: Transformations in Art and Literature 1400-1700 (Garden City, N.Y., 1955), pp. 79-80.   Elizabeth Abel is an assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago. A coeditor of , she is currently writing a book on literary and psychoanalytic representation of female identity. Ernest B. Gilman Word and Image in Quarles' Emblemes In Quarles' world the emblem as traditionally conceived must strain across a widening gap between the verbal and the visual. Rosemary Freeman's criticism of Quarles, that in a mechanical "imposition of meaning" the text of the emblem applies an interpretation to, rather than discovers a significance within, the image, is more apt than Freeman realized. With the semantic congruence between word and image no longer guaranteed, artists attempting to yoke the two would have to reconceive the relationship between them. Seen as a response to this need, Blake's illuminated books complicate the emblem tradition in an art of dazzling improvisatory juxtapositions. Indeed, his revaluation of the ties between "body" and "soul" may be taken in one sense as a revision of the emblematist's traditional distinction. Words, once the soul of the emblem, now become truly animate for Blake - flowing, sprouting, multicolored - while their quirky energy, no longer restrained by standardized print, is embodied on sensual, quasi-pictorial shapes; images speak in a new and private vocabulary of emblematic birds, curling tendrils, and other forms that gesture allusively from plate to plate. These frame, underscore, celebrate, intrude upon, parody, or oppose themselves by "contraries" to the meaning of the adjoining text. If Quarles' work signals the failure of the emblem in England, its success in probing the problems of combining language and imagery points toward the renewal of the form in Blake.   Ernest B. Gilman, assistant professor of English at the University of Virginia, is the author of The Curious Perspective. He is currently working on a book on joint literary and pictorial forms in the Renaissance. Leo Steinberg The Line of Fate in Michelangelo's Painting Let us agree, to begin with, that we are not shown [in Last Judgment], as Life Magazine long ago phrased it, a Saint Bartholomew who "holds his own mortal skin, in which Michelangelo whimsically painted a distorted portrait of himself."1 The face was sloughed with the rest of the skin and goes with it. What we see is a Saint Bartholomew with another's integument in his hand. We next consider an aspect of the self-portrait which even La Cava left out of account - its relative siting. This has to matter since the portrait lies in the path of Christ's imminent action. More than that, it lies on a diagonal that traverses the fresco like a heraldic bend chief to base - from left top to right bottom. The twofold competence thus assumed by the self-portrait - in its concrete location and in the range of its influence - is something to marvel at. A hangdog face flops to one side, helpless and limp. But the tilt of its axis projected upward across the field strikes the apex of the left-hand lunette, the uppermost point of the fresco. And if, departing once again from the skin's facial axis, we project its course netherward, we discover the line produced to aim straight at the fresco's lower right corner. Such results do not come by chance. To put it literally, letting metaphor fall where it may: it is the extension of the self's axis that strings the continuum of heaven and hell.   ·  1. Life Magazine, 6 December 1949, p. 45. So also Redig de Campos speaks of the lifeless Apostle's own skin, "dove il Buonarroti ha nascoto un singolare autoritratto..in caricatura tragica della sua 'infinita miseria'" (Il Giudizio Universale di Michelango [Rome, 1964], p. 39). Tolnay sees the matter correctly: "It is the artist's empty skin which the saint holds in his hand" (The Final Period, p. 44.)   Leo Steinberg is Benjamin Franklin Professor and University Professor of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. His publications include Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art, Michelangelo's Last Paintings, Borromini's San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, as well as studies of Leonardo, Pontormo, Velazquez, and Picasso. Gerald Mast Kracauer's Two Tendencies and the Early History of_Film_Narrative If narrating the feeling of stories, fictional or otherwise is an inherent possibility of motion pictures (in fact, the first possibility to be realized in the history of film), then Kracauer's distinction between the realist and formative tendencies must be questioned and, in effect, the two must be synthesized. Wasn't the practical problem for the earliest films how to construct a formative sequence of events within an absolutely real-looking visual context? Wasn't the paradox of film narrative the combination of an obviously unreal sequence of events with an obviously real visual and social setting? And isn't that paradox the most intriguing and complex problem of narrative film today, when the visual and social setting have become increasingly real-seeming? And doesn't this paradox have something to do with the fact that narrative film today seems richer and more important than it did a decade ago, at a time when various admirers of both cinéma vérité and cinéma pur had announced the death of fictional filmed narrative?   Kracauer's realist aesthetic, concentrating exclusively on the photographic surfaces of things in the material world (as neither Bazin's nor Cavell's aesthetic does), overlooks this paradox altogether. It overlooks the fact extremely relevant to the cinema that the term "realist" means one thing in its common application to a painting or photograph and quite another thing in its equally common application to a novel or play. A realistic visual image is one that is said to "look like," "resemble," "reproduce," "iconically represent" the surfaces of the visual world. We see or think we see in a painting what we see or think we see in the real world.1 But a realistic story is one that is said to chronicle "credibly," "probably," and "believably" the way we think people feel, think, or act, the way things happen, and the reasons they happen, all of which are consistent with the reader-audience-society's beliefs about psychology, motivation, and probability. The standard of one sense of realism is primarily visual while the standard of the other is primarily psychological. One might see the early films groping, then, toward a synthesis of the visual realism of late-nineteenth- century painting/photography with the psychological realism of late-nineteenth-century novel/drama.   ·  1. This equivocation deliberately avoids the question of whether there is anything actually real about what one sees in a painting or photograph. The fact is that a very large number of viewers operate in this assumption because they think there is something real about what they see, despite the theoretical imprecision of their holding such a belief.   Gerald Mast is the author of, among other works, A Short History of the Movies, The Comic Mind: Comedy and the Movies, and Film/Cinema/ Movie: A Theory of Experience. His previous contribution to , "What Isn't Cinema?," appeared in the Winter 1974 issue. John R. Searle Las Meninas and the Paradoxes of Pictorial Representation Now, back to the picture. On the illusionist reading the spectators have become identical with Philip IV and Maria Ana. Given its position across the room and our position at the front of the scene, we would have to see ourselves in the mirror, but we only see the royal couple. Now what exactly is the painter on the left painting? Well it is obvious that he is painting us, that is, Philip IV and his wife. He looks straight at us, scrutinizing our features, before applying the brush to the canvas. We have plainly caught him in the very act of painting us. But in what sort of picture is he painting us? The standard interpretation is that he is painting a full length portrait of what we see in the mirror. But there is an objection to that interpretation which seems to me fairly convincing. The canvas he is painting on is much too large for any such portrait. The canvas on which he is painting is indeed about as big as the one we are looking at, about 10 feet high and 8 feet wide (the dimensions of Las Meninas are 3.19 meters by 2.67 meters). I think that the painter is painting the picture we are seeing; that is, he is painting Las Meninas by Velazquez. Although this interpretation seems to me defensible on internal grounds alone, there are certain bits of external evidence: as far as we know, the only portrait Velazquez ever painted of the royal couple is the one we are looking at, Las Meninas. Velazquez is plainly painting us, the royal couple, but there is no other picture in which he did that; and indeed he seldom used such large canvases for interiors. The Spinners is a large-scale interior but most of his big canvases are equestrian portraits of Spanish royalty.   John R. Searle, professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley, is the author of Speech Acts, The Campus War, and Expression and Meaning. Rudolf Arnheim A Plea for Visual Thinking The habit of separating the intuitive from the abstractive functions, as they were called in the Middle Ages, goes far back in our tradition. Descartes, in the sixth Meditation, defined man as "a thing that thinks," to which reasoning came naturally; whereas imagining, the activity of the senses, required a special effort and was in no way necessary to the human nature or essence. The passive ability to receive images of sensory things, said Descartes, would be useless if there did not exist in the mind a further and higher active faculty capable of shaping these images and of correcting the errors that derive from sensory experience. A century later Leibnitz spoke of two levels of clear cognition.1 Reasoning was cognition of the higher degree: it was distinct, that is, it could analyze things into their components. Sensory experience, on the other hand, was cognition of the lower order: it also could be clear but it was confused, in the original Latin sense of the term; that is, all elements fused and mingled together in an indivisible whole. Thus artists, who rely on this inferior faculty, are good judges of works of art but when asked what is wrong with a particular piece that displeases them can only reply that it lacks nescio quid, a certain "I don't know what."   · 1. Leibnitz, Nouveaux essais sur l'entendement humain (Paris, 1966), bk. 2, chap. 29.   Rudolf Arnheim is the author of Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye, Toward a Psychology of Art, The Dynamics of Architectural Form, and Visual Thinking. His previous contributions to are "On the Nature of Photography" (Autumn 1974) and "A Stricture on Space and Time" (Summer 1978). Joel Snyder Picturing Vision I find it more than merely suggestive that we call many different kinds of pictures "realistic." As a category label, "realistic" is remarkably elastic. We cheerfully place into the category pictures that are made in strict accordance with the rules of linear perspective, pictures that are at slight variance with those rules but that nonetheless look perfectly "correct" (e.g., paintings that have been "fudged" so that certain "distortions" generated by strict adherence to the stipulated geometry have been "softened" or corrected), and pictures made in flagrant contravention of perspective geometry (e.g., pictures that look likethey were made with one point perspective but that have two vanishing points). We accept as realistic pictures that are made in strict accordance with the rules of perspective construction that we could never judge as being similar to anything we might or could ever see (e.g., a picture done in three point perspective looking down at skyscrapers). We accept as realistic pictures that are in sharp disagreement with what we now take to be the facts of vision (e.g., an architectural view across a plaza in which all objects in every plane are in focus; a brief look around the room he is sitting in will convince the reader that we cannot see that way.) . . . There is something charming and yet nasty about the belief in the special relation of picture to world. It is charming because it allows us to "enter" with ease into pictures and allows them to "extend" into our world. It allows us to think of pictures as "true to life," to use [Ernst] Gombrich's beguiling term, to look at a picture and ask questions of it, as if we were looking at the world through a window. It allows us to treat pictures as substitutes for the objects they represent (I do not mean to imply that they represent only objects) and so, for example, to buy clothing from an illustrated catalogue, or to analyze architectural styles from pictures of buildings. In brief, it allows us to feel proximity to what is depicted and urges us to conclude that in certain important respects looking at a picture is equivalent to looking at what is pictured.   Joel Snyder, associate professor of humanities and of art and design at the University of Chicago, teaches aesthetics, and theory and history of photography. A practicing photographer, he is currently completing a monograph on the photographer Timothy H. O'Sullivan. His contributions to include "Photography, Vision, and Representation" (written with Neil Walsh Allen)( Autumn 1975) and "Reflexions on Las Meninas: Paradox Lost", written with Ted Cohen in the Winter 1980 issue. Robert P. Morgan Musical Time/Musical Space There is no question, of course, that music is a temporal art. Stravinsky, noting that it is inconceivable apart from the elements of sound and time, classifies it quite simply as "a certain organization in time, a chrononomy."1 His definition stands as part of a long and honored tradition that encompasses such diverse figures as Racine, Lessing, and Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer, putting the case in its strongest terms, remarks that music is "perceived solely in and through time, to the complete exclusion of space," thus making explicit the opposition between time and space and ruling out the latter as a possible area for legitimate musical experience.   Yet anyone familiar with the philosophical and theoretical literature dealing with music must be struck by the persistence with which spatial terminology and categories appear. Indeed, it would seem to be impossible to talk about music at all without invoking spatial notions of one kind or another. Thus in discussing even the most elementary aspects of pitch organization and among the musical elements, only pitch, we should remember, is uniquely musical one finds it necessary to rely upon such spatially oriented oppositions as "up and down," "high and low," "small and large" (in regard to intervallic "distances"), and so on. Space, then, pace Schopenhauer, apparently forms an inseparable part of the musical experience.   ·  1. Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons, trans, Arthur Knodel and Ingolf Dahl (Cambridge, Mass., 1947), p. 28.   Robert P. Morgan is active as both a music composer and theorist. A professor of music at the University of Chicago, he is currently composing a concerto for flute, oboe, and string orchestra to be performed at Swarthmore College. His previous contribution to , "On the Analysis of Recent Music," appeared in the Autumn 1977 issue. Anthony Gilbert responds to the current essay in "Musical Space: A Composer's View" (Spring 1981). W. J. T. Mitchell Spatial Form in Literature: Toward a General Theory Although the notion of spatiality has always lurked in the background of discussions of literary form, the self-conscious use of the term as a critical concept is generally traced to Joseph Frank's seminal essay of 1945, "Spatial Form in Modern Literature."1 Frank's basic argument is that modernist literary works (particularly by Eliot, Pound, and Joyce) are "spatial" insofar as they replace history and narrative sequence with a sense of mythic simultaneity and disrupt the normal continuities of English prose with disjunctive syntactic arrangements. This argument has been attacked on several fronts. An almost universal objection is that spatial form is a "mere metaphor" which has been given misplaced concreteness and that it denies the essentially temporal nature of literature. Some critics will concede that the metaphor contains a half-truth, but one which is likely to distract attention from more important features of the reading experience. The most polemical attacks have come from those who regard spatial form as an actual, but highly regrettable, characteristic of modern literature and who have linked it with antihistorical and even fascist ideologies.2 Advocates of Frank's position, on the other hand, have generally been content to extrapolate his premises rather than criticize them, and have compiled an ever-mounting list of modernist texts which can be seen, in some sense, as "antitemporal." The whole debate can best be advanced, in my view, not by some patchwork compromise among the conflicting claims but by a radical, even outrageous statement of the basic hypothesis in its most general form. I propose, therefore, that far from being a unique phenomenon of some modern literature, and far from being restricted to the features which Frank identifies in those works (simultaneity and discontinuity), spatial form is a crucial aspect of the experience and interpretation of literature in all ages and cultures. The burden of proof, in other words, is not on Frank to show that some works have spatial form but on his critics to provide an example of any work that does not.   ·  1. Frank's essay first appeared in Sewanee Review 53 (Spring, Summer, Autumn 1945) and was revised in his The Widening Gyre (New Brunswick, N.J., 1963). Frank's basic argument has not changed essentially even in his most avante-garde statements; he still regards spatial form "as a particular phenomenon of modern avante- garde writing." See "Spatial Form: An Answer to Critics," Critical Inquiry 4 (Winter 1977): 231-52. A useful bibliography, "Space and Spatial Form in Narrative," is being complied by Jeffrey Smitten (department of English, Texas Tech University). ·  2. This charge generally links the notion of spatial form with Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, the imagist movement, the "irrationality" and pessimistic antihistoricism of modernism, and the conservative Romantic tradition. Frank discusses the complex motives behind these associations in the work of Robert Weimann and Frank Kermode in his "Answer to Critics," pp. 238-48.   W. J. T. Mitchell, editor of , is the author of Blake's Composite Art,and The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon. The present essay is part of Iconology: The Image in Literature and the Visual Arts. "Diagrammatology" appeared in the Spring 1981 issue of . Leon Surette responds to the current essay in "‘Rational Form in Literature'" (Spring 1981). vol6num4cov290x435.jpg] John Hollander Stanley Cavell and "The Claim of Reason" Even as the philosopher can show us how to treat an object conceptually as a work of art, by regarding it in some (unavowedly figurative) context, so Cavell constantly implies that there are parables to be drawn about the way we treat the objects of our consciousness and the subjects of parts of it. But this special sort of treatment like projective imagination itself is not fancy or wit but more like a kind of epistemological fabling that is close to what Shelley called, in A Defense of Poetry, "moral imagination." What is so powerful and yet elusive of the nets of ordinary intellectual expectation in The Claim of Reason is the way in which the activities of philosophizing become synecdochic, metonymic, and generally parabolic for the activities of the rest of life itself. It is the way in which the large (in English), unphilosophical, "poetic," or "religious" questions are elicited from their precise and technical microcosms that makes so much of this book poetical, but not "literary," philosophy. When he writes of how tragedy "is the story and study of a failure of acknowledgment, of what goes before it and after it i.e., that the form of tragedy is the public form of skepticism with respect to other minds"; or when, after brilliantly adducing The Winter's Tale in his consideration of Othello, he confronts the magic of Hermione's statue coming to life, he observes that "Leontes recognizes the fate of stone to be the consequence of his particular skepticism," the reader can perceive the kind of vast fiction in which minds, bodies, the privacy of insides, dolls, statues, and other representations figure as agents and elements. It will take longer to understand, I think, the imaginative significance of the earlier portions of the book. The philosophers who find its terrain familiar tend to have little patience with poetry; the reader whose sensibility is "literary" may be unable to distinguish between the arguments and examples, and the meta- arguments and examples, of the discussions of Wittgensteinian and Austinian method. Both kinds of readers should keep at it.   John Hollander, a distinguished poet and critic, is professor of English at Yale. The author of The Untuning of the Sky: Ideas of Music in English Poetry, 1500-1700, Vision and Resonance: Two Senses of Poetic Form, and The Figure of Echo,his books of poetry include Spectral Emanations and Blue Wine and Other Poems. Stanley Cavell A Reply to John Hollander Having just read through John Hollander's brilliant and moving response to my book, my first response in turn is one of gratitude, for the generosity of his taking of my intentions, allowing them room to extend themselves; and of admiration, at the writing of a writer who has original and useful things to say about the relations of poetry and philosophy, of fable and argument, of trope and example, relations at the heart of what my book is about. . . . I am reminded of W. H. Auden's foreword to his A Certain World: A Commonplace Book in which he recognizes that his compilation amounts to a sort of autobiography. He calls it, responding to a passage from G. K. Chesterton, "a map of my planet." The passage Auden quotes from Chesterton contains these sentences: "The original quality in any man of imagination is imagery. It is a thing like the landscape of his dreams; the sort of world he would like to make or in which he would wish to wander; the strange flora and fauna of his own secret planet; the sort of thing he likes to think about." I would like to accept the idea that I have revealed a secret planet in revealing myself, a certain errant wholeness, with the proviso that no one's planet contains anything anyone else's may not contain, or does not contain, or does not have the equivalent of; and that their contents are commonplaces, including an aspiration toward the better possibility, which I might call the life of philosophy. Philosophy, at any rate, must ask no less.   Stanley Cavell's other works include Must We Mean What We Say?, The World Viewed, and The Senses of Walden. His contributions to are "On Makavejev On Bergman" (Winter 1979) and "North by Northwest" (Summer 1981). Vincent B. Leitch The Lateral Dance: The Deconstructive Criticism of J._Hillis_Miller Miller undermines traditional ideas and beliefs about language, literature, truth, meaning, consciousness, and interpretation. In effect, he assumes the role of unrelenting destroyer or nihilistic magician who dances demonically upon the broken and scattered fragments of the Western tradition. Everything touched soon appears torn. Nothing is ever finally darned over, or choreographed for coherence, or foregrounded as (only) magical illusion. Miller, the relentless rift-maker, refuses any apparent repair and rampages onward, dancing, spell-casting, destroying all. As though he were a wizard, he appears in the guise of a bull- deconstructer loose in the china shop of Western tradition.   Vincent B. Leitch, associate professor of English at Mercer University, is the editor of Robert Southwell's Marie Magdalens Funeral Teares and The Poetry of Estonia: Essays in Comparative Analysis. Sections of the present essay will appear in his The Poetics of Deconstruction, which offers a critical history and anatomy of deconstructive criticism. J. Hillis Miller Theory and Practice: Response to Vincent Leitch Leitch speaks of his procedure with my work as employing an "abrupt asyndetic format" and as being "a metonymic montage in which themes and citations are playfully and copiously combined." One form of this playfulness is the panoply of figures he uses to describe me and my criticism. The need to use figures for this is interesting, as is their incoherence, though the figures can be shown to fall into a rough antithetical pattern. At one moment the deconstructive critic is a fairy godmother able to turn the pumpkin of the Western tradition into a phantasmal coach. He is a magician or wizard who shows that things are not what they have seemed with the great texts of our tradition or who turns them into something other than what they have seemed solidly to be, pragmatic pumpkins, unequivocally there. At the next moment the deconstructer is a disco dancer, moving sideways in the "lateral dance of interpretation" (my own image, but it was not really mine; it was taken from Tess of the d'Urbervilles, the novel I was discussing in the sentences Leitch quotes). The more or less benign fairy godmother and dancer then turns into a "nihilistic magician - who dances demonically upon the broken and scattered fragments of the Western tradition." He becomes a ferocious shaman, "Ravening, raging, and uprooting that he may come/Into the desolation of reality" (Yeats). He is "a bull-deconstructer loose in the china shop of Western tradition" (Leitch). In the next moment the bull metamorphoses into a lamb, as Leitch realizes the conservative aspects of deconstruction, the way it claims to be rescuing and preserving aspects of our culture which have always been there, both in literary and philosophical works and in the techniques of interpreting them. The same point is made more sharply and critically by William E. Cain in another recent essay on my work (College English 41, no.4. [December 1979]: 367-81). In the final paragraph of his essay, Leitch has fun inventing permutations of an image of sand in the salad from one of my essays. Will deconstruction sandblast the whole shebang, or will the alien grain of sand turn into a pearl of price?   J. Hillis Miller is Frederick W. Hilles Professor of English at Yale. His previous contributions to are "Ariadne's Thread: Repetition and the Narrative Line" (Autumn 1976) and "The Critic as Host" (Spring 1977). Dore Ashton On Harold Rosenberg Rosenberg was a chronicler and a good one, yet much of his inner dialogue was not with the present so much as the omnipresent artistic past. The central question, posed early in his life, concerned a man's individuality. Dostoyevsky had called it his "dearest" possession. At no time, even in his Marxist youth, did Rosenberg relinquish his vision of the individual as the central, most important player in any drama. Rosenberg was positively possessed with Dostoyevsky's doubts. One can hear the rant of the man from the underground repeatedly in Rosenberg's written works the stubborn hero who maintains the right even to be absurd and to "desire for himself what is positively harmful and stupid" if he claims it as a right. The right of the individual to live up to man's nature which, as Dostoyevsky said, "acts as one whole, with everything in it, conscious or unconscious" was Rosenberg's most consistent ideal.   The individual he most admired, both in himself and in others, was the artist. But only in spite of everything. No one was more alert to the tartufferie that bedevils the world of the artist. Rosenberg craved sincerity with the same kind of passion for it he had found in Dostoyevsky. Art and artifact would not be a substitute for ethics and hard thought. Rosenberg's deepest conviction is revealed in his 1960 essay, "Literary Form and Social Hallucination," which begins with Dostoyevsky complaining about literature that does not lead to truth.   Dore Ashton, professor of art history at The Cooper Union, is the author of numerous works, including Abstract Art Before Columbus, Poets and the Past, A Reading Of Modern Art, and, most recently, A Fable of Modern Art. Her previous contribution to , "No More than an Accident?" appeared in the Winter 1976 issue. Michael Riffaterre Syllepsis Ambiguity is not the polysemy most words display as dictionary entries but results from the context's blocking of the reader's choice among competing meanings, as when, to use an example from Derrida, a French context hinders the reader from deciding whetherplus de means "lack" (no more) or "excess" (more than).1 In this case, the undecidability is due entirely to the fact that the reader is playing a score, the syntax, that will not let him choose. This must be because the score is badly written; yet it is precisely this sort of willful neglect that critics have labeled poetic license, thereby underlining its literary nature. Undecidability has become a central feature in Derrida's analyses of literariness, and it is also the main underpinning of his creative writing.2 Better still, his own critical discourse has put undecidability to use, not a rare case of metalanguage imitating the very devices of the language it purports to analyze. My example are therefore drawn from Derrida on the assumption that his conscious practice of écriture, backed up by a sophisticated theory, will be particularly illuminating. For my own analysis of these phenomena, I shall be using a special word that Derrida has adopted and adapted from the terminology of ancient rhetoric. He proposes it in his commentary on this sentence of Mallarmé's: "La scène n'illustre que l'idée, pas une action effective, dans une hymen . . . entre le désir et l'accomplissement, la perpétration et son souvenir."3 Our critic points out that the grammar prevents the reader from choosing between hymen as "marriage," a symbolic union or fusion, and as "vaginal membrane," the barrier is broken through if desire is to reach what it desires. Undecidability is the effective mechanism of pantomime as an art form since from mimicry alone, without words, the spectator cannot tell whether a dreamed, or a remembered, or a present act is being set forth. This, in turn, Derrida shows to be fundamental to Mallarmé's concept of poetry. It is simply a pun or, as Derrida prefers to call it, a "syllepsis,"4 the trope that consists in understanding the same word in two different ways at the same time, one meaning being literal or primary, the other figurative.5 The second meaning is not just different from and incompatible with the first: it is tied to the first as its polar opposite or the way the reverse of a coin is bound to its obverse the hymen as unbroken membrane is also metaphorical in both its meanings is irrelevant to its undecidability. What makes it undecidable is not that it is an image but that it embodies a structure, that is, the syllepsis.   ·  1. See Jacques Derrida's La Dissémination (Paris, 1972), p. 307. ·  2. Because Derrida is a philosopher by trade, one would expect his undecidability to reflect the very precise logical and mathematical concepts of that discipline - which is to say, the limitations inherent in the axiomatic method. Kristeva, for example, tries to do this in her Le Texts du roman: Approche sèmiologique d'une structure discursive transformationnelle (The Hague, 1970), pp. 76-78. So far as I can make out, however (as a layman I have hardly been able to go beyond the relatively simplified but highly instructive exposition of the problem in Ernst Nagel and James R. Newman's Gödel's Proof [New York, 1958]), Derrida's critical theory and reading practice do not pack more into the word "undecidable" than does the definition I offer in this paper. ·  3. Stephane Mallarmé, Mimique, Oeuvres complètes (Paris, 1951), p. 310: "the scene [a drama, or rather a pantomime] bodies forth only an idea, not an action: it is like a hymen between desire and its realization, or between an act committed and the memory of it"; here and elsewhere, my translation unless otherwise cited. Derrida's commentary, "La Double Séance," has been rpt. in La Dissémination, pp. 199-317; see esp. pp. 240 ff. ·  4. See La Dissémination, p. 249. ·  5. This definition has prevailed ever since Dumarsais' treatise, Des Tropes (Paris, 1730). That syllepsis must be distinguished from the so-called grammatical syllepsis or the zeugma is apparent in Heinrich Lausberg's Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik (Munich, 1960), pars. 702-7; on the acceptation chosen by Derrida, see pars. 7-8.   Michael Riffaterre, Blanche W. Knopf Professor of French Literature and chairman of the department of French and Romance literatures at Columbia University, is the editor of Romantic Review. He is the author of Semiotics of Poetry, La Production du Texte, Typology of Intertextuality and A Grammar of Descriptive Poetry. "Syllepsis" developed out of seminars he led at the Irvine School of Criticism and Theory and at Johns Hopkins University. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan Doubles and Counterparts: Patterns of Interchangeability in Borges' "The Garden of Forking Paths" Analogy among characters is not the only structural device which blurs the boundaries of the self. The very repetition of the act of narration, involving a chain of quotations, makes the story a perfect example of what Jakobson calls "speech within speech"1 and divorces the various characters from their own discourse. In addition to the real author's speech to the real reader, crystallized in that of the implied author to the implied reader, the whole story is the speech of an extradiegetic-heterodiegetic narrator who, in the footnote, calls himself "editor" and who sums up Liddell Hart's account and juxtaposes it with Yu Tsun's dictated statement. Just as the editor quotes Tsun, so Tsun, an extradiegetic-homodiegetic narrator, quotes Albert who in turn quotes Ts'ui Pên, sometimes verbatim, as in the case of the crucial letter, sometimes by conjecture, as in the instance of Pên's supposed declarations about the book and the maze. Quotation, then, is a dominant narrative mode in this story, and quotation is the appropriation by one person of the speech of another. Since a person is to a large extent constituted by one person of his discourse, such an appropriation implies, at least partly, an interpenetration of personalities. Thus both repetition through analogy and repetition through quotation threaten the absolute autonomy of the self.   ·  1. Roman Jakobson, "Linguistics and Poetics," in Essays on the Language of Literature, ed. Seymour Chatman and Samuel R. Levin (Boston, 1967), pp. 296-322.   Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan is a senior lecturer in the department of English at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The author of The Concept of Ambiguity: The Example of James, she is currently writing on the poetics of repetition and, in collaboration with Moshe Ron, on contemporary narrative theory. Loy D. Martin Literary Invention: The Invention of the Individual Talent In a paper presented at a symposium on structuralism at the Johns Hopkins University in 1968, the historian Charles Morazé analyzed the issue of invention largely with reference to mathematics and the theory of Henri Poincare.1 Poincare, along with the physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz, was the first to put forward a theory of scientific discovery as occurring in discrete phases. In 1926, Joseph Wallas generalized this theory to apply to all creativity, positing phrases which closely resemble those of Morazé. While both Poincare and Wallas use a four-phrase model of invention, Morazé reduces his to three phrases: information, cogitation, and intellection. In information, the inventor becomes familiar with the sign systems and knowledge, the "collective contributions of society," relevant to his field of problems. Cogitation assembles these materials and concentrates them until "a certain moment" when "a light breaks through." This "sudden illumination...forces us to insist upon the neurological character" of the inventive moment. Finally, in intellection, the inventor rationally evaluates the utility of his invention and thus, in a sense, steps outside of himself and rejoins society. The distinction which organizes Morazé 's entire account, as well as most of the discussion that followed his presentation, is between the "collective" support and control of the inventor and his own individual, or "neurological," act of synthesis or creation.   ·  1. See Charles Morazé 's "Literary Invention," in The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore, 1972), pp. 22-55.   Loy D. Martin is an assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago. He has written The Language of Invention, a study of Robert Browning and the genesis of the dramatic monologue. "A Reply to Carl Pletsch and Richard Schiff" appeared in the Spring 1981 issue of . Jay Schleusener Convention and the Context of Reading Speech-act theory is often called upon to support one of the central claims of contextualism: that works of literature differ from ordinary speech because they are not tied to an immediate social context. The distinction is simple enough. Speakers and hearers meet face-to-face in a world of concrete circumstances that has a good deal to do with what they say. Their use of language is supported by facts that help to clarify their meaning, and they understand one another partly because they share an understanding of their situation. Authors and readers, on the other hand, can hardly be said to meet anywhere at all. Their only common ground is the text, and they share nothing but the words that pass between them. Meanings that might be clear enough in the social context of ordinary speech tend toward ambiguity in this circumstantial void where author and reader must do without a common world of reference and make the best of a language that cannot rely on the casual support of facts.   Jay Schleusener, an associate professor of English at the University of Chicago, is currently completing a book on Piers Plowman. His previous contribution to , "Literary Criticism and the Philosophy of Science: Rader's 'Fact, Theory, and Literary Explanation,'" appeared in the Summer 1975 issue. John C. Sherwood Prolegomena to Any Future Criticism Which Shall Claim_to_Make_Sense The principle of selection necessarily follows if we accept that a poem is a verbal structure of a very complex kind involving the interaction of all kinds of elements ideas, images, rhythms, rhetorical features, narrative, logical patterns, whatever. The possible relationships among all these elements seem infinite or at least, in Frye's phrase, unlimited. (Although the terms used here may sound like those of a formalist, one easily could make the same point in structuralist terms, for not only must the elements within a given structure be related to other structures inside and outside the poem.) Hence, a definitive critique of any work seems, even in theory, impossible. It is hard to see how the human mind could consciously contemplate, much less articulate, all aspects at once, even in short pieces; as the various aspects are enumerated, we begin to lose sight of the wood for the trees, to lose our grip on the integrated whole which we at least partially intuit at a given moment in time. And so many are the attitudes and interests which may be brought to bear upon a poem that the critique which once seemed definitive soon seems incomplete to the critic after a further reading, for every time we read a work of any complexity, we find something new; and even the less sensitive know that each new school of criticism, not to mention each latest shift in politics, society, or psychology, will throw at least some of our masterpieces into a new light. As for translation, the only way to avoid it would be wholesale quotation, and even that would be a partial translation in that it would alter the poet's total meaning by substituting a part for the whole.   John C. Sherwood, professor of English at the University of Oregon, is the author of articles on Dryden, modern literature, and English composition. He is currently at work on an annotated bibliography of R. S. Crane. Howard Felperin Romance and Romanticism The work of Northrop Frye, evenly divided as it is between those earlier and later literatures and equally influential in both fields, will serve to illustrate the literary-historical myth I have begun to describe. "Romanticism," he writes, "is a 'sentimental' form of romance, and the fairy tale, for the most part, a 'sentimental' form of folk tale."1 Frye's terms are directly adopted from Schiller's famous essay, "Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung," though "naive" for Frye means simply "primitive" or "popular" and is not historically identified, as it is in Schiller, with "classical," while "sentimental," as in Schiller, means "later" or "sophisticated." In adopting Schiller's terms, however, Frye has also adopted, though less obviously, Schiller's historical scheme. In the theory of modes that opens the Anatomy, Frye's division of Western literature into a descending scale from "myth" through "romance," "high mimetic," and "low mimetic" to "irony" is correlated to the historical periods in which each mode successively dominates: classical, medieval, Renaissance, eighteenth century, nineteenth century, and modern. Like Schiller's starker contrast of the "naive" or classical poet in touch with the natural world and the "sentimental" or Romantic poet alienated from it by modern civilization, Frye's logical and chronological scheme conceives literary history as a process of disintegration or displacement away from the natural integrity and univocality of myth and toward the self-conscious distancing and discontinuities of irony. The history of literature moves, following hard upon an Enlightenment conception of cultural history that derives as much from Rousseau as from Schiller and Friedrich von Schlegel, from the anonymous universality of myth to the individuality or eccentricity of modern fiction. Frye systematically avoids valorizing this "progress of poetry" in any of the ways it has been successively valorized by various schools of ancients and moderns, classics and Romantics, over the past three centuries. Yet he nonetheless repeats the historical scheme that underlies and generates these schools and their quarrels in the first place. It may turn out that the weakness of Frye's rehabilitation of romance is not his avoidance of history, as is commonly charged, but his inability to do without a version of it.   ·  1. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, N.J., 1957), p. 35.   Howard Felperin is the author of Shakespearean Romance and Shakespearean Representation. He has taught at Harvard, the University of California, and Yale and is currently Robert Wallace Professor of English at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Cary Nelson Soliciting Self-Knowledge: The Rhetoric of Susan Sontag's Criticism Sontag is certainly attracted to the aesthetic she describes but not so wholeheartedly as many readers have assumed.1 One of the ironies of her career has been her reputation as an enthusiast for works toward which she actually expresses considerable ambivalence. Many of her essays include overt advocacy, but it is rarely uncomplicated or uncompromised.2 Despite her reputation for partisanship, she more typically begins her essays by recounting an experience of alienation, annoyance, uncertainty, or shock. For example, she describes the "happening" as an event "designed to tease and abuse the audience"3 and speaks of the "profoundly discouraging," even "hopeless," emotions of her first days in North Vietnam. She is, therefore, often motivated by her sense of difference from the event or object she describes. But it is not her wish merely to find ways of assimilating and dominating unpleasant or alien experience; while that is certainly one of the main impulses in her work - to control apparently impossible subjects, to exhilarate in the Nietzschean will to power over the text - her will to power is always countered by a need to credit and honor the text's otherness. Sontag never finally assumes an easy familiarity with her subject but rather draws its difficult and negating otherness ever closer to herself. Her work may be understood, in a way, as a search for a text that is utterly unknowable, a text that will always elude and contradict what we may say about it, a text, in short, that cannot be contaminated by critical rhetoric. That is a quality she has recently attributed to Artaud's work: "Like Sade and Reich, Artaud is relevant and understandable, a cultural monument, as long as one mainly refers to his ideas without reading much of his work. For anyone who reads Artaud through, he remains fiercely out of reach, an unassimilable voice and presence."4   ·  1. There is, to be sure, an atmosphere of iconoclasm and intellectual challenge about Sontag's criticism, but it is not especially self-congratulatory. She is only interested in difficult topics or in topics whose difficulties have been repressed, partly because that context energizes her mind and partly, as she has written of Diane Arbus, because she wants "to violate her own innocence, to undermine her sense of being privileged" (On Photography [New York, 1977], p. 43) ·  2. The exception is some of the early reviews included in Against Interpretation, where the polemical requirements of the occasion distinguish those brief judgments from her more careful and extended pieces. ·  3. Sontag, Against Interpretation (New York, 1966), p. 267. ·  4. Sontag, "Artaud," Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings (New York, 1976), p. lix.   Cary Nelson teaches critical theory at the University of Illinois. He is the author of The Incarnate Word: Literature as Verbal Space and Our Last First Poets: Vision and History in Contemporary American Poetry and Reading Criticism: The Literary Status of Critical Discourse. Susan Fromberg Schaeffer The Unreality of Realism What should be immediately apparent to any writer of realistic fiction is its unreal or synthetic nature. Regardless of how persuasive the forgery appears, it is still a forgery. The colors of the painting are not identical to those of the real world. The illusion of similarity is achieved by trickery. The houses of realistic novels are like those found on a stage set; they are there to lend reality and weight to what is important, which may be a conversation between two realistically dressed people, walking in front of the novels' realistic buildings, conversing about something which would, in actuality, be impossible to talk about openly, something which would, ordinarily, seem impossible to take seriously as a motive for violent emotion which leads to violent action. No matter how expertly and exactly a novelist's world duplicates common reality, the duplication must be a means to an end. Duplication itself is not the novel's goal. If it were, the novelist would be properly defined as a camera which takes pictures with words or as a maker of verbal documentaries who strives to capture the passing scene. This is an axiom which must appear self- evident to both the writer and the audience. However, when I wrote Anya (New York, 1975), I found that this self-evident truth provided random and unreliable light; if this truth had been a source of electricity, it would be safe to say that its failure to illuminate caused a blackout of comprehension for many critics and readers.   Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, professor of English at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, is the author of Falling, Anya,and Time in Its Flight, several collections of poetry, including Rhymes and Runes of the Toad and Alphabet for the Lost Years, and, most recently, The Queen of Egypt and Other Stories. Lawrence W. Hyman Harpsicord Exercises and the My Lai Massacre That there is something not altogether honest about a didactic novel can be seen once we imagine a novel which violates our political sympathies or our moral principles, such as a novel that shows the Nazis or the American soldiers at My Lai as heroes. We certainly would not like this novel. But could we refute it because of our certain knowledge that these men, in real life, were murderers? I don't think so, since a skillful writer could easily make his characters act heroically in the situation and even make us dislike their victims. Could we say that the situation is false? Perhaps, but since the actions and the characters are fictional, what does it mean to refute them? We can say that a novel is bad or unconvincing if the characters do not resemble people in real life or if the actions do not satisfy our sense of logic or probability. But these are literary objections, not political ones. And because the writer cannot be refuted by evidence from the real world, he cannot make pronouncements about this world. For example, even if there were evidence that no slave resembled Tom and no overseer resembled Legree, such evidence could not refute the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. And as Moody Prior points out in his essay ("Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom," 5 [Summer 1979]: 635-50), our disagreement with the philosophy of spiritual, rather than physical resistance to slavery cannot take away the heroism of Tom's action. His final act of forgiveness is indeed Christ-like, and no philosophy of political activism which is validated by, let us say, our admiration for Tom within the novel cannot validate Tom's kind of inward action in the real world. If it did, then our admiration for Tom, a fictional character, would prelude our support for a more active resistance to oppression. But, of course, it does not, or at least it should not, if we are to see fiction as performing a different role than politics and philosophy.   Lawrence W. Hyman, professor of English at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, is the author of The Quarrel Within: Art and Morality in Milton's Poetry. His previous contribution to , "The 'New Contextualism' Has Arrived: A Reply to Edward Wasiolek," appeared in the Winter 1975 issue. Strother Purdy Reply to Lawrence W. Hyman We differ mainly, I think, in that Hyman is willing to indulge his taste for subtlety more extensively than I am. He seems comfortable with post-modern paradoxes like "the tendency of a literary work to refuse to give us a moral direction is itself a value" and believes that this refusal is properly based on the writer's incapacity to "make pronouncements about [the] world." It could be I mistake him here, and he means only to reject those solutions toutes faites that are part of the didactic mode, in which case I agree once more. But I feel the thrust of his argument is to deny the existence of the first of the two abysses, frivolity and propaganda, into which, according to Camus, it is the task of the writer to keep from falling. To seek a strengthening of moral commitment in a literature that operates at "a level of awareness deeper than our moral and political judgments" is certainly to avoid exposure to propaganda; but it is also something of a logical and psychological contradiction in terms and therefore doomed to irrelevance or, in Camus' terms, frivolity. One cannot answer for individual variations on common aesthetic experiences, of course; there exist men and women and literary characters who find strength to take a moral stand in the contemplation of a Chinese jar or in what I called harpsichord exercises the term includes, after all, Das wohltemperiertes Klavier but such experiences, for all their abstract beauty, lack a social basis and a social relevance. The mimetic imperative is not so easily bypassed.   Strother Purdy, professor of English at Marquette University, is the author of The Hole in the Fabric: Science, Contemporary Literature, and Henry James. He has also contributed "Stalingrad and My Lai: A Literary-Political Speculation" to . John Reichert Making Sense of Interpretation If we are capable of changing our minds of rejecting, that is, one hypothesis for another the issue becomes one of the criteria which govern our choices. Are they, as [Stanley] Fish would argue, dependent on "beliefs" and "assumptions"? Perhaps, at some very fundamental level, they are. But I do not think Fish has succeeded in showing them to be so. Certainly the criteria are independent of anything so specific as beliefs about the nature of literature or the human mind. Who among us, for example, whatever the object of interpretation, would choose one on the grounds of its greater inconsistency, or on the grounds of its accounting for fewer of the facts that we want to explain, or on the grounds of its being unnecessarily complicated? On the contrary, do we not tend to argue, as Fish does so effectively, as if counterexamples and inconsistencies tell against an hypothesis? It may be the case that our cherished beliefs (in the unconscious, say, or in ordinary language, or in progress) often make it difficult in practice even to formulate our questions in ways that allow such criteria as I have hinted at to come into play. But why should hard work discourage us?   John Reichert is the chairman of the English department at Williams College and the author of Making Sense of Literature. He has contributed "But That Was in Another Ball Park: A Reply to Stanley Fish" to . Stanley E. Fish One More Time What I would add, and what Reichert seems unable to see, is that the facts of the text do not identify themselves. He faults Roskill for failing to see that coherence is not a function of the text but of "principles we bring to the text"; yet he himself does not see that the text, insofar as one can point to it, is produced by those same principles. Indeed, Reichert is continually doing the very thing for which he criticizes Roskill, attributing to the text qualities and features that are the product of interpretive strategies. Thus, for example, he cites the instance of "the interpreter . . . noticing something in the text that makes his former reading seem implausible" as evidence that the text is at some level independent of interpretation; but noticeability is a function of what it is possibleto notice given a particular set of assumptions: a reader innocent of the principles of typology would be incapable of "noticing" a typological pattern, whereas for a reader like Madsen, the pattern will seem to announce itself; and a reader who "notices" something he didn't "notice" before is a reader who (for a variety of reasons that one could discuss) is proceeding within a different set of interpretive assumptions. That which is noticeable, in short, can never be the means of confirming or constraining interpretations because it is always a product of one. The same argument dissolves the distinction, invoked by Reichert, between extratextual and textual evidence; it is not that such a distinction is never in force (it almost always is) but that what counts as internal and external evidence will vary according to the interpretive principles one espouses. Just what is and what is not extratextual is a matter of continual debate, and when the debate has been (temporarily) concluded, it is not because the matter has been settled by the facts but because one set of interpretive principles has won the right to say what the facts are.   Stanley E. Fishis the author of, among other works, Is There a Text in This Class: The Sources of Interpretative Authority. His contributions to include "Facts and Fictions: A Reply to Ralph Rader" (June 1975), "Interpreting the Variorum" (Spring 1976), "Interpreting 'Interpreting the Variorum'" (Autumn 1976), "Normal Circumstances, Literal Language, Direct Speech Acts, the Ordinary, the Everyday, the Obvious, What Goes without Saying, and Other Special Cases" (Summer 1978), and "A Reply to John Reichert; or, How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love Interpretation" (Autumn 1979). Leonard Dean Theory and the Muddle Editor's Note: We are happy to print the following comment by Leonard Dean as a reminder that the arbitrary, improvisatory nature of practical criticism (dignified by certain theorists under the rubric ofbricolage) has its origins in a much more homely and familiar phenomenon.   A muddler naturally feels flattered by any kind of praise from the world of theory, as, for example, by Robert Scholes' generous remark that "muddling along, in literary theory as in life, is often more humane and even more efficient than the alternatives offered by political, ethical, or aesthetic systems. We may in fact 'know' more than we can systematize about certain kinds of human behavior, so that our intuitions may indeed be superior to our more reasoned positions" ("Toward a Semiotics of Literature," Critical Inquiry 4 [Autumn 1977]: 105). For a moment praise like that makes a muddler feel the way the ghost of Shakespeare must have felt when he was called a natural genius in the days of the Rules, but then you remember how it really was and is. Like Shakespeare and the New Dealers we patched things together under pressure, and like them we borrowed from anybody. New critical methods were a godsend for anyone who was trying to revive an old survey course into a discussion of literature, and equally useful were old critical methods like those used by Dr. Johnson for the job of general public education. W. J. T. Mitchell Editor's Note: On Narrative The essays included in this special issue of are a product of the symposium on "Narrative: The Illusion of Sequence" held at the University of Chicago on 26-28 October 1979. The rather special character of this symposium was not fragmented into concurrent or competing sessions, and all the speakers remained throughout the entire weekend to discuss the papers of their fellow participants. Several distinguished participants, in fact, did not read papers but confined their contributions to the conversations which developed over the several sessions of the three-day program. The impact of these sustained discussions is reflected in the revisions which the authors made in preparing their papers for this special issue, and thus this collection is a "product" of the symposium in a fairly precise sense. Hayden White The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of_Reality To raise the question of the nature of narrative is to invite reflection on the very nature of culture and, possibly, even on the nature of humanity itself. So natural is the impulse to narrate, so inevitable is the form of narrative for any report of the way things really happened, that narrativity could appear problematical only in a culture in which it was absent absent or, as in some domains of Western intellectual and artistic culture, programmatically refused. As a panglobal fact of culture, narrative and narration are less problems than simply data. As the late (and already profoundly missed) Roland Barthes remarked, narrative "is simply there like life itself . . . international, transhistorical, transcultural."1 Far from being a problem, then, narrative might well be considered a solution to a problem of general human concern, namely, the problem of how to translate knowing into telling,2 the problem of fashioning human experience into a form assimilable to structures of meaning that are generally human rather than culture-specific. We may not be able fully to comprehend specific thought patterns of another culture, but we have relatively less difficulty understanding a story coming from another culture, however exotic that culture may appear to us. As Barthes says, "narrative...is translatable without fundamental damage" in a way that a lyric poem or a philosophical discourse is not.   ·  1. Roland Barthes, "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives,"Music, Image, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York, 1977), p. 79. ·  2. The words "narrative," "narration," "to narrate," and so on derive via the Latin gnārus ("knowing," "acquainted with," "expert," "skillful," and so forth) and narro ("relate," "tell") from the Sanskrit root gnâ ("know"). The same root yields γνωριμος ("knowable," "known"): see Emile Boisacq, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque (Heidelberg, 1950), under the entry for this word. My thanks to Ted Morris of Cornell, one of our greatest etymologists.   Hayden White, professor in the program of history of consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is the author of The Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, The Greco-Roman Tradition, and Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe. " The Narrativization of Real Events" appeared in the Summer 1981 issue of . Critical Responses to the present essay include Louis O. Mink's "Everyman His or Her Own Annalist", and Marilyn Robinson Waldman's "The Otherwise Unnoteworthy Year 711: A Reply to Hayden White," both in the Summer 1981 issue of . Roy Schafer Narration in the Psychoanalytic Dialogue The primary narrative problem of the analyst is, then, not how to tell a normative chronological life history; rather, it is how to tell the several histories of each analysis. From this vantage point, the event with which to start the model analytic narration is not the first occasion of thought Freud's wish-fulfilling hallucination of the absent breast; instead, one should start from a narrative account of the psychoanalyst's retelling of something told by an analysand and the analysand's response to that narrative transformation. In the narration of this moment of dialogue lies the structure of the analytic past, present, and future. It is from this beginning that the accounts of early infantile development are constructed. Those traditional developmental accounts, over which analysts labored so hard, may now be seen in a new light: less as positivistic sets of factual findings about mental development and more as hermeneutically filled-in narrative structures. The narrative structures that have been adopted control the telling of the events of the analysis, including the many tellings and retellings of the analysand's life history. The time is always present. The event is always an outgoing dialogue.   Roy Schafer is clinical professor of psychology and psychiatry at Cornell University Medical College, adjunct professor of psychology at New York University, and a supervising and training analyst at Columbia University's Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. He is the author of A New Language for Psychoanalysis, Language and Insight,and Narrative Actions in Psychoanalysis: Narratives of Space and Narratives of Time. Jacques Derrida The Law of Genre The law is mad. The law is mad, is madness; but madness is not the predicate of law. There is no madness without the law; madness cannot be conceived before its relation to law. Madness is law, the law is madness. There is a general trait here: the madness of law mad for me, the silhouette of my daughter mad about me, her mother, etc. But La Folie du jour, An (accountless)Account?, carrying and miscarrying its titles, is not at all exemplary of this general trait. Not at all, not wholly. This is not an example of a general or generic whole. The whole, which begins by finishing and never finishes beginning apart from itself, the whole that stays at the edgeless boundary of itself, the whole greater and less than a whole and nothing, An Account? will not have been exemplary. Rather, with regard to the whole, it will have been wholly counter- exemplary.   The genre has always in all genres been able to play the role of order's principle: resemblance, analogy, identity and difference, taxonomic classification, organization and genealogical tree, order of reason, order of reasons, sense of sense, truth of truth, natural light and sense of history. Now, the test of An Account? brought to light the madness of genre. Madness has given birth to and thrown light on the genre in the most dazzling, most blinding sense of the word. And in the writing of An Account?, in literature, satirically practicing all genres, imbibing them but never allowing herself to be saturated with a catalog of genres, she, madness, has started spinning Peterson's genre-disc like a demented sun. And she does not only do so in literature, for in concealing the boundaries that sunder mode and genre, she has also inundated and divided the borders between literature and its others.   Jacques Derrida is professor of history of philosophy at L'Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. His greatly influential works include Writing and Difference, Of Grammatology, Spurs: Of Nietzsche's Styles, Positions, and Dissemination. Avital Ronell teaches German at the University of Virginia and is the author of Poetics of Desire and Principles of Textuality in Kafka's "Das Schloss." Frank Kermode Secrets and Narrative Sequence The capacity of narrative to submit to the desires of this or that mind without giving up secret potential may be crudely represented as a dialogue between story and interpretation. This dialogue begins when the author puts pen to paper and it continues through every reading that is not merely submissive. In this sense we can see without too much difficulty that all narrative, in the writing and the reading, has something in common with the continuous modification of text that takes place in a psychoanalytical process (which may tempt us to relate secrets to the condensations and displacements of dreams) or in the distortions induced in historical narrative by metahistorical considerations.   All that I leave to Roy Schafer1 and Hayden White. My immediate purpose is to make acceptable a simple proposition: we may like to think, for our purposes, of narrative as the product of two intertwined processes, the presentation of a fable and its progressive interpretation (which of course alters it). The first process tends toward clarity and propriety ("refined common sense"), the second toward secrecy, toward distortions which cover secrets. The proposition is not altogether alien to the now classic fabula/sujet distinction. A test for connexity (an important aspect of propriety) is that one can accurately infer the fable (which is not to say it ever had an independent existence). The sujet is what became of the fable when interpretation distorted its pristine, sequential propriety (and not only by dislocating its order of presentation, though the power to do so provides occasions for unobvious interpretations of a kind sequence cannot afford).   ·  1. Not forever, I hope; his essay and its "refined common sense" have powerful implications for a more general narrative theory.   Frank Kermodeis King Edward VII Professor of English at Cambridge University. The author of The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, Continuities, and Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne: Renaissance Essays, his works also include The Classicand The Genesis of Secrecy. His previous contributions to are "Novels: Recognition and Deception" (Autumn 1974), "A Reply to Denis Donoghue" (Spring 1975), and "A Reply to Joseph Frank" (Spring 1978). Nelson Goodman Twisted Tales; or, Story, Study, and Symphony In sum, flashbacks and foreflashes are commonplace in narrative, and such rearrangements in the telling of a story seem to leave us not only with a story but with very much the same story.1 . . . Will no disparity between the order of telling and the order of occurrence destroy either the basic identity or the narrative status of any story? An exception seems ready at hand: suppose we simply run our film...backwards. The result, though indeed a story, seems hardly to be the same story in any usual sense . . . Does cinematic narrative actually differ this sharply from narrative in a series of snapshots or in words? I think not. Our first impulse with any tale when the order of telling is clear is to take the order of occurrence to be the same as the order of telling; we then make any needed corrections in accord with temporal indications given in the narrative and with our antecedent knowledge both of what happened and of causal processes in general. But discrepancy between order of telling and order of occurrence cannot always be discovered instantaneously or at all. If our series of snapshots is shown in reverse order at normal speed, we readily detect the reversal; for we know that a race begins at the starting gate, ends at the finish line, and so on. Even if the pictures do not show the starting gate or finish line or other identifiable parts of the track, we are not deceived, for we know that horses do not run backward. But when the film is run backward, such clues and considerations usually cannot be brought to bear soon enough, and we momentarily mistake the direction of the actions filmed. A little time is needed to make the correction. What seemed like a drastic difference between film and other forms of narrative amounts to nothing more than this lag.   ·  1. In an obvious and important sense. Of course, whether two version are properly said to be of the same story or of the same world depends upon which of many permissible interpretations of sameness is understood; but that need not trouble us here.   Nelson Goodman is emeritus professor of philosophy at Harvard and the founder of both Project Zero and the Harvard Dance Center. His works include The Structure of Appearance; Fact, Fiction, and Forecast, and Ways of Worldmaking. His contributions to Critical Inquiryare "The Status of Style" (Summer 1975), "Metaphor as Moonlighting" (Autumn 1979), and "The Telling and the Told" (Summer 1981). Seymour Chatman What Novels Can Do That Films Can't (and_Vice_Versa) The key word in amy account of the different ways that visual details are presented by novels and films is "assert." I wish to communicate by that word the force it has in ordinary rhetoric: an "assertion" is a statement, usually an independent sentence or clause, that something is in fact the case, that it is a certain sort of thing, that it does in fact have certain properties or enter into certain relations, namely, those listed. Opposed to asserting there is mere "naming." When I say, "The cart was tiny; it came onto the bridge," I am asserting that certain property of the cart of being small in size and that certain relation of arriving at the bridge. However, when I say "The green cart came onto the bridge," I am asserting nothing more than its arrival at the bridge; the greenness of the cart is not asserted but slipped in without syntactic fuss. It is only named. Textually, it emerges by the way. Now, most film narratives seem to be of the latter textual order: it requires special effort for films to assert a property or relation. The dominant mode is presentational, not assertive. A film doesn't say, "This is the state of affairs," it merely shows you that state of affairs. Of course, there could be a character or a voice-over commentator asserting a property or relation; but then the film would be using its sound track in much the same way as fiction uses assertive syntax. It is not cinematic description but merely description by literary assertion transferred to film. Filmmakers and critics traditionally show disdain for verbal commentary because it explicates what, they feel, should be implicated visually. So in its essential visual mode, film does not describe at all but merely presents; or better, it depicts, in the original etymological sense of that word: renders in pictorial form. I don't think that this is mere purism or a die-hard adherence to silent films. Film attracts that component of our perceptual apparatus which we tend to favor over the other senses. Seeing, after all, is believing.   Seymour Chatman, professor in the department of rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of The Later Style of Henry James and Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. His contribution to , "Reply to Barbara Herrnstein Smith" appeared in the Summer 1981 issue. Victor Turner Social Dramas and Stories about Them Although it might be argued that the social drama is a story in [Hayden] White's sense, in that it has discernible inaugural, transitional, and terminal motifs, that is, a beginning, a middle, and an end, my observations convince me that it is, indeed, a spontaneous unit of social process and a fact of everyone's experience in every human society. My hypothesis, based on repeated observations of such processual units in a range of sociocultural systems and in my reading in ethnography and history, is that social dramas, "dramas of living," as Kenneth Burke calls them, can be aptly studied as having four phases. These I label breach, crisis, redress, and either reintegration orrecognition of schism. Social dramas occur within groups of persons who share values and interests and who have a real or alleged common history. The main actors are persons for whom the group has a high value priority. Most of us have what I call our "star" group or groups to which we owe our deepest loyalty and whose fate is for us of the greatest personal concern. It is the one with which a person identifies most deeply and in which he finds fulfillment of his major social and personal desires. We are all members of many groups, formal or informal, from the family to the nation or some international religion or political institution. Each person makes his/her own subjective evaluation of the group's respective worth: some are "dear" to one, others it is one's "duty to defend," and so on. Some tragic situations arise from conflicts of loyalty to different star groups.   Victor Turner is professor of anthropology and a member of the Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Virginia. His many publications include Schism and Continuity in an African Society, The Forest of Symbols, The Ritual Process,and, with Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture. Paul Ricoeur Narrative Time The configurational dimension, in turn, displays temporal features that may be opposed to these "features" of episodic time. The configurational arrangement makes the succession of events into significant wholes that are the correlate of the act of grouping together. Thanks to this reflective act in the sense of Kant's Critique of Judgment the whole plot may be translated into one "thought." "Thought," in this narrative context, may assume various meanings. It may characterize, for instance, following Aristotle's Poetics, the "theme" (dianoia) that accompanies the "fable" or "plot" (mythos) of a tragedy.1 "Thought" may also designate the "point" of the Hebraic maschal or of the biblical parable, concerning which Jeremias observes that the point of the parable is what allows us to translate it into a proverb or an aphorism. The term "thought" may also apply to the "colligatory terms" used in history writing, such terms as "the Renaissance," "the Industrial Revolution," and so on, which, according to Walsh and Dray, allow us to apprehend a set of historical events under a common denominator. (Here "colligatory terms" correspond to the kind of explanation that Dray puts under the heading of "explaining what.") In a word, the correlation between thought and plot supersedes the "then" and "and then" of mere succession. But it would be a complete mistake to consider "thought" as a- chronological. "Fable" and "theme" are as closely tied together as episode and configuration. The time of fable-and theme, if we may make of this a hyphenated expression, is more deeply temporal than the time of merely episodic narratives.   ·  1. It may be noted in passing that this correlation between "theme" and "plot" is also the basis of Northup Frye's "archetypal" criticism.   Paul Ricoeur is professor of philosophy at the Université de Paris (Nanterre) and John Nuveen Professor at the University of Chicago. Some of his works to appear in English are Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology, Main Trends in Philosophy,and The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays on Hermeneutics. His previous contribution to , "The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling," appeared in the Autumn 1978 issue. Ursula K. Le Guin It Was a Dark and Stormy Night; or,_Why_Are_We_Huddling_about_the Campfire? It was a dark and stormy night, in the otherwise unnoteworthy year 711 E.C. (Eskimo Calendar), and the great-aunt sat crouched at her typewriter, holding his hands out to it from time to time as if for warmth and swinging on a swing. He was a handsome boy of about eighteen, one of those men who suddenly excite your desire when you meet them in the street, and who leave you with a vague feeling of uneasiness and excited senses. On the plate beside the typewriter lay a slice of tomato. It was a flawless slice. It was a perfect slice of a perfect tomato. It is perfectly boring. I hold out my hands to the typewriter again, while swinging and showing my delicate limbs, and observe that the rows of keys are marked with all the letters of the English alphabet, and all the letters of the French alphabet minus accent marks, and all the letters of the Polish alphabet except the dark L. By striking these keys with the ends of my fingers or, conceivably, a small blunt object, the aging woman can create a flaw in the tomato. She did so at once. It was then a seriously, indeed a disgustingly flawed tomato, but it continued to be perfectly boring until eaten. She expired instantly in awful agony, of snakebite, flinging the window wide to get air. It is a dark and stormy night and the rain falling in in the typewriter keys writes a story in German about a great-aunt who went to a symposium on narrative and got eaten in the forest by a metabear. She writes the story while reading it with close attention, not sure what to expect, but collaborating hard, as if that was anything new; and this is the story I wrote . . .   Ursula K. Le Guin, distinguished novelist, poet, and essayist, is the author of The Left Hand of Darkness, Malafrena,and The Dispossessed, for which she won both the Hugo and the Nebula Award. Her novel The Lathe of Heaven was made into a film by the Public Broadcasting System. Paul Hernadi On the How, What, and Why of Narrative Why, then, do we huddle in the dark around the campfires of our flickering narratives? There are obviously many different reasons for doing so. Yet, having heard various récits whether "stories" or "accounts" during the narrative conference, I am more inclined than ever to see self-assertive entertainment and self-transcending commitment as two kinds of ultimate motivation for our countless narratives. Stories and histories and other narrative or descriptive accounts help us to escape boredom andindifference ours as well as that of other people. Those nearly vacant states of mind at the zero degree of entertainment and commitment bring us frightfully close to the experience of nonexistence. Hence our desire to replace boredom by thrilling or gratifying entertainment (remember Edmund Burke's contrast between the Sublime and the Beautiful?) and to replace indifference by the social or cosmic commitment either to change the world or to change ourselves. In a world of unmixed colors and pure literary genres, tragedy, comedy, satire, and romance might answer distinct needs for thrill, gratification, indignation, and admiration. But, as Roy Schafer and Victor Turner have reminded us, the private and social dramas underlying psychoanalytical and anthropological accounts are even less pure than most works of literature. Couldn't we conclude that life's internal and external dramas stem from a compound desire for self-assertion and self-transcendence a desire which, in the realm of literary entertainment and commitment, motivates the emergence and appreciation of tragicomedy?   Paul Hernadi teaches English and comparative literature at the University of Iowa. He is the author of Beyond Genre: New Directions in Literary Classification and the editor of What is Literature? and What is Criticism? His previous contribution to ,"Literary Theory: A Compass for Critics," appeared in the Winter 1976 issue. Robert Scholes Language, Narrative, and Anti-Narrative This long digression into language was necessary because we cannot understand verbal narrative unless we are aware of the iconic and indexical dimensions of language. Narrative is not just a sequencing, or the illusion of sequence, as the title of our conference would have it; narrative is a sequencing of something for somebody. To put anything into words is to sequence it, but to enumerate the parts of an automobile is not to narrate them, even though the enumeration must mention each part in the enumeration's own discursive order. One cannot narrate a picture, or a person, or a building, or a tree, or a philosophy. Narration is a word that implicates its object in its meaning. Only one kind of thing can be narrated: a time-thing, or to use our normal word for it, an "event." And strictly speaking, we require more than one event before we recognize that we are in the presence of a narrative. And what is an event? A narrated event is the symbolization of a real event: a temporal icon. A narration is the symbolic presentation of a sequence of events connected by subject matter and related by time. Without temporal relation we have only a list. A telephone directory is a list, but we can give it a strong push in the direction of narrative by adding the word "begat" between the first and second entries and the words "who begat" after each successive entry until the end. This will resemble certain minimal religious narratives, even down to the exclusion of female names from most of the list (the appearance of nonpersonal listings in the phonebook complicates things, of course).   Robert Scholes is professor of English and comparative literature and director of the semiotics program at Brown University. He is the author of Structuralism in Literature: An Introduction, Fabulation and Metafiction, and Reading, Writing, and Semiotics. "Toward a Semiotics of Literature," his previous contribution to ,appeared in the Autumn 1977 issue. Barbera Herrnstein Smith Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories . . . I should like to review and summarize the preceding general points:   1. For any particular narrative, there is no single basically basic story subsisting beneath it but, rather, an unlimited number of other narratives that can be constructed in response to it or perceived as relatedto it. 2. Among the narratives that can be constructed in response to a given narrative are not only those that we commonly refer to as "versions" of it (for example, translations, adaptations, abridgements, and paraphrases) but also those retellings that we call "plot summaries," "interpretations," and, sometimes, "basic stories." None of these retellings, however, is more absolutely basic than any of the others. 3. For any given narrative, there are always multiple basic stories that can be constructed in response to it because basic-ness is always arrived at by the exercise of some set of operations, in accord with some set of principles, that reflect some set of interests, all of which are, by nature, variable and thus multiple. Whenever we start to cut back, peel off, strip away, lay bare, and so forth, we always do so in accord with certain assumptions and purposes which, in turn, create hierarchies of relevance and centrality; and it is in terms of these hierarchies that we will distinguish certain elements and relations as being central or peripheral, more important or less important, and more basic or less basic. 4. The form and feature of any "version" of a narrative will be a function of, among other things, the particular motives that elicited it and the particular interests and functions it was designed to serve. Some versions, such as translation and transcriptions, may be constructed in order to preserve and transmit a culturally valued verbal structure. Others, such as adaptations and abridgements, may be constructed in order to amuse or instruct a specific audience. And someversions, such as "interpretations," "plot summaries," and "basic stories," may be constructed in order to advance the objectives of a particular discipline, such as literary history, folklore, psychiatry or, of course, narratology. None of these latter versions, however, is any less motivated or, accordingly, formally contingent than any of the other versions constructed to serve other interests or functions.   Barbara Herrnstein Smith is professor of English and communications and the director of the Center for the Study of Art and Symbolic Behavior at the University of Pennsylvania, and the author of Poetic Closure and On the Margins of Discourse. "On the Margins of Discourse" was also contributed as an essay to in the June 1975 issue. Responses to the present essay are Nelson Goodman's "The Telling and the Told" and Seymour Chatman's "Reply to Barbara Herrnstein Smith". Both appear in the Summer 1981 issue of . E.H. Gombrich Standards of Truth: The Arrested Image and the_Moving_Eye I have stressed here and elsewhere that perspective cannot and need not claim to represent the world "as we see it." The perceptual constancies which make us underrate the degree of objective diminutions with distance, it turns out, constitute only one of the factors refuting this claim. The selectivity of vision can now be seen to be another. There are many ways of "seeing the world," but obviously the claim would have to relate to the "snapshot vision" of the stationary single eye. To ask, as it has so often been asked, whether this eye sees the world in the form of a hollow sphere or of a projection plane makes little sense, for it sees neither. The one point in focus can hardly be said to be either curved or flat, and the remainder of the field of vision is too indistinct to permit a decision. True, we can shift the point of focus at will, but in doing so we lose the previous perception, and all that remains is its memory. Can we, and do we, compare the exact extension of these changing percepts in scanning a row of columns extended at right angles from the central line of vision to mention the most recalcitrant of the posers of perspectival theory?1 I very much doubt it. The question refers to the convenient choice of projection planes, not to the experience of vision. ·  1. I now prefer this formulation to my somewhat laboured discussion in Art and Illusion, chap. 8, sec. 4. E.H. Gombrich was director of the Warburg Institute and Professor of the History of the Classical Tradition at the University of London from 1959 to 1976. His many influential works include The Story of Art, Art and Illusion, Meditations on a Hobby Horse, The Sense of Order,and Ideals and Idols. An early version of "Standards of Truth" was presented at Swarthmore College in October 1976 at a symposium to mark the retirement of Professor Hans Wallach. His contributions to include "The Museum: Past, Present, and Future" (Spring 1977), "Notes and Exchanges" (Summer 1979), and, with Quentin Bell, "Canons and Values in the Visual Arts: A Correspondence" (Spring 1976). Herbert F. Tucker, Jr. Browning's Lyric Intentions The lyric speaker begins by turning his or her will into words, but begins to be a Browningesque speaker when this conversion leads to a turning of the will against words. This inversion, or perversion, of the will against its own expression requires a reader to entertain a complex notion of the relationship between intention and language or, more accurately, to hold in suspension two competing versions of that relationship. A reader learns not only to conceive interpretation in the simple lyric sense, as a prevailing assertion of the will, but also to conceive any given assertion of the will, any intention given over to articulation in language, as an interpretation and therefore a potential falsification inviting further refinement. The playful competition Browning urges between these two conceptions of intentionality frees meaning to wander somewhere beyond the ken of each lyric speaker, somewhere in the future of lyric utterance. Meaning is to the dramatic lyric what action is to the drama proper; and much as the curious "action in character" of Browning's dramas defers dramatic action and makes room for play, so Browning defers meaning in the lyrics by enlisting the patterning forces of the self- interfering will.1 · 1. Browning remarked in the preface to Strafford that his play turned on "Action in the Character rather than Character in Action" (Complete Works, 2:9). Herbert F. Tucker, Jr., an assistant professor of English at Northwestern University, has published articles on Hopkins and Browning. An expanded version of the present essay appears in his Browning's Beginnings: The Art of Disclosure. Gerald L. Bruns Intention, Authority, and Meaning [Herbert F.] Tucker has shown us in a very practical way that the concept of meaning is the problem of problems, not only in hermeneutics but in literary theory and, indeed, literary study generally. It may well be that in literary study there can be no talk of meaning that is not ambiguous, that does not require us to speak in figures or by means of metaphorical improvisations. It would not necessarily follow that our talk of meaning is merely provisional or without philosophical authority since we know now that considerable authority attaches to ordinary language, whence we obtain our use of the word "meaning" as well as the figurations that we use to talk our way around it. To be sure, the discipline of literary study is now rapidly filling with grave masters who take our figures to mean that meaning is literally unspeakable only so many transferences and substitutions within a system of differences alarmingly vast (a system whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is an illusion). This is itself a terrific idea, or a terrific figure, although it is used mainly to expose the thoughtless way we talk about meaning as well as our offhand assumptions about the conditions that make understanding possible. Our problem in literary study is not that meaning is unspeakable even if it were it would not be a problem but that we rarely reflect on the subject of meaning in a disciplined way. In our time, meaning as a topic of study is the preserve of logicians. It is almost exclusively a theme of analytical philosophy, and even those not bound by this philosophy address themselves to the analytical tradition when they speak of meaning.1 It is time that we entered into this discourse on meaning; a paper as fine as Tucker's should serve as a summons. · 1. Among numerous cases, see John R. Searle, "Metaphor" and "Literal Meaning," Expression and Meaning (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 76-136, and "Intentionality and the Use of Language," in Meaning and Use, ed. Avishai Margalit (Dordrecht and Boston, 1979), pp. 181-97. Gerald l. Bruns, professor of English at the University of Iowa, is the author of Modern Poetry and the Idea of Language and Inventions: Writing, Textuality, and Interpretation in Literary History. Joseph Kerman How We Got into Analysis, and How to_Get_Out It may be objected that musical analysts claim to be working with objective methodologies which leave no place for aesthetic criteria, for the consideration of value. If that were the case, the reluctance of so many writers to subsume analysis under criticism might be understandable. But are these claims true? Are they, indeed, even seriously entered? Certainly the original masters of analysis left no doubt that for them analysis was an essential adjunct to a fully articulated aesthetic value system. Heinrich Schenker always insisted on the superiority of the towering products of the German musical genius. Sir Donald Tovey pontificated about "the main stream of music" and on occasion developed this metaphor in considerable detail. It is only in more recent times that analysts have avoided value judgments and adapted their work to a format of strictly corrigible propositions, mathematical equations, set-theory formulations, and the like all this, apparently, in an effort to achieve the objective status and hence the authority of scientific inquiry. Articles on music composed after 1950, in particular, appear sometimes to mimic scientific papers in the way that South American bugs and flies will mimic the dreaded carpenter wasp. In a somewhat different adaptation, the distinguished analyst Allen Forte wrote an entire small book, The Compositional Matrix, from which all affective or valuational terms (such as "nice" or "good") are meticulously excluded. The same tendency is evident in much recent periodical literature. Joseph Kerman, professor of music at the University of California at Berkeley, has been the editor of Nineteenth-Century Music. His books include Opera as Drama, The Elizabethan Madrigal, The Beethoven Quartets, Listen(with Vivian Kerman), and The Masses and Motets of William Byrd. Bert O. States The Persistence of the Archetype If we are looking for an Ur-explanation for the persistence of the Ur-myth, or any other myth, in our literature, could we not more directly find it in the structure of a mind which does not have to remember in order to imitate? The occasion of both myth and literature is the social life of the species which, in Starobinski's sense, is a history of continual eviction; but as regards the apparatus of thought by which this social life is reflected in art it is more a history of assimilation and repetition. "The work of the brain," to cite a recent article in Scientific American, "is to create a model of a possible world rather than to record and transmit to the mind a world that is metaphysically true…Different worlds are presumably constructed by similar species."1 And, presumably, similar worlds are constructed by similar species. Weisinger hints briefly at something like this in his essay "The Mythic Origins of the Creative Process," but one has the clear impression, as his title suggests, that he would like to have the [myth/ritual] cart before the creative horse.2 However much this may satisfy our longing to crown our literature, if not creativity itself, with a mythic genealogy, it seems a wistful hypothesis. One might just as well look upon the remains of early man's shelters, marvel that they too had roofs, just like ours, and conclude that therefore our roofs have their origin in theirs. ·  1. Harry J. Jerison, "Paleoneurology and the Evolution of Mind," Scientific American, January 1976, p. 99. ·  2. Herbert Weisinger, The Agony and the Triumph: Papers on the Use and Abuse of Myth (East Lansing, Mich., 1964), p. 250. Bert O. States, professor of dramatic arts at the University of California at Santa Barbara, is the author of Irony and Drama: A Poeticsand The Shape of Paradox: An Essay on "Waiting for Godot." Norman N. Holland Why Ellen Laughed I propose this: Ellen [a graduate student] laughs because she is re-creating her identity. This theory differs from the others because "identity" is not simply a category that is filled or not, like "incongruity" or "superiority" which become variables in an "if this, then that" explanation. "If there is a sudden incongruity, people will laugh." Rather, identity is a further question, a way of asking, Can I understand Ellen's actions as a theme and variations? Moreover, any such interpretation is itself a part of the interpreter's actions, hence a function of his - in this case, my - identity. The principle is general, but putting it into practice in each instance is unique. Unlike an "if this, then that" which leads to closure, an explanation through identity leads to a continuing dialogue. One asks questions of an individual situation, like Ellen's laughing at [B.] Kliban's cartoons. One gets answers that lead to a fuller understanding of that situation. The answers can be generalized into questions, leading to more and closer questioning and more answers that lead to more questions, all within the general principle of identity re-creation as embodied in the unique situation. Norman N. Holland is the James H. McNulty Professor of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He has written a book on the theory of laughter presented in the present essay. His previous contributions to are "Literary Interpretation and Three Phases of Psychoanalysis" (Winter 1976) and "Human Identity" (Spring 1978). Walter Benn Michaels Sister Carrie's Popular Economy Instead of seeing satisfaction as the necessary and appropriate goal of desire, Dreiser seems to see it only as an inevitable but potentially fatal by-product. Desire, for him, is most powerful when it outstrips its object; indeed, it is the very fact of this excessiveness that fuels Sister Carrie's economy which is one reason why Carrie is right to think of money ("something everybody else has and I must get") as "power itself." The economy runs on desire, which is to say, money, or the impossibility of ever having enough money. Nothing is more characteristic of Carrie than her ability to "indulge" in what Dreiser calls "the most high-flown speculations,"1 rocking in her chair and spending in "her fancy" money she hasn't yet earned. Fancy or imagination is the very agent of excessive desire for Carrie, enabling her to get "beyond, in her desires, twice the purchasing power of her bills" (p. 48). When Drouet suggests to her that she has dramatic ability, "imagination," as usual, "exaggerated the possibilities for her. It was as if he had put fifty cents in her hand and she had exercised the thoughts of a thousand dollars" (p. 118). · 1. Thomas Dreiser, Sister Carrie, ed. Donald Pizer (New York, 1970), p. 22. All subsequent references to this work will be cited parenthetically in the text. Walter Benn Michaels is an assistant professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of articles on American literature and literary theory and a book entitledAmerican Epistemologies: Literary Theory and Pragmatism. Sandra M. Gilbert Costumes of the Mind: Transvestism as Metaphor in_Modern_Literature There is a striking difference, however, between the ways female and male modernists define and describe literal or figurative costumes. Balancing self against mask, true garment against false costume, Yeats articulates a perception of himself and his place in society that most other male modernists share, even those who experiment more radically with costume as metaphor. But female modernists like Woolf, together with their post-modernist heirs, imagine costumes of the mind with much greater irony and ambiguity, in part because women's clothing is more closely connected with the pressures and oppressions of gender and in part because women have far more to gain from the identification of costume with self or gender. Because clothing powerfully defines sex roles, both overt and covert fantasies of transvestism are often associated with the intensified clothes consciousness expressed by these writers. But although such imagery is crucially important in works by Joyce, Lawrence, and Eliot on the one hand, and in works by Barnes, Woolf, and H. D. on the other, it functions very differently for male modernists from the way it operates for female modernists. Sandra M. Gilbert, professor of English at the University of California at Davis, is the author of Acts of Attention: The Poems of D.H. Lawrenceand In the Fourth World; the coauthor, with Susan Gubar, of The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, and its sequel, No Man's Land: The Woman Writer and the Twentieth-Century Literary Imagination. Joyce Carol Oates The Picture of Dorian Gray: Wilde's Parable of_the_Fall Beyond the defiance of the young iconoclast Wilde himself, of course and the rather perfunctory curve of Dorian Gray to that gothic final sight (beautiful Dorian dead with a knife in his heart, "withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage"), there is another, possibly less strident, but more central theme. That one is damned for selling one's soul to the devil (for whatever prize "eternal youth" is a trivial enough one) is a commonplace in legends; what arrests our attention more, perhaps, is Wilde's claim or boast or worry or warning that one might indeed be poisoned by a book . . . and that the artist, even the presumably "good" Basil Hallward, is the diabolical agent. Wilde's novel must be seen as a highly serious meditation upon the moral role of the artist an interior challenge, in fact, to the insouciance of the famous pronouncements that would assure us that there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book ("Books are well written, or badly written," Wilde claims in his preface. "That is all.") or that all art is "quite useless." Wilde's genius was disfigured by his talent: he always sounds much more flippant, far more superficial, than he really is. So one always say about Dorian Gray, with an air of surprise, that the novel is exceptionally good after all and anyone who has read it recently replies, with the same air of faint incredulity, yes, it isexceptionally good in fact, one of the strongest and most haunting of English novels. Yet its reputation remains questionable. Gerald Weales virtually dismisses it as "terribly fin de siècle" in a rather flippant introduction to the novel, and it would be difficult to find a critic who would choose to discuss it in terms other than the familiar ones of decadence, art for art's sake, art as "the telling of beautiful untrue things."   Joyce Carol Oates has written, among others, Bellefleur, Childhood, a collection of short stories, Nightside, and Son of the Morning.Her contributions to ,include "Jocoserious Joyce" (Summer 1976) and "Lawrence's Gotterdammerung" (Spring 1978). Joel Snyder and Ted Cohen Reflexions on Las Meninas: Paradox Lost Surely [John R.] Searle must rely on a stable, formal conception of the point of view. He sets Las Meninas on a par with the antimony of the liar and the paradoxes of set theory. (It is apparently because of what he takes to be its rather strict analogy with these conundrums that Searle goes on to say that Las Meninas is involved with self-reference.) But nothing is an antimony or a paradox just because it seems so or just because it is confusing or difficult, even if it seems so to everyone. To deserve such a description, a thing must be, so to speak, intrinsically intractable, not merely resistant when looked at in a particular way. If a man says "I do not believe I am alive," that would be odd, and it would be hard to understand just what he means, and it may even be hard or impossible to believe that he is telling the truth; but there is no antimony. If a man says "I am lying," then we have a primitive version of the antimony of the liar. Given the meaning of this utterance and nothing else there is no way to get a grip on it. If what the man says is true, then it's false; if what he says is false, then it's true.   Joel Snyder, a practicing photographer, is associate professor of humanities and of art and design at the University of Chicago. His contributions to include "Photography, Vision, and Representation," written with Neil Walsh Allen (Autumn 1975), and "Picturing Vision" (Spring 1980). Ted Cohen, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago, has written on language, aesthetics, and taste. His previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, "Metaphor and the Cultivation of Intimacy," appeared in the Autumn 1978 issue. Tzvetan Todorov The Last Barthes It was his mother's death which allowed [Roland] Barthes to write: "I looked through…" "To write on something is to forfeit it," Barthes used to say, reciprocally, it is licit to write on what is already dead, it was Barthes himself in one of his acceptations. His mother was for Barthes the internal order, who permitted both the external other and the I to exist. Once she was dead, his life was over and could therefore become the object of writing. Barthes no doubt had other books to write; but he no longer had any life to live.   I find it emblematic that his last book should have been "on photography" (however deceptively). Eloquent or discreet, a photograph never says anything but: I was there; it leads to a gesture of monstration, to a silent deixis, and symbolizes a pre- or post-discursive world; it makes me an object, that is, a dead man. What Barthes himself calls "my last investigation" (accident? oversight? premonition?) also concerned death.   Tzvetan Todorov, of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, has numerous books on literary theory, including Théories du symbole and Symbolisme et interprétation, which has been published in English. His previous contribution to Crtitical Inquiry, "The Verbal Age," appeared in the Winter 1977 issue. Richard Howard, a poet and critic, has translated many works by Roland Barthes, Tzvetan Todorov, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze. Garrett Stewart Coppola's Conrad: The Repetitions of Complicity The ending of neither story [Heart of Darkness] nor film [Apocalypse Now] is confused, just bifocal. In Coppola we find writ large, for Willard as well as for us, what Conrad seems to keep from Marlowe by ironic distance: that the return to civilization from primitive haunts can never lay the ghostly image of that bestial horror lurking within us, the horror that finds such kinship, regressed beyond any ethical restraint, in the jungle's heart of darkness. It is a horror which the tropical rain droning on the sound track as the film's last trace can scarcely wash clean. For just before, staring straight at the camera and through it at us for one final time, confirming earlier suggestions of the universal complicity in evil, Willard's disembodied face - the reflective mind as if unmoored from its whole self, decapitated - slides out of view to the right behind the dead but deathless carved image. With the film's narrator absorbed into the immemorial icon of that anthropomorphic vanity and villainy which has comprised his tale, Kurtz's "horror" comes onto the sound track as a primal echo in the soul, an echo drenched from without by the sounds of a world that outlasts but cannot quench it.   Garrett Stewart, professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is the author of Dickens and the Trials of Imagination. His previous contribution to , "Modern Hard Times: Chaplin and the Cinema of Self-Reflection," appeared in the Winter 1976 issue.   David M. Halperin Solzhenitsyn, Epicurus, and the Ethics of Stalinism Why did Solzhenitsyn choose to insert an indictment of Epicureanism into the text of his novel?   The answer to this question is simple, but it requires elaborate argumentation. Epicureanism in The First Circle stands for the ethics of Stalinist society and furnished Solzhenitsyn with the vehicle for a destructive critique of Stalinist moral theory. But Stalinism has tended to be viewed in the West chiefly as a vicious form of political opportunism, its implicit ethical structure has escaped due recognition. But Stalinism was more than one man's strategy for the seizure and consolidation of power, more even than the collective aims, policies, and methods of the Soviet bureaucracy. The ideological component of Stalinism must not be neglected. Howsoever the integrity of its doctrines was subordinated to political exigencies of the moment, Stalinist ideology could lay claim to a coherent and distinguished intellectual ancestry: it was heir to the materialist philosophy of the so-called Left Hegelians (Feuerbach, Belinskii, Marx, and Engels), a philosophy militantly reinterpreted by the architects of the Russian Revolution. Stalinist ideology expected a profound influence on the popular notions of obligation and moral value during the period of its ascendancy, smoothing the way of acquiescence and cooperation for the reluctant, the dubious, and the conscience-stricken. One need not therefore subscribe to an idealist interpretation of history in order to agree with Solzhenitsyn that Stalin's creation of an univers concentrationnaire would have been impossible without an accessory code of official ethics.   David M. Halperin, an assistant professor of literature at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is the author of articles on Solzhenitsyn, Conrad, Augustine, Virgil, and ancient bucolic poetry. Elizabeth Ermarth Realism, Perspective, and the Novel I argue that in realism the identity of things, increasingly independent from typological paradigms, becomes series-dependent; that is, it becomes a form emergent from a series of instances rather than a form intelligible through one instance alone. Realistic identity, in other words, becomes abstract, removed from direct apprehension to a hidden dimension of depth. In speaking of realistic identity, I use the term "identity" to mean the oneness or the invariant structure by which we recognize a thing, by which we judge it under varying conditions to be the same. This conception of identity and all it implies about the regularity of nature and about the possibilities of knowledge belongs to an empirical epistemology which, though foreign to the Middle Ages and radically modifies today, was current throughout the otherwise diverse period from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century. It is a conception of identity so obvious to us that we have ceased to see it as the convention it is, but it was not obvious in the Renaissance, and it took a long time to become common sense.   Elizabeth Ermarth teaches English at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and is the author of several articles on George Eliot. Phillip Harth The New Criticism and Eighteenth-Century Poetry It is easy to overlook the fact that the kind of personalist criticism Brower, Wimsatt, and other New Critics were reacting against was a method of interpretation bequeathed by the nineteenth century which most of us would now regard as naïve, simplistic, and sometimes absurd. With the exception of a few poems such as Browning's dramatic monologues, which provided the speaker with an explicit identity as unmistakable as that of a character in a play "I am poor brother Lippo, by your leave! / You need not clap your torches to my face" lyric and didactic poems of the first person were invariably treated as personal statements. The voice, emotions, attitudes, and state of mind of the speaker were those of the poet, and even the most symbolic details were often read as literal aspects of the poet's self or environment. Many critical studies and anthologies remain today on library shelves testifying to the persistence of these critical habits of the late 1940s and 1950s. On the assumption that Rochester's love poems describe his actual sexual experiences, Vivian de Sola Pinto was able to write a much longer biography of the poet than would have been possible if personalist criticism had not been in vogue.1 David Nichol Smith could assert that Dryden's Religio Laici "was wholly spontaneous" the familiar Romantic criterion - and show the poet arguing out "his problems for the peace of his own mind."2 If it became unfashionable to speak in that manner of these and numerous other poems, it was because the New Critics, along with the Chicago critics, had shown convincingly that a lyric poem can be dramatic, the imitation of a fictitious speaker responding to an imagined situation, and that a didactic poem can deal with public issues instead of private agonies.   ·  1. See Vivian de Sola Pinto, Rochester: Portrait of a Restoration Poet (London, 1935). ·  2. David Nichol Smith, John Dryden (Cambridge, 1950), p. 61.   Phillip Harth is Merritt Y. Hughes Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and is the author of Swift and Anglican Rationalism and Contexts of Dryden's Thought.   Jonathan D. Kramer New Temporalities in Music As this century has found new temporalities to replace linearity, discontinuities have become commonplace. Discontinuity, if carried to a pervasive extreme, destroys linearity…There were two enormous factors, beyond the general cultural climate, that promoted composers' active pursuit of discontinuities. These influences did not cause so much as feed the dissatisfaction with linearity that many artists felt. But the impact has been profound.   One factor contributing to the increase of discontinuity was the gradual absorption of music from totally different cultures, which had evolved over the centuries with virtually no contact with Western ideas…Cross-cultural exchange in music will, of course, never destroy aesthetic boundaries, but music of non-Western cultures continues to show Western composers new ways to use and experience time.   The second tremendous influence on twentieth-century musical discontinuity was technological rather than sociological: the invention of recording techniques. Recording has not only brought distant and ancient musics into the here and now, it has also made the home and the car environment just as viable for music listening as the concert hall. The removal of music from the ritualized behavior that surrounds concertgoing struck a blow to the internal ordering of the listening experience. Furthermore, radios, records, and, more recently, tapes allow the listener to enter and exit a composition at will. An overriding progression from beginning to end may or may not be in the music, but the listener is not captive to that completeness. We all spin the dial, and we are more immune to having missed part of the music than composers might like to think.   Jonathan D. Kramer is an associate professor of music theory and composition and director of electronic music at the College- Conservatory of Music of the University of Cincinnati. The present essay is part of his book, Time and Meaning in Music. Mari Riess Jones Only Time Can Tell: On the Topology of_Mental_Space_and_Time An obvious result of including time rules into specifications of world patterns is the rather persuasive representation of rhythm. Rhythm as a property of world patterns has received relatively little attention recently, although it has had a long and distinguished history in psychology. Nonetheless, its recent neglect means that all too often we have failed to consider the implications of time patterning of stimuli that we as psychologists routinely present to individuals in our attempts to study human performance in many tasks, tasks which often do involve explicitly musical stimuli. Often in our psychological studies we present as stimuli words, lights, colored forms, or other items in a fashion that is regularly spaced in time. It's just common sense, and besides it's easier. And other current paradigms have not encouraged experimental questions about the temporal patterning of stimuli. But consider what this pacing means. We are rhythmically programming events. Is it possible that this temporal regularity forms attentional waves that buoy up our studies and so make it likely that we canstudy what we are most interested in? And, with our own attention as psychologists fixed steadily upon the topic of our immediate concern (Polanyi's focal target?), is it possible that we overlook the fact that underlying our effects is a rhythmic regularity that is crucial to having the subject's attention on the task at hand?   Mari Riess Jones is professor of psychology at Ohio State University and has written numerous articles on the human response to patterns in time. Roger Scruton Photography and Representation It seems odd to say that photography is not a mode of representation. For a photograph has in common with a painting the property by which the painting represents the world, the property of sharing, in some sense, the appearance of its subject. Indeed, it is sometimes thought that since a photograph more effectively shares the appearance of its subject than a typical painting, photography is a better mode of representation. Photography might even be thought of as having replaced painting as a mode of visual representation. Painters have felt that if the aim of painting is really to reproduce the appearances of things, then painting must give way to whatever means are available to reproduce an appearance more accurately. It has therefore been said that painting aims to record the appearances of things only so as to capture the experience of observing them (the impression) and that the accurate copying of appearances will normally be at variance with this aim. Here we have the seeds of expressionism and the origin of the view (a view which not only is mistaken but which has also proved disastrous for the history of modern art) that painting is somehow purer when it is abstract and closer to its essence as an art.   Roger Scruton is the author of Art and Imagination, The Aesthetics of Architecture, The Meaning of Conservatism, From Descartes to Wittgenstein, and The Politics of Culture and Other Essays. Gary Saul Morson Tolstoy's Absolute Language  Among Tolstoy's absolute statements are those that exhibit characteristics of both biblical commands and proverbs and of other types of absolute statements as well. He also draws, for example, on logical propositions, mathematical deductions, laws of nature and human nature, dictionary definitions, and metaphysical assertions. The language of all these forms is timeless, anonymous, and above all categorical. Their stylistic features imply that they are not falsifiable and that they are not open to qualification: they characteristically include words like "all," "each," "every," "only," and "certainly" and phrases like "there neither is nor can be," "the human mind cannot grasp," and "it is impossible that." Even in sentences that omit such phrases, the very refusal to use a qualifier of any kind can assert unqualifiability. When Tolstoy's absolute statements take the form of syllogisms, the use of the word "therefore" or some explicit or implicit equivalent carries the force of logical inevitability. It carries the same force with Tolstoy's enthymemes, which omit the major premise for the reader to reconstruct. [An example] from The Death of Ivan Ilysch,1 cited above, for instance, contains a minor premise and a conclusion of a syllogism; the reader himself must supply the major premise, which would be: "The simpler and more ordinary a life is, the more terrible it is." ·  1. "Ivan Ilysch's life was the most simple and the most ordinary, and therefore the most terrible." Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilysch, ed. John Bayley, trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude (New York, 1967), p.225. Gary Saul Morson is an associate professor of Russian literature at the University of Pennsylvania, and the author of The Boundaries of Genre: Dostoevsky's Diary of a Writer and the Traditions of Literary Utopia,and The Broken Frame: The Anti-tradition of Russian Literature.The present article is from a theoretical study of literary creativity and the biography of authors.   Marshall Brown Mozart and After: The Revolution in Musical Consciousness There can be no question, of course, of any "influence" of Kant's or Rousseau's ideas on Mozart's musical structures. While I have used various loosely synonymous nonmusical terms reverie, dream, unconscious, ethereal, and so on the analysis could proceed on a nonmetaphorical, strictly technical basis. Indeed, much of it has. I should therefore clarify why I have superimposed this philosophical and literary layer on the musical analysis, even at the risk of giving the false impression that I wished to make the history of music dependent upon the history of ideas. My answer lies, first of all, in the contention in which I follow chiefly Michel Foucault, though with qualifications that at every period in history a subterranean network of constraints governs the organization of human thought. Different fields develop and change in parallel not because they affect one another but because the infrastructures of mental activity affect them all. In this respect, the relationship of music and philosophy is no different from the relationship of literature and philosophy. The infrastructure is the precondition of thought and is by definition unconscious and unarticulated. Because it lies outside the limits of the individual disciplines, it cannot really be formulated within any of them. Hence arises the necessity of comparative study. The infrastructure comes to light at the juncture of independent fields. In the present case, it is accurate to say that music and philosophy mutually illuminate one another precisely because they are such different media; where they coincide lie the true invariants of eighteenth-century thought. Marshall Brown, an associate professor of English at the University of Colorado, Boulder, is the author of The Shape of German Romanticism, and Pre-Romanticism: Studies in Stylistic Transformation. James B. White Homer's Argument with Culture From beginning to end, the poem is literally made up of relations… [that] constitute a method of contemplation and criticism, a way of inviting the reader to think in terms of one thing in terms of another. Consider, for example, Odysseus' trip to Chryse in book 1, a passage I never read without surprise: in this tense and heavily charged world, in which everything seems to have been put into potentially violent contention, why are we given this slow and deliberate journey, so heavily formulaic in texture? The answer is that this is a ritual of reconciliation, a kind of healing, which will receive its most ample performance at the great movement in book 24 when Achilles and Priam share their sorrows. A movement begins here that will run throughout the poem. It is by such an art of arrangement, by placing one thing against another, that Homer criticizes the world of book 1 with which he began; not, as we expect of a writer today, by elaborating competitive languages of motives and value but by ordering his materials into patterns of experience that teach the reader something different from anything the material itself seems to say.1 In a way the poem, as a whole thus has the form of argument; not, of course, argument in the ratiocinative sense of a thesis supported by propositions, from which it can be said to proceed by the rules of logic or the laws of probability, but argument as an activity of critical engagement, a definition of resources and a testing of limits, that results in the creation of a new position taken by the writer and offered to the reader. An argument goes on in the text, but its method is closer to that of music than debate. ·  1. Cf. Cedric H. Whitman, Homer and the Heroic Tradition (Cambridge, Mass., 1958) chap. 6, for another view of the ways that formula and image combine. James B. White is a professor in the law school, the college, and the committee on the ancient Mediterranean world at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Legal Imagination, Constitutional Criminal Procedure, and a book on rhetoric and culture, from which the present article is drawn. Frederic K. Hargreaves, Jr. The Concept of Private Meaning in Modern Criticism In sum, major critics of the twentieth century continually insist that poetry's unique value lies in its ability to convey meanings for which there are no public criteria whatsoever. But there are no such meanings, and to praise a poem for conveying them is empty. Again, these critics assume that what we understand by emotion is to be identified simply with an inner experience or state of mind and that this state of mind is what is conveyed by, or gives meaning and definition to, words which are used to refer to our emotional life. The emotions or qualities of emotions supposedly communicated by poetry alone, moreover, are said to elude public language altogether; they can be neither defined nor discussed but only embodied in images. But whatever the status these private experiences have for us, they as yet play no part in our language, even our poetic language, and reference to them certainly contributes nothing to our criticism of poetry. Criticism can play a central role in interpreting and shaping our lives, but it will only be worth writing if its vocabulary has content. If criticism is to become intelligible, it must begin by abandoning the appeal to private knowledge. Frederic K. Hargreaves, Jr. received his doctorate in English from Boston University. Joel Rudinow Duchamp's Mischief We began by…implying a comparison between Duchamp and the swindlers; we lately find ourselves . . . implying a comparison between Duchamp and the child. I believe that in the end both comparisons are essential to a thorough understanding of Duchamp's significance; it is also, however, essential that each comparison temper and qualify the other. The swindlers begin and end as aliens to the community on which they practice their art. Duchamp is as much inside the artworld as is the child inside his community. On the other hand, Duchamp is not disenfranchised, as is the child, though, like the child, he is innocent of certain illusions typical of full enfranchisement. Like the swindlers, and unlike the child, Duchamp is full of guile. He pointedly produces something ambiguous, something which supports diametrically opposed readings, depending on where one's bets are placed. One of the readings amounts to a critique of the other reading as a hoax. But unlike the swindle, whose effectiveness depends on the degree to which the critique remains hidden and the hoax enjoys full rein, Duchamp's gesture is effective, as is the child's unambiguous announcement, to the degree that the critique embarrasses the hoax. It seems, then, that Duchamp embodies some rare and interesting combination of guile and innocence which the fable keeps apart by dividing them between agents whose activities are at cross-purposes. The limitation of the fable as an analogy is that it provides no model for the combination. The fable contains the figures of the swindler, of the gullible mark, and of the observer so innocent as to be incapable of duplicity. What we are confronted with in Duchamp is the figure of the wise guy. Joel Rudinow, a conceptual artist, created a multimedia satire entitled Higher Learnin'; or, The Song and Dance of Socrates: In Which the Love of Wisdom Leads to the Discovery that the Unlived Life is Not Worth Examining. Stanley Cavell North By Northwest [Alfred Hitchcock's] film is called North by Northwest. I assume that nobody will swear from that fact alone that we have here an allusion to Hamlet's line that he is but mad north-northwest; even considering that Hamlet's line occurs as the players are about to enter and that North by Northwest is notable, even within the oeuvre of a director pervaded by images and thoughts of the theater and of theatricality, for its obsession with the idea of acting; and considering that both the play and the film contain plays- within-the-play in both of which someone is killed, both being constructed to catch the conscience of the one for whose benefit they are put on. But there are plenty of further facts. The film opens with an ageless male identifying himself first of all as a son. He speaks of his efforts to keep the smell of liquor on his breath (that is, evidence of his grown-up pleasures) from the watchful nose of his mother, and he comes to the attention of his enemies because of an unresolved anxiety about getting a message to his mother, whereupon he is taken to a mansion in which his abductor has usurped another man's house and name and has, it turns out, cast his own sister as his wife. (The name, posted at the front of the house, is Townsend, and a town is a thing smaller than a city but larger than a village, or a hamlet.) The abductor orders the son killed by forcing liquid into him. It is perhaps part of the picture that the usurper is eager to get to his dinner guests and that there is too much competitive or forced drinking of liquor. Nor, again, will anyone swear that it is significant that the abductor-usurper's henchmen are a pair of men with funny, if any, names and a single man who stands in a special relationship with the usurper and has a kind of sibling rivalry with the young woman that this son, our hero, will become attracted to and repelled by. These are shadowy matters, and it is too soon to speak of "allusions" or of any other very definite relation to a so- called source. But it seems clear to me that if one were convinced of Hamlet in the background of North by Northwest, say to the extent that one is convinced that Saxo Grammaticus' Danish History is in the background of Hamlet, then one would without a qualm take the name Leonard as a successor to the name Laertes. Stanley Cavell, professor of philosophy at Harvard University, is the author of Must We Mean What We Say?, The Senses of Walden, The World Viewed, The Claim of Reason, and Pursuits of Happiness. His previous contributions to are "On Makajev On Bergman" (Winter 1979) and "A Reply to John Hollander" (Summer 1980). Erwin Panofsky The Concept of Artistic Volition Objections arise to the concept of artistic intention based upon the psychology of a period. Here too we experience trends or volitions which can only be explained by precisely those artistic creations which in their own turn demand an explanation on the basis of these trends and volitions. Thus "Gothic" man or the "primitive" from whose alleged existence we wish to explain a particular artistic product is in truth the hypostatized impression which has been culled from the works of art themselves. Or it is a question of intentions and evaluations which have become conscious as they find their formulation in the contemporary theory of art or in contemporary art criticism. Thus these formulations, just like the individual theoretical statements of the artists themselves, can once more only be phenomena parallel to the artistic products of the epoch; they cannot already contain their interpretation. Here again this parallel phenomenon would, in its entirety, represent an extraordinarily interesting object of humanistic investigation, but it would be incapable of defining in detail a methodologically comprehensible volition. So, too, the view of art which accompanies a period's artistic output can express the artistic volition of the period in itself but cannot put a name to it for us. This view can be of eminent significance when we are seeking a logical explanation for the perception of tendencies dominating at a given time and thus also for the judgment of artistic volition at that time, which must also be interpreted. Erwin Panofsky, the renowned art historian, was professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University, until his death in 1968. Among his many books and articles are Meaning in the Visual Arts, Early Netherlandish Painting, and Renaissance and Renascenes in Western Art. Kenneth Northcott is professor of German and comparative literature at the University of Chicago and the translator of Arnold Hauser's Sociology of Art(forthcoming). Joel Snyder is chairman of the committee on general studies in the humanities at the University of Chicago. Jerome J. McGann The Meaning of the Ancient Mariner What does "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" mean? This question, in one form or another, has been asked of the poem from the beginning; indeed, so interesting and so dominant has this question been that Coleridge's poem now serves as one of our culture's standard texts for introducing students to poetic interpretation. The question has been, and still is, an important one, and I shall try to present here yet another answer to it. My approach, however, will differ slightly from the traditional ones, for I do not believe that we can arrive at a synthetic answer until we reflect upon the meaning of the question itself. I will begin, therefore, by reconsidering briefly the history of the poem's criticism. . . . A poem like the "Rime" encourages, therefore, the most diverse readings and interpretations. Since this encouragement is made in terms of the Christian economy, the interpretations have generally remained within the broad spiritualist terms, "heathen" terms, in Newman's view, which Coleridge's mind had allowed for. The historical method of the "Rime," however, had also prepared the ground for a thoroughly revisionist view of the poem, in which the entire ideological structure of its symbolist procedures would finally be able to be seen in their special historical terms. Donald Wesling Difficulties of the Bardic: Literature and the Human_Voice Speech, like sound, "exists only when it is passing out of existence."1 Although confounded with the very breath of life, speech dies on the lips that give it form. This undulation of air, whose speechprint is so personal that we have not been able to build machines to recognize it, is born in the body but effaces, forgets the body. This quality of speech, that it takes support form the body but does not reside there, has evoked a debate about the role of voice which was doubtless begun earlier but has never been so sharply discussed, I think, as in the present generation: Must voice and the concept of the speaking subject be defined as a unity? Can we validate a definition of the self and what it means to be human through a physiology of voice or a metaphysics of voice? The logical and chronological priority of empirical speech, of utterances seemingly unplanned and unwritten, is what is at issue in this debate.2 ·  1. Walter J. Ong, "The Word in Chains," In the Human Grain(New York, 1967), p. 53. ·  2. Spontaneous utterances are the subject matter of speech-act philosophy and sociolinguistics, disciplines that stress the social and communicative context which helps condition personal speaking. Such a privileging of voice also occurs in modern poetic theory, for example in Charles Olson's "Projective Verse" and in statements by Gary Snyder, Jerome Rothenberg, and David Antin, but usually these writers show to what degree the oral must always remain a fiction in our era. Donald Wesling is professor of English at the University of California, San Diego. The author of The Chances of Rhyme: Device and Modernity, he is currently writing a critique of modern metrical theory, The Scissors of Meter: Grammetrics and Interpretation. Roy Harvey Pearce Whitman Justified: The Poet in 1855 Whitman was not one to be troubled about the solution of the problem of knowledge in particular, much less in general, nor for that matter was Emerson. Their way was to postulate solutions to problems just before they encountered them. My point, however, is that Whitman, with Emerson, did encounter a problem, the Diltheyan solution to which has tempted philosophers of history into our own time. If quoting Dilthey as a gloss on Emerson I would seem to want to involve Whitman in philosophical issues beyond his ken, then instead I would recall an earlier, quite fundamental statement of the mood, rather than one of the mode: "That which hath been is now; and that which is to be hath already been; and God requireth that which is past." The King James version of these words from Revelations 3:16 is perhaps clarified in the Revised Standard version: "That which is, already has been; that which is to be, already has been , and God seeks what has been driven away." Roy Harvey Pearce is a professor of American literature at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of The Savages of America: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind; The Continuity of American Poetry; and Historicism Once More: Problems and Occasions for the American Scholar. Harold Beaver Homosexual Signs (In Memory of Roland Barthes) Just consider, for sheer paranoia, the range of synonyms when the mask is ripped, the silence broken, the deferment brutally concluded: angel-face, arse-bandit, auntie, bent, bessie, bugger, bum-banger, bum boy, chicken, cocksucker, daisie, fag, faggot, fairy, flit, fruit, jasper, mincer; molly, nancy boy, nelly, pansy, patapoof, poofter, cream puff, powder puff, queen, queer, shit- stirrer, sissie, swish, sod, turd-burglar, pervert. For Aristophanes, as for Norman Mailer and Mary Whitehouse, buggery equaled coprophagy: a corrupt, destructive, hypocritical, excremental, urban scatology. Heterosexuality equalled the fecund, rural norm. Aristophanes' diet for a giant dung beetle was turds from a buggered boy: "he says he likes them well kneaded."1 To this day degeneracy often seems to be just another code word for homosexuality, as does perversion and decadence; this very essay will seem to many a "decadent" project. Nor would I balk at the term as long as it is interpreted in the French sense: intent on fulfilling Baudelaire's program of transforming the erotically passive to the intellectually active, the voluptuous to rational self-mastery. ·  1.Literally, "a hetairekos boy": male prostitute, or boy-friend (Aristophanes Peace 11). Harold Beaver, reader of American literature at the University of Warwick, was recently elected to the new chair of American literature at the University of Amsterdam. He has published widely on American literature and is currently completeing a collection of his articles, The Great American Masquerade Nelson Goodman Routes of Reference Yet while all features of reality are dependent upon discourse, are there perhaps some features of discourse that are independent of reality the differences, for example, between the ways two discourses may say exactly the same thing? The old and ugly notion of synonomy rattles a warning here: Can there ever be two different discourses that say exactly the same thing in different ways, or does every difference between discourses make a difference in what is said? Luckily, we can pass over that general question here. We are concerned only with the specific question whether organization into referential chains and levels is purely conventional, independent of everything beyond discourse. And the plain answer is that such organization of discourse participates notably in the organization of a reality. A label in any nonnull application, literal or metaphorical, marks off entities of a certain kind, and even where the denotation is null, the label marks off labels of a certain kind that apply to that label. Just such marking off or selection of entities and relevant kinds makes them such as distinguished from the results of alternative organizations. Nelson Goodman, emeritus professor of philosophy at Harvard University and the author of, among other works, The Structure of Appearance, Ways of Worldmaking, and Problems and Projects, is currently working on projects in the performing arts and on a new collection of essays. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are "The Status of Style' (Summer 1975), "Metaphor as Moonlighting" (Autumn 1979), "Twisted Tales; or, Story, Study, and Symphony" (Autumn 1980), and "The Telling and the Told" (Summer 1981). Alexander Nehamas The Postulated Author: Critical Monism as a Regulative_Ideal The aim of interpretation is to capture the past in the future: to capture, not to recapture, first, because the iterative prefix suggests that meaning, which was once manifest, must now be found again. But the postulated author dispenses with this assumption. Literary texts are produced by very complicated actions, while the significance of even our simplest acts is often far from clear. Parts of the meaning of a text may become clear only because of developments occurring long after its composition. And though the fact that an author means something may be equivalent to the fact that a writer could have meant it, this is not to say that the writer did, on whatever level, actually mean it. Alexander Nehamas, professor of philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, has written articles on ancient Greek philosophy, literary theory, Nietzsche and Thomas Mann. [/uploads/banners/banner stripe.png] Elaine Showalter Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness Until very recently, feminist criticism has not had a theoretical basis; it has been an empirical orphan in the theoretical storm. In 1975, I was persuaded that no theoretical manifesto could adequately account for the varied methodologies and ideologies which called themselves feminist reading or writing.1 By the next year, Annette Kolodny had added her observation that feminist literary criticism appeared "more like a set of interchangeable strategies than any coherent school or shared goal orientation."2 Since then, the expressed goals have not been notably unified. Black critics protest the "massive silence" of feminist criticism about black and Third-World women writers and call for a black feminist aesthetic that would deal with both racial and sexual politics. Marxist feminists wish to focus on class along with gender as a crucial determinant of literary production. Literary historians want to uncover a lost tradition. Critics trained in deconstructionist methodologies with to "synthesize a literary criticism that is both textual and feminist." Freudian and Lacanian critics want to theorize about women's relationship to language and signification. ·  1. See my "Literary Criticism," Signs 1 (Winter 1975): 435-60. ·  2. Annette Kolodny, "Literary Criticism," Signs 2 (Winter 1976): 420. Elaine Showalter is professor of English at Rutgers University. The author of A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing, she is currently completing The English Malady, a study of madness, literature, and society in England. Mary Jacobus The Question of Language: Men of Maxims and_The_Mill_on_the_Floss A politics of women's writing, then, if it is not to fall back on a biologically based theory of sexual difference, must address itself, as Luce Irigary has done in "Pouvoir du discours, subordination du feminin," to the position of mastery held not only by scientific discourse (Freudian theory, for instance), not only by philosophy, "the discourse of discourses," but by the logic of discourse itself. Rather than attempting to identify a specific practice, in other words, such a feminist politics would attempt to relocate sexual difference at the level of the text by undoing the repression of the "feminine" in all systems of representation for which the other (woman) must be reduced to the economy of the Same (man). Mary Jacobus is an associate professor of English and of women's studies at Cornell University. She is the author of a book on Wordsworth as well as the editor of a collection of feminist criticism, Women Writing and Writing about Women. Currently she is at work on a study of Thomas Hardy and a collection of essays on Romantic poetry and prose. Margaret Homans Eliot, Wordsworth, and the Scenes of the Sisters'_Instruction Despite criticism's collusion with Eliot, there are a number of incongruities between Wordsworth's ideas and Eliot's texts that do not seem to be simply differences, scenes and passages that Eliot invites her readers to find Wordsworthian while she indicates a significant pattern of divergence from Wordsworthian prototypes. The brotherly instructions that Eliot is most generally concerned at once to follow and to deny are contained in Wordsworth's wish, in the verse "Prospectus" to The Recluse, to see "Paradise, and groves/Elysian" be "A simple produce of the common day" (ii. 47-48, 55). But when she follows this wish literally, her "common day," the intensely social world of her novels, tests far more strenuously the adaptability of the paradisal vision than does anything Wordsworth wrote. The generic incompatibility between a poet's vision and the form of the novel may account for some of the obvious differences, yet, as I will try to suggest later, it may be that Eliot's choice of the realistic novel as the form for her vision is in part an effect, not a cause of her ambivalent divergences from Wordsworth (for example, a series of her sonnets articulates these concerns as much as do the novels). Margaret Homans, an assistant professor of English at Yale University, is the author of Women Writers and Poetic Identity: Dorothy Wordsworth, Emily Bronte, and Emily Dickinson. She is currently at work on a book of feminist criticism of Romanticism and Victorian fiction. Susan Gubar "The Blank Page" and the Issues of Female_Creativity Woman is not simply an object, however. If we think in terms of the production of culture, she is an art object: she is the ivory carving or mud replica, an icon or doll, but she is not the sculptor. Lest this seem fanciful, we should remember that until very recently women have been barred from art schools as students yet have always been acceptable as models. Both Laura and Beatrice were turned into characters by the poems they inspired. A poet as sensitive as Chaucer to this reification of the female allowed Criseyde to recognize and lament her own dilemma: "Allas, of me, unto the worldless ende,/Shall neyther ben ywritten nor ysonge/No good word; for these bokes wol me shende" (bk. 5, st. 152). Like the words written about her, she fears she will be "rolled on many a tongue!"6 ·  6. I am indebted for this view of Criseyde to Marcelle Thiebaux's "Foucault's Fantasia for Feminists: The Woman Reading" (paper delivered at the MMLA Convention, Indianapolis, 8 November 1979). Susan Gubar, associate professor of English at Indiana University, is coauthor of The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination and coeditor of Shakespeare's Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets, both with Sandra M. Gilbert. They are currently working on No Man's Land: Feminism and Modernism, the sequel to their book. Nancy J. Vickers Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme The import of Petrarch's description of Laura extends well beyond the confines of his own poetic age; in subsequent times, his portrayal of feminine beauty became authoritative. As a primary canonical text, the Rime sparse consolidated and disseminated a Renaissance mode. Petrarch absorbed a complex network of descriptive strategies and then presented a single, transformed model. In this sense his role in the history of the interpretation and the internalization of woman's "image" by both men and women can scarcely be overemphasized. When late-Renaissance theorists, poets, and painters represented woman's body, Petrarch's verse justified their aesthetic choices. His authority, moreover, extended beyond scholarly consideration to courtly conversation, beyond the treatise on beauty to the after-dinner game in celebration of it. The descriptive codes of others, both ancients and contemporaries, were, of course, not ignored, but the "scattered rhymes" undeniably enjoyed a privileged status: they informed the Renaissance norm of a beautiful woman.1 ·  1. On this "thoroughly self-conscious fashion," see. Elizabeth Cropper, "On Beautiful Women, Parmigianino, Petrarchismo, and the Vernacular Style," Art Bulletin 58 1976): 374-94. Nancy Vickers is an assistant professor of French and Italian at Dartmouth College. She has published articles on Dante and Petrarch and has recently completed a book, The Anatomy of Beauty: Woman's Body and Renaissance Blazon. Nina Auerbach Magi and Maidens: The Romance of the Victorian_Freud It is commonly assumed that Victorian patriarchs disposed of their women by making myths of them; but then as now social mythology had an unpredictable life of its own, slyly empowering the subjects it seemed to reduce. It also penetrated unexpected sanctuaries. If we examine the unsettling impact upon Sigmund Freud of a popular mythic configuration of the 1890's we witness a rich, covert collaboration between documents of romance and the romance of science. Fueling this entanglement between the clinician's proud objectivity and the compelling images of popular belief is the imaginative power of that much-loved, much-feared, and much-lied- about creature, the Victorian woman. Nina Auerbach, associate professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction as well as articles on Victorian women and culture. The present essay is an excerpt from her forthcoming book, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth, a mythography of Victorian Womanhood Froma I. Zeitlin Travesties of Gender and Genre in Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazousae Three of Aristophanes' eleven extant comedies use the typical comic device of role reversal to imagine worlds in which women are "on top." Freed from the social constraints which keep them enclosed within the house and silent in the public realms of discourse and action, women are given a field and context on the comic stage. They issue forth to lay their plans, concoct their plots, and exercise their power over men. The Lysistrate and the Ecclesiazousae stage of the intrusion of women into the public spaces of Athens, the Acropolis and Agora, respectively, as an intrusion into the political and economic life of the city. The Thesmophoriazousae, however, resituates the battle of the sexes in another domain, that of aesthetics, and, more precisely, that of theatre itself. Instead of the collective confrontation of men and women, the play directs the women's actions against a single male target, the tragic poet, Euripides. Froma I. Zeitlin, an associate professor of classics at Princeton University, is the author of several articles on Greek tragedy and on the ancient novel. Her monograph, Under the Sign of the Shield: Language, Structure, and the Son of Oedipus in Aeschylus' "Seven against Thebes," is forthcoming, and she is presently completing The Divided World: Gender and System in Aescylean Drama. Annette Kolodny Turning the Lens on "The Panther Captivity": A_Feminist_Exercise_in Practical Criticism My purpose here, then, is to reexamine a form which has already attracted considerable attention and, more particularly, by utilizing precisely that same mythopoetic analytic grid established by Fielder and Slotkin to reread on of its most popular incarnations, only adding to it a feminist perspective. My reading will thus avoid the unacknowledged and unexamined assumption which marks their work: the assumption of gender. Nonfeminist critics, after all, tend to ignore the fact (and significance) of women as readers as much as they tend to ignore the potentially symbolic significations of gender within a text. Fiedler, for example, obviously focuses on a male audience when he asserts that "westering, in America, means leaving the domain of the female" (pg. 60). And Slotkin, in making the same mistake, ignores the fact that women, too, required imaginative constructs through which to accommodate themselves to the often harsh realities of the western wilderness. Annette Kolodny, the author of The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters, has recently completed the first volume of Westering Women, a projected multivolume analysis of women's imaginative responses to the successive American frontiers. She is presently working on Dancing through the Minefield, a study of the theoretical political, and methodological concerns of feminist literary criticism. Judith Kegan Gardiner On Female Identity and Writing by Women During the past few years, feminist critics have approached writing by women with an "abiding commitment to discover what, if anything, makes women's writing different from men's" and a tendency to feel that some significant differences do exist.4 The most common answer is that women's experiences differ from men's in profound and regular ways. Critics using this approach find recurrent imagery and distinctive content in writing by women, for example, imagery of confinement and unsentimental descriptions of child care. The other main explanation of female difference posits a "female consciousness" that produces styles and structures innately different from those of the "masculine mind." The argument from experience is plausible but limited in its applications: the argument from a separate consciousness is subject to mystification and circular evidence. In both cases, scholars tend to list a few characteristics of writing by women without connecting or explaining them. ·  4. Annette Kolodny, "Some Notes on Defining a "Feminist Literary Criticism"", 2 (Autumn 1975): 78. Judith Kegan Gardiner is an associate professor of English and a member of the women's studies program at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle. The author of Craftmanship in Context: The Development of Ben Johnson's Poetry as well as articles on Robert Burton, feminist literary criticism, and contemporary women writers, she is currently working on a study of twentieth-century fiction by women. Catharine R. Stimpson Zero Degree Deviancy: The Lesbian Novel in English The "Kinsey Report" suggests the existence of such a mentality. Of 142 women with much homosexual experience, 70 percent reported no regrets. This consciousness has manifested itself in literature in two ways. First, in lesbian romanticism: fusions of life and death, happiness and woe, natural imagery and supernatural strivings, neoclassical paganism with a ritualistic cult of Sappho, and modern beliefs in evolutionary progress with a cult of the rebel. At its worst an inadvertent parody of fin de siecle decadence, at its best lesbian romanticism ruthlessly rejects a stifling dominant culture and asserts the value of psychological autonomy, women, art, and a European civilization of the sensuous, sensual, and voluptuous. Woolf's Orlando is its most elegant and inventive text, but its symbol is probably the career of Natalie Barney, the cosmopolitan American who was the prototype of Valerie Seymour.23 ·  23. See Rubin, introduction to Vivien's A Woman Appeared to Me, and George Wickes, The Amazon of Letters: The Life and Loves of Natalie Barney (New York, 1976). Catherine R. Stimpson, professor of English at Rutgers University, is the former editor of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. The author of both critical essays and fiction, she recently co-edited, with Ethel Spector Person, Women, Sex and Sexuality. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak "Draupadi" by Mahasveta Devi I have suggested elsewhere that, when we wander out of our own academic and First-World enclosure, we share something like a relationship with Senanayak's doublethink.2 When we speak for ourselves, we urge with conviction: the personal is also political. For the rest of the world's women, the sense of whose personal micrology is difficult (though not impossible) for us to acquire, we fall back on a colonialist theory of most efficient information retrieval. We will not be able t speak to the women out there if we depend completely on conferences and anthologies by Western-trained informants. As I see their photographs in women's studies journals or on book jackets, indeed, as I look in the glass, it is Senanayak with his anti-Fascist paperback that I behold. In the inextricably mingling historico-political specificity with the sexual differential in a literary discourse, Mahasveta Devi invites us to begin effacing that image. ·  2. See my "Three Feminist Readings: McCullers, Drabble, Habermas," Union Seminary Quarterly Review 1-2 (Fall-Winter 1979- 80), and "French Feminism in an International Frame." Mahasveta Devi teaches English at Bijaygarh College in Jadavpur, India, an institution for working-class women. She has published over a dozen novels, most recently Chotti Munda ebang Tar Tir, and is a prolific journalist, writing on the struggle of the tribal peasant in West Bengal and Bihar. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. The translator of Derrida's De la grammatologie, she has published essays on Marxist meminism, deconstructive practice, and contemporary literature and is currently completing a book on theory and practice in the humanities. Robert von Hallberg Donald Davie and "The Moral Shape of Politics" I have suggested that, despite his polemics on behalf of rightist attitudes, Davie is deeply committed to the liberalism of his generation of intellectuals. This commitment makes itself felt indirectly; it is in fact not fully expressed in the patently political poems. The poems that are frankly political, in terms of their content, are often rightist, but these poems, as I have indicated, do not show Davie's accomplishment; his poetic power lies elsewhere. In far better poems, Davie shows what I take to be a deeper allegiance, one that rests neither on his ideological beliefs nor on his class origins 22 but on certain habits of mind that derive from the liberal tradition. Although they operate throughout Davie's poetry, regardless of the particular subjects being treated, these habits always retain an almost silent gesture toward liberal ideals. Davie is often most deeply political when he seems to be least so. Of course one should not link away his rightist avowals; nor should one think of his rightism as deriving from the current critical perspective on liberal aspirations. His liberalism is nothing if not critical, and his righitst opinions express more desire than conviction. As I will try to show, below the level of content Davie as a poet shares the liberal presuppositions of his generation, and his rightism develops largely from a lack of faith in his audience. 22. In answer to Hamburger, Davie makes a point of his still strong bond to his family, which he refers to as "undeniably and proudly proletarian; and they include Labour Party activists" ("A Mug's Game?" p. 18). Robert von Hallberg, associate professor of English at the University of Chicago, is the author of Charles Olson: The Scholar's Art and a coeditor of . Paul Alpers What is Pastoral? Pastoral seems a fairly accessible literary concept; most critics and readers seem to know what they mean by it, and they often seem to have certain works in mind that count as pastorals. But when we look at what has been written about pastoral in the last decades - - when it has become one of the flourishing light industries of academic criticism -- we find nothing like a coherent account of either its nature or its history. We are told that pastoral "is a double longing after innocence and happiness"; that its universal idea is the Golden Age; that it is based on the antithesis of Art and Nature; that its fundamental motive is hostility to urban life; that its "central tenet" is "the pathetic fallacy"; that it expresses the ideal of otium; that it is "the poetic expression par excellence of the cult of aesthetic Platonism" in the Renaissance or of Epicureanism in the Hellenistic world; that it is "that mode of viewing common experience through the medium of the rural world."1 It sometimes seems as if there are as many versions of pastoral as there are critics who write about it. […] A definition of pastoral must first give a coherent account of its various features formal, expressive, and thematic and second, provide for historical continuity or change within the form. The basis of such a definition is provided by what Kenneth Burke calls a "representative anecdote": Men seek for vocabularies that will be faithful reflections of reality. To this end, they must develop vocabularies that are selections of reality. And any selection of reality must, in certain circumstances, function as a deflection of reality. Insofar as the vocabulary meets the needs of reflection, we can say that it has the necessary scope. In its selectivity, it is a reduction. Its scope and reduction become a deflection when the given terminology, or calculus, is not suited to the subject matter which it is designated to calculate. Dramatism suggests a procedure to be followed in the development of a given calculus, or terminology. It involves the search for a "representative anecdote," to be used as a form in conformity with which the vocabulary is constructed.6 Burke uses "anecdote" and not a more philosophically respectable term (like "instance" or "example") in order to emphasize the contingencies inherent in all such intellectual choices. Anecdote implies that they are inseparable from the stuff of reality with which they deal and that of their selection does not escape the conditions of ordinary accounts of our lives. (On the other hand, the term does not carry its normal implications of a story, as the examples cited in the next paragraph will show.) "Representative," as Burke uses it here, has a double meaning. An anecdote is representative in that (1) it is a typical instance of an aspect of reality and (2) by being typical it serves to generate specific depictions or representations of that reality. 1. The allusions are to the following: "double longing" (Renato Poggioli, The Oaten Flute [Cambridge, Mass., 1975], p. 1, all further references to this work will be included in the text); Golden Age (W.W. Greg, Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama [1906; New York, 1959], p. 5); Art and Nature (English Pastoral Poetry, ed. Frank Kermode [1952; New York, 1972], all further references to this work will be included in the text; and Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden [New York, 1967]); hostility to urban life (K.W. Gransden, "The Pastoral Alternative," Arethusa 3 [1970]: 103-21, 177-96; see also Raymond Williams, The Country and the City [London, 1973]); "pathetic fallacy" (E.W. Tayler, Nature and Art in Renaissance Literature [New York, 1964], p.154); otium (Hallett Smith, Elizabethan Poetry [Cambridge, Mass., 1952], p. 2), "aesthetic Platonism" (Richard Cody, The Landscape of the Mind [Oxford, 1969], p. 6); Epicureanism (Thomas G. Rosenmeyer, The Green Cabinet [Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1969]; "viewing common experience" (John Lynen, The Pastoral Art of Robert Frost [New Haven, Conn., 1960], p.9). 6. Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1969), p. 59. This is the beginning of the section entitled "Scope and Reduction." Paul Alpers is professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, and is the author of The Poetry of "The Faerie Queene" and The Singer of the Eclogues: A Study of Virgilian Pastoral. The present essay is part of a larger study entitled "Pastoral Poetics."   James K. Chandler Romantic Allusiveness Our tendency is not to read Romantic poetry as alluding to the texts it reminds us of. We think of the Augustans as the author of what Reuben Brower calls "the poetry of allusion."5 We envision Romantic poets carrying on their work in reaction to these Augustans and in mysterious awe, whether fearful or admiring, of most other poets sometimes even of each other. No self- respecting Romantic, it is usually assumed, will deliberately send his reader elsewhere for a meaning to complement the effect of his own words. If a reader's mind wanders to an earlier poem, that is not the Romantic poet's fault but a matter of accident or perhaps of cruel destiny. The Romantic wants to keep the poem an intimate affair just the two of us and does what he can to keep his reader's attention on himself. […] What follows is an effort to test the applicability of Wasserman's Augustan hypothesis to the poetic mode of high Romanticism. This effort should not be taken to imply either that the Romantics simply continue in the allusive mode of the Augustans or that the assumptions that lead Bloom and others to read Romantic poetry as they do are utterly mistaken. I will in fact be arguing quite otherwise. Nor must there be any confusion about Wasserman's conception of the Augustan mode. Some of the language of his summary, for example where he speaks of "the rich interplay between the author's text and the full contexts it allusively arouses," might lead one to liken his work to the criticism now associated with the notion of "intertextuality." For the practitioners of this criticism, as Jonathan Culler explains, "to read is to place a work in a discursive space, relating it to other texts and to other codes of that space, and writing is a similar activity."8 Writing and reading a poem are in this account both acts of "intertextual location," if you will, but the reader of the poem need not concern himself with the aims and circumstances of its writer's "similar activity." The decisive difference between this view and the one Wasserman offers for the Augustans is that Wasserman's is intentionalist and historicist. This shows plainly in his exegetical commentary on the Rape, where his characteristic claim follows the formula: "Pope [expects, invites, prods, wants] his (contemporary) reader to [discover, exercise his wit on, recognize, see] X in his allusion to such-and-such a text." And to support his claim he repeatedly brings his historicist scholarship to bear on questions about "the kind of ready knowledge Pope demands of his reader" and what "facts [were] known to any serious reader" of the time.9 5. See Reuben Brower, Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion (Oxford, 1959), esp. pp. 1-14. 8. Jonathan Culler, "Presupposition and Intertextuality," MLN 91 (1976): 1382-3; Culler refers primarily to the work of Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva but notes that Bloom himself occasionally sounds curiously like an intertextualist critic. 9. Wasserman, "Limits of Allusion," pp. 427, 429. For a response to Wasserman less sympathetic than mine, see Irvin Ehrenpreis, Literary Meaning and Augustan Values (Charlottesville, Va., 1974), pp. 12-15. James K. Chandler, an assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago, has published work on Wordsworth's poetry and politics and is currently completing a book on the subject. Stanley Corngold Error in Paul de Man The power of literature to resist "totalization," to divide and oppose whole meaning, to separate Being from the word, or to name Being as itself divided this is de Man's oldest and best- defended idea. Behind its deconstructionist and semiological variations in the recent work is a long genealogy of such insistence.6 This "genealogy" (the metaphor is abhorrent to de Man) contains instructive continuities and aberrations. The continuities tend to show de Man to an extraordinary degree the captive of his beginnings. The aberrations pose a threat to the very criterion of rigor which he makes the touchstone of his position. I will restrict myself here to an account of what is coherent and what is incoherent in de Man's treatment of the category of error. […] Error is not mistake. The concept of the mistake is usable, perhaps, within the restricted teleology of pragmatic acts or within the quasi-rigorous language of scientific description. Mistakes (or what de Man sometimes calls "mere error" [see, e.g., BI, p. 109]) are without true value: trivial, in principle corrigible according to a norm already known. But the skew of error implies a truth. Furthermore, the concept of error supplies to the categories of blindness and insight as much coherence as they are able to achieve. As we shall see, it brings together the constituents of the essential ambivalence of all literary and at least some philosophical language (see BI, p. viii). 6. In 1956, for instance, in a review of Nathalie Sarraute's L'Ère du Soupçon, de Man offered his reading of "the central moment of Ulysses, the carefully prepared encounter between Bloom and Stephan Dedalus": it "indicates, surely, the total impossiblity of any contact, of any human communication, even in the most disinterested love" (Monde Nouveau 11 [June 1956]:59; my translation). Stanley Corngold, professor of German and comparative literature at Princeton University, is the author of books and articles on Kafka, including The Commentator's Despair and an annotated translation of The Metamorphosis. A volume of his essays on the question of the self in Hölderlin, Dilthey, Nietzsche, Freud, Kafka, Mann, and Heidegger is forthcoming. Paul de Man A Letter Whenever a binary pair is being analyzed or "deconstructed," the implication is never that the opposition is without validity in a given empirical situation (no one in his right mind could maintain that it is forever impossible to tell night from day or hot from cold) but only that the figure of opposition involved in all analytical judgments is not reliable, precisely because it allows, in the realm of language to which, as figure, it belongs, for substitutions that cannot occur in the same manner in the world of experience. When one moves from empirical oppositions such as night and day to categorical oppositions such as truth and falsehood, the epistemological stakes increase considerably because, in the realm of concepts, the principle of exclusion applies decisively. The critical function of deconstruction is not to blur distinctions but to identify the power of linguistic figuration as it transforms differences into oppositions, analogies, contiguities, reversals, crossings, and any other of the relationships that articulate the textual field of tropes and of discourse. Hence the distinctively critical, in the not necessarily benign Kantian sense, function of texts, literary or other, with regard to aesthetic, ethical, epistemological, and practical judgements they are bound to generate. These judgements are never merely contingent mistakes or merely preordained errors, nor can they be kept in abeyance between the two mutually exclusive alternatives. As Pascal said with regard to the coercive choice between dogmatism and skepticism, the refusal to decide between them, since it is itself a conceptual rather than a contingent decision, is always already a choice for error over mistake. Conversely, any decision one makes with regard to the absolute truth or falsehood value of a text always turns out to be a mistake. And it will remain one unless the perpetrator of the mistake becomes critically aware of the abusive schematization that caused his mistake and thus transforms the mistaking of error (for mistake) into the error of mistaking. Paul de Man, Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University, is the author of Blindness and Insight and Allegories of Reading and is currently completing a book tentatively titled The Resistance to Theory. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are "Political Allegory in Rousseau" (Summer 1976) and "The Epistemology of Metaphor" (Autumn 1978). Françoise Meltzer Laclos' Purloined Letters The role of the reader is central to the epistolary genre because the letters anticipate a reader within the novel's framework. There is the letter's intended recipient (destinataire), the occasional interceptor, the invented publisher and/or editor who organize(s) the collected correspondence, and the extrafictional reader who reads the collection in its entirety, including the disclaiming or condemning prefaces which precede it. The epistolary form, however, with so many layers of readers, considerably complicates the issue of reader response. If we share, for example, Stanley Fish's assumption that "literature is in the reader," the epistolary novel apparently reverses the formula: the reader is in the literature. And yet it is in the novel of letters that the reader, the fictional reader, most clearly creates the text. Let us return to Merteuil's admonishment to Cécile: "Voyez donc à soigner davantage votre style…. Vous voyez bien que, quand vous écrivez à quelqu'un, c'est pur lui et non pas pour vous: vous devez donc moins chercher à lui dire ce que vous pensez, que ce qui lui plaît davantage."2 If a reader's response to a given sentence is colored by the previous one, the epistolary novel achieves the same effect within a larger unit: each letter is determined by the one which precedes it. In this sense the letter is a grammatical unit, a larger sentence. Moreover, a letter-novel presents the possibility of an architectural as well as conceptual interruption. That is, whereas insufficiencies in a first-or third-person narrative must consist of circumlocutions, repetitions, and exclusions of information, the letter-novel can create a concrete insufficiency by a lost, suppressed, stolen, or interrupted letter. In such cases the letter must function without its precedent since the destinataire remains empty-handed. Thus, the epistolary novel has a great capacity for mise en abîme. Both inside and outside the narrative, there always is a destinataire; and even if he is the wrong one in the context of the récit he is the intended one for the histoire.3 In any case, the extrafictional reader is the final destinataire and holds a privileged position. And yet, he too is subject to interruptions: here the editor rears his head by claiming in footnotes that a letter is lost, too damaged to decipher, or so boring or obscene that he has seen fit to exclude it; these footnotes are the only "letters" addressed to and meant for us. At this point the editor removes his mask but remains on stage. Apart from such tricks, however, we do read every letter available, each of which is addressed to another reader, a system of the once removed or of the "letter in suffrance." Or, loosely interpreting Jacques Lacan, a purloined letter means that a letter always arrives at its destination.4 2. Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liasons dangereuses (Paris 1961), letter 105, p. 247; all subsequent quotations are taken from this edition and will be identified by letter and page number in the text. "Therefore attend more to your style....You must well know that, when you write to someone, it is for him and not for you: you must therefore seek less to tell him what you think, than what pleases him more"; here and elsewhere my translation. 3. I am using the French terms of Gérard Genette to avoid confusion caused by English equivalents. "Récit is often translated as discourse, plot, narrative, subject, narration; histoire as story, events, myth, and so forth. 4. See Jacques Lacan, "Seminar on'The Purloined Letter,'" trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, Yale French Studies 48 (1972): 38-72; all further references to this work, abbreviated as "SPL," will be included in the text. The final sentence reads as follows: "Thus it is that what the 'purloined letter,' nay, the 'letter in suffrance' means is that a letter always arrives at its destination." What Lacan means by this statement has to do with the language of the unconscious, or of unconscious Desire. Each individual sends his own message of "truth" of identity. Earlier in this passage Lacan says: "The sender, we tell you , receives from the receiver his own message in reverse form." ("Lettre" has for Lacan two meanings: epistle and typographical character.) Françoise Meltzer is an associate professor of Romance language and literatures and of comparative literature at the University of Chicago. Her previous contributions to are "Color as Cognition in Symbolist Verse" (Winter 1978) and the translation of Christian Metz's "Trucage and the Film" (Summer 1977). She is presently working on the relationship between rhetoric and psychoanalytic terminology. Jean Ricardou Proust: A Retrospective Reading Deliberately employing rather vague terms, let us postulate a literature of the past and a literature of today. Two very simple ways of bringing them into relation are conceivable. One might adopt a prospective attitude, which would consider today's literature in the light of the past's. Or one might adopt a retrospective attitude, which would consider the literature of the past in the light of today's. The two positions are not equivalent. The prospective attitude is threatened with sterility: it may well find itself mainly seeking in today's literature the trace of that which was active in the literature of the past, that is, the persistence of something which is now perhaps fading away. The retrospective attitude, on the other hand, has a good chance of proving fruitful: what it tends to seek in the literature of the past is a foreshadowing of that which is alive in the modern text, that is, the beginnings of what is now in effect. In short, the former tends to minimize the innovations of today's text; the latter tends to stress the innovations in the text of the past. Clearly, this does not mean that today's text has a metaphysical role that of containing a truth which would illuminate its inarticulate beginnings in the text of the past. Rather, today's text has an operative role that of an instrument with which to analyze the text of the past. And this retrospective analysis is threefold: it detects the way the text works; it explains the way the text works; it specifies the way the text works. In the first two operations, detection and explanation, the resemblances between a highly active process in a recent text and a less intense one in an old text are turned to account. In the third operation, specification, the differences between the two are stressed. If we subject Proust's Remembrance of Things Past to a retrospective analysis in the light of the recent literary movement that has been named the New Novel, we immediately perceive, in Proust's work, a highly significant process. We are, in fact, witness to the beginnings of a monumental metamorphosis: a famous linguistic operation, metaphor, undergoes a radical change in function. It used to be mainly expressive or representative; with Proust, it becomes productive. Let's see how. Jean Ricardou is the author of many works of fiction and criticism. His most recent critical works are Nouveau problèmes du roman and the forthcoming Le théâtre des métamorphoses. His previous contributions to are "Birth of a Fiction" (Winter 1977) and "Composition Discomposed" (Autumn 1976). Erica Freiberg regularly translates Jean Ricardou's works. She holds degrees in French and Italian, philosophy, and modern literature from the University of Paris (Sorbonne) and the University of Geneva. Carolyn Burke Gertrude Stein, the Cone Sisters, and the Puzzle_of_Female Friendship For ten years, between 1903 and 1913, Gertrude Stein saw human relationships as painful mathematical puzzles in need of solutions. Again and again, she converted the predicaments of her personal life into literary material, the better to solve and to exorcise them. The revelation that relationships had a structural quality came to her during the composition of Q.E.D. (1903), when she grasped the almost mathematical nature of her characters' emotional impasse. Stein's persona in the novel comments on their triangular affair, "Why it's like a piece of mathematics. Suddenly it does itself and you begin to see."1 The theory encouraged her to examine such situations as if they were case histories: she continued to study the same piece of mathematics from different angles in Fernhurst(1904), Three Lives (1905-6), and The Making of Americans (1906-11). But whatever the sexual arrangements in these triangles, the powerful generally managed to impose their wills upon the less powerful, and the triangles resolved themselves into oppositional structures, pitting two against one. Gradually, when the couple began to replace the triangle as her structural model, Stein composed numerous verbal portraits of couples and their relationships. In two of these, "Ada" and "Two Women," Stein applied her general theory of relationships to the particular puzzle of female friendships because, I think, she felt that women's characters were most intensely molded in same-sex involvements. Although she attempted to "prove" these theories in distanced, deliberately depersonalized prose, we as readers must examine "the complex interplay of self-discovery and writing" from which her portraits emerged.2 Stein's portraits of women entangled in familial and erotic bonds seem to invite us into "the process whereby the self creates itself in the experience of creating art"; to read them, we must "join the narrator in reconstructing the other woman by whom we know ourselves."3 This task of reconstruction implies that we must also rethink the place of biography generally dismissed by New Criticism and its subsequent post-structuralist permutations as "mere" biography in feminist critical projects. If it is true that "in reading as in writing, it is ourselves that we remake," then feminist critics have a special stake in understanding the biographical, and autobiographical, impulses at work in these activities.4 Stein's portraits, which hover between fiction and biography, raise important questions about the ways in which biographical information can justify our suspicion that female writers may be "closer to their fictional creations than male writers are."5 Recently, feminist critics have adapted psychoanalytic theory to examine the particular closeness of female characters in women's writing or to suggest a related closeness between the female author and her characters. We find it useful to speak of the pre-Oedipal structures and permeable ego boundaries that seem to shape women's relationships. Although Stein used very different psychological paradigms, she approached these same issues in her own studies of female friendships. Realizing that she preferred to write about women, she observed, "It is clearer…I know it better, a little, not very much better."6 In spite of her qualifications, she knew that she could see the structuring principles of relationships with greater clarity when writing from her own perspective. 1. Stein, "Fernhurst," "Q.E.D.," and Other Early Writings, ed. Leon Katz (New York, 1971), p. 67. 2. Elizabeth Abel, "Reply to Gardiner," Signs 6 (Spring 1981): 444. For a very useful critical discussion of this complex issue, see Abel, "(E)Merging Identities: The Dynamics of Female Friendship in Contemporary Fiction by Women," and Judith Kegan Gardiner, "The (US)es of (I)dentity: a Response to Abel on '(E)Merging Identities,'" in the same issue of Signs (pp. 413-35, 436-42). 3. Gardiner, "The (US)es of (I)dentity," p. 442. 4. Jonathan Morse, "Memory, Desire, and the Need for Biography: The Case of Emily Dickinson," The Georgia Review 35 (Summer 1981): 271. See also J. Gerald Kennedy's suggestive remarks on the "tension between personal confession and implacable theory" in Barthes' later work ("Roland Barthes, Autobiography, and the End of Writing," in the same issue of The Georgia Review, p. 381). 5. Abel, "Reply to Gardiner," p. 444. 6. Stein, The Making of Americans, cited in Richard Bridgeman, Gertrude Stein in Pieces (New York, 1970), p. 78. Carolyn Burke, an Affiliated Scholar at the Center for Research on Women, Stanford University, has published articles on French feminist writing and on Mina Loy, whose biography she is now completing. The theoretical implications of this essay will be explored in her related study in progress on feminist biography. Gary Tomlinson Music and the Claims of Text: Monteverdi, Rinuccini,_and_Marino The composer of vocal music writes as poet and scholiast. His message is autonomous but not wholly his own. He sets to work with a preexistent artwork before him a poem or passage of prose, often written without thought of musical setting and fashions his song under its constraints. He welcomes to his work a second, distinct language, one which corresponds to his own at most only partially in syntax and significance. The composer's unique act of accommodation, structuring his setting after certain requisites of his text, may have far-reaching implications for his musical style implications too often ignored in today's musical analysis and criticism. Which particular textual characteristics the composer chooses to emphasize will depend on much beyond the text itself: on his view of the nature and capabilities of musical discourse, shaped internally by musical procedures developed from the canon of his predecessors, externally by general expectations and aspirations of his culture; and on his equally rich conception of the tradition behind his text. The text- music interface is therefore a provocative area of exploration for critic and historian alike. It points to the expressive aims of a composer in a given work, and it elucidates broader cultural assumptions concerning the nature of musical and poetic discourse. Gary Tomlinson, assistant professor of music history at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of articles on Monteverdi, early opera, and Verdi. He is currently writing a book on Monteverdi and late-Renaissance culture. Hans Robert Jauss Poiesis Historically, the productive aspect of the aesthetic experience can be described as a process during which aesthetic practice freed itself step by step from restrictions imposed on productive activity in both the classical and the biblical tradition. If one understands this process as the realization of the idea of creative man, it is principally art which actualizes this idea.1 First, when the poietic capacity is still one and undivided, it asserts itself subliminally; later, in the competition between technical and artistic creation, it explicitly claims to be a production of a special kind. It is in that history of the concepts labor and work that the restrictions become most palpable.2 In the Greek tradition, all producing (poiesis) remains subordinate to practical action (praxis). As the activity of slaves who are rigorously excluded from the exercise of the virtues, poiesis occupies the lowest rank in social life. In the Christian tradition, handiwork is cursed, which means that man is meant to maintain himself only by toiling against a resistant nature ("cursed is the ground for thy sake" [Gen. 3:17]); salvation can only be found beyond his activity in this world. But in both the classical and the Christian conceptual fields relating to labor, we already encounter ambivalent definitions which could introduce and justify an upward revaluation of man's labor. 1. See Hans Blumenberg, "'Nachahmung der Natur': Zur Vorgeschichte des schöpferischen Menschen," Studium Generale 10 (1957): 266-83, still unexcelled. I also base my discussion on Jürgen Mittelstrass, Neuzeit und Aufklårung; Studien zur Entstehung der neuzeitlichen Wissenchaft und Philosophie (Berlin, 1970), and to the results of two seminars at Constance held jointly and to which I owe essential insights. 2. See Werner Conze, "Arbeit," in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historiches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, ed. Conze, Otto Brunner, and Reinhart Koselleck, 4 vols. (Stuttgart, 1972), 1:154-215, and Walther Bienert, Die Arbeit nach der Lehre der Bibel (Stuttgart, 1954); an abbreviated version appears in Bienert's "Arbeit," Die Religion in Gescheichte und Gegenwart (Tübingen, 1957). Hans Robert Jauss is professor of literary criticism and Romance philology at the University of Constance. He is the author of many books and articles, including two works forthcoming in English, Toward an Aesthetic of Receptionand Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics, from which the present essay is taken. Michael Shaw has translated many works, among them Max Horkheimer's Dawn and Decline. W.J.T. Mitchell and the Ideology of Pluralism The criterion of "arguability" has tended to steer away from the kind of pluralism which defines itself as neutral, tolerant eclecticism toward a position which I would call "dialectical pluralism." This sort of pluralism is not content with mere diversity but insists on pushing divergent theories and practices toward confrontation and dialogue. Its aim is not the mere preservation or proliferation of variety but the weeding out of error, the elimination of trivial or marginal contentions, and the clarification of fundamental and irreducible differences. The goal of dialectical pluralism is not liberal toleration of opposing views from a neutral ground but transformation, conversion, or, at least, the kind of communication which clarifies exactly what is at stake in any critical conflict. A good dramatization of Critical Inquiry's editorial ideal would be the dialogue of the devil and angel in Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell, an exchange in which each contestant enters into and criticizes the metaphysics of his contrary and which ends happily with the angel transformed into a devil.   Michael Fried Painter into Painting: On Courbet's After Dinner at_Ornansand Stonebreakers In the pages that follow I looked closely at two major paintings by Gustave Courbet (1819-77): the After Dinner at Ornans, perhaps begun in the small town of the title (the artist's birthplace) but certainly completed in Paris during the winter of 1848-49; and the Stonebreakers, painted wholly in Ornans just under a year later. The After Dinner and the Stonebreakers are the first in a series of large multifigure compositions--others are the Burial at Ornans (1949-50) and the Peasants of Flagey Returning from the Fair (1850) that mark not only Courbet's maturity as an artist but his emergence as a disruptive force, almost a one-man wrecking crew, in the cultural politics of his time. They are also those works in which his self-declared identity as a Realist first becomes manifest, and probably the chief concern of the most interesting recent scholarship on Courbet has been to try to decode that epithet in social-historical terms, or at any rate to situate his activity as a painter during the years 1848-55 in the context of the social and political struggles that accompanied the creation of the Second Republic and its subversion by Louis Bonaparte.2 At the core of that tradition, motivating and, as it were, mobilizing it, is the demand that the painter succeed in placing in abeyance the primordial convention that paintings are made to be beheld that he contrive in one way or another to establish the fiction, the meta-illusion, that the beholder does not exist, that there is no one standing before the picture. From Greuze through Gèricault, this was chiefly to be accomplished in and through the medium of visual drama, that is, by representing figures so deeply absorbed in their actions, emotions, and states of mind and furthermore so efficaciously bound together in a single comprehensive dramatic situation that they would strike one as absolutely immured in the world of the painting and a fortiori as oblivious to the very possibility of being viewed. And one way of describing the crisis that I believe overtook French painting (or this tradition) by the 1820s and '30s is to say that the dramatic as such came more and more to be revealed as inescapably theatrical that the array of conventions that once had served to establish the meta-illusion of the beholder's nonexistence now seemed merely to attest to his controlling presence. 1. The present essay is adapted from a book-length study, in progress, of Courbet's art. Recent books and articles emphasizing social and political considerations include Linda Nochlin, Gustave Courbet: A Study of Style and Society (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1963; rpt. New York, 1976); T.J. Clark, "A Bourgeois Dance of Death: Max Buchon on Courbet," Burlington Magazine 111 (April-May 1969): 208-12, 282-89, and Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the Second French Republic, 1848-51 (Greenwich, Conn., 1973); Jack LIndsay, Gustave Courbet: His Life and Art (New York, 1973); Klaus Herding, ed., Realismus als Widerspruch: Die Wirklichkeit in Courbets Malerei (Frankfurt am Main, 1978); Herding, "Les Lutteurs 'détestables': Critique de style, critique sociale," Histoire et critique de l'art 4-5 (1978): 94-122; and James Henry Rubin, Realism and Social Vision in Courbet and Proudhon (Princeton, N.J., 1980). 2. For an account of the early evolution of that tradition, see my Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1980), as well as the essays on Courbet cited in n. 3. Michael Fried, professor of humanities and the history of art at the Johns Hopkins University, is the author of Morris Louis and Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot. He is currently at work on a book on Courbet. Robert L. Carringer Orson Welles and Gregg Toland: Their Collaboration on_Citizen_Kane Though he has worked almost exclusively in collaborative mediums like radio and film, Orson Welles has always tended to think of himself as an individual author. "Any production in any medium is a one-man production," he said to me. On the question of sharing creative responsibility for the works that bear his name, he is deeply ambivalent. His insistence on multiple billings for himself is legendary. As I can well testify, the very mention of the term collaboration at a wrong moment can be enough to send him into a rage. The controversy over who scripted Citizen Kaneinitiated by Pauline Kael hurt him very deeply. That the wound still festers to this day is evident in the rancor with which he speaks of former associates like John Houseman. Yet in quieter moments he will fully concede how indispensable his principal collaborators have been to him and will openly discuss the nature and extent of their contributions. He is especially full of praise for cinematographers with whom he has worked over the years, such as Gregg Toland, Russell Metty, and, more recently, Gary Graver. On Citizen Kane,he singles out four individuals whom he thinks deserve special recognition: writer Herman Mankiewicz, art director Perry Ferguson, composer Bernard Herrmann, and Toland. Of these, he says, Toland's contribution to the film was the greatest, second in importance only to his own. In this essay I deal with the history and nature of Welles' collaboration with Toland on Citizen Kane what brought them together, their working relationship, and the characteristics and rationale of the visual plan they created for the film. As we shall see, Toland brought a largely pre-conceived visual plan to Citizen Kanewhich he had been working out in his previous films. Welles accepted Toland's plan so readily because he recognized how dramatically appropriate it was to the story material. Toland's cinematography for Citizen Kanealso left a major legacy to Hollywood films of the 1940s. Robert L. Carringer, is associate professor of English and cinema studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This essay is excerpted from his book in progress, The Road through Xanadu. His most recent contribution to was "The Scripts of Citizen Kane" (Winter 1978). Jacques Derrida The Linguistic Circle of Geneva Linguists are becoming more and more interested in the genealogy of linguistics. And in reconstituting the history or prehistory of their science, they are discovering numerous ancestors, sometimes with a certain astonished recognition. Interest in the origin of linguistics is awakened when the problems of the origin of language cease to be proscribed (as they had been from the end of the nineteenth century) and when a certain geneticism or a certain generativism comes back into its own. One could show that this is not a chance encounter. This historical activity is no longer elaborated solely at the margins of scientific practice, and its results are already being felt. In particular, we are no longer at the stage of the prejudice according to which linguistics as a science was born of a single "epistemological break" a concept, called Bachelardian, much used or abused today and of a break occurring in our immediate vicinity. We no longer think, as does Maurice Grammont, that "everything prior to the nineteenth century, which is not yet linguistics, can be expedited in several lines."1 Noam Chomsky, in an article announcing his Cartesian Linguistics,which presents in its major lines the concept of "generative grammar," states: "My aim here is not to justify the interest of this investigation, nor to describe summarily its procedure, but instead to underline that by a curious detour it takes us back to a tradition of ancient thought, rather than constituting a new departure or a radical innovation in the domain of linguistics and psychology."2 If we are to set ourselves down in the space of this "curious detour," we could not help encountering the "linguistics" of Jean- Jacques Rousseau. We would have to ask ourselves, then, in what ways Rousseau's reflections on the sign, on language, on the origin of languages, on the relations between speech and writing, and so on announce (but what does "announce" mean here?) what we are so often tempted to consider as the very modernity of linguistic science, that is, modernity aslinguistic science, since so many other "human sciences" refer to linguistics as their particular model. And we are all the more encouraged to practice this detour in that Chomsky's major references, in Cartesian Linguistics,are to the Logi cand General and Reasoned Grammarof Port-Royal, works that Rousseau knew well and held in high esteem.3 For example, on several occasions Rousseau cites Duclos' commentary on the General and Reasoned Grammar. The Essay on the Origin of Languageseven closes with one of these citations. Thus Rousseau acknowledges his debt. 1. Maurice Grammont, cited by Noam Chomsky, Cartesian Linguistics (New York, 1966), p. 1. 2. Chomsky, "De quelques constantes de la théory linguistique," Diogène, no. 51 (1965); my italics. See also Chomsky, Current Issues in Linguistic Theory (The Hague, 1964), p.15 ff. There is an analogous gesture in Jakobson, who refers not only to Peirce and, as does Chomsky, to Humboldt but also to John of Salisbury, to the Stoics, and to Plato's Cratylus: see Jakobson, "A la recherche de l'essence du langage," Diogène, no. 51 (1965). 3. "I began with some book of philosophy, like the Port-Royal Logic, Locke's Essay, Malebranch, Leibniz, Descartes, etc." (Jean- Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1, Confessions [Paris, 1959], p. 237). Jacques Derrida, professor of the history of philosophy at the Ècole Normale Supérieure in Paris, is the author of, among other works, Writing and Difference, Of Grammatology,and Marges de la philosophie,from which the present essay is taken. His previous contribution to ,"The Law of Genre," appeared in the Autumn 1980 issue. Alan Bass, a psychoanalyst, has published essays on deconstruction and psychoanalytic theory and practice. Stanley E. Fish With the Compliments of the Author: Reflections on_Austin_and Derrida In the summer of 1977, as I was preparing to teach Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology to a class at the School of Criticism and Theory in Irvine, a card floated out of the text and presented itself for interpretation. It read: WITH THE COMPLIMENTS OF THE AUTHOR Immediately I was faced with an interpretive problem not only in the ordinary and everyday sense of having to determine the meaning and the intention (they are the same thing) of the utterance but in the special sense (or so it might seem) occasioned by the fact that I didn't know who the author named or, rather, not named by the card was. It might have been Derrida himself whom I had met, but only in passing. Or it might have been Derrida's translator, Gayatri Spivak whom I had known for some time and who might well have put me on the publisher's list. Or it might have been the publisher, in this case the Johns Hopkins University Press of whose editorial board I was then a member. In the absence (a key word) of any explicit identification, I found myself a very emblem of the difficulties or infelicities that attend distanced or etiolated communication: unable to proceed because the words were cut off from their anchoring source in a unique and clearly present intention. That is to say, I seemed, in the very moment of my perplexity, to be proving on my pulse the superiority of face-to- face communication, where one can know intentions directly, to communication mediated by the marks of writing and in this case by a writing that materialized without any clues as to its context of origin. It may not have been a message found in a bottle, but it certainly was a message found in a book. Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels Against Theory By "theory" we mean a special project in literary criticism: the attempt to govern interpretations of particular texts by appealing to an account of interpretation in general. The term is sometimes applied to literary subjects with no direct bearing on the interpretation of individual works, such as narratology, stylistics, and prosody. Despite their generality, however, these subjects seem to us essentially empirical, and our argument against theory will not apply to them. Contemporary theory has taken two forms. Some theorists have sought to ground the reading of literary texts in methods designed to guarantee the objectivity and validity of interpretations. Others, impressed by the inability of such procedures to produce agreement among interpreters, have translated that failure into an alternative mode of theory that denies the possibility of correct interpretation. Our aim here is not to choose between these two alternatives but rather to show that both rest on a single mistake, a mistake that is central to the notion of theory per se. The object of our critique is not a particular way of doing theory but the idea of doing theory at all. Theory attempts to solve or to celebrate the impossibility of solving a set of familiar problems: the function of authorial intention, the status of literary language, the role of interpretive assumptions, and so on. We will not attempt to solve these problems, nor will we be concerned with tracing their history or surveying the range of arguments they have stimulated. In our view, the mistake on which all critical theory rests has been to imagine that these problems are real. In fact, we will claim such problems only seem real--and theory itself only seems possible or relevant when theorists fail to recognize the fundamental inseparability of the elements involved. The clearest example of the tendency to generate theoretical problems by splitting apart terms that are in fact inseparable is the persistent debate over the relation between authorial intention and the meaning texts. Some theorists have claimed that valid interpretations can only be obtained through an appeal to authorial intentions. This assumption is shared by theorists who, denying the possibility of recovering authorial intentions, also deny the possibility of valid interpretations. But once it is seen that the meaning of a text is simply identical to the author's intended meaning, the project of grounding meaning in intention becomes incoherent. Since the project itself is incoherent, it can neither succeed nor fail, hence both theoretical attitudes toward intention are irrelevant. The mistake made by theorists has been to imagine the possibility or desirability of moving from one term (the author's intended meaning) to a second term (the text's meaning), when actually the two terms are the same. One can neither succeed nor fail in deriving one term from the other, since to have one is already to have them both. In the following two sections we will try to show in detail how theoretical accounts of intention always go wrong. In the fourth section we will undertake a similar analysis of an influential account of the role interpretive assumptions or beliefs play in the practice of literary criticism. The issues of belief and intention are, we think, central to the theoretical enterprise; our discussion of them is thus directed not only against specific theoretical arguments but against theory in general. Our examples are meant to represent the central mechanism of all theoretical arguments, and our treatment of them is meant to indicate that all such arguments will fail and fail in the same way. If we are right, then the whole enterprise of critical theory is misguided and should be abandoned. John Paul Russo I.A. Richards in Retrospect I. A. Richards ushered the spirit of Cambridge realism into semantics and literary criticism. When he arrived as an undergraduate in 1911, Cambridge was in the midst of its finest philosophical flowering since the Puritanism and Platonism of the seventeenth century. The revolution of G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell against Hegelian idealism had already occurred; the Age of Principia was under way. There was a reassertion of native empiricism and a new interest in philosophical psychology, and the whole discussion was marked increasingly by a preoccupation with language. Richards, too, would break with the past, with the history of criticism in the previous two generations, gather psychological ideas to establish an empirical semantics and aesthetics, and center his attention on language. Although Romantic and late-Victorian values inform his theories, Richards set down an original criticism on first principles, not on tradition. Many of his books' titles show this rationalist strains: The Foundations of Aesthetics (1921), The Meaning of Meaning (1923), Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), Basic Rules of Reason (1933), and The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936). The originality and influence of Richards' criticism can be shown by the number of terms he put into circulation, terms which became the currency of debate for almost half a century: close reading, tone, pseudostatement, stock response, tension, equilibrium, tenor and vehicle of metaphor, emotive and referential language. John Paul Russo is a professor and chairman of the English department at the University of Miami. He is the editor of I. A. Richards' Complementarities: Uncollected Essays and the author of Alexander Pope: Tradition and Identity and an annotated bibliography of Richards' works. He is currently completing a critical biography of Richards. "A Study in Influence: The Moore- Richards Paradigm," his previous contribution to , appeared in the Summer 1979 issue. Paul de Man Sign and Symbol in Hegel's Aesthetics We are far removed, in this section of the Encyclopediaon memory, from the mnemotechnic icons described by Francis Yates in The Art of Memoryand much closer to Augustine's advice about how to remember and to psalmodize Scripture. Memory, for Hegel, is the learning by rote of names, or of words considered as names, and it can therefore not be separated from the notation, the inscription, or the writing down of these names. In order to remember, one is forced to write down what one is likely to forget. The idea in other words, makes its sensory appearance, in Hegel, as the material inscription of names. Thought is entirely dependent on a mental faculty that is mechanical through and through, as remote as can be from the sounds and the images of the imagination or from the dark mine of recollection, which lies beyond the reach of words and of thought […] No wonder, then, that Hegel's Aestheticsturns out to be a double and possibly duplicitous text. Dedicated to the preservation and the monumentalization of classical art, it also contains all the elements which make such a preservation impossible from the start. Theoretical reasons prevent the convergence of the apparently historical and the properly theoretical components of the work. This results in the enigmatic statements that have troubled Hegel's readers, such as the assertion that art is for us a thing of the past. This has usually been interpreted and criticized or, in some rare instances, praised as a historical diagnosis disproven or borne out by actual history. We can now assert that the two statements "art is for us a thing of the past" and "the beautiful is the sensory manifestation of the idea" are in fact one and the same. To the extent that the paradigm for art is thought rather than perception, the sign rather than the symbol, writing rather than painting or music, it will also be memorization rather than recollection. As such, it belongs indeed to a past which, in Proust's words, could never be recaptured, retrouve. Art is "of the past" in a radical sense, in that, like memorization, it leaves the interiorization of experience forever behind. It is of the past to the extent that it materially inscribes, and thus forever forgets, its ideal content. The reconciliation of the two main theses of the Aestheticsoccurs at the expense of the aesthetic as a stable philosophical category. What the Aestheticscalls the beautiful terms turns out to be, also, something very remote from what we associate with the suggestiveness of symbolic form. Paul de Man, Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University, is the author of Blindness and Insightand Allegories of Readingand is currently completing a book tentatively titled The Resistance to Theory. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiryare "Political Allegory in Rousseau" (Summer 1976), "The Epistemology of Metaphor" (Autumn 1978), and "A Letter" (Spring 1982). Michel Foucault The Subject and Power I would like to suggest another way to go further toward a new economy of power relations, a way which is more empirical, more directly related to our present situation, and which implies more relations between theory and practice. It consists of taking the forms of resistance against different forms of power as a starting point. To use another metaphor, t consists of using this resistance as a chemical catalyst so as to bring to light power relations, locate their position, and find out their point of application and the methods used. Rather than analyzing power from the point of view of its internal rationality, it consists of analyzing power relations through the antagonism of strategies. […] Let us come back to the definition of the exercise of power as a way in which certain actions may structure the field of other possible actions. What, therefore, would be proper to a relationship of power is that it be a mode of action upon actions. That is to say, power relations are rooted deep in the social nexus, not reconstituted "above" society as a supplementary structure whose radical effacement one could perhaps dream of. In any case, to live in a society is to live in such a way that action upon other actions is possible-- and in fact ongoing. A society without power relations can only be an abstraction. Which, be it said in passing, makes all the more politically necessary the analysis of power relations in a given society, their historical formation, the source of their strength or fragility, the conditions which are necessary to transform some or to abolish others. For to say that there cannot be a society without power relations is not to say either that those which are established are necessary or, in any case, that power constitutes a fatality at the heart of societies, such that it cannot be undermined. Instead, I would say that the analysis, elaboration, and bringing into question of power relations and the "agonism" between power relations and the instransitivity of freedom is a permanent political task inherent in all social existence. […] In effect, between a relationship of power and a strategy of struggle there is a reciprocal appeal, a perpetual linking and a perpetual reversal. At every moment the relationship of power may become a confrontation between two adversaries. Equally, the relationship between adversaries in society may, at every moment, give place to the putting into operation of mechanisms of power. The consequence of this instability is the ability to decipher the same events and the same transformations either from inside the history of struggle or from the standpoint of the power relationships. The interpretations which result will not consist of the same elements of meaning or the same links or the same types of intelligibility, although they refer to the same historical fabric, and each of the two analyses must have reference to the other. In fact, it is precisely the disparities between the two readings which make visible those fundamental phenomena of "domination" which are present in a large number of human societies. Michel Foucault has been teaching at the Collège de France since 1970. His works include Madness and Civilization (1961), The Birth of the Clinic (1966), Discipline and Punish (1975), and History of Sexuality (1976), the first volume of a projected five-volume study. Edward W. Said Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community I do not want to be misunderstood as saying that the cultural situation I describe here caused Reagan, or that it typifies Reaganism, or that everything about it can be ascribed or referred back to the personality of Ronald Reagan. What I argue is that a particular situation within the field we call "criticism" is not merely related to but is an integral part of the currents of thought and practice that play a role within the Reagan era. Moreover, I think, "criticism" and the traditional academic humanities have gone through a series of developments over time whose beneficiary and culmination is Reaganism. Those are the gross claims that I make for my argument. A number of miscellaneous points need to be made here. I am fully aware that any effort to characterize the present cultural moment is very likely to seem quixotic at best, unprofessional at worst. But that, I submit, is an aspect of the present cultural moment, in which the social and historical setting of critical activity is a totality felt to be benign (free, apolitical, serious), uncharacterizable as a whole (it is too complex to be described in general and tendentious terms) and somehow outside history. Thus it seems to me that one thing to be tried out of sheer critical obstinacy is precisely that kind of generalization, that kind of political portrayal, that kind of overview condemned by the present dominant culture to appear inappropriate and doomed from the start. It is my conviction that culture works very effectively to make invisible and even "impossible" the actual affiliations that exist between the world of ideas and scholarship on the one hand, and the world of brute politics, corporate and state power, and military force, on the other. The cult of expertise and professionalism, for example, has so restricted our scope of vision that a positive (as opposed to an implicit or passive) doctrine of noninterference among fields has set in. This doctrine has it that the general public is best left ignorant, and the most crucial policy questions affecting human existence are best left to "experts," specialists who talk about their specialty only, and to use the word first given wide social approbation by Walter Lippman in Public Opinion and The Phantom Public "insiders," people (usually men) who are endowed with the special privilege of knowing how things really work and, more important, of being close to power1. 1. See Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Boston, 1980), pp. 180-85 and 212-6. Donald A. Davie Poet: Patriot: Interpreter If patriotism can thus be seen as an incentive or as an instigation even in such a recondite science as epistemology, how much more readily can it be seen to perform such functions in other studies more immediately or inextricably bound up with communal human life? I pass over instances that occur to me for instance, the Victorian Jesuit, Father Hopkins, declaring (too shrilly tor modern susceptibilities) that every good poem written by an Englishman was a blow struck for England--and profit instead, if I may, by the presence among us of Edward Said. I do not know, and it is none of my business to know, what passport Said presents at the international frontier. But it is surely common knowledge among us that he has deep and feelingful and intimate allegiances to the state of Lebanon. Who of us has failed to connect this with his books Orientalism and The Question of Palestine? The point is that, having made this connection, none of us thinks the worse of Said. On the contrary, we recognize that he has a special stake in such topics and therefore speaks on them with a special authority. Unless I am mistaken, that stake and that authority are, in a perhaps extended sense, patriotic. And whatever our speculative objections to the idea and the principle of patriotism, in practice we recognize it and we honour it. What I am questioning, it will now be plain, is the principle of "disinterest." "The disinterested pursuit of knowledge" it is what in our distinct disciplines all of us have paid lip-service to, and perhaps more than lip-service. But when we come right down to it, is it what we believe? The honest patriot declares an interest; and if we are wise, we take note of the declaration, making allowances and reserving doubts accordingly. But what are we to make of the scholar who declares no interest, who claims implicitly to be truly disinterested. Can we believe him? And if we cannot, what guidance do we have as to what reservations to make, what doubts to entertain? I am of one mind with my Marxist colleagues who, from a political position very far from mine, warn us to be especially suspicious of the scholar who claims to have no axe to grind. We, all of us, have axes to grind; the crucial distinction is between those who know this about themselves and those who don't. Let me make myself clear. When I urge that the terms "patriotism" and "patriotic" be reinstated in our discourse, and particularly in those forms of our discourse that may be called "interpretation," I do not imply that patriotism is a nobler, a more elevated instigation than sundry others, mostly ideological, of which we are more aware. The point is precisely that of these others we are aware because we share a vocabulary which acknowledges them, whereas "patriotic" has been banished from our vocabulary, and so the reality which the word represents is left out of our calculations. Let me admit for the sake of argument what I do not in fact believe-- that patriotism is a concept and a sentiment so besmirched by the unholy uses made of it that, if mankind is to survive, patriotism will have to be eradicated. Even if that were the case, it remains true that patriotic interest and incitement are very far from having been eradicated from the world that we in fact inhabit, and try to interpret, here and now; and if we try to work within a vocabulary that pretends otherwise, we condemn ourselves to producing interpretations that are drastically partial and perhaps disastrously misleading. The point is not whether patriotism is a good thing or a bad thing but simply that it is; it exists, as powerful factor which we all in our hearts acknowledge even as our vocabulary refuses to. And when we speak in this context of "the world," we certainly include in that world ourselves, who offer to interpret it. Every one of our interpretations is coloured by the fact that we, the several interpreters, are British or American, French or Italian or Russian or whatever. If we think otherwise, we deceive ourselves; and yet where, in any of our currently acceptable vocabularies, determined as all of them are by the glib rationalism of the Enlightenment, do we find that momentous fact about ourselves acknowledged? Where is it acknowledged, for instance, in the vocabulary of feminism that "woman," as conceived by an American writing about Italians, cannot help but be significantly different from "woman" as conceived by an Italian looking at Americans? Or again, an Italian woman may well, we must suppose, be an Italian patriot; but where, in the current vocabulary of feminists, is that dimension of her "woman-ness" allowed for? Let it be acknowledged only so as to be deplored; but let it in any event be acknowledged. At the moment, it isn't. Donald A. Davie, the distinguished poet, is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Vanderbilt University and honorary fellow of Saint Catharine's College, Cambridge and of Trinity College, Dublin. He has edited The New Oxford Book of Christian Verse, and his Collected Poems 1950-1970 appeared in 1972. His latest publications are Dissentient Voice and These the Companions; Recollections. Wayne C. Booth Freedom of Interpretation: Bakhtin and the Challenge of_Feminist Criticism In turning to the language of freedom, I am not automatically freed from the dangers of reduction and self-privileging. "Freedom" as a term is at least as ambiguous as "power" (or as "politics" or "interpretation"). When I say that for me all questions about the politics of interpretation begin with the question of freedom, I can either be saying a mouthful or saying nothing at all, depending on whether I am willing to complicate my key term, "freedom," by relating it to the language of power. The best way to do that is to get power in from the beginning, by making a distinction taken for granted by many earlier thinkers and too often ignored today: freedom from as contrasted with freedom to; freedom fromexternal restraints and the power of others to inhibit our actions, and freedom to act effectively when restraints disappear. All the freedom from in the world will not free me to make an intellectual discovery or to point a picture unless I have somehow freed myself to perform certain tasks. Such freedoms are gained only by those who surrender to disciplines and codes invented by others, giving up certain freedoms from. Nobody forbids by interpreting the original text of Confucius' Analects or the Principia Mathematica, yet I am not free to do so, lacking the disciplines having not been disciplined to do so. The distinction can lead to troublesome complexities, but in its simple form here it cuts through some of the problems that arise in power language. Every critical revolution tends to speak more clearly about what it is against than about what it seeks. The historicists against impressionism, the New Critics against historicism, the new new critics against intentionalism and the authority of canons, the feminists against misogynous art and criticism clearly one could write a history of modern criticism as a glorious casting off of errors. But it is rightly a commonplace among intellectual historians that all revolutionaries depend on their past far more than they know. Revolutionary critics are enslaved by a nasty law of nature: I can say only what I can say, and that will be largely what I have learned to say from the kings I would depose. Everyone who tries to forge any kind of ideological criticism must struggle with these complexities. Nobody ever knows just what powers have been rejected and what voices heard. But at the moment it seems clear that what follows here, both in its emerging clarities and remaining confusions, results from my somewhat surprised surrender to voices previously alien to me: the "Mikhail Bakhtin" who speaks to me, muffled by my ignorance of Russian, and the feminist criticism" that in its vigor and diversity and challenge to canonic views has belatedly, belatedly forced me to begin listening. Wayne C. Booth's most recent work, Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism, won the Laing Prize in 1982. He is working on a book about ethical and political criticism of narrative. A new edition of The Rhetoric of Fiction will appear in 1983. Julia Kristeva Psychoanalysis and the Polis The essays in this volume convince me of something which, until now was only a hypothesis of mine. Academic discourse, and perhaps American university discourse in particular, possesses an extraordinary ability to absorb, digest, and neutralize all of the key, radical or dramatic moments of thought, particularly, a fortiori, of contemporary though. Marxism in the United States, though marginalized, remains deafly dominant and exercises a fascination that we have not seen in Europe since the Russian Proletkult of the 1930s. Post-Heideggerian "deconstructivism" though esoteric, is welcomed in the United States as an antidote to analytic philosophy or, rather, as a way to valorize, through contrast, that philosophy. Only one theoretical breakthrough seems consistently to mobilize resistances, rejections and deafness: psychoanalysis not as the "plague" allowed by Freud to implant itself in America as a "commerce in couches" but rather as that which, with Freud and after him, has led the psychoanalytic decentering of the speaking subject to the very foundations of language. It is this latter direction that I will be exploring here, with no other hope than to awaken the resistances and, perhaps, the attention of a concerned few, after the event (après coup). For I have the impression that the "professionalism" discussed throughout the "Politics of Interpretation" conference is never as strong as when professionals denounce it. In fact, the same preanalytic rationality unites them all, "conservatives" and "revolutionaries" in all cases, jealous guardians of their academic "chairs" whose very existence, I am sure, is thrown into question and put into jeopardy by psychoanalytic discourse. I would therefore schematically summarize what is to follow in this way: 1. There are political implications inherent in the act of interpretation itself, whatever meaning that interpretation bestows. What is the meaning, interest, and benefit of the interpretive position itself, a position from which I wish to give meaning to an enigma? To give a political meaning to something is perhaps only the ultimate consequence to he epistemological attitude which consists, simply, of the desire to give meaning. This attitude is not innocent but, rather, is rooted in the speaking subjects' need to reassure himself of his image and his identity faced with an object. Political interpretation is thus the apogee of the obsessive quest for A Meaning. 2. The psychoanalytic intervention within Western knowledge has a fundamentally deceptive effect. Psychoanalysis, critical and dissolvent cuts through political illusions, fantasies, and beliefs to the extent that they consist in providing only one meaning, an uncriticizable ultimate Meaning, to human behavior. If such a situation can lead to despair within the polis, we must not forget that it is also a source of lucidity and ethics. The psychoanalytic intervention is, from this point of view, a counterweight, an antidote, to political discourse which, without it, is free to become our modern religion: the final explanation. 3. The political interpretations of our century have produced two powerful and totalitarian results: fascism and Stalinism. Parallel to the socioeconomic reasons for these phenomena, there exists as well, another, more intrinsic reason: the simple desire to give a meaning to explain, to provide the answer, to interpret. In that context I will briefly discuss Louis Ferdinand Céline's texts insofar as the ideological interpretations given by him are an example of political delirium in avant-garde writing. Julia Kristeva,professor of linguistics at the University of Paris VII and a regular visiting professor at Columbia University, is the author of Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art and About Chinese Women. Margaret Waller, a doctoral candidate in French at Columbia University, is currently translating Kristeva's Revolution du langage poétique. Stephen Toulmin The Construal of Reality: Criticism in Modern and_Postmodern Science The hermeneutic movement in philosophy and criticism has done us a service by directing our attention to the role of critical interpretation in understanding the humanities. But it has done us a disservice also because it does not recognize any comparable role for interpretation in the natural sciences and in this way sharply separates the two fields of scholarship and experience.1 Consequently, I shall argue, the central truths and virtues of hermeneutics have become encumbered with a whole string of false interferences and misleading dichotomies. These distortions have had two effects. On the one hand, they have rationality which are crucial goals of the natural sciences; and, on the other hand, they have encouraged an exaggerated idea of the extent to which difference in personal and/or cultural standpoint rule out any such goal for the humanities. Once we recognize that the natural sciences too are in the business of "construing" reality, we shall be better able to preserve the central insights of the hermeneutic method, without succumbing to the misleading implications of its rhetorical misuse. Physics, in particular, has always required its participants to adopt an interpretive standpoint, and this standpoint has changed more than once during the historical development of that science. Yet this variable standpoint has done nothing to undercut the commitment of physicists to rationality and objectivity: on the contrary, they have made it one of their chief aims to discover just what aspects of reality, or nature, lend themselves to interpretation and understanding as considered from any particular standpoint. If we can drive this wedge between scientific objectivity and hermeneutic relativity in the case of physics, we are free to return to the humanities and apply the same distinction there too. It has too often, and too readily, been assumed that whatever needs to be interpreted in order to be understood will, to that extent, become a matter of taste or subjectivity; and, as a result, any claims to rationality and objectivity in the critical realms whether moral or aesthetic, political and intellectual have been too hastily surrendered. The current sharp distinction between scientific explanations and hermeneutic interpretation was launched by Wilhelm Dilthey nearly a century ago; and, in justice to Dilthey, we need to bear in mind that the interpretive element in natural science was far less evident then than it is today. Scientists nowadays view the world from a new and less rigid standpoint. This period which Frederick Ferre calls "postmodern science," differs from the older one of "modern science" in just those respects that enable us to reconcile the rational claims that have always been central to the natural sciences with a new hermeneutic richness and variability. 1. Some will respond that Edmund Husserl, for one, spoke of the natural sciences as being, in their own way, "interpretive"; but the role allotted to natural science by the phenomonologists and their successors I have in mind Hans Georg Gadamer and Jürgen Habermass much as Martin Heidegger and Husserl I an impoverished and unhistorical one. The hermeneutic philosophers have not, in this respect, fully recognized either the plurality or the historical variability of the interpretive modes adopted in one or another of the natural sciences for different intellectual purposes and at different stages in their historical development. Stephen Toulmin is a professor in the Committee on Social Thought, the Department of Philosophy, and the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. He is author of, among other works, Foresight and Understanding, Human Understanding, and Knowing and Acting and is currently at work on volume 2 of Human Understanding. His previous contribution to , "The Inwardness of Mental Life," appeared in the Autumn 1979 issue. Hayden White The Politics of Historical Interpretation: Discipline and De- Sublimation The politics of interpretation should not be confused with interpretive practices such as political theory, political commentary, or histories of political institutions, parties, and conflicts that have politics itself as a specific object of interest. In these other interpretive practices, the politics that informs or motivates them "politics" in the sense of political values or ideology is relatively easily perceived and no particular meta-interpretive analysis is required. The politics of interpretation, on the other hand, arises in those interpretive practices which are ostensibly most remote from overtly political concerns, practices which are carried out under the aegis of a purely disinterested search for the truth or inquiry into the natures of things which appear to have no political relevance at all. This "politics" has to do with the kind of authority the interpreter claims vis-à-vis the established political authorities of his society, on the one side, and vis-à- vis other interpreters in his own field of study or investigation, on the other, as the basis of whatever rights he conceives himself to possess and whatever duties he feels obligated to discharge as a professional seeker of truth. This politics which presides over interpretive conflicts is difficult to identity because traditionally, in our culture at least, interpretation is thought to operate properly only as long as the interpreter does not have recourse to the one instrument which the politician per vocationem utilizes as a matter of course in his practice the appeal to force as a means of resolving disputes and conflicts.1 1. I have followed the lead of Max Weber in defining the phrase "politics of interpretation." In "Politics as Vocation," Weber wrote that " ‘politics' means for us striving to share power or striving to influence the distribution of power, either among states or among groups within a state" (From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology,ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. W. Mills [New York, 1958], p. 78). Rather than discuss the age-old problem of the professional interpreter's political responsibilities, I will consider that politics which is endemic to the pursuit of truth the striving to share power amongst interpreters themselves. The activity of interpreting becomes political at the point where a given interpreter claims authority over rival interpreters. As long as this claim is not reinforced by appeal to the power of the state to compel conformity of belief or conviction, it is "political" only in a metaphorical sense. Of course, interpretation becomes political when a given point of view or finding is taken as orthodoxy of belief by those holding political power, as in the Soviet Union, Germany under Hitler, or any number of religiously puritanical regimes. But these are the easy cases. It is much more difficult to determine the political nature of interpretive practices which, as in literary criticism or antiquarian scholarship, appear to have no bearing upon political policies or practices. Hayden White is a professor and director of the program in the history of consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is coeditor of Representing Kenneth Burke (forthcoming this fall) and is currently working on a book on the rhetoric of realism. His previous contributions to are "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality" (Autumn 1980) and "The Narrativization of Real Events" (Summer 1981). T. J. Clark Clement Greenberg's Theory of Art It is not intended as some sort of revelation on my part that Greenberg's cultural theory was originally Marxist in its stresses and, indeed in its attitude to what constituted explanation in such matters. I point out the Marxist and historical mode of proceeding as emphatically as I do partly because it may make my own procedure later in this paper seem a little less arbitrary. For I shall fall to arguing in the end with these essay's Marxism and their history, and I want it understood that I think that to do so is to take issue with their strengths and their main drift. But I have to admit there are difficulties here. The essays in question ["Avant-Garde and Kitsch" and "Towards a Newer Lacoön"] are quite brief. They are, I think, extremely well written: it was not for nothing the Partisan Review described Clement Greenberg, when he first contributed to the journal early in 1939, as "a young writer who works in the New York customs house" fine, redolent avant-garde pedigree, that! The language of these articles is forceful and easy, always straightforward, blessedly free from Marxist conundrums. Yet the price paid for such lucidity, here as so often, is a degree of inexplicitness certain amount of elegant skirting round the difficult issues, where one might otherwise be obliged to call out the ponderous armory of Marx's concepts and somewhat spoil the low of the prose from one firm statement to another. The Marxism, in other words, is quite largely implicit; it is stated on occasion, with brittle and pugnacious finality, as the essay's frame of reference, but it remains to the reader to determine just how it works in the history and theory presented what that history and theory depend on, in the way of Marxist assumptions about class and capital or even abase and superstructure. That is what I intend to do in this paper: to interpret and extrapolate from the texts, even at the risk of making their Marxism declare itself more stridently than the "young writer" seems to have wished. And I should admit straight away that there are several point in what follows where I am genuinely uncertain as to whether I am diverging from Greenberg's argument or explaining it more fully. This does not worry me overmuch, as long as we are alerted to the special danger in this case, dealing with such transparent yet guarded prose, and as long as we can agree that the project in general pressing home a Marxist reading of texts which situate themselves within the Marxist tradition is a reasonable one.2 2. This carelessness distinguishes the present paper from two recent studies of Greenberg's early writings, Serge Guilbaut's "The New Adventures of the Avant-Garde in America," October 15 (Winter 1980), and Fred Orton and Griselda Pollock's "Avant-Gardes and Partisans Reviewed," Art History 3 (September 1981) I am indebted to both these essays and am sure that their strictures on the superficiality not to say the opportunism of Greenberg's Marxism are largely right. (Certainly Mr. Greenberg would not now disagree with them.) But I am nonetheless interested in the challenge offered to most Marxist, and non-Marxist, accounts of modern history by what I take to be a justified though extreme, pessimism as t the nature of established culture since 1870. That pessimism is characteristic, I suppose, of what Marxists call an ultraleftist point of view. I believe, as I say, that a version of some such view is correct and would therefore with to treat Greenberg's theory as if it were a decently elaborated Marxism of an ultraleftist kind, on which issues in certain mistaken views (which I criticize) but which need not so issue and which might still provide, cleansed of those errors, a good vantage for a history of our culture. T. J. Clark, professor of fine arts at Harvard University, is the author of The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848-1851 and Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution. His book on impressionist painting and Paris is forthcoming. Stanley Cavell Politics as Opposed to What? In my essay on Austin I did not specify what I took the politics of my own discourse to be, but the institutional pressures on it, in particular the pressures of the professionalization of American philosophy, were in outline clear enough. I was more and more galled by the mutual shunning of the continental and the Anglo- American traditions of philosophizing, and I was finding more and more oppressive the mutual indifference of philosophy and literature to one another, especially, I suppose, of American philosophy and American literature, and especially philosophy's indifference to the literary conditions of its own existence. (I understand this to imply not an interdisciplinary wish but rather a wish for philosophy to take a further step toward itself.) I was still near the beginning of what is turning out to be a lifelong quarrel with the profession of philosophy. One of its recent manifestations has been the question put to me by certain professional colleagues whether I do not take satisfaction from the newer literary theory and criticism, especially as that has been inspired by developments over the past fifteen or so years in French intellectual life. This would seem to answer my plea at one stroke for both continental philosophy and for an understanding with literary matters. The fact is that my ambivalence toward these developments has been so strong, or anyway periodic, that I have found it difficult to study in any very orderly way. The reason for my difficulty is contained in what I mean by my quarrel with the profession of philosophy. That this is a quarrel means that I recognize the profession to be the genuine present of the impulse and the history of philosophy, so far as that present takes its place in our (English-speaking) public intellectual life. This is what makes my quarrel with it a part of what I take my intellectual adventure to be. My point in the quarrel is that I can recognize no expression of mine to be philosophical which simply thinks to escape my profession's paradigms of comprehensibility; so that the invocations of the name of philosophy in current literary debate are frequently not comprehensible to me as calls upon philosophy. It may be that I should care less about this than I do, even less than my ambivalence asks. I mean to bear this in mind as I go on to spend the bulk of my time here considering in a practical way some passages from the writing of two literary theorists who have recourse to the work of Austin. In the case of the passages from Stanley Fish, it may be that my efforts will just amount to clearing up some unnecessarily confusing terminology; some passages from Paul de Man I find more troubling. Stanley Cavell, professor of philosophy at Harvard University, is the author of, among other works, Must We Mean What We Say?, The Senses of Walden, The Claim of Reason, and most recently Pursuits of Happiness. His previous contributions to are "On Makavejev On Bergman" (Winter 1979), "A Reply to John Hollander" (Summer 1980), and "North by Northwest" (Summer 1981). Ronald Dworkin Law as Interpretation The puzzle arises because propositions of law seem to be descriptive they are about how things are in the law, not about how they should be and yet it has proved extremely difficult to say exactly what it is that they describe. Legal positivists believe that propositions of law are indeed wholly descriptive: they are in fact pieces of history. A proposition of law in their view, is true just in case some event of a designated law-making kind has taken place, and other wise not. This seems to work reasonably well in very simple cases. If the Illinois legislature enacts the words "No will shall be valid without three witnesses, "then the proposition of law, that in Illinois will needs three witnesses, seems to be true only in virtue of that historical event. But in more difficult cases the analysis fails. Consider the proposition that a particular affirmative action scheme (not yet tested in the courts) is constitutionally valid. If that is true, it cannot be so just in virtue of the text of the Constitution and the fact of prior court decisions, because reasonable lawyers who know exactly what the constitution says and what the courts have done may yet disagree whether it is true. (I am doubtful that the positivist's analysis holds even in the simple case of the will; but that is a different matter I shall not argue here.) What are the other possibilities? One is to suppose that controversial propositions f law, like the affirmative action statement, are not descriptive at all but are rather expressions of what the speaker wants the law to be. Another is more ambitious: controversial statements are attempts to describe some pure objective or natural law, which exits in virtue of objective moral truth rather than historical decision. Both these projects take some legal statements, at least, to be purely evaluative as distinct from descriptive: they express either what the speaker prefers his personal politics or what he believes is objectively required b the principles of an ideal political morality. Neither of these projects is plausible because someone who says that a particular untested affirmative action plan is constitution does mean to describe the law as it is rather than as he wants it to be or thinks that, by the best moral theory, it should be. He might, indeed, say that the regrets that the plan is constitutional and thinks that, according to the best moral theory, it ought not to be. There is a better alternative: propositions of law are not simply descriptive of legal history, in a straightforward way, nor are they simply evaluative in some way divorced from legal history. They are interpretive of legal history, which combines elements of both description and evaluation but is different from both. This suggestion will be congenial, at least at first blush, to many lawyers and legal philosophers. They are used to saying that law is a matter of interpretation; but only, perhaps because they understand interpretation in a certain way. When a statute (or the Constitution) is unclear on some point, because some crucial term is vague or because a sentence is ambiguous, lawyers say that the statute must be interpreted, and they apply what they call "techniques of statutory construction." Most of the literature assumes that interpretation of a particular document is a matter of discovering what its authors (the legislators, or the delegates to the constitutional convention) meant to say in using the words they did. But lawyers recognize that on many issues the author had no intention either way and that on others his intention cannot be discovered. Some lawyers take a more skeptical position. They say that whenever judges pretend they are discovering the intention behind some piece of legislation, this is simply a smoke screen behind which the judges impose their own view of what the statute should have been. Ronald Dworkin, professor of jurisprudence at Oxford University, is the author of Taking Rights Seriously and editor of The Philosophy of Law. Garry Wills (Kritik) in Clausewitz 1.Wechselwirkung Suppose that A is standing at a bar with his friend B and tells B, "I'll give you a dollar to fight the man on the side of you"(C). B, naturally, answers: "Are you crazy? Even if I win, I'll probably tear my clothes, or mess them up. A dollar wouldn't even cover the dry-cleaning bill." B is very sensible. But then C starts to pick up B's change on the bar about a dollar's worth. "You can't do that," B assures him, emphatically. C says, "Who says?" "Oh yeah?"s get traded, then shoulders pushed in rotation and before you know it, B is fighting for a dollar after all. But now, B will assure us, the money does not matter, it's the principle of the thing. What principle? "That no one can steal from me, no matter what the amount." But the man picking up the change thought it was his; no principle about stealing existed in his mind. "Well, I don't want the idea to get around that anyone can take things from me." So C is suffering proleptically for all the people who might feel tempted to engage in C-like activities (the deterrence theory of punishment). But what if C's calamity does not get around to all the bars? What, that is, if future Cs do not know about the educational improvements B has effected on C's nose? "They might not know, but I would." B, it appears, can have no pride in himself unless he fights over one-dollar misunderstandings. Joel Weinsheimer "London" and the Fundamental Problem of Hermeneutics In the preface to the Yale edition of Samuel Johnson's poems, the editors remark that "for a modern reader who can recreate the situation in which ["London"] was written, it may still be exciting enough. But to one with less imaginative capacity or historical knowledge, its appeal lies in Johnson's skillful handling of the couplet."2 To assist us in re- creating the milieu of 1738, the editors supply the usual notes identifying various historical personages and events which are no longer in the domain of common knowledge. In this respect they follow Johnson's lead. "London" is manifestly an occasional poem; and its occasion in part, Walpole's timidity abroad and corruption at home like all occasions, passed.3 Indeed it passed so quickly that Johnson himself felt called upon in the fifth edition (1750) to annotate, for instance, his mention of "the Gazetteer": "the paper which at that time contained apologies for the Court." By 1750 Walpole was long out of court, the Gazetteer extinct, and "London" as outdated as yesterday's newspaper. For poems like "London" whose contents are neither au courant nor immortal but rather historical or simply dead, the Yale editors suggest two avenues of resuscitation: the reader may either restore the background by means of historical imagination or, failing that, admire Johnson's couplet art, which perhaps has a better chance at perennial appeal. Either content or form, either history or art both options require a sacrifice on our part, and that sacrifice is our occasion, our need. Even assuming that the poem's context could be exhumed and that we could participate once again in all the rage of the "patriot" opposition to Walpole, Why would we want to? The problem is that not only "London" but the Walpole regime itself is now defunct. Yet the same question must be asked of the poem's art, even and especially if it is eternal. Why are we interested in the aesthetic knowledge of couplets that have been drained of all substance? Is understanding "London" in either case an end in itself? The pure content of the poem is too concrete, its pure form too abstract, to answer our occasions. Thus to understand the poem as either history or art demands a leisure that has no exigencies and is therefore free for the bygone and ethereal.4 2. E.L. McAdam, Jr. and George Milne, eds., Poems, vol. 6, The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven, Conn., 1964), p. xvii. 3. For a detailed exposition of the social and political background of "London," see Donald Greene, The Politics of Samuel Johnson (New Haven, Conn., 1960), pp. 88-92, and James Clifford, "London," Young Sam Johnson (New York, 1955), pp. 175- 94. 4. John Locke explains the infinite leisure we can take in understanding the obscurities of ancient authors in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser, 2 vols. (New York, 1955), 2:110: There being no writings we have any great concernment to be very solicitous about the meaning of, but those that contain either truths we are required to believe, or laws we are to obey, and draw inconveniences on us when we mistake or transgress, we may be less anxious about the sense of other authors; who, writing but their own opinions, we are under no greater necessity to know them, than they to know ours. Our good or evil depending not on their decrees, we may safely be ignorant of their notions: and therefore in the reading of them, if they do not use their words with a due clearness and perspicuity, we may lay them aside. Arnold Krupat An Approach to Native American Texts Recent developments in post-structuralist hermeneutical theory, whatever their effect on the reading of Western literature, have had an enormously salutary effect on the reading of Native American literature. With the reexamination of such concepts of voice, text, and performance, and of the ontological and epistemological status of the sign, has come a variety of effective means for specifying and demonstrating the complexity and richness of Native American narrative. The movement away from structuralism's binary method necessarily rejected Claude Lévi-Strauss' opposition of the "myth" to the "poem," the one infinitely translatable, the other virtually untranslatable. In Lévi-Strauss' work, anything that might be considered the literature of the "primitive" people always appeared as myth, its "content" available for transformation into abstract pairs while its "form," its actual language, was simply ignored or dismissed. Ruth Bernard Yeazell Podsnappery, Sexuality, and the English Novel Dickens' famous satire of complacency and chauvinism entails a peculiarly English fiction about the innocence of girls. The "Podsnappery" chapter of Our Mutual Friend is in fact devoted to a dinner party in honor of Georgiana Podsnap's eighteenth birthday, though "it was somehow understood…that nothing must be said about the day"1 the generation of Miss Podsnap being one of those disagreeable facts that Mr. Podsnap simply refuses to admit. But if Miss Podsnap's birth is unmentionable, her existence is crucial: Podsnappery very much depends upon the presence of a daughter. What Mr. Podsnap cannot dismiss as "Not English!" starving Englishmen, for instance can always be removed as subjects unsuited to the female young. The "cheek of the young person" becomes the test of knowledge over a wide field. 1. Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, ed. Stephen Gill (Harmondsworth, 1971), bk. 1, chap. 11, pp. 181-82; all further references to this work will be included parenthetically in the text with only book and chapter numbers for the convenience of those using other editions. Elizabeth Langland Society as Formal Protagonist: The Examples of Nostromo_and Barchester Towers Usually a novel's subject is the individual in action. That individual must confront a set of social expectations and norms which define and limit him. In such novels the revelation of social expectations constitutes a central element in the artist's depiction. The degree to which society limits the hero's action, of course, varies widely. We can imagine a continuum along which the influence of society is arranged. Sociological/ naturalistic novels, in which a social order is depicted as destructive, define one extreme of that continuum. The protagonists in their suffering reveal this society's destructive force. At the opposite extreme, society's values and norms may be important in guiding and evaluating a protagonist's movement toward his fate without society itself becoming an obstacle to his progress. We think, for instance, of Jane Austen's novels. In the broad middle range of the continuum, protagonists struggle to realize their potential within social limitations, and their successes are usually partial. In assessing their triumphs, we must evaluate the obstacles they have encountered both in their own natures and in the natures of their social milieu. To make society the protagonist of a novel upsets the expectations of readers, first because the novel as a genre usually depicts the growth or change of protagonists moving from complications to stability, and second because the novel customarily concludes in some alteration of the protagonist's external state and in some expansion of his understanding. With society as his protagonist, a writer commits himself to engaging our primary interest in the life of an abstraction or set of principles. Here, too, action is crucial. This kind of novel differs from a utopian novel, however, which focuses on ideas about society and whose principal end is to criticize or espouse a particular social order, not to engage us in working out instabilities through action. In novels in which society is protagonist, we are involved with the fate of an entire social order, and it is one about which we are made to care. The principal purpose is to present a society moving from a state of instability toward a qualitatively defined fate analogous to the movement of an individual hero. To achieve this end, characters become agents through which a social order realizes its fate. This function of character entails no simple inversion of the usual relationships between individuals and society, because characters can never be reduced to a backdrop the way society can, and society cannot easily achieve the particularity of definition and identity the way a character can. In attempting to discover narrative terms for realizing the fate of a society, a novelist faces an enormous technical challenge. He must make us care as much about a social order as he would about a particular individual, and yet he cannot write directly about ideas he must record the actions of humans. Because his plot will focus on no single individual but on abstract processes and social hopes, he must constantly minimize individual fates and aspirations and make them clearly a function of society's larger turmoil. Our empathy must rest firmly with the social principles being threatened rather than with any single character. With this end in view, a clearly defined, circumscribed arena for action becomes necessary. Literal battles, or scenes in which battles operate as a principal metaphor, frequently appear in such novels. By bringing many of the major characters together, defining and creating allegiances, and pitting opposing social principles, such battles provide an important context for measuring the progress of those values with which we empathize. Marshall Brown The Classic is the Baroque: On the Principle_of_Wölfflin's_Art History In the chapter on multiplicity and unity, the affective or anthropological motifs are both more complex and more interesting. Wölfflin's initial distinction is between "the articulated system of forms of classic art and the (endless) flow of the baroque" (PAH, p. 158). Imagery of fluidity pervades the chapter, for water, according to Wölfflin, "was the period's favourite element" (RB, p. 154). "Now, and now only," he says, "the greatness of the sea could find its representation"(PAH, p. 178), and as if to inculcate this affinity he places the reproduction of a baroque seascape by Jan van Goyen at the head of the introduction to the book and a riverscape by Peter Brueghel at the head of this chapter, even though neither painting is discussed where it is reproduced. In fact it is worth observing that Wölfflin does not discuss any water paintings in this chapter, though of course he does so elsewhere. Where fluidity becomes the meaning of his category, it is absent from the contents of the paintings. Wölfflin's procedure, as I have argued, is both objectively analytical and subjectively interpretive, and in this chapter he seems careful to preserve the distance between the forms he describes and the significances he reveals. Were he to treat water paintings here, he would obscure the fact that his analyses are always the prelude to translations. Though he conceals the fact, Wölfflin has here effected a translation of the baroque into itself, of water painting (and fountain architecture) into fluidity. Baroque art has declared its true meaning, which is to be an art of flux of time and, throughout this chapter, of momentariness. Suddenly here the baroque comes into its own, with a surprising reversal in Wölfflin's categories. Until now he has associated the baroque with lawlessness and confusion, and classicism with the unifying force of symmetrical organization around a center. Unity is repose the equation had been made explicitly in the discussion in Classic Art of Michelangelo's Medici Madonna (see p. 194) and clearly in Principles of Art History Wölfflin seems to say that the unification achieved in Leonardo's Last Supper was later lost Tiepolo's version.21 As Wölfflin says in the first sentence of chapter 4, "The principle of closed form of itself presumes the conception of the picture as a unity." But as the baroque now comes into its own, it appears that the unity of classicism is an illusory, "multiple unity," whereas the true or "unified unity" actually pertains to the baroque. It is the usurping baroque, rather than the deposed classic, that now has "a dominating central motive." And So Wölfflin returns in this chapter to the two Last Suppers in order to rescind his earlier position. He still claims that Leonardo's painting is unified, but he offers Tiepolo's version to illustrate the "possibility of surpassing this unity" (PAH, pp. 189, 174). In becoming itself, baroque art has overthrown classicism. 21. "Tiepolo composed a Last Supper which, while it cannot be compared with Leonardo as a work of art, stylistically presents the absolute opposite. The figures do not unite in the plane, and that decides" (PAH, p. 88). Berel Lang Looking for the Styleme Nature did not equip any of its creatures with wheels, but that means of locomotion was discovered anyway; an even swifter vehicle for the mind has been found in the atom that irreducible unit which by virtue of its ubiquity provides reason with immediate access to alien objects, naturalizes nature, and urges an essential likeness beneath appearances so diverse that only an improbable imagination would even have placed them in a single world. The goal of atomism is to find one entity, a building block which then in multiples constitutes the structures of reality and appearance. All that is needed, given this once and future One, is a set of transformational rules and everything comes to life that has been dreamed of in the topologies of geometry, physics, history, even of metaphysics: a full representation of the world as it has been, is, will be.   The ideology of atomism includes the assumption that, for structures distinguishable into parts and wholes, the parts precede the whole, temporally and logically. For the atomist, all structures can be analyzed in this way; that, in fact, turns out to be his definition of structure. This premise is already evident in the building-block universe first depicted by Democritus and Leucippus; it is no less present in the heady days of twentieth- century physics (although by now the proliferation of quarks and the thirty-odd other particles might cause the most ardent atomist to long for an unatomic whole that exerted some prior restraint). It is slightly more pliable in latter-day atomists like Claude Lévi-Strauss and Noam Chomsky and their descendent structuralists; but here, too, atomic units of linguistic or social discourse are claimed as blind first causes of the sighted and complex structures allegedly derived from them. And if the followers of even these contemporary advocates find themselves still waiting for the promises of atomism to be kept, the imaginative turns of those promises the binary code, the rules of an innate grammar keep old expectations alive.   In contrast to this general ideological assertion, the search for artistic atoms by poetics and aesthetic theory has lagged noticeably. We can see this disparity in the characteristic resistance to fragmentation by works of art; for many writers, the will of artistic appearance to exhibit itself as a whole, to insist on an undivided surface rather than on the elements within or beneath it, is precisely what distinguishes the structures of art from others. Even where a craftsmanlike impulse breaks into the surface of artistic unity (for example, when Aristotle itemizes the "parts" of tragedy), the pieces are usually counted teleologically: they matter as contributions to an effect, retrospectively. The artist himself, it is implied, deployed them in the first place to anticipate the unified surface; we (audience, critics, theorists), in turn, then understand them only in terms of that whole, not with the atomist by conjuring a unity from the earlier accidental joining of what then become accidental parts. Marjorie Perloff Between Verse and Prose: Beckett and the New_Poetry Whatever we choose to call Beckett's series of disjunctive and repetitive paragraphs (sixty-one in all), Ill Seen Ill Said surely has little in common with the short story or the novella. Yet this is how the editors of the New Yorker, where Beckett's piece first appeared in English in 1981, evidently thought of it, for like all New Yorker short stories, it is punctuated by cartoons and, what is even more ironic, by a "real" poem, Harold Brodkey's "Sea Noise" (see fig. 1). Notice that the reader immediately knows or is supposed to know that Brodkey is a poet and Beckett a fiction writer, not only because "Sea Noise" is designated a poem in the issue's table of contents, but also because its placement on the page, framed by white space, distinguishes it from Ill Seen Ill Said, which is printed in standard New Yorker columns. Yet if we examine the sound structure of Brodkey's poem, we find that the rhythm of recurrence is, if anything, less prominent here than in the Beckett "prose." The four stanzas are of irregular line length (9, 6, 9, 7); the stress count ranges from one ("and cúrsive") to five ("ínterlócutóries [baritone]"); rhyme occurs only once, at the end of the poem ("lie"/ "reply"); and alliteration and assonance are not marked. Unless we assume that poetry is defined by the sheer decision of its maker to lineate the text, or unless we want to call "Sea Noise" a poem because it is built around a single extended metaphor (the witty analogy of sea:shore = professor:class), there is no rationale for the classification the New Yorker has implicitly adopted.4 The meaning of this classification is worth pondering, for it represents, in microcosm, the orthodoxy of every major literature textbook and literary history as well as of most classrooms in the United States and Britain, which that Beckett is a writer who, like the young Joyce or the young Faulkner, wrote in his dim youth some negligible, clotted lyric poems but whose real work belongs to drama and fiction. As such, we don't teach Beckett in our poetry courses or include him in discussions of contemporary poetry and poetics. The index of any major book on the subject say, Robert Pinsky's The Situation of Poetry will bear this out. And yet the irony is that contemporary poets are increasingly using forms that cannot be properly understood without the example of Beckett's astonishing "lyrics of fiction" to use Ryby Cohn's apt term5 or, as I shall call them, his "associative monologues." Perhaps, then, it is time to rethink our current procedures of canon making. In what follows, I shall use Ill Seen Ill Said as an example. 4. Contemporary prosodists, perhaps because they must account for the difficult case of free verse, generally do equate verse and hence implicitly the poem with lineation. For example, Charles O. Hartman, in his recent Free Verse: An Essay in Prosody (Princeton, N.J., 1980), observes that, difficult as it is to define the word "poetry" "rigorously and permanently," verse can be distinguished from prose quite readily: Verse is language in lines. This distinguishes it from prose…. This is not really a satisfying distinction, as it stands, but it is the only one that works absolutely. The fact that we can tell verse from prose on sight, with very few errors…indicates that the basic perceptual difference must be very simple. Only lineation fits the requirements. [P.11] But, as I have just shown in the case of Beckett and Brodkey, what looks like verse may sound like prose and vice versa. The "basic perceptual difference" between the two is surely not as simple as Hartman suggests. I discuss this question from a somewhat different angle in "The Linear Fallacy," Georgia Review 35 (Winter 1981): 855-69. 5. See Ruby Cohn, Back to Beckett (Princeton, N.J., 1973), chap. 5, "Lyrics of Fiction." Barbara Herrnstein Smith Contingencies of Value One of the major effects of prohibiting or inhibiting explicit evaluation is to forestall the exhibition and obviate the possible acknowledgment of divergent systems of value and thus to ratify, by default, established evaluative authority. It is worth noting that in none of the debates of the forties and fifties was the traditional academic canon itself questioned, and that where evaluative authority was not ringingly affirmed, asserted, or self- justified, it was simply assumed. Thus Frye himself could speak almost in one breath of the need to "get rid of…all casual, sentimental, and prejudiced value-judgments" as "the first step in developing a genuine poetics" and of "the masterpieces of literature" which are "the materials of literary criticism" (AC, pp. 18, 15). The identity of those masterpieces, it seemed, could be taken for granted or followed more or less automatically from the "direct value-judgment of informed good taste" or "certain literary values…fully established by critical experience" (AC, pp. 27, 20). In a passage of particular interest, Frye wrote: Comparative estimates of value are really inferences, most valid when silent ones, from critical practice…The critic will find soon, and constantly, that Milton is a more rewarding and suggestive poet than Blackmore. But the more obvious this becomes, the less time he will want to waste belaboring the point. [AC, p. 25] In addition to the noteworthy correlation of validity with silence (comparable, to some extent, to Wimsatt's discreet "intimations" of value), two other aspects of Frye's remarks here repay some attention. First, in claiming that it is altogether obvious that Milton, rather than Blackmore, is "a more rewarding and suggestive poet [for the critic] to work with," Frye begged the question of what kind of work the critic would be doing. For surely if one were concerned with a question such as the relation of canonical and noncanonical texts in the system of literary value in eighteenth-century England, one would find Blackmore just as rewarding and suggestive to work with as Milton. Both here and in his repeated insistence that the "material" of criticism must be "the masterpieces of literature" (he refers also to a "feeling we have all had: that the study of mediocre works of art remains a random and peripheral form of critical experience" [AC, p. 17]), Frye exhibits a severely limited conception of the potential domain of literary study and of the sort of problems and phenomena with which it could or should deal. In this conceptual and methodological confinement, however (which betrays the conservative force of the ideology of traditional humanism even in the laboratories of the new progressive poetics), he has been joined by just about every other member of the Anglo-American literary academy during the past fifty years.   Barbara Herrnstein Smithis University Professor of English and communications and director of the Center for the Study of Art and Symbolic Behavior at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of, among other works, Poetic Closure and On the Margins of Discourse. Her previous contribution to , "Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories," appeared in the Autumn 1980 issue. The present essay is part of a full-length study of literary and aesthetic value and evaluation. Charles Altieri An Idea and an Ideal of a Literary_Canon It is unfortunately a lot easier to raise an arch eyebrow than it is to describe critical terms that might account for the values in idealization while preserving a pluralistic sense of possible canons and their uses. Instead of facing the challenge directly, I shall rely on what I call a contrastive strategy. Were I simply to assert a traditional psychology with its attendant values, I would expose myself to a host of suspicious charges about my pieties and delusions. So I shall begin by concentrating on the limitations I take to be inherent in the empiricism of the critical historicists' position. If, by deflating idealization, their arguments prove reductive, they should provoke us to ask what it is they reduce. We will find ourselves forced back within the circle of literary and existential expectations I suspect most of us still share. But now we might appreciate the force and possible uses of that training when we measure it against all we cannot do if we accept an alternative stance. That we can measure at all, of course, may emerge as the most significant consequence of this experiment in using contrastive strategies. The subject of self-interest provides us with a clear test among these competing positions, and it establishes some of the psychological concepts we will need if we are to describe the cultural functions canons can serve. Critical historicism concentrates on two basic aspects of self-interest the desire for power over others and the pursuit of self-representations that satisfy narcissistic demands. Out of these aspects, ideologies are generated and sustained. But this is hardly an exhaustive account of needs, motives, and powers. I propose that at least two other claims seem plausible, each with important consequences for our understanding of the canon that some people can understand their empirical interests to a degree sufficient to allow them considerable control over their actions and that a basic motive for such control is to subsume one's actions under a meaning the self can take responsibility for.4   4. I use the term "empirical interests" in what I take to be a Kantian sense. "Empirical" refers to interests one simply accepts as preferences, without any need for justification. These interests invite ideological analysis, since, for Kant, they come essentially from outside as heteronomous rather than autonomous features of a subject's life. The opposite of "empirical," in this sense, is interests one tries to rationalize on principles that, at some level, have criteria not selected by the agent and also applicable to some other agents. For a historical account of the concept of interests, see Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton, N.J., 1977). For a clear conceptual analysis of problems in attributing all motives to self- interest, see Paul W. Taylor, Principles of Ethics: An Introduction (Belmont, Calif., 1978), chap. 3.   Charles Altieri is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Washington. He is the author of Act and Quality: A Theory of Literary Meaning and Humanistic Understanding (1981) and Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry (forthcoming) and is presently working on value in ethics and esthetics. His previous contributions to Critical Lawrence Lipking Aristotle's Sister: A Poetics of Abandonment In the beginning was an aborted word. The first example of a woman's literary criticism in Western tradition, or more accurately the first miscarriage of a woman's criticism, occurs early in the Odyssey. High in her room above the hall of suitors, Penelope can hear a famous minstrel sing that most painful of stories, the Greek homecoming from Troy significantly, the matter of the Odyssey itself. That is no song for a woman. She comes down the stairs to protest.             "Phêmios, other spells you know, high deeds             of gods and heroes, as the poets tell them;             let these men hear some other, while they sit             silent and drink their wine. But sing no more             this bitter tale that wears my heart away.             It opens in me again the wound of longing             For one incomparable, ever in my mind             His fame all Hellas knows, and midland Argos." It seems a reasonable request. But her words meet an immediate brutal rebuff from an unexpected source: her own son Telemachus.             "Mother, why do you grudge our own dear minstrel             Joy of song, wherever his thought may lead?             Poets are not to blame, but Zeus who gives what fate he pleases to adventurous men. Here is no reason for reproof: to sing the news of the Danaans! Men like best a song that rings like morning on the ear. But you must nerve yourself and try to listen. Odysseus was not the only one at Troy never to know the day of his homecoming. Others, how many others, lost their lives!"9 Men like to hear the news; women must learn not to take songs so personally! And Penelope gives in. Marveling at the wisdom of her son, she goes back to her room and cries herself to sleep. Telemachus' words do not seem very much to the point. Penelope had not asked Phêmios to stop singing, after all, or to sing something fit for women; she only asked him to choose some other adventure. And to reproach her for not considering that others besides Odysseus had failed to come home seems irrelevant as well as cruel. The fact that others feel pain is hardly a reason for her not to feel it. Penelope cannot bear even to name her husband, but Telemachus seems to take pleasure in saying "Odysseus." By proclaiming his own indifference to pain, he argues just like a man. And that, of course, is the point. The scene has been contrived exactly to show his new maturity. He proves himself no longer a boy in the time-honored fashion, by rejecting any tenderness of heart and by putting down a woman. Henceforth he will be equal to the suitors.   Lawrence Lipkingis Chester D. Tripp Professor of Humanities at Northwestern University and director of the program in comparative literature and theory. He is the author of The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England and The Life of the Poet, which won the Christian Gauss Award of Phi Beta Kappa in 1982. His previous contributions to are "The Marginal Glass" (Summer 1977) and "Arguing with Shelly" (Winter 1979). The present essay was originally given as a lecture at the School of Criticism and Theory in the summer of 1982. It is part of a book, Abandoned Women and Poetic Tradition, which is to appear in 1984. James E. G. Zetzel Re-creating the Canon: Augustan Poetry and the Alexandrian_Past The Alexandrian emphasis on smallness, elegance, and slightness at the expense of grand themes in major poetic genres was not preciosity for its own sake: although the poetry was written by and for scholars, it had much larger sources than the bibliothecal context in which it was composed. Since the time of the classical poets, much had changed. Earlier Greek poetry was an intimate part of the life of the city-state, written for its religious occasions and performed by its citizens. But eh conquests of Alexander had altered the structure and the boundaries of the Greek world to an astonishing degree. Alexandria, the center of the poetic culture of the new age, was a city that had not even existed at the time of Euripides; it was in Egypt, not in Greece, and was a huge, polyglot community. As immigrants immersed in a new, impersonal, and bureaucratic society, the poets not unreasonably sought out what was small, intimate, and personal in their verses. The heroes of early Greek poetry are larger than life; those of Alexandrian poetry are life-size. They are human, like us; they have a childhood and an old age; they are afraid or in love or caught in a rainstorm. It was simply one way of reducing the world to more manageable dimensions. At the same time, the new world of Alexandria needed a new poetry. To continue writing epics about a mythology that seemed very far away was senseless; it was impossible to recapture either the style or the immediacy of Homer, lyric poetry, or Attic tragedy. The scholar-poets of Alexandria admired the literature of classical Greece; for them Homer was incomparable and inimitable, to be studied but not to be copied. Far better, then, to find a new voice on a more manageable scale: instead of oral epic, erudite epyllion; instead of lyric, epigram; instead of tragedy, mime. The poets of an urban and unheroic world might long for but could never re-create the grandeur of the past.   James E. G. Zetzel is associate professor of classics at Princeton University and editor of the Transactions of the American Philological Association. He is the author of Latin Textual Criticism in Antiquity (1981) and, with Anthony T. Grafton and Glenn W. Most, has translated Friedrich August Wolf's Prolegomena ad Homerum (forthcoming). Joseph Kerman A Few Canonical Variations Since the idea of a canon seems so closely bound up with the idea of history, there should be something to be learned from the persistent efforts that have been going on for nearly two hundred years to extend the musical repertory back in time. What is involved here is nothing less than a continuous effort to endow music with a history. From the workings of this process in the nineteenth century, we learn that where the ideology is right the past can indeed yield up a canon of works and even a canon of performance.   Bach, to take the most weighty example, would appear to have entered the canon Hoffman's canon before entering the repertory. The history of the nineteenth-century Bach revival begins as a triumph of ideology over practice. Only after J. N. Forkel, in his famous biography, canonized Bach as the archetypal German master was The Well-tempered Clavier published for the first time and if any one work of music deserved to be called canonic, it would have to be The Well-tempered Clavier.14 (But when did it really enter the repertory? Not really until the formation of a new repertory, the repertory of the modern harpsichord, in our own time.) Gradually other Bach works, works which fitted better into nineteenth-century concert life, did enter various nineteenth- century repertories; Mendelssohn's revival of the St. Matthew Passion is a famous landmark, and various piano transcriptions and orchestral arrangements, not to speak of Gounod's "Ave Maria," followed in due course. Bach was made to sound like a premature Romantic. There was as yet no call for historical "authenticity." But I do not think it was Bach that Hood was thinking of when he complained of musical traditions of the past whose "real identities are gone." The skeleton may not have been bodied out with authentic flesh and blood, but it was made into a handsome waxwork which was quite real enough for the nineteenth century.   14. This point is made by Crocker, "Is There Really a ‘Written Tradition'?"   Joseph Kerman, professor of music at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Opera as Drama, The Beethoven Quartets, The Masses and Motets of William Byrd,and (with Alan Tyson) The New Grove Beethoven. He is also coeditor of Beethoven Studiesand Nineteenth-Century Music and is presently working on a concise study of modern musical scholarship. "How We Got into Analysis, and How to Get Out," his previous contribution to , appeared in the Winter 1980 issue. Jerome J. McGann The Religious Poetry of Christina Rossetti I want to argue…that to read Rossetti's religious poetry with understanding (and therefore with profit and appreciation) requires a more or less conscious investment in the peculiarities of its Christian orientation, in the social and historical particulars which feed and shape the distinctive features of her work. Because John O. Waller's relatively recent essay on Rossetti, "Christ's Second Coming: Christina Rossetti and the Premillenarianist William Dodsworth," focuses on some of the most important of these particulars, it seems to me one of the most useful pieces of scholarship ever written on the poet. The essay locates the special ground of Rossetti's religious poetry in that peculiar Adventist and premillenarian context which flourished for about fifty years in mid nineteenth-century culture. In point of historical fact and it is a historical fact which has enormous significance for the aesthetic character of Rossetti's poetry her religious verse is intimately meshed with a number of particular, even peculiar, religious ideas.18 From the vantage of her strongest poetry, the most important of these ideas (along with the associated images and symbols they helped to generate) were allied to a once powerful religious movement which later toward the end of the century slipped to a marginal position in English culture. The whole question [of premillenarianism] was overshadowed first and last by the Tractarian Movement, Anglo-Catholicism, and the resulting Protestant reaction. And we can see in retrospect that all through the years [1820-1875] the theological future actually belonged to liberal, or Broad Church, principles. By the middle 1870s, apparently [the issues raised through the premillenarian movement] were no longer very alive.19­­ In this context we may begin to understand the decline of Rossetti's reputation after the late nineteenth century, when she was still regarded as one of the most powerful and important contemporary English poets. Her reputation was established in the 1860s and 1870s, when Adventism reached the apogee of its brief but influential career. Thereafter, the availability of religious poetry was mediated either through the Broad Church line (which stretches from Coleridge and the Cambridge Apostles and Arnold, to figures like Trilling and Abrams in our own day) or through the High Church and Anglo-Catholic line (which was defined backwards from certain influential twentieth-century figures like Eliot to include the Noetics, Hopkins, and various seventeenth-century religious writers). The premillenarian and evangelist enthusiasm which supported Rossetti's religious poetry had been moved to the periphery of English culture when the canon of such verse began to take shape in the modern period. To read Rossetti's poetry, then, we have to willingly suspend not only our disbelief in her convictions and ideas but also our belief in those expectations and presuppositions about religious poetry which we have inherited from those two dominant ideological lines Broad Church and High Church and Anglo-Catholic. Waller has drawn our attention to the general premillenarian content of her work, and I should like to follow his lead by emphasizing another crucial and even more particular doctrinal feature of her poetry.   19. Waller, "Christ's Second Coming," p. 477. For a general discussion of millenarianism in the early nineteenth century, see J. E. Harrison, The Second Coming, Popular Millenarianism, 1780-1850 (London, 1979).   Jerome J. McGann is the Doris and Henry Dreyfuss Professor of Humanities at the California Institute of Technology. His two most recent books are The Romantic Ideology. A Critical Investigation (1983) and A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (1983). His previous contributions to are "Formalism, Savagery, and Care; or, The Function of Criticism Once Again" (Spring 1976) and "The Meaning of the Ancient Mariner" (Autumn 1981). Arnold Krupat Native American Literature and the Canon Although not exactly continuous, the Native American challenge to the canon, as I have tried to show, has been of comparatively long standing. Nonetheless, inasmuch as Native American literary production and Euramerican writing influenced by it have only barely begun to enter the courses in and the anthologies of general American literature, that challenge cannot be said to have been effective as yet. No doubt it will take more time for poets and teachers to recognize what Native American literatures aboriginally were and, to some extent, still are; to recognize when and if the influence of these literatures is present in work by Native and non-Native writers. It is only since the 1950s and 1960s that philological and structural work has begun to make this recognition possible in any case. It is only more recently still that an adequately sophisticated criticism for these literatures has begun to develop, with the publication of Abraham Chapman's basic and eclectic collection of essays, Literature of the American Indians: Views and Interpretations (1975); Karl Kroeber's uneven but valuable introduction to the subject, Traditional Literatures of the American Indian: Texts and Interpretations (1981); and Hymes' "In Vain I Tried to Tell You": Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics (1981), a collection of Hymes' seminal and indispensable work. The broadest and most sophisticated collection of essays gathering work by Hymes, Tedlock, Toelken, Kroeber, and others has only just appeared: Smooting the Ground: Essays on Native American Oral Literature (1982) is edited by Brian Swann, a poet and translator of Mative American song.61 These developments are encouraging for Native American literatures. As American society continues to move away from anthropocentrism and textual authority, the Native tradition may for the first time effectively assert its claim upon the canon of American literature.   61. For his translations, see, for example, Swann's Song of the Sky: Versions of Native American Songs and Poems (forthcoming). Swann works from texts, not performances, from English language versions, not transcriptions of Native languages; as a result, he has made a point of insisting, "These poems of mine are not translations" but instead "versions" of Native American poetry. Although he has given up specific claims to authenticity, Swann has nonetheless shown how much can be done by the non-Native poet and scholar responding to the Native tradition as a powerful source.   Arnold Krupat is a member of the literature faculty at Sarah Lawrence College. He is the coeditor of the University of Nebraska Press' Native American Autobiography Series and is currently completing an anthology of Native American autobiographies, Indian Lives. His previous contribution to , "An Approach to Native American Texts," appeared in the December 1982 issue. John Guillory The Ideology of Canon-Formation: T. S. Eliot and_Cleanth_Brooks Nostalgia is only the beginning of a recognizably ideological discourse. The way through to the ideological sense of Tennyson's "failure," beneath the phenomenal glow of Eliot's nostalgia, lies in the entanglement of minority in this complex of meanings, the determination that Tennyson is properly placed when seen as a "minor Virgil." The diffusion of a major talent in minor works suggests that what Tennyson or Eliot might have been was another Virgil, and for Eliot that means simply a "classic." In "What Is a Classic?," we are told that English literature has no classic poet who would exalt, as Virgil or Dante did, the truths of his age.14 The absence of a modern classic reflects not an individual failure but rather the absence of a universal truth, which has been hidden in the minor works. Here is the reason both for the ambivalence Eliot expresses about the fact of minority (a valuing of the right things and yet a deferral of greatness) and for the peculiar, and certainly not necessary, association of poetic minority with a marginal elite.15 It is the latter point to which I now want to turn. If it has been shown that the canon Eliot legislated in his early career was not merely an arbitrary set of aesthetic preferences, we have not yet fully evinced the ideological sense of Eliot's canonical principle. We have only determined that one way to reconstruct Eliot's canon would be to list those "minor" poets. But the essential quality of their minority, what drives them away from the "mainstream" of English literature, is what Eliot approved as their fidelity to "tradition." Such a concept of tradition must be exclusive as well as revisionary, because it implies that the major poets of English literary history cannot also be "traditional." Eliot finally understood that his canonical principle was the literary reflection of a more fundamental evaluative norm, extrinsic to literature, which he identified as "orthodoxy." So he tells us in After Strange Gods that he is rewriting "Tradition and the Individual Talent" by substituting "orthodoxy" for "tradition," and this is unquestionably an ideological correction.16 In the same way, the canon of minor writers is established retrospectively as determined by the rule of orthodoxy. Neither they nor the young Eliot need be orthodox Christians for this rule to have enabled their productions. It is precisely Eliot's meaning that these elite, like the "elect" before them, may come at some point to a conviction of their election, yet they were always the elect. In this sense, Eliot's conversion to Christianity was the recognition that he already belonged to a marginal elite, whose membership had been polemically foreshadowed by the construction of an alternative canon.   14. The whole argument of "What Is a Classic?" is interesting in this respect. Eliot's standard of classical value is "universality," which is opposed to the "provincial." The closest English literature comes to a classical age is in the eighteenth century, and this too fails because its "restriction of religious sensibility itself produces a kind of provinciality: the provinciality which indicates the disintegration of Christendom, the decay of a common belief and a common culture" (OPP, pp. 61-62). 15. But at least a hint about how to make this connection is given in Eliot's "The Classics and the Man of Letters," To Criticize the Critic (New York, 1965): "The continuity of literature is essential to its greatness; it is very largely the function of secondary writers to preserve this continuity, and to provide a body of writings which is not necessarily read by posterity, which plays a great part in forming the link between those writers who continue to be read" (p. 147). 16. Eliot, After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (New York, 1933), p. 22.   John Guillory, assistant professor of English at Yale University, is the author of Poetic Authority: Spenser, Milton, and Literary History (1983). He is currently working on a study of canon- formation. Richard Ohmann The Shaping of a Canon: U.S. Fiction, 1960-1975 Categorical names such as "The English Novel," "The Modern American Novel," and "American Literature" often turn up in catalogs as titles of college courses, and we know from them pretty much what to expect. They also have standing in critical discourse, along with allied terms unlikely to serve as course titles: "good writing," "great literature," "serious fiction," "literature" itself. The awareness has grown in recent years that such concepts pose problems, even though we use them with easy enough comprehension when we talk or write to others who share our cultural matrix. Lately, critics like Raymond Williams have been reminding us that the categories change over time (just as "literature" used to mean all printed books but has come to mean only some poems, plays, novels, etc.) and that at any given moment categories embody complex social relations and a continuing historical process. That process deeply invests all terms with value: since not everyone's values are the same, the negotiating of such concepts is, among other things, a struggle for dominance whether between adults and the young, professors and their students, one class and another, or men and women. We don't usually notice the power or the conflict, except when some previously weak or silent group seeks a share of the power: for example, when, in the 1960s, American blacks and their supporters insisted that black literature be included in school and college curricula, or when they openly challenged the candidacy of William Styron's Confessions of Nat Turner for inclusion in some eventual canon.1 But the gradual firming up of concepts like, say, postwar American fiction is always a contest for cultural hegemony, even if in our society if is often muted carried on behind the scenes or in the seemingly neutral marketplace.   1. See John Henrik Clarke, ed., William Styron's Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond (Boston, 1968).   Richard Ohmannis professor of English at Wesleyan University. He is the author of English in America and is presently working on studies in mass culture. Gary Saul Morson Who Speaks for Bakhtin?: A Dialogic Introduction The more we spoke, the more we discovered disagreement behind our agreements and envisaged different implications for the same or were they the same ideas. "I suppose that's what Bakhtin meant when he wrote that agreement, not just disagreement, is a dialogic relationship," she reflected. "Agreement is never identity. It always presupposes or becomes the occasion for differences which I guess may be one reason why it can be so profitable to agree." I could detect Kuhn's concept of a scientific consensus here but agreed anyway. It turned out, in fact, that I had hidden disagreements with all the contributors to the collection. I had undertaken the project with the evidently quixotic hope that we could create, in imitation of Bakhtin's eccentric circle of linguists, Marxists, Christians, biologists, and literary theorists, a circle of our own. "You want to be a living allusion," she would say. By the end of that afternoon, however, neither she nor I were confident that we could despite all the views we did share ever sign both our names to the same introduction. "Not to be a Formalist," she interrupted, "perhaps it's a question of form…" Moi: …You know, the most appropriate form for an article introducing Bakhtin would be a dialogue, since dialogue is his central concept. Elle: Of course, if you can speak of a center in a writer so eccentric. How would it begin? Moi: Well, like Notes from Underground, on an ellipsis…That would illustrate his idea that all speech is a response to words that have been uttered before, that we never confront a linguistically virgin world, that each utterance is a response to other utterances and is formulated in expectation of a response to it all that might be developed later on in the dialogue. Moi could explain it all to Elle.   Gary Saul Morson, associate professor and chairman of Slavic languages at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of Boundaries of Genre: Dostoevsky's "Diary of a Writer" and the Traditions of Literary Utopia. His previous contribution to , "Tolstoy's Absolute Language," appeared in the Summer 1981 issue. Caryl Emerson The Outer Word and Inner Speech: Bakhtin, Vygotsky,_and_the Internalization of Language Both Bakhtin and Vygotsky, as we have seen, responded directly or indirectly to the challenge of Freud. Both attempted to account for their data without resorting to postulating an unconscious in the Freudian sense. By way of contrast, it is instructive here to recall Jacques Lacan who, among others, has been a beneficiary of Bakhtin's "semiotic reinterpretation" of Freud.17 Lacan's case is intriguing, for he retains the unconscious while at the same time submitting Freudian psychoanalysis to rigorous criticism along the lines of Bakhtin. By focusing attention on the dialogic word, he encourages a rereading of Freud in which the social element (the dynamics between doctor and patient) is crucial. As Lacan opens his essay "The Empty Word and the Full Word": Whether it sees itself as an instrument of healing, of formation, or of exploration in depth, psychoanalysis has only a single intermediary: the patient's Word….And every word calls for a reply. I shall show that there is no word without a reply, even if it meets no more than silence, provided that it has an auditor: this is the heart of its function in psychoanalysis.18 The word is conceived as a tool not only in the external world but also of an autonomous internal world as well. And what emerges, it would seem, is a reinterpretation of the role of dialogue in the painful maturational process of the child. For Vygotsky, the child's realization of his separateness from society is not a crisis; after all, his environment provides both the form and the content of his personality. From the start, dialogue reinforces the child's grasp on reality, as evidenced by the predominantly social and extraverted nature of his earliest egocentric speech. For Lacan, on the contrary, dialogue seems to function as the alienating experience, the stade du miroir phase of a child's development. The unconscious becomes the seat of all those problems that Bakhtin had externalized: the origin of personality, the possibilities of self-expression. The je-moi opposition in the mirror gives rise to that permanent for "a locus where there is constituted the je which speaks as well as he who has it speak."19 And consequently, the Word takes on an entirely different coloration: it is no longer merely an ideological sign but a potent tool for repressing knowledge of that gap, the face in the mirror, the Other. Lacan's celebrated inversion of Saussure's algorithm, with the line between signifier and signified representing repression, created a powerful but ominous new role for language. The child is released from his alienating image only through discovering himself as Subject, which occurs with language; but this language will inevitably come to him from the Other. Thus speech is based on the idea of lack, and dialogue, on the idea of difference.   17. See Ivanov, "The Significance of M. M. Bakhtin's Ideas," p. 314. 18. Jacques Lacan, "The Empty Word and the Full Word," in Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis, ed. and trans. Anthony Wilden (Baltimore, 1981), p. 9. 19. Lacan, from "La Chose freudienne" (1955), quoted in Wilden, "Lacan and the Discourse of the Other," in Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis, p. 266.   Caryl Emerson, assistant professor of Russian literature at Cornell University, has translated (with Michael Holquist) The Dialogic Imagination, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (forthcoming 1984). She is currently at work, on a study of Boris Godunov in Russian cultural history Susan Stewart Shouts on the Street: Bakhtin's Anti-Linguistics According to Bakhtin, the reason that literature is the most ideological of all ideological spheres may be discovered in the structure of genre. He criticizes the formalists for ending their theory with a consideration of genre; genre, he observes, should be the first topic of poetics. The importance of genre lies in its two major capacities: conceptualization and "finalization." A genre's conceptualization has both inward and outward focus: the artist does not merely represent reality; he or she must use existing means of representation in tension with the subject at hand. This process is analogous to the dual nature of the utterance, its orientation simultaneously toward its past contexts and its present context. "A particular aspect of reality can only be understood in connection with the particular means of representing it" (FM, p. 134).Genre's production of perception is not simply a matter of physical orientation; it is also a matter of ideology: "Every significant genre is a complex system of means and methods for the conscious control and finalization of reality" (FM, p. 134). According to Bakhtin, nonideological domains are "open work," not subject to an ultimate closure; but one goal of works of art is precisely to offer closure, a "finalization" that accounts for their ideological power and their capacity to produce consciousness. In the particular finalization of genre, we see a continual tension between tradition and situation.25 As Terry Eagleton suggests in Criticism and Ideology, "A power-loom, for one thing, is not altered by its products…in the way that a literary convention is transformed by what it textually works."26 Analogously, Bakhtin writes that "the goal of the artistic structure of every historical genre is to merge the distance of space and time with the contemporary by the force of all-penetrating social evaluation" (FM, p. 158). It is perhaps because of this purported goal that Bakhtin himself seemed to prefer the novel, which he viewed as a meta-genre incorporating at once all domains of ideology and all other literary genres. Finally, we must emphasize that Bakhtin's model of genre rests upon his insistence that literary evolution is not the result of device reacting against device, as Viktor Shklovsky believed, but rather of ideological, and ultimately socioeconomic, changes.   25. For a discussion of the tension between genre and performance, and between tradition and situation, in folkloric performances, see Hymes, "Folklore's Nature and the Sun's Myth,"Journal of American Folklore 88 (Oct.-Dec. 1975): 345- 69. 26. Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology, p. 73.   Susan Stewart is associate professor of English at Temple University. She is the author of a book of poetry, Yellow Stars and Ice (1981), and two books of literary theory, Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature (1979) and On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, and the Collection (forthcoming 1984). Michael André Bernstein When the Carnival Turns Bitter: Preliminary Reflections Upon_the Abject Hero For Bakhtin the "gradual narrowing down" of the carnival's regenerative power is directly linked to its separation from "folk culture" and its ensuing domestication as "part of the family's private life." Nonetheless, Bakhtin's faith in the inherent indestructibility of "the carnival spirit" compels him to find it preserved, even if in an interiorized and psychological form, in the post-Renaissance literary tradition, and he specifically names Diderot, along with Molière, Voltaire, and Swift, as authors who kept alive the subversive possibilities of a Saturnalian laughter (pp. 33, 34). But, of course, as Bakhtin himself recognizes, much more has changed in both the nature and the effects of that laughter than merely its locus of action. The crucial difference, according to Bakhtin, is a new sense of terror felt at the heart of the post-Renaissance carnival grotesque: The transformation of the principle of laughter which permeates the grotesque, that is the loss of its regenerating power, leads to a series of other essential differences between Romantic grotesque and medieval and Renaissance grotesque…The world of Romantic grotesque is to a certain extent a terrifying word, alien to man…Something frightening is revealed in that which was habitual and secure. [Pp. 38-39] Directly linked to this burden of terror, of laughter as a response to dread, not exuberance, is a change in the literary function of madness: Other specific traits are linked with the disappearance of laughter's regenerating power…. The theme of madness is inherent to all grotesque forms, because madness makes men look at the world with different eyes, not dimmed by "normal," that is by commonplace ideas and judgments. In folk grotesque, madness is a gay parody of official reason, of the narrow seriousness of official "truth." It is a "festive" madness. In Romantic grotesque, on the other hand, madness acquires a somber, tragic aspect of individual isolation. [P. 39] Bakhtin's typology of laughter, for all its richly textured local insights, is haunted, from its inception, by a wistfully nostalgic longing for a realm of pure and ahistorical spontaneity, a rite of universal participation whose essentially affirmative character is guaranteed by its very universality. The most characteristic feature of such a carnival is, in fact, its abolition of all distinctions between participant and viewer: Carnival does not know footlights, in the sense that it does not acknowledge any distinction between actors and spectators. Footlights would destroy a carnival, as the absence of footlights would destroy a theatrical performance. Carnival is not a spectacle seen by the people; they live in it, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the people. While carnival lasts, there is no other life outside it…. It has a universal spirit: it is a special condition of the entire world, of the world's revival and renewal, in which all take part. [P. 7] Yet as soon as the question of representation arises, whether in Rabelais or in his successors, the "footlights" which separate actor and spectator, reader and character, come into being, introducing the very divisions the work's themes deny. Belatedness, the knowledge of coming after the festival has already been fragmented, is thus not limited to a post-Rabelaisian, bourgeois culture; it is itself a condition of every Saturnalian text, and what has changed is not the inclusiveness of the carnival per se but the literary consequences of acknowledging that belatedness.   Michael AndréBernstein, associate professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic and Prima della Rivoluzione, a volume of verse. He is currently at work on a book about the Abject Hero and literary genealogy. Michael Holquist Answering as Authoring: Mikhail Bakhtin's Trans-Linguistics All of Mikhail Bakhtin's work stands under the sign of plurality, the mystery of the one and the many. Unlike the third eye of Tibetan Buddhism, which gives those who possess it a vision of the secret unity holding creation together, Bakhtin seems to have had a third ear that permitted him to hear differences where others perceived only sameness, especially in the apparent wholeness of the human voice. The obsessive question at the heart of Bakhtin's thought is always "Who is talking?" It was his sense of the world's overwhelming multiplicity that impelled Bakhtin to rethink strategies by which heterogeneity had traditionally been disguised as a unity. In his several attempts to find a single name for the teeming forces which jostled each other within the combat zone of the word whether the term was "polyphony," "heteroglossia," or "speech communion" Bakhtin was at great pains never to sacrifice the tension between identity and difference that fueled his enterprise. He always sought the minimum degree of homogenization necessary to any conceptual scheme, feeling it was better to preserve the heterogeneity which less patient thinkers found intolerable and to which they therefore hurried to assign a unitizing label. Bakhtin's metaphysical contrariness has the effect of making at times appear to be indiscriminate, as when he refused to recognize borders between biography and autobiography or, more notoriously, between speaking and writing. But, as I hope to show, these apparently cardinal distinctions are for Bakhtin only local instances of unity that participate in and are controlled by a fare more encompassing set of oppositions and differences. All this places an extra burden on those who seek an overarching design in Bakhtin's legacy: the apparently unitizing term "Bakhtin" proves to be as illusory or more illusory in its ability to subsume real distinctions as any other, if we submit it to a Bakhtinian analysis.   Michael Holquist is professor and chairman of the department of Slavic languages and literatures a Indiana University. With his wife, Katerina Clark, he has just completed Mikhail Bakhtin, a study of Bakhtin's life and works, forthcoming in the autumn of 1984. He is currently working in Moscow. Christine Froula When Eve Reads Milton: Undoing the Canonical Economy There are, of course, many important differences between the deployment of cultural authority in the social context of second- century Christianity and that of twentieth-century academia. The editors of the Norton Anthology, for example, do not actively seek to suppress those voices which they exclude, nor are their principles for inclusion so narrowly defined as were the church fathers'. But the literary academy and its institutions developed from those of the Church and continue to wield a derivative, secular version of its social and cultural authority. Since Matthew Arnold, the instutition of literature has been described in terms which liken its authority to that of religion, not only by outsiders Woolf's woman "divining the priest" but by insiders who continue to employ the stances and language of religious authority; see, for instance, J. Hillis Miller's credo in a recent issue of the ADE Bulletin: "I believe in the established canon of English and American literature and in the validity of the concept of privileged texts. I think it is more important to read Spenser, Shakespeare, or Milton than to read Borges in translation, or even, to say the truth, to read Virginia Woolf."9 Such rhetoric suggests that the religious resonances in literary texts are not entirely figurative, a point brought out strikingly by revisionary religious figures in feminist texts. In her recent essay " ‘The Blank Page' and the Issues of Female Creativity," Susan Gubar cites as some of the "many parables in an ongoing revisionary female theology" Florence Nightingale's tentative prophecy that "the next Christ will perhaps be a female Christ," H. D.'s blessed Lady carrying a "Bible of blank pages," and Gertrude Stein's celebration of The Mother of Us All.10 The revisionary female theology promoted in literary writing by women implicitly counters the patriarchal theology which is already inscribed in literature. The prophesied female Christ, blank Bible, and female Creator revise images familiar in the literary tradition, and, in contrast to earlier appropriations of religious imagery by Metaphysical, Pre-Raphaelite, and other poets, make visible the patriarchal preoccupations of literary "theology." These voices, like the Gnostic voices recovered at Nag Hammadi, are only now being heard in chorus; and Pagels' study of "the gnostic feminism" (as the New York Review of Books labeled it) helps to illuminate some aspects of a cultural authority predicated on the suppression or domination of other voices.   Christine Froula, associate professor of English at Yale University, is the author of A Guide to Ezra Pound's "Selected Poems"and of the forthcoming "To Write Paradise": Syle and Error in Pound's Cantos. She is currently working on a book about literary authority in James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Stanley Fish Profession Despise Thyself: Fear and Self-Loathing in Literary Studies It might seem at this point that I am courting a contradiction: If antiprofessionalism is a form of professional behavior and if professional behavior covers the field (in the sense that anything one might urge will be a manifestation of it), then how can I fault Bate for using antiprofessionalism to further a professional project? By collapsing the distinction (on which antiprofessionalism runs) between activity that is professionally motivated and activity motivated by a commitment to abstract and general values, have I not deprived myself of a basis for making judgments, since one form of activity would seem to be no different from or better than any other? The answer is no, because the consequence of turning everything into professionalism is not to deny value but to redistribute it. One deconstructs an opposition not by reversing the hierarchy of its poles but by denying to either pole the independence that makes the opposition possible in the first place. If my argument that there can be no literary criticism or pedagogy that is not a form of professionalism, it is also that there can be no form of professionalism that is not an extension of some value or set of values. Whereas before one was asked to choose between professionalism and some category of pure value (which, significantly, could only be named in the vaguest terms), the choice can now be seen as a choice between different versions of professionalism, each with its attendant values. To say that antiprofessionalism is a form of professional behavior (and is therefore in a philosophical sense incoherent) is not to have closed the discussion but to have identified the basis on which it can continue by identifying the questions that should now be asked: What kind of professional behavior is antiprofessionalism? and What are its consequences? The answer is that, at least in its literary form, it urges impossible goals (the breaking free or bypassing of the professional network) and therefore has the consequence of making people ashamed of what they are doing. The psychological distress that marks this profession, the fact that so many of its members exist in a shamefaced relationship with the machinery that enables their labors, is in part attributable, I think, to literary antiprofessionalism, which is, as a form of professional behavior, almost always damaging.   Stanley Fish's most recent work is "Wrong Again: A Reply to Ronald Dworking," Texas Law Review (August 1973). His previous contributions to include "With the Compliments of the Author: Reflections on Austin and Derrida" (Summer 19820 and "Working on the Chain Gang: Interpretation in the Law and in Literary Criticism" (September 1982). Walter Jackson Bate To the Editor of II. Without mentioning what most of the article is about, Fish plucks out some remarks from a small part of it and condemns me as being antiblack, antifeminist, and so forth. It seems to me that Fish, after removing a few sentences from context (forgivable we all do it; there's a limit to the amount one can naturally quote), then does three other things: (1) he summarizes or rephrases these remarks in such a way as to turn them into a polemical statement; (2) he makes an inference all his own; and (3) he then attacks the inference he has made. In his second paragraph, speaking unfavorably of the old-fashioned hope of finding universal values, he states: "It follows, then, … that works which advocate or have their origin in particular attitudes, strategies, sectarian projects, or political programs do not qualify as literature and should not be treated as such by literary scholars" (p. 350; my emphasis). It by no means "follows," except perhaps in Fish's mind. It follows merely that some of these concerns if pursued in isolation from other contexts and in a spirit of propaganda are not, by themselves, an adequate substitute, or replacement, for approaches (broadly historical, sociological, moral, stylistic) that may provide a center from which to move to the subjects Fish mentions. I certainly have no wish to exclude these subjects from the curriculum. In fact, I have probably devoted as much of my teaching to some of them, especially political writing, as has Fish. I realize that for Fish himself our reactions in reading are inevitably subjective and that no text can be viewed as a settled thing. But I must plead that the reader, before condemning me because of Fish's remarks, judge me by what I said rather than by what he inferred or magnified. I said only that, facing a decline in numbers of students, English departments found it more tempting than ever to provide courses on subjects often removed from larger contexts and treated in comparative isolation rather than to require more general study of history, philosophy, sociology, or psychology. I should like to repeat that I was not condemning departments for doing this. I felt it was rather sad that what Fish calls the "market," and the fondness of so many students now for propagandistic approaches, should force us to jettison much that was more rigorous and demanding therefore less popular.   Walter Jackson Bate is the Kingsley Porter University Professor of English at Harvard University. Among his many books are John Keats (1963) and Samuel Johnson (1975), both of which were awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Edward W. Said Response to Stanley Fish At one point Fish says that a profession produces no "real" commodity but offers only a service. But surely the increasing reification of services and even of knowledge has made them a commodity as well. And indeed the logical extension of Fish's position on professionalism is not that it is something done or lived but something produced and reproduced, albeit with redistributed and redeployed values. What those are, Fish doesn't say. Then again he makes the rather telling remarks that he is "turning everything into professionalism" (p. 361) an instance of overstating and overinsisting at a moment when what he is really arguing for can neither be formulated nor defended clearly. To turn "everything" into professionalism is to strip professionalism of any meaning at all. For until one can define professionalism and the particular values associated with it there is very little value in going on about the incoherencies of antiprofessionalism. Fish resorts to the reductionist attitude of telling us that professionalism is what is, and whatever is, is more or less therefore right, which by only the slightest extension of its logic is a view no less applicable to antiprofessionalism. On the other hand, Fish does say that the profession has changed, that new ways of doing things have emerged, that values are contested within and without the profession. Those kinds of observations, however, have to be pursued, made me more concrete, put in specific historical contexts, one of which is the fact that professions are not natural objects but concrete, political, economic, and social formations playing very defined, although sometimes barely visible, roles. Unfortunately, Fish commits the lobbyist-s error by obscuring and being blind to the sociopolitical actualities of what he lobbies for even as he defends its existence. Thus when Fish alleges that the reason most literary professionals "exist in a shamefaced relationship with the machinery that enables their labors" is because of their damaging antiprofessionalism (pp. 361-62), he is making an observation whose form is assertive but whose sense is tautological since he neither defines the professional and professionalism nor specifies "machinery" and "labors" with any precision at all. For if you take the extraordinary step of reducing everything to professionalism and institutionalism as Fish does, then the very possibility of talking about the profession with any intelligibility is negated. Few would dispute Fish's important point, that all interpretive and social situations are in fact already grounded in a context, in institutions, communities, and so forth. But there is a very great difference between making that claim and going on to say that so far as the literary profession is concerned, "the profession" is the context to which "everything" can be related.   Edward W. Said's most recent work is The World, the Text, and the Critic. His previous contributions to are "The Problem of Textuality: Two Exemplary Positions" (Summer 1978) and "Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community" (September 1982). Leonard B. Meyer Innovation, Choice, and the History of Music Before going further, it will be helpful to consider briefly the notion that novelty per se is a fundamental human need. Experiments with human beings, as well as with animals, indicate that the maintenance of normal, successful behavior depends upon an adequate level of incoming stimulation or, as some have put it, of novelty.2 But lumping all novelty together is misleading. At least three kinds of novelty need to be distinguished. (1) Some novel patterns arise out of, or represent, changes in the fundamental rules governing the organization of musical processes and structures. By significantly weakening our comprehension of the musical relationships presented undermining not only our understanding of what is past but our ability to envisage what is to come such systemic change seriously threatens our sense of psychic security and competent control. Far from being welcome, the insecurity and uncertainty thus engendered is at least as antipathetic, disturbing, and unpleasant as stimulus privation. (2) Novel patterns may also result from the invention of a new strategy that accords with prevalent stylistic rules. Though they may initially seem to threaten existing competencies, the function and significance of novel strategies within the larger set of stylistic constraints can usually be grasped without too much delay or difficulty. For a while the tensions produced by strategic innovation may seem disturbing. But in the end, when our grasp of the principles ordering events is confirmed and our sense of competency is reestablished and control is reinforced, tension is resolved into an elation that is both stimulating and enjoyable. (3) Most novel patterns original themes, rhythms, harmonic progressions, and so forth involve the innovative instantiation or realization of an existing strategy or schema (see examples 1-3 below).3 Novelties of this kind not only enhance our sense of control a feeling that we know how things really "work" but provide both the pleasure of recognition and the joy of skillfully exercising some competency. We enjoy novelty the stimulation of surprise, the tension of uncertainty as long as it can be accommodated within a known and understandable set of constraints. When the rules governing the game are abrogated or in doubt when comprehension and control are threatened the result is usually anger, anguish, and desperation. These responses to novelty are consequences of fundamental and poignant verities of the human condition: the centrality of choice in human behavior. Because only a minute fraction of human behavior seems to be genetically specified, choice is inescapable. While in lower organisms, behavior is strictly determined by the genetic program, in complex metazoa the genetic program becomes less constraining, more "open" as Ernst Mayr puts it, in the sense that it does not lay down behavioral instructions in great detail but rather permits some choice and allows for a certain freedom of response. Instead of imposing rigid prescriptions, it provides the organism with potentialities and capacities. This openness of the genetic program increases with evolution and culminates in mankind.4 The price of freedom is the imperative of choice. Human beings must choose were to sow and when to reap, when to work and where to live, when to play and what to build. Intelligent, successful choices are possible only if alternative courses of action can be imagined and their consequences envisaged with reasonable accuracy.   2. For further discussion, see my Music, the Arts, and Ideas (Chicago, 1967), p. 50. 3. Rules are transpersonal but intracultural constraints for instance, the pitch/time entities established in some style, as well as grammatical and syntactic regularities. Strategies are general means (constraints) for actualizing some of the possibilities that are potential in the rules of the style. The rules of a style are relatively few, while the number of possible strategies may, depending upon the nature of the rules, be very large indeed. The ways of instantiating a particular strategy are, if not infinite, at least beyond reckoning. 4. François Jacob, The Possible and the Actual (New York, 1982), p. 61. See also Stephen Jay Gould, Ever Since Darwin (New York, 1977), p. 257. Amelie Oksenberg Rorty Experiments in Philosophic Genre: Descartes' Meditations It would be pretty to think that Descartes' Meditations is itself a structured transformation of the meditational mode, starting with the dominance of an intellectual, ascensional mode, moving through the penitential form, and ending with the analytic- architectonic mode. Unfortunately the text does not sustain such an easy resolution to our problems. Instead, we see that different modes seem dominant at different stages; their subterranean connections and relations remain unclear. We could try to construct a nesting of mask, face, and skeleton in Descartes' use of these distinct traditions. He might have unselfconsciously inherited a Stoic skeletal structure, fleshed it with the weight of his analytic-architectonic meditation, and masked it with a penitential meditation for the sake of safety in orthodoxy. But the penitential mode provides essential structural support it cannot be unmasked. And, as we have seen, the analytic-architectonic flesh does not always conform to the Stoic skeletal structure. The problem is that the various readings subtly undermine one another. It is as if the Meditations were composed like a Francis Bacon painting. There are plenty of good solid clues for how to read the composition of the work in fact there are too many. The work we see when using some of those clues is quite different from the work we see when following others. Did Descartes do this deliberately? An extremely chartable reading would turn him into a new sort of Socrates, constructing puzzles to force us to examine the truth of his arguments dialectically. But whatever Descartes may be, he is not Socrates, any more than he is Hume. He is defensive as well as devious, proud as well as prickly; and he is not funny. Menachem Brinker Farce and the Poetics of the Vraisemblable French theorists have recently proposed a theory which describes all literature in terms of the probable, the vraisemblable.6 This poetics of the probable commences with a purely relativistic claim. What is probable not only changes in accordance with the audience's concept of reality but also changes in accordance with the needs of the story and with the narrative possibilities open to various genres. It includes all of the norms and models making a given text understandable to the reader, however outlandish and eccentric it may be. Various levels of the vraisemblable are distinguished from each other, and the vraisemblable based upon models of the world or the world view prevalent in a given culture is scrupulously separated from types of the vraisemblable that are based upon literary, generic models. However, as Tzvetan Todorov gladly admits, "the two notions tend to melt into each other."7 He and other theorists see the literary genre itself as one of the models "probabilizing" a given text, at times in direct contradiction with "natural" models of the world. Still others see the world, or the prevalent world view, as the universal text which probabilizes other texts. […] Rather than how this new concept of the vraisemblable, of probability, fares in relation to farce in films, theater, and literature, I prefer to ask how farce fares in relation to it. I think that it doesn't do well. Farce shows that it is a mistake to unify the possibilities for understanding a text and the possibilities for understanding its fictional world within a single integrated concept. It is a further mistake to term such a concept "probability." When dealing with the fantastic or the marvelous, for instance, probabilizing the text and probabilizing the work's fictional world may legitimately be unified under a single principle or concept. If we agree to change or suspend a fundamental belief about the world, we will be able to perceive as logical and probable not only the texts but also the fictional worlds of such works. Coleridge's "willing suspension of disbelief" excellently fits works that are written in these genres. Such works require that we temporarily forget ("for the moment," as Coleridge would have it) a certain general belief about the world. After we've agreed, as a result of this suspension, to include certain elements in the world (like fairies or witches), we may then rebuild the fictional world while using the rest of our beliefs along with this new assumption.   Farce's incredibility creates a different situation. Before we have even begun to recover from an attack upon one probability principle, another is undermined. In farce the rules of probability are not neutralized in one specific realm of reality; their inversion operates constantly on all of reality's realms. The image of a seemingly real world, reminding us of our own world and of our own set of probabilities, is all we need to be constantly astonished by farce's persistently novel deviations from predictable probability. Here, in direct opposition to the marvelous, the new deviations must keep on coming from unexpected directions, because farce won't allow its incredibilities to consolidate and become new rules of probability. The fictional world of overt farce lacks a specific factor, the one that would have probabilized all of the other factors of this world. Such an Archimedean center might seem to be located in the genre's definition this genre, however, does not probabilize the incredible. Farce's definition does not make farce's world more intelligible in any sense of that word. At the very most, farce allows us to forgo such intelligibility without transgressing the established boundaries of art. 6. For an excellent presentation of their views, see Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature (London, 1975), pp. 131-60. 7. Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca, N.Y., 1977), p. 83. See also his introduction to Communications 11 (1968): 2. Neil Hertz A Reading of Longinus It became customary in the eighteenth century to praise Longinus in ways that mimicked one of his own favorite turns of thought to identify enthusiastically two elements that would more commonly be thought of as quite distinct. To say, with Boileau and Pope, that Longinus "is himself the great Sublime he draws," or to profess to doubt, as Gibbon did, "which is the most sublime, Homer's Battle of the Gods or Longinus' apostrophe…upon it," is knowingly to override certain conventional lines of demarcation between writers and their subject matter, between text and interpretation very much in the manner of Longinus overriding the distinction between Homer and his heroes, between sublime language and its author ("sublimity is the echo of a noble mind"), or between sublime poet and his audience ("we come to believe we have created what we have only heard").1 Longinus' admirers, struck by the force of the treatise, are usually willing to release him from the strictures of theoretical discourse and allow him the license of a poet; they are likely to appreciate his transgressions of conventional limits without ever calling them into question. It has been left to more skeptical readers, wary of Longinus' "transports," to draw attention to his odd movements of thought: W. K. Wimsatt, for example, is unsympathetic but acute when he accuses Longinus of "sliding" from one theoretical distinction to another, a slide "which seems to harbor a certain duplicity and invalidity."2 Wimsatt is right: something one might want to call a "slide" is observable again and again in the treatise, and not merely from one theoretical distinction to another. One finds in the treatise a rhetorician's argument conducted with great intelligence and energy, but one also discovers that it is remarkably easy to lose one's way, to forget which rhetorical topic is under consideration at a particular point, to find oneself attending to a quotation, a fragment of analysis, a metaphor some interestingly resonant bit of language that draws one into quite another system of relationships. I want to attempt to follow that movement here, to hold it in mind and to question its implications. I will look closely at a number of passages in which Longinus interweaves language of his own with that of the authors he admires for it is here, out of the play of text with quotation and of quotations with one another, that the most interesting meanings as well as the peculiar power of the treatise are generated. 1. ‘Longinus' On Sublimity, trans. D. A. Russell (Oxford, 1965), 9. 2, 7. 2; all further references to this work will appear in text, though I have changed a word or two of Russell's translation in the interests of a more literal rendering of the Greek. I am indebted to another recent translation, G. M. A. Grube's Longinus On Great Writing (New York, 1957), and more particularly to the ample and intelligent introduction and notes accompanying Russell's edition of the Greek text, ‘Longinus' On the Sublime (Oxford, 1964). 2. W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History (New York, 1957), p.101. Gerald Graff The Pseudo-Politics of Interpretation Critics, then, who label theories such as objectivism or deconstructionism as "authoritarian" or "subversive" are committing a fallacy of overspecificity. To call Hirsch's theory authoritarian is to assume that such a theory lends itself to one and only one kind of political use and that that use can be determined a priori. To refute such an assumption, one need only stand back from the present in order to recall that today's authoritarian ideology is often yesterday's progressive one, and vice versa. Indeed, there's considerable historical irony in the fact that objectivism has now acquired the status of a right-wing idea, while Nietzsche and Heidegger have emerged as heroes of literary leftism. As recently as a few decades ago, these alignments were different. George Orwell, for instance, thought that the tendency to deny the possibility of objective truth reflected a totalitarian mentality. "Totalitarianism," he wrote, "in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the existence of objective truth." He added that "the friends of totalitarianism in this country tend to argue that since absolute truth is not attainable, a big lie is no worse than a little lie. It is pointed out that all historical records are biased and inaccurate, or, on the other hand, that modern physics has proved that what seems to us the real world is an illusion, so that to believe in the evidence of the senses is simply vulgar philistinism."10 It's not that it hadn't occurred to Orwell that the notion of objective truth could easily be used to justify the actions of tyrants and oppressors. But Orwell's experience of Fascist and Communist falsification of history showed how the denial of the possibility of objectivity could also justify oppressive actions, perhaps in a more disarming way. For various historical reasons, Orwell's insight is easily lost today. His is one of those Enlightenment concepts of truth which have been compromised in usage. As the Enlightenment has come to be associated not with progress, democracy, and equality but with the ideological exploitation of those concepts in the interests of social control, a great moral and political transvaluation of the epistemological vocabulary has occurred. Enlightenment thinking is frequently associated with the bourgeois complacency or the menacing technology of Western democracies or is identified with the totalitarian regimentation of the Soviet Union. Thus the concepts of objective truth, nature, essence, identity, and teleology have come to be viewed as conservative or reactionary ideas, as if these ideas had never operated, and never could operate, in quite other ways.11   10. George orwell, "The Prevention of Literature," The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, 4 vols. (London, 1968), 4: 63-64. 11. As Frederic Jameson has noted, "it is certainly the case that a belief in the natural is ideological and that much of bourgeois art has worked to perpetuate such a belief…. Yet in different historical circumstances the idea of nature was once a subversive concept with a genuinely revolutionary function, and only the analysis of the concrete historical and cultural conjuncture can tell us whether, in the post-natural world of late capitalism, the categories of nature may not have acquired such a critical charge again" ("Conclusion," Aesthetics and Politics [London, 1977], p. 207). Michael Fried The Structure of Beholding in Courbet's Burial at_Ornans The first thing to stress is that although the orientation of the grave implies a point of view somewhere to its left, the attenuation of illusion in the rendering of the grave makes that implication anything but conspicuous. Consequently, a beholder who approaches the Burial by centering himself before it (our natural impulse before an easel painting, and the Burial, for all its size, is simply that), and in so doing exposes himself to the full force of its solicitations toward merger (still more on those in a moment), will very likely not even notice that the grave is skewed relative to the picture plane (if it has been noticed, it hasn't been deemed worth mentioning). Furthermore, the fact that the point of view posited by the orientation of the grave lies opposite the most active and, at first glance, the most confusion portion of the composition also serves to forestall an awareness that such a point of view may be held to exist. Here it is useful to compare the finished painting with the preliminary drawing. In the latter the grave is at the far left; a single procession, to be joined by the pallbearers, makes its way across the sheet; and two figures, the crucifix-bearer and the hatless man at the center (and perhaps a third figure as well, the officiant in a conical hat slightly to the right of the crucifix- bearer), appear to gaze out of the drawing as if at a spectator centered before it. In the finished painting, on the other hand, various processional units are shown converging precisely there; and yet not only does no outward gaze place the beholder directly before the grave, it appears that a deliberate effort has been made to keep the center of the composition blank, as if to install at the ostensible heart of the painting a formal/ontological equivalent to the unemphatic emptiness lying open below it. Thus both the gravedigger and (an inspired touch) the dog turn their heads away from the vicinity of the grave; the mourner to the right of the gravedigger weeps facelessly into a handkerchief; and a barely modulated expanse of black pigment looms like a great blind spot ("Je travaille à l'aveuglette") between the gravedigger and the two veterans of '93. It is as though the Burial's curiously indeterminate affective atmosphere (Clark comments aptly on its "peculiar, frozen fixity of expression" and uses terms like "distraction," "inattention," and "blankness" to characterize both the states of mind of the mourners and the overall mood of the image) comes to a head in this portion of the canvas, which as we have seen bears the principal burden of facilitating the merger of painting and beholder.47 And of course the avoidance of overt address to the beholder that such a strategy implies also helps to reduce the risk of conflict between the generally centering character of the composition as a whole and the slant orientation of the grave.   47. Clark, Image of the People, p.81. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The "Blackness of Blackness": A Critique of the_Sign_and_the Signifying Monkey Perhaps only Tar Baby is as enigmatic and compelling a figure from Afro-American mythic discourse as is that oxymoron, the Signifying Monkey.3 The ironic reversal of a received racist image of the black as simianlike, the Signifying Monkey he who dwells at the margins of discourse, ever punning, ever troping, ever embodying the ambiguities of language is our trope for repetition and revision, indeed, is our trope of chiasmus itself, repeating and simultaneously reversing in one deft, discursive act. If Vico and Burke, or Nietzsche, Paul de Man, and Harold Bloom, are correct in identifying "master tropes," then we might think of these as the "master's tropes," and of signifying as the slave's trope, the trope of tropes, as Bloom characterizes metalepsis, "a trope-reversing trope, a figure of a figure." Signifying is a trope that subsumes other rhetorical tropes, including metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony (the "master" tropes), and also hyberbole, litotes, and metalepsis (Bloom's supplement to Burke). To this list, we could easily add aporia, chiasmus, and catachresis, all of which are used in the ritual of signifying. The black tradition has its own subdivisions of signifying, which we could readily identify with the typology of figures received from classical and medieval rhetoric, as Bloom has done with his "maps of misprision." In black discourse "signifying" means modes of figuration itself. When one signifies, as Kimberly W. Benston puns, one "tropes-a- dope." The black rhetorical tropes subsumed under signifying would include "marking," "loud-talking," "specifying," "testifying," "calling out" (of one's name), "sounding," "rapping," and "playing the dozens."4   3. On Tar Baby, see Ralph Ellison, "Hidden Man and Complex Fate: A Writer's Experience in the United States," Shadow and Act (New York, 1964), p. 147, and Toni Morrison, Tar Baby (New York, 1981). On the black as quasi-simian, see Jean Bodin, Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, trans. Beatrice Reynolds (1945; New York, 1966), p. 105; Aristotle Historia Animalium606b; Thomas Herbert, Some Years Travels (London, 1677), pp. 16-17; and John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 8th ed., 2 vols. (London, 1721), 2:53. 4. Geneva Smitherman defines these and other black tropes and then traces their use in several black texts. Smitherman's work, like that of Claudia Mitchell-Kernan and Abrahams, is especially significant for literary theory. See Smitherman, Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America (Boston, 1977), pp. 101- 66. See also nn. 13 and 14 below. Anne, Margaret, and Patrice Higgonet Façades: Walter Benjamin's Paris "Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century" juxtaposes elliptical descriptions that reveal the interiorization of commodities in the economy of high capitalism. "Allegory in the nineteenth century vacated the outer world, to colonize the inner world."32 Each of the exposé's six sections consists of two parts: "Fourier, or the Arcades," "Daguerre, or the Panoramas," "Grandville, or the World Exhibitions," "Louis-Philippe, or the Interior," "Baudelaire, or the Streets of Paris," "Haussmann, or the Baricades."33 The commercial arcade and not the factory is the logical starting point for Benjamin. Paris, like London, the other capital of nineteenth-century capitalism, is an administrative and financial but not an industrial center. Paris is the locus classicus of bourgeois culture, which finds its most conspicuous expression in the arcade. The arcade cuts through and commercializes the residential block. It harnesses the technology of cast-iron "Pompeian" pillars, to offer in its enticing bay windows the latest, most sophisticated form of bourgeois merchandising. Fourier houses his "land of Cockaigne" in a "reactionary modification" of the arcade.34 Parallel to the technical innovation of the arcades is that of the lifelike painted panoramas, which serve Jacques-Louis David's pupils when they "draw from nature." Politically superior, the city still dreams of the country. "The panoramas, which declare a revolution in the relation of art to technology, are at the same time an expression of a new feeling about life."35 They drive a wedge between "plastic foreground" and "informational base." The worker in the literary panorama is "a trimming for an idyll." Technical innovations in photography (a simultaneously urban and commercial phenomenon) reduce the representational significance of painting. Now photography "is given the task of making discoveries": it explores the sewers and catacombs. It markets events. With impressionism and cubism, painting in turn transcends bourgeois conceptions of realism.   32. "Die Allegorie hat im neunzehnten Jahrhundert die Umwelt geråumt, um sich in der Innenwelt anzusiedeln" (1:681). 33. Adorno objects to the use of people's names in these titles and suggests that objects like dust or plush would bemore illuminating. Benjamin retains the names to evoke bourgeois interiorization. Louis-Philippe, however, is anomalous, since he is emblem rather than allegorist; the true allegorist of the "Louis-Philippe, or the Interior" section is the collector. Otherwise, the organization is strictly symmetrical: Benjamin discusses Charles Fourier, Louis Daguerre, and Grandville at the end of the sections in which they appear, the others at the beginning. 34. Trans. Jephcott, p. 148. "Das Schlaraffenland," "ihre reaktionåre Umbildung" (5:47).   Anne Higonnet, formerly a student at the Ecole du Louvre, is a graduate student of art history at Yale University. Margaret Higonnet, professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Connecticut, has written on Romantic and modern literary theory. Patrice Higonnet is Goelet Professor of French History at Harvard University. He has written on the French Revolution and, with Margaret Higonnet, is coauthor of a forthcoming book on suicide in eighteenth-century France. Garry Wills Washington's Citizen Virtue: Greenough and Houdon Washington eludes us, even in the city named for him. Other leaders are accessible there Lincoln brooding in square-toed rectitude at his monument, a Mathew Brady image frozen in white, throned yet approachable; Jefferson democratically exposed in John Pope's aristocratic birdcage. Majestic, each, but graspable. Washington's faceless monument tapers off from us however we come at it visible everywhere, and perfect; but impersonal, uncompelling. Yet we should remember that this monument, unlike the other two, was launched by private efforts. When government energies were stalled, in the 1830s, subscriptions kept the project alive. Even when Congress took over the project, stones were added by the citizenry, those memorial blocks one can study while descending the long inner stairway. The classical control of the exterior hides a varied and spontaneous interior an image of the puzzle that faces us, the early popularity of someone lifted so high above the populace. The man we can hardly find was the icon our ancestors turned to most easily and often. We are distanced from him by their generosity, their willingness to see in him something more than human. The larger they made Washington, the less they left us to admire until, in Horatio Greenough's George Washington, he becomes invisible by sheer vastness. Greenough took for his model what the neoclassical period believed was the greatest statue ever created, by the greatest sculptor who ever lived the Elean Zeus of Phidias. Since that chryselephantine wonder was no longer extant, artists had to rely on the description given by Pausanias in the Description of Greece, and on coins of Elis that celebrated the work. Here is what Pausanias had to say. The seated god is himself fashioned from gold and ivory; the garland on his head appears to be real olive shoots. In his right hand he holds a Victory, also of gold and ivory, offering a ribbon, a garland on her head. In the god's left hand there is a scepter, encrusted with every kind of metal, and the bird on the tip is an eagle.1   1. Pausanias Description of Greece 5. 11.   Garry Wills, a prize-winning author and journalist, is Henry R. Luce Professor of American Culture and Public Policy at Northwestern University. Among his many books are Nixon Agonistes (1970), Inventing America (1978), and The Kennedy Imprisonment (1982). His forthcoming book, Cincinnatus: George Washington in the Englightenment, will appear in June 1984. His previous contribution to was " (Kritik) in Clausewitz" (December 1982). Robert P. Morgan Secret Languages: The Roots of Musical Modernism It is frequently noted that a "crisis in language" accompanied the profound changes in human consciousness everywhere evident near the turn of the century. As the nature of reality itself became problematic or at least suspect, distrusted for its imposition of limits upon individual imagination so, necessarily, did the relationship of language to reality. Thus in the later nineteenth century, the adequacy of an essentially standardized form of "classical" writing was increasingly questioned as an effective vehicle for artistic expression: even though often in "elevated" form, such writing bore too close a connection to ordinary discourse. Indeed, it was precisely the mutually shared, conventional aspects of language that came to be most deeply distrusted for their failure to mirror the more subjective, obscure, and improbable manifestations of a transcendent reality or, rather, realities the plural reflecting an insistence upon the optional and provisional nature of human experience. Language in its normal manifestations with its conventionalized vocabulary and standardized rules for syntactical combination proved inadequate for an artistic sensibility demanding, in Friedrich Nietzsche's words, "a world of abnormally drawn perspectives." This dissatisfaction with "normal" language received its classic statement through Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Lord Chandos. Writing in 1902, Hofmannsthal conveys through the figure of the aristocratic Chandos the loss of an encompassing framework within which the various objects of external reality are connected with one another and integrated with the internal reality of human feelings. Chandos' world has become one of disparate, disconnected fragments, resistant to the abstractions of ordinary language. It is a world characterized by "a sort of feverish thought, but thought in a material that is more immediate, more fluid, and more intense than that of language." Chandos longs for a new language in which not a single word is known to me, a language in which mute objects speak to me and in which perhaps one day, in the grave, I will give account of myself before an unknown judge."2 The content and forms of art thus shifted away from exterior reality, which no longer provided a stable, "given" material, toward language itself to "pure" language in a sense closely related to the symbolists' "pure" poetry. "No artist tolerates reality," Nietzsche proclaimed.3 And Gustave Flaubert's farsighted advice to himself was that he should write "a book about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the internal strength of its style."4   2. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, "Ein Brief," Gesammelte Werke, ed. Bernd Schoeller with Rudolf Hirsch, 10 vols. (Frankfurt am Main, 1980), 7:471-72; my translation. All further translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. 3. Friedrich Nitzsche, Complete Works, ed. Oscar Levy, 18 vols. (London, 1909-15), vol. 15, The Will to Power, trans. Anthony M. Ludovici, p. 74. 4. Gustave Flaubert, Flaubert to Louise Colet, 16 Jan. 1852, The Letters of Gustave Flaubert 1830-1857, ed. and trans. Francis Steegmuller (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), p. 154. Other passages in this letter are equally remarkable for their "modernist" tone. Flaubert argues that from the standpoint of l'Art pur, "one might almost establish the axiom that there is no such thing as subject style in itself being an absolute manner of seeing things" (p. 154). Further: The finest works are those that contain the least matter; the closer expression comes to thought, the closer language comes to coinciding and merging with it, the finer the result. I believe the future of Art lies in this direction. I see it, as it has developed from its beginnings, growing progressively more ethereal …. Form, in becoming more skillful, becomes attenuated, it leaves behind all liturgy, rule, measure; the epic is discarded in favor of the novel, verse in favor of prose; there is no longer any orthodoxy, and form is as free as the will of its creator. This progressive shedding of the burden of tradition can be observed everywhere: governments have gone through similar evolution, from oriental despotisms to the socialisms of the future. [P. 154]   Robert P. Morgan, professor of music at the University of Chicago, is currently writing a history of twentieth-century music and working on a study of form in nineteenth-century music. His previous contributions to are "On the Analysis of Recent Music" (Autumn 1977) and "Musical Time/Musical Space" (Spring 1980). Gerald L. Bruns Canon and Power in the Hebrew Scriptures Thus it would not be the content or meaning of a written Torah that Jeremiah would attack; rather it would be the Deuteronomic "claim to final and exclusive authority by means of writing" (pp. 38-390). Jeremiah's problem is political rather than theological. He knows that writing is more powerful than prophecy and that he will not be able to withstand it and he knows that the Deuteronomists know no less. As Blenkinsopp says, "Deuteronomy produced a situation in which prophecy could not continue to exist without undergoing profound transformations" (p. 39) that is, without ceasing to be "free prophecy," or prophecy unbound by any text, including its own. "It might be considered misleading or flippant to say that for [Deuteronomy], as for rabbinic orthodoxy, the only good prophet is a dead prophet. But in point of fact the Deuteronomic scribes, despite their evident debt to and respect for the prophets, contributed decisively to the eclipse of the kind of historically oriented prophecy (Geshcichtsprophetie) represented by Jeremiah and the emergence in due course of quite different forms of scribal prophecy" (pp. 38-39; see also pp. 119-20). It is at this point that we reach a sort of outer limit of biblical criticism a threshold that scholars, with their foundations in literary criticism, their analytical attitude toward texts, and their theological concerns, are not inclined to cross. In any case, it is no accident that the political meaning of the conflict of prophecy and canon has received its most serious attention not from a biblical scholar but from a radical historian, Ellis Rivkin. In The Shaping of Jewish History, a brilliant and tendentious book, Rivkin proposes to treat the question of canon-formation and the promulgation of canonical texts of the Scriptures, not according to literary criteria but according to power criteria. For Rivkin, the production of the Hebrew Scriptures "was not primarily the work of scribes, scholars, or editors who sought out neglected traditions about wilderness experience, but of a class struggling to gain power."23   23. Ellis Rivkin, The Shaping of Jewish History: A Radical New Interpretation (New York, 1971), p. 30; further references to this work will be included in the text.   Gerald R. Bruns is professor of English at the University of Iowa. He is the author of Modern Poetry and the Idea of Language (1974) and Inventions: Writing, Textuality, and Understanding in Literary History (1982). The present essay is from a work in progress, Hermeneutics, Ancient and Modern. James Chandler The Pope Controversy: Romantic Poetics and the English_Canon To see what might be at stake in the question of Pope's place in the poetic canon in the question as such, before anything is said of critical theory we must understand that late eighteenth-century England was developing a different sort of canon from the one which Pope and the Augustans had in view. As everyone knows, Pope's classics were, well, classical. His pantheon was populated with poets of another place and time whose stature was globally recognized. One recalls the tribute to these "Bards triumphant" in An Essay on Criticism (1711):                         Still green with Bays each ancient Altar stands,             Above the reach of SacrilegiousHands,             Secure from Flames, from Envy'sfiercer Rage,             Destructive War, and all-involving Age.             See, from each Climes the Learn'd their Incense bring;             Hear, in all Tongues consenting Paeans ring!             In Praise so just, let ev'ry Voice be join'd,             And fill the Gen'ral Chorus of Mankind!14 Pope's song of praise here forms just a part of mankind's "Gen'ral Chorus." These are poets for all climates and languages, and for all nations, even "Nations unborn" and "Worlds…that must not yet be found" (ll. 193-94). Although I want to place adequate stress on Pope's deep commitment to this universalized canon, it would be misleading to suggest that he was completely uninterested in the poetry of his own nation. He studied it an imitated it. He even sketched a plan for a possible history of poetry in England. It is to the point here, however, that this project remained only a sketch and that England would have no major overview of its national accomplishment until the 1770s and 1780s, when Thomas Warton issued the first three volumes of his pioneering History of English Poetry, and Johnson, his Lives of the English Poets. Building on the scholarship of René Wellek, Lawrence Lipking has offered a compelling account of the emergence of these great works at that time, buy reference to the "interested and demanding public" that called for them.15 What the public wanted and got, Lipking explains, "was a history of English poetry, or a survey of English poets, that would provide a basis for criticism by reviewing the entire range of the art. Warton and Johnson responded to a national desire for an evaluation of what English poets had achieved" (p. 238). Such terms are most useful, although "evaluation" connotes a greater degree of neutrality than even Lipking's own subsequent analysis permits. For example, among the public needs served by such work as Johnson's and Warton's, Lipking lists the "patriotic" and the "political" as primary. These needs are obviously related. The patriotic need expresses itself as a hunger for "a glorious national poetic pantheon" (p. 328); that is, for a specifically national rather than a global canon of classics. Such a canon would in turn serve political purposes that Lipking sees motivating "the poets" of mid-century, Thomson and Akenside and Collins and Gray and Mason and Smart," who all "wrote variations on the mythopolitical them of Milton: sweet Liberty, the nymph who had freed English pens to outstrip the cloistered conservative rule- bound verses of less favored nations." Politically, in other words, and this is the crucial point, "English literary history was shaped by the need for a definition of the superiority of the national character" (p. 329).   James Chandler, assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago, is the author of Wordsworth's Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and Politics (forthcoming this autumn). His previous contribution to was "Romantic Allusiveness" (Spring 1982). Michael Fried Painting Memories: On the Containment of the Past_in_Baudelaire_and Manet Near the beginning of Charles Baudelaire's Salon of 1846 one of the most brilliant and intellectually ambitious essays in art criticism ever written the twenty-five-year-old author states that "the critic should arm himself from the start with a sure criterion, a criterion drawn from nature, and should then carry out his duty with a passion; for a critic does not cease to be a man, and passion draws similar temperaments together and exalts the reason to fresh heights."1 It may be the emphasis on passion, indeed on strong personal feeling of every kind, not only here but everywhere in the Salon, that has prevented commentators from taking wholly seriously the possibility that a single criterion is in fact at work throughout it. But what if that criterion operates in the realm of feeling, if it is itself a feeling or complex of feelings, and if, moreover, as Baudelaire as much as says, no conflict between the claims of reason and of passion exists within his conception of the critical enterprise? Not that scholars have failed to recognize either the brilliance or (within limits) the ambitiousness of the Salon of 1846; on the contrary, it is widely regarded as the major extrapoetic text of Baudelaire's early career and especially in recent years has received extensive commentary. But by and large, those who have written about it have focused primarily on topics, such as Baudelaire's conception of nature, his vision of the creative process, and the relation of his ideas to those of other critics, that seem to me, if not quite pseudoproblems, at any rate concerns that lead us to ignore what the text may be saying about its own manner of proceeding.2 I acknowledge, too, that certain features of that manner the mixture of irony and seriousness in the opening dedication to the bourgeois, the many abrupt fluctuations of tone in the body of the essay, the seeming breaks in the argument from section to section, the texture and movement of the prose could hardly be less systematic in effect. And yet it would not be hard to show that the Salon as a whole is the product of a remarkable effort, not merely to ground the judgment of individual works of art in a single experiential principle but also to bind together a number of diverse concerns pictorial, literary, political, philosophical in an intellectually coherent structure every part of which is meant to be consonant with every other. No wonder the last sentence of the Salonapostrophizes Balzac: the sheer inclusiveness of Baudelaire's undertaking recalls nothing so much as the scope of the Comédie humaine.   1. Charles Baudelaire, Salon of 1846, Art in Paris 1845-1862: Salons and Other Exhibitions, ed. and trans. Jonathan Mayne (Ithaca, N.Y., 19810, p. 45; for the original French, see Baudelaire, Salon de 1846, "Curiosités esthétiques," "L'Art romantique," et autres oeuvres critiques,ed. Henri Lemaître (Paris, 1971), pp. 101-2. All further references to the Salon of 1846 (the translation and the original, in that order) will be included parenthetically in the text (occasionally I have modified Mayne's renderings in the interest of greater exactness). I have also consulted the recent edition, Baudelaire: "Salon de 1846," ed. David Kelley (Oxford, 1975), which includes a useful introduction and bibliography. 2. See, for example, Margaret Gilman, Baudelaire, the Critic (New York, 19430, pp. 3-54; Lucie Horner, Baudelaire, critique de Delacrois (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1955; Geneva, 1956), pp. 12-53 and 77-111; F. W. Leakey, "Les Esthétiques de Baudelaire: Le ‘Système' des annés 1844-1847," Revue des sciences humaines, n.s., fasc. 127 (July-Sept. 1967) : 481-96, and Baudelaire and Nature (Manchester, 1969), pp. 73-88; and Kelley, "Deux Aspects du Salon de 1846 de Baudelaire : La Dédicace aux bourgeois et la couleur," Forum for Modern Language Studies 5 (Oct. 1969) : 331-46, and introduction to Baudelaire:"Salon de 1846," pp. 1-114.   Michael Fried, professor of humanities and the history of art and director of the Humanities Center at the Johns Hopkins University, is the author of Morris Louis and Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot. He is currently at work on a book on Gustave Courbet. His most recent contribution to , "The Structure of Beholding in Courbet's Burial at Ornans," appeared in the June 1983 issue. Quentin Bell A "Radiant" Friendship This was to have been a confutation. My intention was to rebut and for the record's sake to correct certain fashionable errors concerning the life of Virginia Woolf. What could be more proper, and what, it has to be said, more tedious? If the defence of truth had remained my only objet, I should have left these words unwritten, or at least should have addressed them to a very small audience. But the pursuit of truth sent me back to my sources, and there I found a story, in many ways sad, but also funny and certainly instructive. It seemed worth extracting this record of a friendship from the great mass of evidence in which it is embedded. I hope that the reader will agree with me in finding it interesting in itself but, just as Prince's Hal's "plain tale" is made livelier by being contrasted with Falstaff's "eleven buckram men," so too the simple facts are made more striking by the intentions of Virginia's recent interpreters. Let me therefore begin with a quotation from one of them. Volume I [of Virginia Woolf's Letters] has a rarely preserved portrait of a female artist in the making, love and work intensely intertwined in her relations with women who encouraged her to write, read, and think, and gave her the nourishment of womanly love and literary criticism, which she was to seek and find in female friendship all her life. Bloomsbury fades into insignificance as an "influence" next to the radiance of Woolf's relationships with Margaret Llewelyn Davies, head of the Cooperative Working Women's Guild, Janet Case, her Greek teacher, violet Dickinson, Madge Vaughan, and her aunt Caroline Stephen, the Quaker whom she called "Nun."1 These words were written by Professor Jane Marcus, a person of great charm and ability, whose opinions are, I understand, accepted by a multitude of admirers. In those articles by her which I have read, she hardly disguises her contempt for me as a biographer. But, painful though it is to have incurred the disdain of so influential a personage, it much be allowed that, if the influence of Virginia Woolf's husband, her sister, and her closest friends "fades into insignificance" when compared with that of Miss Caroline Stephen and Mrs. W. W. Vaughan, then indeed I have gone sadly astray.   Quentin Bell is the author of, among other works, Virginia Woolf: A Biography, Bloomsbury, Ruskin, and On Human Finery. His previous contributions to include "Art and the Elite" (Autumn 1974) and "Bloomsbury and ‘the Vulgar Passions' " (Winter 1979). Ralph W. Rader The Logic of Ulysses; or, Why Molly Had_to_Live_in_Gibraltar "O, rocks!" Molly exclaims in impatience with Bloom's first definition of metempsychosis, "tell us in plain words" (p. 64). Looking forward, then, we remember that Bloom asks Murphy if he has seen the Rock of Gibraltar and (after receiving an ambiguous reply, which Bloom interprets affirmatively) asks further what year that would have been and if Murphy remembers the boats that plied the strait. "I'm tired of all them rocks in the sea," replies Murphy (here characterized as "the wily old customer" [p. 630]).   Bloom's interest derives from Molly's connection with Gibraltar, and Molly herself in her monologue remembers the boats well and thinks of missing the boat at Algeciras (opposite from Europa point), just before the book ends with her thoughts of the awful deepdown torrent," the tide that moves like a river through the strait. Imaginatively she moves with that torrent, figuratively the torrent of time that plunges from the future to the past, which she accepts, with her yes, going deeply with the flow of life, and with her goes Murphy/Joyce, touching on Gibraltar at last. Molly remembers Ulysses S. Grant getting off a boat in Gibraltar, an occurrence that Adams sees as unduly stretching probability merely in order to bring Molly in incidental touch with a man named Ulysses.19 But remembering that Murphy is a "wily old customer," we may remember also that the Ulysses of Joyce's favorite Dante cannot rest with Penelope but, in search of knowledge and excellence, moves on through the two rocks of the straits of Gibraltar, the pillars of Hercules, to further adventure and also to destruction; and we may then think that with this reference, Joyce took pains to tell us that the Ulysses of this book here completes in hidden climax the design and purpose of his work, and sails on to oblivion, or rather to dispersion and reconstitution as everyone in the new adventure of Finnegans Wake.   19. See Adams, Surface and Symbol, p. 233.   Ralph W. Rader, professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Tennyson's "Maud": The Biographical Genesis. He is currently working on a theoretical study of form in the novel and other genres. His previous contributions to include "The Literary Theoretical Contribution of Sheldon Sacks" (Winter 1979) and "The Dramatic Monologue and Related Lyric Forms" (Autumn 1976). Larzer Ziff Whitman and the Crowd On the night of 12 November 1958, Walt Whitman witnessed a meteor shower which he later described in his notebook. The lines never found their way into a published piece. But when he came to write his poem about the year 1859-60, the year in which Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas contested the presidency, John Brown was hanged in Virginia, and the mighty British iron steamship the Great Eastern arrived in New York on its maiden voyage, he remembered the heavenly phenomenon of the year before and began his poem, "Year of meteors! brooding year!"1 Brooding, indeed, because this poem, the first version of which was completed after the Civil War, is concerned with the year in which South Carolina seceded from the United States, thereby plunging the union of Whitman's celebrations into bloody divisiveness. Yet the onset of that event is never mentioned in the poem. Rather, its imminence is expressed in the meteor imagery the portent of human history written in the heavens, a fairly rare example of Whitman employing a traditional literary convention. Among the events of the "Year of meteors," and seemingly the least of them, certainly the one that appears most unconnected with the "brooding," "transient," "strange" atmosphere invoked in the poem, is the visit Edward, Prince of Wales, paid to New York on 11 October 1860 (pp. 238, 239). Whitman saw the prince's procession, recorded it in his notebook, and introduced it, somewhat incongruously, into his poem, devoting three lines to it:             And you would I sing, fair stripling! Welcome                         to you from me, young prince of England!             (Remember your surging Manhattan's crowds as you                         pass'd with your cortege of nobles?             There in the crowds stood I, and singled you out                         with attachment;) [P. 239] 1. Walt Whitman, "Year of Meteors (1859-60)," Leaves of Grass, ed. Sculley Bradley and Harold W. Blodgett (New York, 1973), p. 238; all further references to Whitman's poetry will be cited by page number from this edition and will included in the text.   Larzer Ziff is Caroline Donovan Professor of English at the Johns Hopkins University. He has written several books on American culture, the most recent of which is Literary Democracy: The Declaration of Cultural Independence in America (1981). David Marshall Adam Smith and the Theatricality of Moral Sentiments In Smith's view, the dédoublement that structures any act of sympathy is internalized and doubled within the self. In endeavoring to "pass sentence" upon one's own conduct, Smith writes, "I divide myself, as it were, into two persons; and … I, the examiner and judge, represent a different character from that other I, the person whose conduct is examined into and judged of" (p. 113). Earlier in his book, Smith claims that in imagining someone else's sentiments, we "imagine ourselves acting the part" of that person (p. 75); here he pictures us trying to play ourselves by representing ourselves as two different characters. "The first," writes Smith, "is the spectator, whose sentiments with regard to my own conduct I endeavour to enter into, by placing myself in his situation." The second character, according to Smith, is "the agent, the person whom I properly call myself, and of whose conduct, under the character of a spectator, I was endeavouring to form some opinion" (p. 113). In the version of this chapter that appeared in the first edition, Smith made these roles explicitly by stating that "we must imagine ourselves not the actors, but the spectators of our own character and conduct" (p. 11 n.2). In his final exposition, he makes it clear that we are both actors and spectators of our characters. We are actors not just because we appear before spectators played by ourselves but also because, as Smith describes, we personate ourselves in different parts, persons, and characters. The self is theatrical in its relation to others and in its self-conscious relation to itself; but it also enters the theater because "the person whom I properly call myself" must be the actor who can dramatize or represent to himself the spectacle of self-division in which the self personates two different persons who try to play each other's part, change positions, and identify with each others. Ironically, after founding his Theory of Moral Sentiments on a supposedly universal principle of sympathy, and then structuring the act of sympathy around the epistemological void that prevents people from sharing each other's feelings, Smith seems to separate the self from the one self if could reasonably claim to know: itself. In order to sympathize with ourselves, we must imagine ourselves as an other who looks upon us as an other and tries to imagine us. Indeed, calling the spectator within the self the person judged of, Smith writes, "but that the judge should, in every respect, be the same with the person judged of, is as impossible, as that the cause should in every respect, be the same with the effect" (p. 113). Thus the actor and spectator into which one divides oneself can never completely identify with each other or be made identical. Identity is itself undermined by the theatrical model which pictures the self as an actor who stands beside himself and represents the characters of both spectator and spectacle.14   14. Smith's depiction of the impartial spectator and the relations it creates within the self suggest that he has been reading Shaftesbury. The characterization of the impartial spectator as the "man within the breast" (p. 130) recalls Joseph Butler's discussion of "the witness of conscience" in his sermons "Upon the Natural Supremacy of Conscience" (The Works of Joseph Butler, 2 vols. [Cambridge, Mass., 1827], 2:52, and see 2:47-65. Smith may or may not have read Butler; see Macfie, The Individual in Society, p. 99). Hume discusses the moral value of considering how we appear in the eyes of those who regard us: "By our continual and earnest pursuit of a character, a reputation in the world, we bring our own deportment and conduct frequently in review, and consider how they appear in the eyes of those who approach and regard us. This constant habit of surveying ourselves, as it were, in reflection, keeps alive al the sentiments of right and wrong" (Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, p. 276). It is Shaftesbury, however, who expounds a "doctrine of two persons in one individual self" as he presents his "dramatic method" ("Soliloquy or Advice to an Author," in Characteristics of Men, Manner, Opinions, Times, etc., ed. John M. Robertson, 2 vols. [Gloucester, Mass., 1963], 1:121) …. The terms and figures of theater are clearly inscribed within Smith's characterizations of sympathy and the impartial spectator but they are clearly informed by Shaftesbury's meditation on the dramatic character of the self and the problem of theatricality that threatens the self as it appears before the eyes of the world. This interpretation of Shaftesbury is developed at length in my The Figure of Theater.   David Marshall, assistant professor of English and comparative literature at Yale University, has written on Rilke and Shakespeare. The present essay is adapted from a chapter of his forthcoming book, The Figure of Theater: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith, and George Eliot. Anthony Newcomb Sound and Feeling I do not by any means with to take on the philosophy or aesthetics of music as a whole. In his review of Edward Lippman's Humanistic Philosophy of Music, Monroe Beardsley lists six areas in which an ideal philosophy of music ought to provide guidance: (1) an ontology of music, an answer to the question What is a musical work of art? (2) a taxonomy of music, a categorical scheme for the basic and universal aspects of music; (3) a hermeneutics or semiotics of music, an answer to the question What, if anything, can music refer to? (4) an epistemology of music; (5) a theory of music criticism, an answer to the question What makes one musical work better than another? (6) the foundations of a social philosophy of music.4 My subject here is the third item. I want most particularly to separate it from the fifth item, for to arrive at an interpretation of a particular piece is not to arrive at an evaluation of it. I shall also try, particularly in my discussion of Nelson Goodman's seminal Languages of Art, to avoid the first item.5 And I shall try throughout to avoid embroilment in the question of how the aesthetic experience can be separated from the nonaesthetic. My subject is in fact only a part of the third item above, namely, current theories of musical expression. "Expression" is not equivalent to "meaning"; I understand and shall use the word "expression" to indicate a kind of meaning that entails some kind of reference outside the internal syntax of the artwork itself. As Goodman remarks, "rather obviously, to express is to refer in some way to what is expressed."6 How this reference is made by the artwork is interaction with the listener, and what sort of purpose it serves these concerns will be the focus of this essay. To choose this focus is not to deny something of which I have no doubt, both from Peter Faltin's careful arguments and from my own experience: there is a kind of musical meaning that is purely syntactic, that operates without reference outside the internal operations or procedures of musical systems themselves.7 But through this may be ontologically the most fundamental kind of musical meaning, it is not the only kind. To listen for this alone is not the only way to approach music. Indeed, I should guess it is not the most fundamental way for many listeners.   4. I paraphrase and abbreviate from Monroe C. Beardsley, review of A Humanistic Philosophy of Music by Edward A. Lippman, Musical Quarterly66 (Apr. 1980): 305. 5. See Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols(Indianapolis, 1968); all further references to this work, abbreviated LA, will be included in the text. 6. Goodman, "Reply to Beardsley," Erkenntnis 12, pt. 1 (Jan. 1978): 171; and see Edward T. Cone: "Expressive values in any art … cannot arise from analytical values alone. How could they? Unless one wishes to explain what it could possibly mean for a work of art to ‘express itself,' then one must agree that expression, by its very definition, implies a relationship between the work of art and something else; while analytical values are derivable purely from internal structure" ("Beyond Analysis," Perspectives of New Music 6 [Fall-Winter 1967]: 46).   Anthony Newcomb, professor of music at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of The Madrigal at Ferrara. He is currently at work on a book on musica ficta, Understood Accidentals in Renaissance Vocal Polyphony, 1450-1600, and a study of the relationship between structure and expression in nineteenth- century music. Jonathan Beck Formalism and Virtuosity: Franco-Burgundian Poetry, Music, and Visual Art, 1470-1520 Let us look first at poetry. It is well known that by the fifteenth century, lyric poetry had undergone a radical transformation; the early lyric fluidity and formal variability (the now famous mouvance of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries) had hardened into the nonlyric and even, some maintain, antilyric forms fixeswhich characterize the poetic formalism of late medieval France. Dispensing with the details of how and why this occurred, the essential point is that by the end of the Middle Ages, the poet in France and Burgundy saw himself as an artisan of words, not as a singer.6 He refers to himself as a craftsman (a facteur, faiseur, rhétoricien), and it is plain, sometimes painfully so, to anyone who reads the works that the rhétoriqueur is, indeed, an artisan of forms or, if you will, an architecte de la parole, a specialist in verbal matter. He works words, sounds, metric and strophic forms into intricate patterns and arranges his elaborate designs in blocks of exact and harmonious symmetry. He is, in fact, from Machaut on, a virtuoso of the verbal equivalent of the architectural art of carrelage ("Tile designs") which adorned the princely château in which he worked and lived. No one familiar with the period will avoid noticing the strikingly similar types of patters in the poet's works and in his surroundings. I have gathered elsewhere the visual documentation which bears out Zumthor's suggestions quoted above ("analogies of perception" and "proximity of design") with respect to the meticulously constructivist mentality of the Franco- Burgundian artisan. But the analogies I found are much more than perceptual. It is true that the elaborate designs on the walls, floors, ceilings, windows, woodwork, and so forth of the early Renaissance château are, indeed, composed of intricate blocks of material; but their function is not merely decorative (that is, analogously restricted to this simple plane when compared with contemporaneous poems), it is also narrative, with emblematic motifs and allegorical figures arrayed in linear patterns of "visual" discourse the invariable "discours de la gloire" (see ML, pp. 56-77) which silently proclaims the magnificence of the patron prince and proprietor of the château (see figs. 1-4).7   6. A summary of internal and external factors in the transformation of lyric to Rhetoric is provided in my review of Die musikalische Erscheinungsform der Trouvèrepoesie by Hans-Herbert S. Råkel (Bern, 1977), in Romance Philology 34 (Nov. 1980): 250-58. 7. This following collage of fragments from ML was constructed (like a Renaissance quodlibet) ôto serve as commentary on photographs of tile designs compared with verbal texts, in an earlier version of this paper ("Formal Constructivism in Late Medieval French Poetry: Lyric to Rhetoric, mouvance to formex fixes, canso to carreau"), from which the examples in figs. 1-4 are taken. Culte de l'objet subtilement travaillé, au-delà de toute fonctionnalité primaire (28) *** primat du labeur ardu, patient, du difficile, de l'inattendu (212) *** les mots mêmes semblent travaillés d'un besoin de scientificité fictive, d'anoblissement par le savoir (76) *** les … mots ne sont plus que les particules d'une parole dont la seule signification est globale (50) *** matériau émancipé (autant que faire se peut) des contraintes de la phrase, transposé sur un plan où le signe devient le nom vide de ce signe (195) *** goût du bricolage plutôt que de l'industrie; … du bariolage plus que du fondu et de la nuance; de l'équilibre numéral des parties plus que de la synthèse; du multiple plus que de l'un. Outil forgé martelé d' "aornures" sans fonction utilitaire; enchâssements cubiques, coniques, pyramidaux, cruciformes du bâtiment … meubles marquetés, forrés de tiroirs minuscules et secrets (134) [and so forth]. For the iconography of these examples (and numerous others), see Emile Amé, Less Carrelages émaillés du Moyen Age et de la Renaissance (Paris, 1859), pp. 61-108.   Jonathan Beck is associate professor of French at the University of Arizona. He is the author of Théâtre et propaganda aux débuts de la Réforme(forthcoming in 1984), a sequel to his edition and study, Le Concil de Basle: Le Origines du theater réformiste et partisan en France. Walter A. Davis The Fisher King: Wille zur Macht in Baltimore Interpretation is an institutional activity and that may be the most significant fact about it; we are, indeed, a profession, and as such we train students to think about literature in certain ways. Membership in the community is determined by how well one masters the rules of the game. These inescapable facts may be the source of our greatest problems or their hidden solution. Stanley Fish champions the latter alternative, arguing, in his most recent book, that "the interpretive community" is the ultimate principle of authority in criticism and is capable of resolving all the problems of interpretation.1 If we want to know what reading is, how texts achieve determinate meaning, what constitutes validity in interpretation, or how to resolve the "conflict of interpretations," we must, Fish argues, focus on the community itself, for it is here alone that these matters are determined. Though he has had more than his share of professional attention, having developed this argument makes Fish's work worthy of further consideration. He quite simply presents the best picture we are likely to get of the "mind" of the profession, and, in treating him at length here, I am primarily concerned with his representative status. His great achievement is to have articulated the assumptions and beliefs underlying the practices that are favored in our profession: the tacit theoretical position composed of ideas and commonplaces that are so deeply held and constantly in use that they "prestructure" both our dealings with literature and our debates over those dealings. While remaining for the most part "unconscious," these ideas nevertheless function as self-evident and unassailable truths. (Fish's focus on general rules shared by everyone cuts across both the debates among theorists of different persuasions and the old opposition between theory and practical criticism.) If we are to move, as I think we must, toward experiencing a crisis in our discipline, we first have to know where we are. And for that, Fish is invaluable because he has set out to become the official spokesman and efender of the profession.   Walter A. Davis, associate professor of English at the Ohio State University, is the author of The Act of Interpretation: A Critique of Literary Reason. The present essay is from a recently completed work on contemporary criticism. He is currently writing a book on modern American drama. Stanley Fish Fear of Fish: A Reply to Walter Davis Perhaps the best place to begin would be with the model or picture of things Davis opposes to mine. It is a familiar model that has at its center an independent text, or at least a text that is independent enough to provide "common reference points" that serve as a check against, and a means of discriminating between, the operation of different interpretive strategies (p. 681). In my account of interpretation, Davis complains, there is no such check, and therefore different interpretive strategies are free to "create completely different texts with no point of comparison"; as a result, "all attempts to ground criticism in commonly observed data are ruled out" (p. 681). Davis cites as a piece of "commonly observed data," which in my argument "suddenly become[s] problematic," the fact that "God is represented as somewhat ponderous and dull in book 3 of Paradise Lost" (p. 681). Now it is certainly the case that much criticism has been grounded in this piece of data, and it is also the case that it has been "commonly observed," in the sense that many commentators begin by assuming it before proceeding either to lament it or explain it or explain it away. The question I would ask, however, is "What is its source?" Davis' answer is already given; its source is the text; but I would suggest that its source is a tradition of literary judgment at least as old as the pronouncements of Alexander Pope, a tradition that over a period of time was consolidated and became so authoritative that it acquired the status of a commonplace, which, in combination with other related commonplaces, made up the context within which the act of reading occurred. In short, I would want to historicize (and perhaps rhetorize) the category of commonly observed data, and I would do this in part by pointing out first, that the category is a relational one formed not by direct inspection but by a system of differences that inform perception and second, that what is in the category can change (although change is one of the things Davis claims that I cannot accommodate).   Stanley Fish is the William Kenan, Jr., Professor of English and the Humanities at the Johns Hopkins University. His contributions to include "Working on the Chain Gang: Interpretation in the Law and in Literary Criticism" (September 1982) and "Profession Despise Thyself: Fear and Self-Loathing in Literary Studies" (December 1983). Walter A. Davis Offending the Profession (After Peter Handke) Interpretation is an institutional activity and that may be the most significant fact about it; we are, indeed, a profession, and as such we train students to think about literature in certain ways. Membership in the community is determined by how well one masters the rules of the game. These inescapable facts may be the source of our greatest problems or their hidden solution. Stanley Fish champions the latter alternative, arguing, in his most recent book, that "the interpretive community" is the ultimate principle of authority in criticism and is capable of resolving all the problems of interpretation.1 If we want to know what reading is, how texts achieve determinate meaning, what constitutes validity in interpretation, or how to resolve the "conflict of interpretations," we must, Fish argues, focus on the community itself, for it is here alone that these matters are determined. Though he has had more than his share of professional attention, having developed this argument makes Fish's work worthy of further consideration. He quite simply presents the best picture we are likely to get of the "mind" of the profession, and, in treating him at length here, I am primarily concerned with his representative status. His great achievement is to have articulated the assumptions and beliefs underlying the practices that are favored in our profession: the tacit theoretical position composed of ideas and commonplaces that are so deeply held and constantly in use that they "prestructure" both our dealings with literature and our debates over those dealings. While remaining for the most part "unconscious," these ideas nevertheless function as self-evident and unassailable truths. (Fish's focus on general rules shared by everyone cuts across both the debates among theorists of different persuasions and the old opposition between theory and practical criticism.) If we are to move, as I think we must, toward experiencing a crisis in our discipline, we first have to know where we are. And for that, Fish is invaluable because he has set out to become the official spokesman and defender of the profession.   Walter A. Davis, associate professor of English at the Ohio State University, is the author of The Act of Interpretation: A Critique of Literary Reason. The present essay is from a recently completed work on contemporary criticism. He is currently writing a book on modern American drama. Stanley Fish Fear of Fish: A Reply to Walter Davis It may seem that I am simply confirming Davis' assertion (and accusation) that in my view of the critical process "different interpretive strategies create completely different texts with no point of comparison" (p. 681); but the differences are not all that complete. While many readers now see (and argue for) a God who is more dramatically effective than Pope's "school divine," they still see a God who exists in a defining relationship with the figure of Satan, a Satan who is himself significantly changed from the energy-bearing Byronic antihero who was for so long a "given" in the interpretive landscape. The point is, again, that changes do not occur in isolation, because the facts that have undergone change (and, on occasion, dislodgment) did not exist in isolation either. In the history of Milton criticism, any judgment against God is always and simultaneously a judgment for Satan (of course the ways of making thatpositive judgment are themselves varied); and it follows that a reversal in one pole of the judgment cannot occur without a corresponding that is, related reversal in the other. Any increase in the literary "cash value" of Milton's God will be registered at the expense of his Satan. In short, since literary judgments or observations are not made piecemeal, the process of challenging and (perhaps) changing them is not piecemeal either. That is why it is not "contradictory," as Davis asserts, "to talk about recalcitrant features of a text" in the context of a thesis that makes the text's features a function of interpretation (p. 672). The source of recalcitrance or resistance is not the text as it exists independently of interpretation, but the text as an authoritative and elaborated interpretation has given it to us. I stress "elaborated" because the interpretation is not a single assertion but a complex of assertions; and when a challenge is made to the interpreted text at one point, its other points constitute a reservoir from which objections and "counterchallenges" can emerge. Thus, when someone offers a revisionist account of Milton's God, a skeptical or unpersuaded reader will respond by observing that this account is incompatible with what we know to be true about other parts of the poem: the characterization of Satan, or of the War in Heaven, or of books 11 and 12. It is then the obligation of the revisionist critic either to demonstrate there is no incompatibility or (and this is the more usual path) to extend his new reading in such a way as to recharacterize those parts of the poem that seem to stand as refutations of the revisionist's reading. He will then be working against resistance, but it will not be the resistance of something that stands outside interpretation; rather it will be the resistance offered by one interpretively produced shape to the production of another.   Stanley Fish is the William Kenan, Jr., Professor of English and the Humanities at the Johns Hopkins University. His contributions to include "Working on the Chain Gang: Interpretation in the Law and in Literary Criticism" (September 1982) and "Profession Despise Thyself: Fear and Self-Loathing in Literary Studies" (December 1983). Walter A. Davis Offending the Profession Fish has always been adept at revising his position to incorporate what he's learned from his critics while repaying the favor by assigning them a position they never took. The latter practice naturally helps conceal the borrowings, but as Fish's position evolves it becomes progressively difficult to determine who is the author of his essays. (Fish Unlimited Inc., abc) I am, of course, gratified to see how much Fish has learned from me. It is salutary to find that Fish is finally just a humble historian working with others at "recovering a system of thought and feeling" (p. 697) that will enable us to establish the historical context of Milton's most probable intentions and realizing, as many historians of literature don't, that we can only do so by bringing concepts provided by literary theory form, function, artistic purpose, and so forth to bear on the mass of historical materials at our disposal.3 It is also gratifying to see that Fish has discovered the law of context and now realizes that there are no local matters. Had he discovered that earlier, we'd have been spared Aunt Tilly and the discussion of Mr. Collins as well as the general notion extrapolated from those examples that anything a sizable group decides to do will fly since nothing else constraints interpretation. We'd also have been spared the concepts of reading and affective criticism presented in Fish's early work and the unchecked linguistic hijinks used to sustain those readings. I derive my deepest pleasure, however, from finding that Fish has finally discovered the conflict of interpretations proper and its primacy "the resistance offered by one interpretively produced shape to the production of another" (p. 699) though I must sadly abridge this progress report by noting that he finds himself powerless to do anything with this recognition. That is as it must be, for the most interesting thing about Fish's borrowings is where he stops and why he has to. Having let me write the first 5 ½ pages of his reply, he suddenly stops taking dictation so that he can simply reassert, in all its abstract glory, his tried-and-true resolution of all interpretive controversy by community interest. Had he read further, he would have discovered that a good deal more emerges if one attempts to preserve and deal with the conflict of interpretations rather than to do away with it. He would even have discovered my epistemology and would have learned the main lesson that his position is not an alternative to mine but an early moment it contains and sublates in a larger context. Have taught Fish so much, I found myself, instead, poorly repaid by the position he foists upon me. Constantly caught up in an effort to reiterate the dichotomy on which his entire theorizing depends, Fish's fixed need is to rework all disputes into an opposition between the party of independent fact-disinterested reason and the party of interest so that he might triumphantly resolve all difficulties by once again discovering the simple fact of interests. Lest this strategy hide behind a common misconception, our debate is not a case where distinct frameworks are simply misreading one another, as they must, but one where one framework must deliberately and seriously misread others since it has no other way to sustain itself. If the account Fish gives of my argument is the way things must look from his framework, all that this fact signifies is the paucity of his framework and its inability to achieve even minimal descriptive adequacy.   3. But even here things are a good deal more complex than Fish imagines. For a good statement of the logic and problems of historical interpretation, see Robert Marsh, "Historical Interpretation and the History of Criticism," in Literary Criticism and Historical Understanding, ed. Philip Damon (New York, 1967), pp. 1-24. Richard Rorty Deconstruction and Circumvention I think … we ought to distinguish two sense of "deconstruction." In one sense the word refers to the philosophical projects of Jacques Derrida. Taken this way, breaking down the distinction between philosophy and literature is essential to deconstruction. Derrida's initiative in philosophy continues along a line laid down by Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger. He rejects, however, Heidegger's distinctions between "thinkers" and "poets" and between the few thinkers and the many scribblers. So Derrida rejects the sort of philosophical professionalism which Nietzsche despised and which Heidegger recovered. This does indeed lead Derrida in the direction of "a general, undifferentiated textuality." In his work, the philosophy-literature distinction is, at most, part of a ladder which we can let go of once we have climbed up it. In a second sense of "deconstruction," however, the term refers to a method of reading texts. Neither this method, nor any other, should be attributed to Derrida who shares Heidegger's contempt for the very idea of method.2 But the method exists, and the passage I have quoted from Culler describes one of its essential features. Culler is quite right to say that deconstruction, in the second sense, needs a clear distinction between philosophy and literature. For the kind of reading which has come to be called "deconstructionist" requires two different straight persons: a macho professional philosopher who is insulted by the suggestion that he has submitted to a textual exigency, and a naive producer of literature whose jaw drops when she learns that her work has been supported by philosophical oppositions. The philosopher had thought of himself as speaking a sparse, pure, transparent language. The poetess shyly hoped that her unmediated woodnotes might please. Both reel back in horror when the deconstructionist reveals that each has been making use of complex idioms to which the other has contributed. Both go all to pieces at this news. A wild disorder overtakes their words. Their whimpers lend into interminable androgynous keening. Once again, deconstructionist intervention has produced a splendidly diffuse irresolution.   Richard Rorty is Kenan Professor of Humanities at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Consequences of Pragmatism and is currently writing a book on Martin Heidegger. Brook Thomas The Legal Fictions of Herman Melville and Lemuel_Shaw I have three aims in this essay. (1) I want to offer an example of an interdisciplinary historical inquiry combining literary criticism with the relatively new field of critical legal studies. (2) I intend to use this historical inquiry to argue that the ambiguity of literary texts might better be understood in terms of an era's social contradictions rather than in terms of the inherent qualities of literary language or rhetoric and, conversely, that a text's ambiguity can help us expose the contradictions masked by an era's dominant ideology. (3) I try to prove my assertion by applying my method to Herman Melville's three most famous short works "Benito Cereno," "Bartleby, the Scrivener," and Bill Budd, Sailor works dealing with the law and lawyers and widely acknowledged as ambiguous.1 I will base my critical inquiry into these stories on Melville's relationship with his father-in-law, Lemuel Shaw, who, while sitting as the chief justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts from 1830 to 1860, wrote some of the most important opinions in what Roscoe Pound has called "the formative era of American law."2 Before I get started, I should clarify what this study does not entail. By using Shaw and his legal decisions in conjunction with Melville's fiction, I am not conducting a positivistic influence study. My method will not depend on the positivist assumption that Shaw's legal opinions can be used to illuminate Melville's texts only when his direct knowledge of Shaw's opinions can be proved. Nor will I limit myself to a traditional psychoanalytic reading: my emphasis is on political and social issues, and too often these issues are deflected by translating them into psychological ones. At the same time, I recognize that critics concerned with political and social issues too often neglect questions raised by a writer's individual situation. I compare Shaw to Melville not to reduce Melville's politics to psychology but to prevent a political study from neglecting the political implications of psychology, to remind us as the title of Fredric Jameson's book The Political Unconscious reminds us that psychological questions always have political implications.   1. See Herman Melville, "Benito Cereno," "Bartleby," and Billy Budd, Sailor, "Billy Budd, Sailor" and Other Stories, ed. Harold Beaver (Harmondsworth, 1967); all further references to these works will be included in the text. 2. See Roscoe Pound, The Formative Era of American Law (Boston, 1938). For discussions of Melville and Lemuel Shaw, see Charles Roberts Anderson, Melville in the South Seas, Columbia University Studies in English and Comparative Literature, no. 138 (New York, 1966), pp. 432-33; Charles H. Foster, "Something in Emblems: A Reinterpretation of Moby-Dick," New England Quarterly 34 (Mar. 1961): 3-35; Robert L. Gale, "Bartleby Melville's Father-in-Law," Annali sezione Germanica, Istituto Universitario Orientale di Napoli 5 (Dec. 1962): 57-72; Keith Huntress, " ‘Guinea" of White-Jacket and Chief Justice Shaw," American Literature 43 (Jan. 1972): 639-41; Carolyn L. Karcher, Shadow over the Promised Land: Slavery, Race and Violence in Melville's America (Baton Rouge, La., 1980), pp. 9-11 and 40; John Stark, "Melville, Lemuel Shaw, and ‘Bartleby,' " in Bartleby, the Inscrutable: A Collection of Comentary on Herman Melville's Tale "Bartleby the Scrivener,"ed. M. Thomas Inge (Hamden, Conn., 1975), all further references to this work, abbreviated JA, will be included in the text.   Brook Thomas teaches English and American literature at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. He is the author of James Joyce's "Ulysses": A Book of Many Happy Returns and is at work on a study of the relations between law and literature in antebellum America. David Simpson Criticism, Politics, and Style in Wordsworth's Poetry Questions could and should be raised about the political profile of English Romanticism both in particular and in general. Wordsworth's poetry is especially useful to me here because of the way in which, through formal discontinuities, it dramatizes political conflicts. Reacting against these discontinuities, aesthetically minded critics have simply tended to leave out of the canon those poems which have the greatest capacity to help us become aware of a political poetics. In this respect it may well be that Wordsworth is the most stylistically perverse of the Romantic poets. Not the most difficult to read, necessarily Percy Bysshe Shelley's breath-suspending songs and William Blake's determination to produce "variety in every line" with the aim of unfettering poetry surely make more aggressive and obvious demands on the reader.1 But in these cases we can be reasonably sure that the difficulties are part of a conscious and coherent intention to set imagination to work in kindling sparks from ashes. Wordsworth also set out to do this, and we can agree that he did so with some success in some poems. But critics from Samuel Taylor Coleridge onward have rightly questioned the unity of Wordsworth's canon in this respect. In Biographia Literaria, Coleridge notices the "inconstancy of the style," an unevenness and a general inability to satisfy the demands of "good poetry" conceived as something possessing an organic form.2 This concern with a wholeness and consistency of artifice is more Coleridge's than Wordsworth's, and it seems to me that it is precisely the disjunctions in the poems that embody some of their most original and historically urgent meanings. The blemishes recorded by Coleridge alternating and dissimilar states of feeling, overminuteness in description, and obsession with "accidental circumstances" (BL, 2:126), overuse of the dramatic mode, disproportion of thought to event, and so forth can in fact serve as eloquent signals for discerning the complexities of the poems as they address a historical crisis in consensus (both social and literary) embodied exactly in the unstable vehicle of the Wordsworthian speaker.3   3. I have explored the "formal" implications of this crisis in Irony and Authority in Romantic Poetry (London and Totowa, N.J., 1979), and the terms of its historical discourse in Wordsworth and the Figurings of the Real (London and Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1982).   David Simpson is professor of English at Northwestern University. He is the author of Irony and Authority in Romantic Poetry (1979), Wordsworth and the Figurings of the Real (1982), and Fetishism and Imagination: Dickens, Melville, Conrad (1982) and editor of German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Hegel (1984). Gerald Mast On Framing One of the common and commonsensical ways to distinguish cinema from every other art and semiotic system, and to define the property of its uniqueness, is to claim that cinema is the only art/"language" that links images. This "linking" can imply three different yet complementary operations. First, cinema links individual still photographs into an apparently continuous sequence of movement by pushing the individual frames or photographs through a camera or projector at sixteen or twenty-four or however many frames per second. Second, cinema links images by editing (or cutting, or montage, or decoupage), by splicing together individual shots, which are continuous chains of linked frames. Finally, cinema links images with sounds, synchronously or otherwise. The only problem with such an apparently unrestrictive and unprescriptive definition of cinema and the "cinematic" is that it obscures an essentially cinematic operation that precedes the linking of cinema images: the image must first be framed before it can be linked with another. But is framing unique to cinema? Don't paintings have frames? Aren't photographs frames?  Isn't the theater's proscenium arch a frame? A consequence of such perfectly sensible questions is a consistent undervaluing of the cinema frame as an essentially and uniquely cinematic tool, unlike that of any other art, producing serious errors in the writing of film theory and serious misunderstandings of the processes of film history. The goal of this article is to diagnose some of these errors (arising from mistaken assumptions and complementary prejudices) so they might someday be cured.   Gerald Mast is professor of English and general in the humanities at the University of Chicago. Among his many books are A Short History of the Movies, The Comic Mind: Comedy and the Movies, Film/ Cinema/Movie, The Movies in Our Midst,and Howard Hawks, Storyteller.His previous contributions to are "What Isn't Cinema?"(December 1974) and "Kracauer's Two Tendencies and the Early History of Film Narrative" (Spring 1980). Anthony J. Niesz and Norman N. Holland Interactive Fiction The structure of traditional fiction is essentially linear or serial. No matter how complex a given work may be, it presents information to its reader successively, one element at a time, in a sequence determined by its author. By contrast, interactive fiction is parallel in structure or, more accurately, dendritic or tree- shaped. Not one, but several possible courses of action are open to the reader. Further, which one actually happens depends largely, though not exclusively, upon the reader's own choices. To be sure, the author is still in overall control, since it is she who has set up the particular nexus of events, but the route up the narrative tree, the actual sequence of events, is generally affected, if not completely determined, by the reader's responses to that particular reader's specific situation. In an adventure, the sequence of action frequently depends upon the reader's decision to go in one geographical direction rather than another. In the eliza sample, the content of the "story" depends on such particulars as whether this reader has a brother or not, whether she fears her father, and why she has consulted the terminal. In general, the text presented to the eliza-reader depends on what that reader has already said and how the computer has interpreted and stored it, and this is generally true of interactive fiction. Further, interactive fiction is, in principle (if not in practice), open-ended infinite. A conversation with eliza could go on for as long as one with Woody Allen's psychoanalyst in principle, forever. It has no necessary terminus. The program will go one writing texts and answers on the screen as long as the reader or player chooses to supply responses. Further, the computer can act as a metafictional narrator like John Barth or Thomas Pynchon who can create a story within a story or a story that generates another story within itself which generates another story within itself and so on, fictions dizzying and dazzling. One senses one's essential humanity wobbling in the midst of the infinite paradoxes of existence and meaning.   Anthony J. Niesz, assistant professor of German at Yale University, is the author of Dramaturgy in German Drama: From Gryphius to Goethe (1980). He is interested in the phenomenon of the meta- theater, especially in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century German drama, as well as in the literature and cultural policies of the German Democratic Republic. Norman N. Holland is Milbauer Eminent Scholar at the University of Florida. He is the author of Laughing (1982) and The I (forthcoming in 1985). Strother B. Purdy Technopoetics: Seeing What Literature Has to Do with_the_Machine What I refer to is how our thought in inventing, designing, modifying, and using machines carries over into acts we do not consciously associate with them like writing or reading poetry. An airplane in flight may be "pure poetry," or a Ferrari "a poem in steel"; it intrigues me to consider that beneath such object comparisons an object-of-thought connection may be made. Or in other words, there may be really something to a hackneyed compliment like "poem in steel." ("Ah, commendatore, tu sei veramente in gamba! Questa volta c'è la poesia di acciaio!") My preference for thought form over object form makes me less interested in machines that we can see than in those that we can't, and it makes me direct my inquiry along two lines, concerning two questions about invisibility. The first involves the history of technology: How is it that machines "disappear" become less visible, impinge less and less upon popular consciousness? The effect cannot be imputed entirely to familiarity. The second involves the history of literature: If machines have disappeared, are there "disappeared" or "invisible" machines in literature? It is reasonably clear that we go to considerable lengths to hide the machines that surround us and that we choose, or our artists choose, insofar as such choice can be located, to restrict the appearance of machines in art.3 Commonly their restricted appearance in art is understood as a kind of resistance to some form of machine takeover, while their concealment has only uncommonly received analysis and is not generally discussed in context with the matter of artistic representation. But we do accept, at least in theory, the idea that style of living and style in literature are connected. If the machine penetrates our style of living, then and this is the end of my inquiry these invisibilities are of interest to literary criticism, for they have something to do with the way literature is written, with whether or not, that is, writers choose to describe machines, use them as characters, or give them any role at all to play in surface structure. Since the artist often works to reveal what his society works to conceal and since the postmodern period has so far been one of crisis in the relations between society and technology, we may expect to find in postmodern fiction, or in writing to come, some greater revelation or simple exposure of the workings, than we could have seen before.   3. I use "restrict" in a statistical sense, for since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution there have been artists to celebrate the machine; today's hyperrealist movement offers contemporary examples. These artists Tom Blackwell, Ron Kleemann, Ralph Goings, and others work a transformation like that of Andy Warhol with the pop object. They present not so much a celebration as an effort to turn looking into seeing, here directed at automobiles in particular, so much a part of everyday life as to have become (despite all efforts of the advertising industry) indistinguishable from one another and as a species from the other parts of the semiurban landscape the mailbox, the front lawn, the visiting relatives staring into the camera.   Strother B. Purdy is the author of The Hole in the Fabric: Science, Contemporary Literature, and Henry James. His previous contributions to are "Stalingrad and My Lai: A Literary-Political Speculation" (Summer 1979) and "Reply to Lawrence W. Hyman (Summer 1980). Michael Riffaterre Intertextual Representation: On Mimesis as Interpretive Discourse If we try to arrive at the simplest and most universally valid definition of the representation of reality in literature, we may dispense with grammatical features such as verisimilitude or with genres such as realism, since these are not universal categories. Their applicability depends on historical circumstances or authorial intent. The most economic and general definition, however, must at least include the following two features. First, any representation presupposes the existence of its object outside of the text and preexistent to it. Readers feel, and critics pronounce, that the text's significance depends on this objective exteriority, even though this significance may entail destroying the commonplace acceptance of the object; indeed, negating something still presupposes that something. Second, the reader's response to the mimesis consists in a rationalization tending to verify and complete the mimesis and to expand on it sensory terms (through visualizations, for instance). The metalanguage of criticism accordingly prolongs and continues the text's mimetic discourse, and critics evaluate representation in terms of its precision and suggestive power. Both processes presupposition and rationalization alike assume that referentiality is the basic semantic mechanism of the literary mimesis. There are, however, literary representations almost devoid of descriptive content, or so vague and so skimpy that their object cannot be analyzed or rationalized in sensory terms. Criticism is hard put to explain why readers feel compelled to evaluate them. And yet these texts not only lend themselves to interpretation but they are especially apt to trigger and control the reader's hermeneutic behavior. In short, the represented object eschews referentiality yet refuses to vanish altogether, becoming instead the verbal vehicle of an interpretive activity that ends up by making the object subservient to the subject.1   1. See Roland Barthes et al., Littérature et réalité (Paris, 1982), esp. my paper, pp. 81-118, on the referential fallacy.   Michael Riffaterre, University Professor at Columbia University, is the editor of Romantic Review. He is presently working on a book about Anthony Trollope (forthcoming in 1985). His previous contribution to , "Syllepsis," appeared in the Summer 1980 issue. Edward Pechter When Pechter Reads Froula Pretending She's Eve Reading_Milton;_or, New Feminist Is But Old Priest Writ Large According to Froula, Paradise Lost is aimed at affirming or reaffirming the power of orthodox authority, by locating its source in an invisible being beyond understanding or question. In this respect, Milton's own authority is analogous to that of the metaphorical priest in the Virginia Woolf passage quoted at the beginning of Froula's essay, who can claim a direct connection, presumably derived from the laying on of hands, with this original authority to which the rest of us have no access. It is an odd analogy: Milton and a priest. It sorts very badly with everything we know about Milton, who was dedicated to the eradication of formal instutitional authority in favor of freedom of conscience. What is more important, such a view sorts oddly with the working of Paradise Lost itself. If we try to read Paradise Lost as an attempt to affirm orthodox authority by mystifying it, we run immediately into some major problems well before "Hee for God only, shee for God in him." The first of these problems is Satan, who is, as we all know, in many ways an impressively heroic figure. Satan directly affirms the autonomy that Eve is said to be made to repress in the story she tells of her creation in book 4. This Satanic affirmation, moreover, is also made to depend upon a creation story. In book 5, responding to Abdiel's argument that he owes gratitude to God for his creation, Satan says that he doesn't remember any time when he was not as he is. The notion that God created him is, Satan declares, a "strange point and new" (5.855). If Milton's purpose in the poem is the affirmation of authority, why has he made the proponent of autonomy and rebellion into such an impressive figure?   Edward Pechter, associate professor of English at Concordia University in Montreal, is the author of Dryden's Classical Theory of Literature and is currently completing a book on Shakespeare and contemporary theory. Christine Froula Pechter's Specter: Milton's Bogey Writ Small; or, Why_Is_He_Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The specter of Mr. Pechter's complaints haunted me as I wrote "When Eve Reads Milton," as those friends who helped me to write by continually banishing it can attest. This ghost seemed somehow familiar, a shadow of Milton's bogey or an echo of that angel in the house who still stalks the precincts of academia. Indeed, if Mr. Pechter did not exist, I confess that I could have invented him, although the specter of my imagining was rather more daunting, with his perfect command of my arguments, urbane bearing, and formidable learning. Never mind. The materialization of this specter in any form elicits some important issues that my article itself could not address; so I must thank Mr. Pechter for the trouble of his reply. The difficulty that I find in answering him, however, is that he responds to my arguments by ignoring them, substituting for them certain inventions of his own. While I could cheerfully join Mr. Pechter in dismissing much of what he says I say, I'm afraid the credit for it goes to him. The best refutation I can offer is the original essay, but it would be a waste of time to reiterate that here. Nor does it make sense, given the extent to which his representation of my essay differs from the essay itself, to refute him point by point. Instead, I will attempt to describe what I think is the crux of our dispute and to propose a way of reconciling our positions. Our disagreement arises, it seems to me, from the fact that, although he and I look at Paradise Lost from two quite different perspectives, Mr. Pechter is able to recognize only one. Since he does not grant that women's position and history in patriarchal culture place us at a vantage point which differs in some fundamental ways from that of readers like himself, who identify strongly with that culture, he cannot grasp indeed, cannot even read my arguments. It is not surprising, then, that such scattered impressions as he does pick up should seem to him not merely different from himself but, as he repeatedly says, "very strange." Mr. Pechter has an interesting way of coping with difference, however; even as he professes to find the essay very strange, he goes to great lengths to claim that in fact I am saying nothing new. My argument, he says, has been anticipated by Milton criticism and indeed by Milton's own Protestant resistance to orthodox authority. This position, so he thinks, already incorporates all imaginable differences, all possible inner voices, in itself. By these lights, there is no need and no use for a feminist critique of Miltonic authority, for it can only perform unoriginally, unnecessarily, indeed, redundantly another repetition of the poem and its critical history.   Christine Froula is associate professor of English at Yale University. Her most recent book is "To Write Paradise": Style and Error in Pound's Cantos; she is currently working on a book about literary authority in James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. "When Eve Reads Milton: Undoing the Canonical Economy," her previous contribution to Critical Inquiry,appeared in the December 1983 issue. Murray Krieger The Ambiguities of Representation and Illusion: An E._H._Gombrich Retrospective It is difficult to overestimate the impact, beginning in the 1960s, which Gombrich's discussion of visual representation made on a good number of theorists in an entire generation of thinking about art and even more about literary art. For literary theory and criticism were at least as affected by his work as were theory and criticism in the plastic arts. Art and Illusionradically undermined the terms which had controlled discussion of how art represented "reality" or, rather, how viewers or members of the audience perceived that representation and related it to their versions of "reality." And, for those who accompanied or followed him from Rosalie Colie to Wolfgang Iser Gombrich helped transform for good the meaning of a long revered term like "imitation" as it could be applied to both the visual and verbal arts. I believe he must, then, be seen as responsible for some of the most provocative turns that art theory, literary theory, and aesthetics have taken in the last two decades. In much of his work since the 1960s, however, Gombrich has appeared more and more anxious to dissociate himself from those who have treated his earlier books and essays as leading to the theoretical innovations which have claimed support from them. In The Image and the Eye, the statements which put distance between himself and such followers seem utterly unambiguous. And against the charge that his work has become more conservative with the passing years, I suspect Gombrich would argue that any claim of difference between, say, Art and Illusion and The Image and the Eye is a result of an original misreading, that the recent work is only more explicitly defending a traditional position which was quietly there all along, though supposedly friendly theorists wrongly saw him as subverting it in the earlier work. Thus Gombrich is now self-consciously committed to undoing what he sees as our errors of reading rather than his own errors of writing.   Murray Krieger is University Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of, among other works, The Tragic Vision, The Classic Vision, Theory of Criticism: A Tradition and Its System, Poetic Presence and Illusion: Essays in Critical History and Theory, and, most recently, Arts on the Level. He is presently working on Ekphrasis: Space, Time, and Illusion in Literary Theory(forthcoming). His latest contribution to Critical Inquiry, "Poetic Presence and Illusion: Renaissance Theory and the Duplicity of Metaphor," appeared in the Summer 1979 issue. E. H. Gombrich Representation and Misrepresentation It is a thankless task to have to reply to Professor Murray Krieger's "Retrospective." Qui s'excuse, s'accuse, and since I cannot ask my readers to embark on their own retrospective of my writings and test them for consistency, I have little chance of restoring my reputation in their eyes. Hence I would have been happier to leave Professor Krieger to his agonizing, if he did not present himself the "spokesman" for a significant body of theorists who appear to have acclaimed my book on Art and Illusion without ever having read it. The followers of this school of criticism of which Professor Krieger is a prominent member had apparently convinced themselves that the book lent support to an aesthetics in which the notions of reality and of nature had no place. They thought that I had subverted the old idea of mimesis and that all that remained were different systems of conventional signs which were made to stand for an unknowable reality. True, professor Krieger admits that I never endorsed such an interpretation of my views, and he even concedes that there are passages in Art and Illusion which contradict such an out-and-out relativism, but he wants to convince his readers that these contradictions lead precisely to the ambiguities he now proposes to analyse. If he were right that the book encourages such a misreading, all I could do would be to express my regrets for having failed to make myself sufficiently clear. Luckily I can draw comfort from the fact that unlike these literary critics, the leading archaeologist of this country, Professor Stuart Piggott, had no difficulty at all in discerning my meaning and profiting from my arguments. In his Walter Neurath Memorial Lecture of 1978, entitled Antiquity Depicted: Aspects of Archaeological Illustration, the author did me the honour of taking a statement from my book as his starting point. It is the passage at the end of part I in which I recapitulate the content of the first two chapters: What matters to us is that the correct portrait, like the useful map, is an end product on a long road through schema and correction. It is not a faithful record of a visual experience but the faithful construction of a relational mode. Neither the subjectivity of vision nor the sway of conventions need lead us to deny that such a model can be constructed to any required degree of accuracy. What is decisive here is clearly the word "required." The form of a representation cannot be divorced from its purpose and the requirements of the society in which the given visual language gains currency.1   1. E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1956 (New York, 1960), p. 90.   E. H. Gombrich was director of the Warburg Institute and Professor of the History of the Classical Tradition at the University of London from 1959 to 1976. His many influential works include The Story of Art, Art and Illusion, Meditations on a Hobby Horse, The Sense of Order, Ideals and Idols, The Image and the Eye, and, most recently, Tributes. His previous contributions to include "The Museum: Past, Present and Future (Spring 1977) and "Standards of Truth: The Arrested Image and the Moving Eye" (Winter 1980). E. D. Hirsch, Jr. Meaning and Significance Reinterpreted Some people have found my distinction between meaning and significance useful. In the following revision of that distinction, I hope to improve its accuracy and perhaps, therefore, its utility as well. My impulse for making the revision has been my realization, very gradually achieved, that meaning is not simply an affair of consciousness and unconsciousness. In 1967, in Validity in Interpretation, I roundly asserted that "there is no magic land of meanings outside human consciousness." 1 That assertion would be true if, godlike, we could oversee the whole of human consciousness, past, present, and future. But we language users, being limited creatures, intend our verbal meanings to go beyond what we can pay attention to at any moment. We intend our meanings to transcend our momentary limitations of attention and knowledge. Hence there isa land of meanings beyond past and present human consciousness the land of the future. What I should have said originally is that there is no magic lance of meanings beyond the whole extent of human consciousness, past, present, and future. This correction of my original statements leads to a deepening of the concept of meaning. In 1960 I first proposed the analytical distinction between two aspects of textual interpretation. One of them, meaning, was fixed and immutable; the other, significance, was open to change.2 I acknowledged that significance, changeable or not, is the more valuable object of interpretation, because it typically embraces the present use of texts, and present use is present value. But I argued that, in academic criticism, the significance and use of a text ought to be rooted in its fixed meaning, since otherwise criticism would lack a stable object of inquiry and would merely float on tides of preference. The claim that one reader's opinion is as valid as another's would then be right, despite any indignant protest to the contrary. I did not wish to dissuade people from floating on the tides of preference if that was what they wished to do. I intended to provide a firm justification for those who wished to pursue historical scholarship. (I was writing in a context in which historical interpretation was being denounced as "unliterary" and hence illegitimate.)3 I also assumed that even those who did not pursue historical scholarship might sometimes wish to exploit the possibility of historically fixed meaning. In my experience, even antiauthorial theorists sometimes with to regard their own texts as having a historically fixed meaning and will complain if someone misunderstands that meaning.   1. E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Validity in Interpretation (New Haven, Conn., 1967), p. 4. 2. See my "Objective Interpretation," PMLA 75 (Sept. 1960): 463-79. 3. See, for instance, W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Monroe C. Beardsley, "The Intentional Fallacy," in Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington, Ky., 1954), which ends: We submit that this is the true and objective way of criticism, as contrasted to what the very uncertainty of exegesis might tempt a second kind of critic to undertake: (2) the way of biographical or genetic inquiry …. Our point is that such an answer to such an inquiry would have nothing to do with the poem "Prufrock"; it would not be a critical inquiry. Critical inquiries, unlike bets, are not settled in this way. Critical inquiries are not settled by consulting the oracle. [P. 18]   E. D. Hirsch, Jr., professor of English at the University of Virginia, is the author of numerous works, including Validity in Interpretation and The Aims of Interpretation. His previous contributions to are "Against Interpretation?" (June 1983), "The Politics of Theories of Interpretation (September 1982), and "Stylistics and Synonymity" (March 1975). Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Sexualism and the Citizen of the World: Wycherley,_Sterne,_and_Male Homosocial Desire Surprisingly, when Laurence Sterne's Yorick sets his head toward Dover, it is with no developed motive of connoisseurship or curiosity: the gentleman dandy ups with his portmanteau at the merest glance of "civil triumph" from a male servant. Perhaps we are in the world of P. G. Wodehouse, with a gentleman's gentleman who happens, like Jeeves, to be the embodiment of all the prescriptive and opportunistic shrewdness necessary to maintain his master's innocent privileges but it is impossible to tell; the servant utters his five words, glances his glance, and disappears from the novel. The prestige that has lent force to his misprision or is it a sneer? seems to belong not to a particular personality but to a position, a function (or lack of it), a bond between gentleman and gentleman's gentleman that, throughout this novel, makes up in affective and class significance what it lacks in utilitarian sense. Yorick's bond to another valet is the most sustained and one of the fondest in the novel; and, for most of the novel, the bond is articulated through various forms of the conquest and exchange of women. In the discussion ahead, I will be using the "exchange of women" paradigm taken from Claude Lévi-Strauss and, for example, René Girard and Gayle Rubin, to focus on the changing meanings of the bonds between men in a seventeenth-century play and an eighteenth-century novel.1 These discussions are part of a book- length study of what I am calling "male homosocial desire" the whole spectrum of bonds between men, including friendship, mentorship, rivalry, institutional subordination, homosexual genitality, and economic exchange within which the various forms of the traffic in women take place.   Eve Kosofsky Sedgwickis associate professor of English at Amherst College. She is the author of Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (forthcoming, 1985). Kendall L. Walton Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism That photography is a supremely realistic medium may be the commonsense view, but as Edward Steichen reminds us it is by no means universal. Dissenters note how unlike reality a photograph is and how unlikely we are to confuse the one with the other. They point to "distortions" engendered by the photographic process and to the control which the photographer exercises over the finished product, the opportunities he enjoys for interpretation and falsification. Many emphasize the expressive nature of the medium, observing that photographs are inevitably colored by the photographer's personal interests, attitudes, and prejudices.1 Whether any of these various considerations really does collide with photography's claim of extraordinary realism depends, of course, on how that claim is to be understood. Those who find photographs especially realistic sometimes think of photography as a further advance in a direction which many picture makers have taken during the last several centuries, as a continuation or culmination of the post-Renaissance quest for realism.2 There is some truth in this. Such earlier advances toward realism include the development of perspective and modeling techniques, the portrayal of ordinary and incidental details, attention to the effects of light, and so on. From its very beginning, photography mastered perspective (a system of perspective that works, anyway, if not the only one). Subtleties of shading, gradations of brightness nearly impossible to achieve with the brush, became commonplace. Photographs include as a matter of course the most mundane details of the scenes they portray stray chickens, facial warts, clutters of dirty dishes. Photographic images easily can seem to be what painters striving for realism have always been after.   2. See André Bazin, "The Ontology of the Photographic Image," What is Cinema?, trans. Hugh Gray, vol. 1 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1967), p. 12; all further references to this work, abbreviated "OPI," will be included in the text. See also Rudolf Arnheim, "Melancholy Unshaped," Toward a Psychology of Art: Collected Essays (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1967), p. 186.   Kendall L. Walton is professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan. He is currently completing a book on representation in the arts.   Barbara Johnson Rigorous Unreliability As a critique of a certain Western conception of the nature of signification, deconstruction focuses on the functioning of claim- making and claim-subverting structures within texts. A deconstructive reading is an attempt to show how the conspicuously foregrounded statements in a text are systematically related to discordant signifying elements that the text has thrown into its shadows or margins; it is an attempt both to recover what is lost and to analyze what happens when a text is read solely in function of intentionality, meaningfulness, and representativity. Deconstruction thus confers a new kind of readability on those elements in a text that readers have traditionally been trained to disregard, overcome, explain away, or edit out contradictions, obscurities, ambiguities, incoherencies, discontinuities, ellipses, interruptions, repetitions, and plays of the signifier. In this sense it involves a reversal of values, a revaluation of the signifying function of everything that, in a signified-based theory of meaning, would constitute "noise." Jacques Derrida has chosen to speak of the values involved in this reversal in terms of "speech" and "writing," in which "speech" stands for the privilege accorded to meaning as immediacy, unity, identity, truth, and presence, while "writing" stands for the devalued functions of distance, difference, dissimulation, and deferment. This transvaluation has a number of consequences for the appreciation of literature. By shifting the attention from intentional meaning to writing as such, deconstruction has enabled readers to become sensitive to a number of recurrent literary topoi in a new way. Texts have been seen as commentaries on their own production or reception through their pervasive thematizations of textuality the myriad letters, books, tombstones, wills, inscriptions, road signs, maps, birthmarks, tracks, footprints, textiles, tapestries, veils, sheets, brown stockings, and self- abolishing laces that serve in one way or another as figures for the text to be deciphered or unraveled or embroidered upon. Thus, a deconstructor finds new delight in a Shakespearean character named Sir Oliver Martext or in Herman Melville's catalog of whales as books in Moby Dick, or she makes jokes about the opposition between speech and writing by citing the encounter between Little Red Riding Hood and the phony granny.   Barbara Johnson is professor of Romance languages and literatures at Harvard University. She is the author of Défigurations du langage poétique and The Critical Difference, translator of Jacques Derrida's Dissemination, and editor of The Pedagogical Imperative: Teaching as a literary Genre. John Fisher Entitling For the moment, I assume that we have some rough idea of what "title" is supposed to mean: the large letters on the spine of a book, the words on the center of the first page of a musical score, or the little plate on the museum wall to the right of the painting (if we ignore the artist's name, the date, and the geographical and historical data). Thus examples of titles would be The Taming of the Shrew, "Mapleleaf Rag," or The Birth of Venus, but that generates a rather complex set of answers. Let us start with what is undoubtedly the simplest situation: where an inscription of the title is physically part of the work. The most familiar of the aquatints of Francisco Goya which collectively are called Los Caprichos the forty-third is titled The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, or, more precisely, the Spanish equivalent of those words, for the Spanish words appear as a large and significant element on the plate, indeed occupying more than 10 percent of its surface. In such cases titles are not given: they are elements of works, not by inference or subtle metaphor but in a most literal way. No other title fits in that way. That print could not be called Bats and Cats and Sleeping Man with the expectation that those words should serve as its title. Some works most works on the other hand, allow for a range of acceptable titles. Guernica could have been titled The Bombing of a Basque Village or Luftwaffe Hell. Neither of these would, I suspect, have been as good a title as Guernica, but they remain possibilities, even though the familiar title is not physically part of the work. (And, of course, some expressions could not serve as title of the mural: Sylvan Springtime or Saint Francis in Ecstasy. Of course, Picasso could have stood up and said, "I hereby name this work Marlene Dietrich on the Beach at Deauville," and no one could claim that the locution was false but more about this later.) Some works, incidentally, contain words, even sentences, and are not titled accordingly. Several familiar works of René Magritte include a most realistic representation of a tobacco pipe and the large words "Ceci n'est pas une pipe." (Of course it isn't a pipe; it's a pipe-picture, we might say. That's the point.) Examples of the titles given by Magritte to paintings in this series are L'Air et la chanson and Le Trahison des images. Obviously, not all works of visual art which contain linguistic inscriptions have titles which correspond to those inscriptions. The simplest situation is hardly much help.   John Fisher is professor of philosophy at Temple University and editor of the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. He is also the editor of Perceiving Artworks (1980) and Essays on Aesthetics (1983). Gerald L. Bruns Loose Talk about Religion from William James In this paper I want to say some things about the way William James talks as, for example, in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), the famous Gifford Lectures in which (as it appears) James attempted to rehabilitate religion as a subject fit for philosophical discourse, or as something still worth talking about.1 Some familiar background for this matter is provided by the epigraph I have just given from "What Pragmatism Means," in which James shows himself to be a nominalist as against a metaphysical realist (see P,pp. 52-52; WWJ, p. 380). The nominalist position, as it applies to James, would be that words make sense to us but not for the reasons we give when we say that we designate things by them, because these things (whether gods or atoms) are never quite there, or at all events never quite things, in the way our language makes them out to be. It does not matter whether we are speaking of universals or particulars: words mean because of the way they hang together in sentences and contexts, and they fail to mean when they fail to fit in, not because of a failure of reference. It is not necessary (or not enough) to claim for our words that they are anchored in reality. The intelligibility of a word (or an utterance or a text) is always a hermeneutical construction, in the sense that the word depends for its meaning upon how it is taken. Whence the meaning of a word is always rhetorically contingent as well, because it is determined in varying measures by the situation in which it occurs and also, therefore, by the audience who is meant to hear it in a certain way, and who may take it in this certain way or perhaps in another way entirely, depending on the situations. We shall see how James exploits this contingency in his own way of speaking. A word can, of course, be taken as referring to some really existing entity, and in fact most words are taken in this way because (James would say) this is how they works for us. Words usually end up being about something. A nominalist in this case would be just someone who believes that (1) words do not have to refer to really existing entities in order to be taken in this realistic way, and (2) most words are taken in this realistic way for no good philosophical reason. But what might be allowed to stand as a good philosophical reason for taking words one way rather than another is exactly what our problem is, and it is also (but only in a loose sort of way) one of the things this paper is about.   Gerald L. Bruns is the author of Modern Poetry and the Idea of Language (1974) and Inventions: Writing, Textuality, and Understanding in Literary History (1982). He is currently at work on a new book, Hermeneutics, Ancient and Modern. His most recent contribution to , "Canon and Power in the Hebrew Scriptures," appeared in the March 1984 issue. George Rochberg Can the Arts Survive Modernism? (A Discussion of_the Characteristics, History, and Legacy of Modernism) In trying to say what modernism is (or was), we must remind ourselves that it cannot and must not to be properly described and understood be confined only to the arts of music, literature, painting, sculpture, theater, architecture, those arts with which we normally associate the term "culture." Modernism can be said to embrace, in the broadest terms, not only the arts of Western culture but also science, technology, the family, marriage, sexuality, economics, the politics of democracy, the politics of authoritarianism, the politics of totalitarianism, and such academic disciplines as philosophy and the social sciences of sociology and anthropology (among others). Its influence and effects have been all-pervasive. No corner of twentieth-century life has escaped its profound alteration of both the individual and society. It has radicalized all levels of human existence. What, then, is modernism? Some have described it as a state of "chronic revolution," that is, revolution against the past, against tradition, against history itself. Others have pointed to its voracious appetite for innovation, for the search for the "new," for the hunger to be "original" to be the first and last with something unique and difference, whatever that something might be or in whatever area of human endeavor it might arise. Still others have characterized modernism as the application to all realms of human life of forms of structural rationalization, that is, finding rationally structured ways of being and doing regardless of consequences and, more especially, rationalizing away the mysteries and questions which have to do with meaning, that is, morality and ethics those areas that lie outside the purely rational. And still others have viewed modernism as a condition of freedom within which the individual can be himself, unfettered and uninhibited, released from the drag of superego and conscience, a separate entity of being, unanswerable to others whether in the form of individuals or society as a whole. Last but not least, there are those who continue to see modernism as a self-perpetuating form of avant-gardism, always at the point of the interface between the present and the future, always ready to move on to the next stage because living itself is a process of constant change, constant motion, perpetual transformation.   George Rochberg is the composer of a large body of musical works and the author of a recently published collection of essays, The Aesthetics of Survival, A Composer's View of Twentieth- Century Music. He is currently writing his fifth symphony, on a commission from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. In 1983 he retired from the University of Pennsylvania as Emeritus Annenberg Professor of the Humanities. Jonathan D. Kramer Can Modernism Survive George Rochberg? Modernism has been a celebration of the present. Why does it need a legacy (beyond its rejection of the past)? Why should that which was born (in Europe, at least) in the spirit of rebellion perpetuate itself as tomorrow's past? Modernism has been profoundly reflective of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century cultural values. Is that not enough? It is not that modernism has forgotten the past an art that rebels against its past must understand its adversary but rather that it asks us not to forget the present. The revolt of modernism was made possible, if not inevitable, by the rediscovery of the past. In earlier, eras, when the past was less readily accessible, artists worked for their present with little thought about their heritage. Renaissance composers, for example, generally knew little of music even two generations old; much medieval music theory and composition were based on misconceptions of Greek models. Yet by the nineteenth century, works from the past were available and understood. Virtually all composers agreed with Johannes Brahms, who reputedly said of Ludwig van Beethoven, "You have no idea how the likes of us feel when we hear the tramp of a giant like him behind us." Historical consciousness had entered the arts, and artists were both threatened by competition with the past and seduced by the powerful idea that their works might outlive them. The Romantic artist became a genius speaking to posterity. Gustav Mahler was not the only Romanticist to pin his hopes on the future: "My time will yet come." Small wonder that, once the future came to be, its artists rebelled against pronouncements from their past the time rightfully belonged to them and no longer to Mahler's generation. While many twentieth-century artists continued to create for their future, the most extreme modernists (in music, Erik Satie and Charles Ives and, a generation later, John Cage) rejected not only their past but also the quest for immortality. They have written of their day and for their day. The real legacy of modernism is that it has no legacy.   Jonathan D. Kramer is professor of music theory and composition at the College-Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati and also program annotator and new music advisor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. He is currently working on Time and the Meanings of Music (forthcoming). His previous contribution to , "New Temporalities in Music," appeared in Spring 1981. Sandra M. Gilbert Life's Empty Pack: Notes toward a Literary Daughteronomy A definition of [George] Eliot as renunciatory culture-mother may seem an odd preface to a discussion of Silas Marner since, of all her novels, this richly constructed work is the one in which the empty pack of daughterhood appears fullest, the honey of femininity most unpunished. I want to argue, however, that this "legendary tale," whose status as a schoolroom classic makes it almost as much a textbook as a novel, examines the relationship between woman's fate and the structure of society in order to explicate the meaning of the empty pack of daughterhood. More specifically, this story of an adoptive father, an orphan daughter, and a dead mother broods on events that are actually or symbolically situated on the margins or boundaries of society, where culture must enter into a dialectical struggle with nature, in order to show how the young female human animal is converted into the human daughter, wife, and mother. Finally, then, this fictionalized "daughteronomy" becomes a female myth of origin narrated by a severe literary mother uses the vehicle of a half-allegorical family romance to urge acquiescence in the law of the Father. If Silas Marner is not obviously a story about the empty pack of daughterhood, it is plainly, of course, a "legendary tale" about a wanderer with a heavy yet empty pack. In fact, it is through the image of the packman that the story, in Eliot's own words, "came across my other plans by a sudden inspiration" and, clearly, her vision of this burdened outsider is a re-vision of the Romantic wanderer who haunts the borders of society, seeking a local habitation and a name.11 I would argue further, though, that Eliot's depiction of Silas Marner's alienation begins to explain Ruby Redinger's sense that the author of this "fluid and metaphoric" story "is" both Eppie, the redemptive daughter, and Silas, the redeemed father. For in examining the outcast weaver's marginality, this novelist of the "hidden life" examines also her own female disinheritance and marginality.12   11. Eliot to Blackwood, 12 Jan. 1861, quoted in Ruby V. Redinger, George Eliot: The Emergent Self (New York, 1975), p. 436. As Susan Garber has suggested to me, the resonant image of the "packman" may be associated with the figure of Bob Jakin in The Mill on the Floss (which Eliot had just completed), the itinerant pack-bearing peddler who brings Maggie Tulliver a number of books, the most crucial of which is Tomas à Kempis' treatise on Christian renunciation (so that its subject metaphorically associates it with Silas Marner's pack full of emptiness). 12. Rediner, George Eliot, p. 439; Eliot, "Finale," Middlemarch, p. 896.   Sandra M. Gilbert, now professor of English at the University of California, Davis, will join the Department of English at Princeton University in fall 1985. Her most recent works include a collection of poems, Emily's Bread (1984), and, coedited with Susan Gubar, The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Tradition in English (1985). In addition, she is at work on Mother Rites: Studies in Literature and Maternity, a project from which "Life's Empty Pack" is drawn, and, with Susan Gubar, on No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, a sequel to their collaborative Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979). "Costumes of the Mind: Transvestitism as Metaphor in Modern Literature" appeared in the Winter 1980 issue of . Zhang Longxi The Tao and the Logos: Notes on Derrida's_Critique_of_Logocentrism In a wholesale destructive or deconstructive critique of Western philosophical tradition, it is precisely this ethnocentric- phonocentric view of language that Jacques Derrida has chosen for his target. In Derrida's critique, Hegel appears as one of the powerful enactors of that tradition yet peculiarly on the verge of turning away from it as "the last philosopher of the book and the first thinker of writing."13 As Derrida sees it, phonocentrism in its philosophical dimension is also "logocentrism: the metaphysics of phonetic writing" (p. 3). Derrida makes it quite clear that such logocentrism is related to Western thinking and to Western thinking alone. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak points this out in the translator's preface to Of Grammatology: "Almost by a reverse ethnocentrism, Derrida insists that logocentrism is a property of the West…. Although something of the Chinese prejudice of the West is discussed in Part I, the East is never seriously studied or deconstructed in the Derridean text" (p. lxxxii). As a matter of fact, not only is the East never seriously deconstructed but Derrida even sees in the nonphonetic Chinese writing "the testimony of a powerful movement of civilization developing outside of all logocentrism" (p. 90). When he looks within the Western tradition for a breakthrough, he finds it in nothing other than the poetics of Ezra Pound and his mentor, Ernest Fenollosa, who built a graphic poetics on what is certainly a peculiar reading of Chinese ideograms: This is the meaning of the work of Fenellosa [sic] whose influence upon Ezra Pound and his poetics is well-known: this irreducibly graphic poetics was, with that of Mallarmé, the first break in the most entrenched Western tradition. The fascination that the Chinese ideogram exercised on Pound's writing may thus be given all its historical significance. [P. 92] Since Chinese is a living language with a system of nonphonetic script that functions very differently from that of any Western language, it naturally holds a fascination for those in the West who, weary of the Western tradition, try to find an alternative model on the other side of the world, in the Orient. This is how the so-called Chinese prejudice came into being at the end of the seventeenth and during the eighteenth centuries, when some philosophers in the West, notably Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, saw "in the recently discovered Chinese script a model of the philosophical language thus removed from history" and believed that "what liberates Chinese script from the voice is also that which, arbitrarily and by the artifice of invention, wrenches it from history and gives it to philosophy" (p. 76). In other words, what Leibniz and others saw in the Chinese language was what they desired and projected there, "a sort of European hallucination," as Derrida rightly terms it. "And the hallucination translated less an ignorance than a misunderstanding. It was not disturbed by the knowledge of Chinese script, limited but real, which was then available" (p. 80).   Zhang Longxi is on the faculty of the Department of English Language and Literature at Peking University. He is the author of A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century Theories of Literature (forthcoming) and is currently studying comparative literature at Harvard University. Jerome J. McGann Some Forms of Critical Discourse The project begins by drawing two basic distinctions. The first distinction is between forms of ideological discourse in general, which may not be critical in their orientation, and those forms of criticaldiscourse which are historically self-conscious in their method. The formal antitype of all critical discourse is, in this view, the discourse of interpretation. The second distinction separates forms of critical thought (for example, forms of logic) from forms of critical discourse. Unlike the latter, forms of thought do not require for their existence the operation of an explicit set of signs or system of objective articulation. One further introductory point is in order. I believe that the elementary forms of critical discourse should be divided into two large categories: the narrative forms, on the one hand, and the nonnarrative forms, on the other. Furthermore, I suggest that the nonnarrative forms which are my chief concern in this paper comprise four elementary types: the hypothetical (which corresponds to the form of thought we call inductive logic); the practical or injunctive (which corresponds to the form of thought we call deductive logic); the array; and the dialectic. I shall concentrate on the nonnarrative forms, and in particular on the array and the dialectic, for two reasons: first, one of these, the array, is not normally recognized as a form of critical discourse; and, second, both the array and the dialectic offer especially clear contrasts with narrative forms of discourse, both critical and noncritical.1   1. Some brief comments on the other two nonnarrative forms may be useful. Perhaps the best examples of a practical or injunctive form are furnished in a book like Euclid's Elements, or any cookbook. The hypothetical form may be illustrated out of any number of classic works such as Sir Humphry Davy's "On Some New Phenomena of Chemical Changes Produced by Electricity" (Philosophic Transactions of the Royal Society of London,19 Nov. 1807) and Michael Faraday's "Electricity from Magnetism" (Philosophic Transactions of the Royal Society of London,24 Nov. 1831).   Jerome J. McGann is the Doris and Henry Dreyfuss Professor of Humanities at the California Institute of Technology. A new book, The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory (1985), continues the critical projects of his recent books The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (1983) and A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (1983). His most recent contribution to is "The Religious Poetry of Christina Rossetti" (September 1983). Peter J. Rabinowitz The Turn of the Glass Key: Popular Fiction_as_Reading_Strategy Even among critics not particularly concerned with detective fiction, Dashiell Hammett's fourth novel, The Glass Key (1931), is famous for carrying the so-called objective method to almost obsessive lengths: we are never told what the characters are thinking, only what they do and look like. Anyone's decisions about anyone else's intentions (which, in this underworld of ward politics, often have life-and-death consequences) are interpretivedecisions, dependent on correct presuppositions on having the right interpretive key. The novel's title, in part, refers to this kind of key. Ned Beaumont, the protagonist, has to decide how to govern his relationship with Janet Henry; one of his major clues to her mind is a dream that she tells him, a dream that climaxes in an attempt to lock a door against an onslaught of snakes. Dream interpretation is difficult enough to begin with, and Janet Henry compounds that difficulty by telling the dream twice. In the first version, the attempt to lock the door succeeds; in the second, the key turns out to be made of glass and it shatters. Ned Beaumont, in deciding which dream to us as his key, chooses the second (as do most readers) but it is a choice based on an intuitive mix of experience and faith, knowledge and hunch. A reader often faces the same difficulties that Ned Beaumont does. Reading a book, too, requires us to make a choice about what key to use to unlock it, and that choice must often be based on an intuitive mix of experience and faith, knowledge and hunch. For example, as I shall show, the experience of reading certain texts not all, but a significant number of them is problematic because it depends in part on whether the reader has chosen, before picking them up, to approach them as popular or serious. My argument hinges on two prior claims. First, I contend that one way (but not the only way) of defining genres is to consider them as bundles of operations which readers perform in order to recover the meanings of texts rather than as sets of features found in the texts themselves. To put this crudely but more modishly, genres can be viewed as strategies that readers use to process texts. Second, I argue that popular literature and serious literature can be viewed as broad genre categories.   Peter J. Rabinowitz is associate professor of comparative literature at Hamilton College. He is currently working on a book about literary conventions and is also active as a music critic for such publications as Fanfare and Ovation. His previous contributions to are "Truth in Fiction: A Reexamination of Audiences" (Autumn 1977) and "Who Was That Lady? Pluralism and Critical Method" (Spring 1979). Stanley Fish Consequences Nothing I wrote in Is There a Text in This Class? has provoked more opposition or consternation than my (negative) claim that the argument of the book has no consequences for the practice of literary criticism.1 To many it seemed counterintuitive to maintain (as I did) that an argument in theory could leave untouched the practice it considers: After all, isn't the very point of theory to throw light on or reform or guide practice? In answer to this question, I want to say, first, that this claim is unsupportable. Here, I am in agreement with Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, who are almost alone in agreeing with me and who fault me not for making the "no consequences" argument but for occasionally falling away from it. Those dislike Is There a Text in This Class? tend to dislike "Against Theory" even more, and it is part of my purpose here to account for the hostility to both pieces. But since the issues at stake are fundamental, it is incumbent to begin at the beginning with a discussion of what theory is and is not.   1. See my Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), p. 370. For a response to the "no consequences" claim, see Mary Louise Pratt, "Interpretive Strategies/Strategic Interpretations: on Anglo-American Reader Response Criticism," Boundary 2 11 (Fall-Winter 1982-830): 222.   Stanley Fish is the William Kenan, Jr., Professor of English and the Humanities at the Johns Hopkins University. His most recent contributions to are "Profession Despise Thyself: Fear and Self-Loathing in Literary Studies" (December 1983) and "Fear of Fish:"A Reply to Walter Davis" (June 1984). The present essay is the concluding chapter of Change (forthcoming, 1985). Richard Rorty Philosophy without Principles My colleague E. D. Hirsch has skillfully developed the consequences for literary interpretation of a "realistic" epistemological position which he formulates as follows: "If we could not distinguish a content of consciousness from its contexts, we could not know any object at all in the world." Given that premise, it is easy for Hirsch to infer that "without the stable determinacy of meaning there can be no knowledge in interpretation."1 A lot of people disagree with Hirsch on the latter point, and they look to philosophy for replies to the premise from which it was inferred. But it is not clear where in philosophy they should look: To epistemology? Ethics?2 Philosophy of language? What Jacques Derrida calls "a new logic, … a graphematics of iterability"?3 Where do we find first principles from which to deduce an anti-Hirsch argument? I want to argue that there is no clear or straight answer to this question and that there need be none. I shall begin by criticizing the strategy used against Hirsch and others by my fellow pragmatists Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels. They think that one can start with philosophy of language and straighten things out by adopting a correct account of meaning. I share their desire to refute Hirsch, their admiration for Stanley Fish, and their view that "theory" when defined as "an attempt to govern interpretations of particular texts by appealing to an account of interpretation in general" has got to go (p. 723, and see p. 742). But they want to defend this position by exposing a mistake which they think common to all theory so defined: an error about the relation between meaning and intention. They assert that "what is intended and what is meant are identical" and that one will look for an "account of interpretation in general" only if one fails to recognize this identity (pp. 729, 723). Such failure leads to an attempt to connect meaning and intention (as in Hirsch) or to disconnect them (as in Paul de Man). But such attempts must fail, for they presuppose a break "between language and speech acts" which does not exist (p. 733).   1. E. D. Hirsch, Jr., The Aims of Interpretation (Chicago, 1976), pp. 3, 1. 2. See ibid., where Hirsch offers a "fundamental ethical maxim for interpretation" which, he says, "claims no privileged sanction from metaphysics or analysis" (p. 90). Here and elsewhere Hirsch suggests that it may be ethics rather than epistemology which provides the principles that govern interpretation. There remain other passages, however, in which he retains the view, conspicuous in his earlier writings, that an analysis of the idea of knowledge is the ultimate justification for his approach. 3. Jacques Derrida, "Limited Inc abc … , " Glyph 2 (1977) : 219.   Richard Rorty is Kenan Professor of Humanities at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Consequences of Pragmatism (Essays: 1972-1980),among other works, and is currently writing a book on Martin Heidegger. His previous contribution to , "Deconstruction and Circumvention," appeared in the September 1984 issue. Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels A Reply to Richard Rorty: What is Pragmatism? We are grateful to Stanley Fish for demonstrating what "Against Theory" had merely assumed, that the only kind of theory worth attacking is the kind which claims to be more than just another form of practice. Some readers have thought that our arguments were directed against all general reflection about literature or criticism. Others have thought that we were resisting the encroachment on literary study of themes derived from politics, or psychoanalysis, or philosophy. These are plausible misreading of our intention, since the term "theory" is indeed sometimes applied to any critical argument marked by historical or aesthetic generalization or by the reading of literature in terms of themes derived from other disciplines. But, as Fish shows, neither empirical generality nor thematic novelty is enough to make an argument theoretical in more than a trivial sense, that is, in a sense that marks it as importantly different in kind from other critical arguments. Theory in a nontrivial sense always consists in the attempt "to stand outside practice in order to govern practice from without," and this strong ("foundationalist") kind of theory is the kind whose coherence we deny (p. 742). It is also the kind of theory engaged in by the vast majority of those who consider themselves theorists including many who might prefer to think of themselves as practicing theory in some weaker sense. At the conclusion of "Philosophy without Principles," Richard Rorty appears to join those who think we are attacking theory in its weaker senses as well as in the strong sense just described. He suggests that eliminating the writing and teaching of theory would deprive literary scholars of "an opportunity to discuss philosophy books as well as novels, poems, critical essays, and so forth with literature students" (Rorty, p. 464). If this were the only issue between Rorty's version of pragmatism and ours, our disagreement would come to an immediate end, since nothing could be further from the aims of "Against Theory" than rendering a judgment about what books should be discussed in literary classrooms. But our disagreement runs deeper than debates about the curriculum. It involves, first, a fundamental disagreement about language and, second, an equally fundamental disagreement about the nature and consequences of pragmatism.   Steven Knapp is an assistant professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley; his book Personification and the Sublime: Milton to Coleridgeis forthcoming. Walter Benn Michaels,an associate professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, is working on the relation between literary and economic forms of representation in nineteenth-century America. A previous contribution to , "Sister Carrie's Popular Economy," appeared in the Winter 1980 issue. The authors' joint contribution to , "Against Theory," and "A Reply to Our Critics," appeared respectively in the Summer 1982 and June 1983 issues. James McMichael Real, Schlemiel At some moment in his life, James Joyce stopped writing Ulysses. If there had been at least one more thing he meant to fuss with or to fix, one more thing he meant to do to the book, he never did it. Ulysses was at that moment complete. The book reads to me as if it's "harking back in a retrospective sort of arrangement" from that very moment, as if Joyce anticipated coming to it all along.1 Because he knew it would be a moment in which the book he was writing would become the book he had written, that moment backed up into the writing itself, it dictated to him that the narrator's sentences must be in the past tense. For Joyce, each phrase of Ulysses was over and done with as soon as he found that he could let it stand as it was. I think it's for this reason that his characters' actions and words are narrated as if they too were in the past. "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned …" (pp. 2-3). The writing which empowers Buck Mulligan to speak and act had at some moment stopped being a present participle for Joyce and begun to be a noun, a piece of writing, that now- realized thing which had been written. It's therefore in the past tense that the narrative proceeds. Not that along the way there isn't interior monologue that offers what a given character thinks, each thought sounding very much as if it's in the present. "Mr Bloom stood far back, his hat in his hand, counting the bared heads. Twelve. I'm thirteen" (p. 110). The illusion is that right here, right now, autonomously, Bloom is thinking about how many mourners there are at Dignam's funeral and is trying to establish their number for himself. And yet while the sentence fragments "Twelve" and "I'm thirteen" interrupt the already completed past-tense narrative, the past- tense sentence which introduces the fragments implies an intelligence that has managed to narrate Bloom's thoughts before Bloom himself has thought them. To narrate that Bloom is "counting the bared heads" in advance of that counting is paradoxically to review what hasn't yet happened. It implies a knowledge that looks back on each present moment from a point outside of time. And it's from precisely this point that the narrating intelligence closes off Bloom's present- tense thoughts with past-tense news: "The coffin dived out of sight, eased down by the men straddled on the gravetrestles" (p. 110).   James McMichael,professor of English at the University of California, Irvine, is completing a manuscript called Reading "Ulysses."His most recent book of poems is Four Good Things. Jane Marcus Quentin's Bogey In a famous essay, later a chapter in the classic work of feminist criticism The Madwoman in the Attic, called "Milton's Bogey: Patriarchal Poetry and Women Readers," Sandra Gilbert argues that "Milton's bogey" is made deliberately ambiguous by Woolf and may refer to Milton himself, Adam, or Satan. She argues that "the allusion has had no significant development."3­­But, of course, the previous reference to "the large and imposing figure of a gentleman, which Milton recommended for my perpetual adoration" makes it clear that Woolf's bogey is Milton's patriarchal god. That she later calls him a "human being" may be wicked and perverse, but is a brilliant undercutting of patriarchal divinity. The allusion is also developed in several ways throughout A Room of One's Own,and the reader who puts the pieces together has perhaps caught the "little fish" she promises her readers in the beginning. If Milton's bogey blocks the view of the open sky, her aunt's legacy "unveiled the sky" to her; money freed her to look at "reality" (Room, p. 39; and see p. 5). The second development of the figure is in the phantom form of "J H ." Jane Harrison's ghostly presence does not block the view of the open sky: "As if the scarf which the dusk had flung over the garden were torn asunder by star or sword the flash of some terrible reality leaping" (Room, p. 17). Harrison herself, and her great scholarly feminist work on preclassical Greece, is suggested here as having the opposite effect of Milton's bogey. She unveils reality and is held up as a model for women. The third development of the theme is the "loneliness and riot" of Woolf's vision of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle the writer as madwoman, "plunging ever deeper into obscurity and folly": "Evidently the crazy Duchess became a bogey to frighten clever girls with" (Room, p. 65; emphasis mine). Virginia Woolf had been a clever girl, and she feared mental instability. The woman writer as madwoman certainly frightened her. She saw Margaret Cavendish's mind "as if some giant cucumber had spread itself all over the roses and carnations in the garden and choked them to death" (Room, p. 65). There is a distinct relationship between Milton's patriarchal bogey and the giant cucumber. Patriarchy covers sky and earth with phallic images preventing women's vision and growth. The woman writer's power is inhibited by the forbidding Christian God who suggests that writing is a male prerogative; and if that doesn't inhibit her enough, a female bogey is invented to show her the woman writer's madness and folly.   3. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, Conn., 19790, p. 188; and see pp. 187-212.   Jane Marcus is associate professor of English and director of women's studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She has edited three collections of essays on Virginia Woolf, a collection of Rebecca West's socialist-feminist essays, and is presently finishing Liberty, Sorority, Misogyny: Virginia Woolf and the Languages of the Patriarchy. Quentin Bell Reply to Jane Marcus It must be admitted that there are some of us who "teach" Virginia Woolf and yet seem unable to learn from her. The secret of Virginia's eminently readable prose style remains hidden from us. It is for this reason that I find it impossibly hard to read everything that Professor Marcus and some of her colleagues produce in such astounding abundance, and that, she may retort, is why she has found it impossible to read my biography of Virginia Woolf. In a sense, she does not need to; she can imagine it and, thus, credit me with the statement that I considered my aunt "a minor British novelist, ranked somewhere below E. M. Forster as a writer of fiction" (p. 489). Seeing that I made it clear from the outset of that biography that I would not attempt to assess the work of Virginia Woolf, seeing that I have been blamed for this abstention (by Professor Marcus herself, if memory serves), and seeing that I have said absolutely nothing at any time that could possibly be construed in this sense, I think that we may well call this a master-stroke of the imagination. Also it is irrelevant. I accuse her of inaccuracy; she "replies" by asserting that I have bad taste. It seems a rather unconvincing form of defence. In fact, in her "reply," which must be about as long as the article by which it was engendered, Professor Marcus can find so little in the way of evidence or argument with which to support those contentions which I have criticized that the reader must wade through page after page of completely otiose matter before coming to anything which seems to bear on the matter at hand. At last Professor Marcus tells us that she has written "two long essays in which I did at length and in detail exactly what he does here"; here, then, we come to her answer (p. 493). The reader, who may be somewhat bewildered by so long a preface, may wish to be reminded what there is that needs to be answered. I maintain that Professor Marcus has neglected to notice that Margaret Llewelyn Davis was primarily Leonard Woolf's friend rather than Virginia's, that her relationship with Virginia was at times very uneasy, that Virginia was out of sympathy with politically minded women, and that Professor Marcus neglects to notice any of this because she fails to use the evidence of the diaries and the letters. When she does quote from a letter, she completely misunderstands it, just as she fails to understand Virginia's use of the term "the woman's republic" (see p. 563).   Quentin Bell is the author of, among other works,Ruskin (1963), Bloomsbury (1969), Virginia Woolf: A Biography(1972), and On Human Finery (1978). His previous contributions to include "Art and the Elite" (Autumn 1974), "Bloomsbury and ‘the Vulgar Passions'" (Winter 1979), and "A ‘Radiant' Friendship" (June 1984). Murray Krieger Optics and Aesthetic Perception: A Rebuttal I am troubled by the temper of E. H. Gombrich's response, "Representation and Misrepresentation" (Critical Inquiry 11 [December 1984]: 195-201), to my "Ambiguities of Representation and Illusion: An E. H. Gombrich Retrospective" (11 [December 1984]: 181-94) and by his preferring not to sense the profound admiration indeed, the homage intended by my essay, both for his contributions to recent theory and for their influence upon its recent developments. But I am more troubled by the confusions his remarks may cause in the interpretation of his own work as well as in the judgment of mine. There are important issues at stake, I feel, especially as regards the relation between scientific and aesthetic inquiry. The very irritated tone of his reaction helps make what I see as my major point: his work has contained a conflict between two Gombrichs one, the skeptical humanist and, the other, the positive scientist and with the passing years the second has increasingly sought to obliterate signs of the first, becoming increasingly impatient with any attempt to revive those signs or remind us of their existence. On the other side, since the line of literary criticism with which I associate myself has drawn strength from the first Gombrich, this development in his work and in his attitudes has caused some disappointment.   Murray Krieger is University Professor of English at the University of California. He is the author of many works, including The Tragic Vision, The Classic Vision, Theory of Criticism: A Tradition and its System, Poetic Presence and Illusion: Essays in Critical History and Theory,and Arts on the Level. His previous contributions to are "Fiction, History, and Empirical Reality" (December 1974), "Poetic Presence and Illusion: Renaissance Theory and the Duplicity of Metaphor" (Summer 1979), and "The Ambiguities of Representation and Illusion: An E. H. Gombrich Retrospective" (December 1984). George Rochberg Kramer vs. Kramer Confusion abounds in Jonathan Kramer's attempt, in "Can Modernism Survive George Rochberg?" ( [December 1984]: 341-54), to reply to the issues I raised in my essay "Can the Arts Survive Modernism? (A Discussion of the Characteristics, History, and Legacy of Modernism)" (Critical Inquiry [December 1984]: 317-40). Besides the endemic disarray of his thought process, he confutes and contradicts himself at every turn either out of his own mouth or out of the mouths of those he quotes to support his position. He is incapable of following his own line of argument either because he doesn't remember in one part of his paper what he's said in another or because he doesn't grasp the logical implications of his own statements sufficiently follow through. Thus he constantly cuts the ground out from under his own feet. Some specific illustrations are in order. First, let me deal with how he "thinks." To write prose we perforce must use words; and when we use words, it behooves us to know what they mean. All too often Kramer appears not to know what key words he uses domean but he marches blindly on through his own jungle of tangled thoughts. For instance, when he says, "A far better example of reductionism in musical scholarship than Schenker's multilayered theory is Rochberg's own article," he reveals a total lack of understanding his key word, "reductionism" (p. 345). "Reductionism" is the distilled or diminished content left after removing, stripping away, all alternative ways of understanding a situation or problem. That, of course, is what Schenker did in promulgating his theory of tonal practice, and it is clear Kramer understands that much. "Reductionism," however, hardly describes the presentation of an overview of the impact of modernism on the life of the twentieth century (not only its art and culture but its intellectual, societal, and political aspects as well) which is what my article does.   George Rochberg is the composer of a large body of musical works and the author of a recently published collection of essays, The Aesthetics of Survival, a Composer's View of Twentieth- Century Music. He recently completed his fifth symphony, on commission from the Chicago Symphony. In 1983 he retired from the University of Pennsylvania as Emeritus Annenberg Professor of the Humanities. His previous contribution to Critical Inquiry,"Can the Arts Survive Modernism? (A Discussion of the Characteristics, History, and Legacy of Modernism)," appeared in the December 1984 issue. Stanley Cavell The Division of Talent My letter of invitation to this seminar expresses the thought that "it will be very useful to have someone from outside the field help us see ourselves." Given my interests in what you might call the fact of literary study, I was naturally attracted by the invitation to look at literary study as a discipline or profession but also suspicious of the invitation. I thought: Do professionals really want to be helped to see themselves by outsiders? This is an invitation to get a group of people sore at me, and it will only result in the group's having an occasion not to see itself, since any member of it can easily dismiss anything I say as uninformed. But the invitation goes on to give the title for this session as "The Nature and Function of Literary Study: As Others See Us." Reading that, I thought: That is different. That identifies me as an other to the "academic and professional concerns" of the field hence, not just outside but intimately outside, as if my position were an alternativeto yours. And how could I not be better informed about being other to you than you are? But of course I know that there is no single unified "you" to which I am other, that some of you, perhaps most, have other others than philosophy and see your practice not against philosophy but against history or criticism or literary theory. So I should perhaps say that I am not exactly single or unified myself, that I am also other to the Anglo-American profession of philosophy, to which at the same time I belong. A way of expressing my otherness to this profession of philosophy is simply to say that I take you as also among my others, that I recognize the study of literature to be an alternative to what I do a path I might have taken, might still irregularly be taking to occupy a relation to the way I think, that for most of the members of my profession would be occupied by a profession of logic or science. I will not try here to account theoretically for the intimate differences that may make philosophy and literature alternative studies, which means that I will not here systematically try taking the perspective of an other. But I will be bearing in mind its certain messages and rumors that have lately been coming my way from the field of literary studies. You have, for example, not kept it secret that you have been worrying, as a profession, and sometimes in the form of conducting arguments about the obligation to literary theory as part of literary study, nor secret that these arguments sometimes take on the color or texture of strong statements of, or against, something called deconstruction. I will try to say something about these poorly kept secrets.   Stanley Cavell,professor of philosophy at Harvard University, is the author of many works, including Must We Mean What We Say?, The Senses of "Walden," The Claim of Reason,and, most recently, Themes Out of School. He has been chosen by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters to receive the 1985 Morton Dauwen Zabel Award for Criticism. His most recent contribution to , "Politics as Opposed to What?," appears in the September 1982 issue. Joel Snyder Las Meninas and the Mirror of the Prince It is ironic that, with few exceptions, the now vast body of critical literature about Diego Velázquez's Las Meninas fails to link knowledge to understanding fails to relate the encyclopedic knowledge we have acquired of its numerous details to a convincing understanding of the painting as a whole. Las Meninas is imposing and monumental; yet a large portion of the literature devoted to it considers only its elements: aspects of its nominal subjects, their biographies, and their roles in the household of the queen or the king. Niceties of court etiquette; concerns about clothing, and shoes (thought not one shoe appears in the painting), and the small cup of water offered to the Infanta Margarita (such cups were made of scented red clay imported from the East Indies and, after their contents had been imbibed, were eaten in the belief that the clay would bleach the skin to lighter and in a kingdom ruled by Hapsburgs a more regal tone). This increasingly intimate discussion of the painting's details is not altogether beside the point; some of this information deserves to be integrated into descriptions of the painting as a whole. But a reader of these descriptive accounts soon begins to suspect they are offered in the hope that some new details might provoke an understanding of the entire painting, might prove to be the key to our comprehension of it. In fact, Las Meninas invites such analysis. Some nineteenth-century critics called it "photographic" in its naturalism ("as [if seen] in a camera obscura" or "an anticipation of Daguerre's invention"), in the profusion of its detail, and in the alleged "snapshot" quality of its composition.1 The underlying motive of this understanding ought not to be dismissed, even thought the photography analogy is clearly grotesque, in terms both of history and visual sensibility. Although we know a great deal about the contention, in seventeenth- century Spanish art theory, that a major function of art is the perfecting of nature according to ideal standards, Las Meninas nonetheless is most commonly taken to be a pure spectacle memorializing an incidental moment, seemingly explicable solely in terms of what is apparent in it.   1. Gustav Waagen, paraphrased in Carl Justi, Diego Velazquez and His Times (London, 1889), p. 419; William Stirling-Maxwell, quoted in ibid.   Joel Snyder is associate professor of humanities and of art and design and is chairman of the Committee on General Studies in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. He is currently working on a book about the foundations of perspective. His previous contributions to are "Photography, Vision, and Representation," written with Neil Walsh Allen (Autumn 1975), "Picturing Vision" (Spring 1980), and "Reflexions on Las Meninas:Paradox Lost," written with Ted Cohen (Winter 1980). Daniel Cottom The Enchantment of Interpretation First, a joke that was circulating among academics a couple of years ago. In the version I heard, a Texan is walking across Harvard Yard. He stops a guy and asks him, in his nasal drawl, "Can you tell me where the library's at?" The guy looks him up and down, pauses, and says, "At Harvard we do not end our sentences with prepositions." The Texan apologizes, saying, "Excuse me. Can you tell me where the library's at, asshole?" This story may seem far removed from the subject of this essay, which is supposed to be a serious one. But what is the joke about, after all, if not the seriousness of language, its power, and the demystification of that power by our native brand of deconstructionist, the shrewd rube? […] If we find the joke funny, I imagine that the experience with which most of us identify is this: we want the gumption to reject an arrogant cultural authority. This experience may be especially appealing to students, but it also may appeal to intellectuals conscious of those problems of power and knowledge that have been so celebrated in recent years. In fact, if Friedrich Nietzsche was right in suggesting that grammar is a metaphysical discipline comparable to God, then the pleasure of this joke may lie in its humiliation of law, pure and simple. Sigmund Freud, among others, has suggested that figures of authority in jokes are only stand-ins of that general power of society over all individuals which is contested in the very form of the joke. Thus, following Freud, or, say, those who have made Mikhail Bakhtin's conception of carnival so popular a topic of academic discussion, we could see enjoyment of this joke as representing a momentary rebellion against every form of culture that, as the saying goes, it imposed upon us. From that perspective, even my use here of this joke is bound to seem ridiculous; indeed, academic psychologists who write on laughter and humor often preface their discussions with defensive remarks about people who find it funny to see intellectuals seriously and laboriously analyzing jokes.1   1. See, e.g., Anthony J. Chapman and Hugh C. Foot, eds., It's a Funny Thing, Humour (Oxford, 1977), and Paul E. McGhee and Jeffrey H. Goldstein, eds., Handbook of Humor Research,2 vols. (New York, 1983).   Daniel Cottom is associate professor of English at Wayne State University. He is the author of The Civilized Imagination(1985) and is currently working on a study of the politics of interpretation. Betsy Erkkila Greta Garbo: Sailing Beyond the Frame Greta Garbo named herself. It was she who invented the name "Garbo" and officially registered the change from Greta Gustafsson to Greta Garbo at the Ministry of Justice in Sweden on 4 December 1923. The name had the metonymic virtue of suggesting the nature of her screen presence. The Swedish meaning of garbo, "wood nymph," suggests the association with otherworldly forces that became part of her image; while the Spanish meaning of the word, "animal grace sublimated," combines the animal passion and spiritual grace that were part of her power.1 And yet in most accounts of Garbo's life and work the legend still persists that it was Swedish director Mauritz Stiller who named her after a seventeenth-century Hungarian king. The extent to which the legend has obscured Garbo's initial act of self-naming is symptomatic of the larger tendency in film theory and criticism to mask the creative power of the actress by treating her as the blank sheet upon which the director inscribes his own signature. What is particularly misleading about the Svengali metaphor as it has figured in studies of Garbo is that it so deliberately masks the evidence. In her article "Gish and Garbo: The Executive War on the Stars," Louise Brooks suggests that the popular image of Garbo the "dumb Swede" transformed by Stiller's art was perpetuated by Hollywood executives eager to play down the very real power that Garbo already exhibited in the rushes for her first American film, The Torrent (1926). "The whole MGM studio, including Monta Bell, the director, watched the daily rushes with amazement as Garbo created out of the stales, thinnest material the complex, enchanting shadow of a soul upon the screen." Although recent accounts of Garbo's life and work have advanced beyond the "dumb Swede" publicity of Photoplay magazine, critics still reveal a similar, almost vampish determination to deprive Garbo of her creative power. "Her contribution," states Kenneth Tynan, "is calm and receptiveness, an absorbent repose which normally, in women, coexists only with the utmost vanity. Tranced by the ecstasy of existing, she gives to each onlooker what he needs" ("G," p. 347). Comparing Garbo to a "watermark in a blank sheet of paper," David Thomson says in an essay in honor of her seventy-fifth birthday: "She must be no one in herself if she is to signify so much to so many others…. All the moods and moments of love are encompassed because the appearance is hollow. We are to inhabit it, to flesh it out." In these accounts, Garbo is presented not as an active shaping power but as a passive female vessel, ready to receive the impress of male voyeuristic fantasy.   Betsy Erkkila,assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, is author of Walt Whitman among the French: Poet and Myth and editor of Ezra Pound: The Critical Reception. She is currently working on a book, Whitman the Political Poet,and a collection of essays, American Women Poets Musing. Steven Mailloux Rhetorical Hermeneutics The Space Act of 1958 begins, "The Congress hereby declares that it is the policy of the United States that activities in space should be devoted to peaceful purposes for the benefit of all mankind." In March 1982, a Defense Department official commented on the statute: "We interpret the right to use space for peaceful purposes to include military uses of space to promote peace in the world."1 The absurdity of this willful misinterpretation amazed me on first reading, and months later it readily came to mind when I was looking for an effective way to illustrate the politics of interpretation. With just the right touch of moral indignation, I offered my literary criticism class this example of militaristic ideology blatantly misreading an antimilitaristic text. "But … the Defense Department is right!" objected the first student to speak. Somewhat amused, I spent the next ten minutes trying, with decreasing amusement, to show this student that the Reagan administration's reading was clearly, obviously, painfully wrong. I pointed to the text. I cited the traditional interpretation. I noted the class consensus, which supported me. All to no avail. It was at this point that I felt that "theoretical urge": the overwhelming desire for a hermeneutic account to which I could appeal to prove my student wrong. What I wanted was a general theory of interpretation that could supply rules outlawing my student's misreading. This little hermeneutic fable introduces the three topics of my essay. One topic is the theoretical moment that concludes the narrative; another is the simple plot, a brief rhetorical exchange; and finally there's the institutional setting(a university classroom) in which the exchange takes place. These three topics preoccupy the sections that follow. Section 1 analyzes the problems resulting from the theoretical urge, the impasse of contemporary critical theory. Section 2 proposes my solution to this impasse, a solution I call rhetorical hermeneutics, which leads in section 3 to a rhetorical version of institutional history.   1. "National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958," United States Statutes at Large (Washington, D.C., 1959), vol. 72, pt. 1, sec. 102(a), p. 426; Robert Cooper, director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, quoted in Frank Greve, "Pentagon Research Retains Vision of ‘Winning' N- war," Miami Herald, 27 Mar. 1983, sec. D, p. 4.   Steven Mailloux,associate professor of English at the University of Miami, is the author of Interpretive Conventions: the Reader in the Study of American Fiction. He is currently at work on a book tentatively entitled Rhetorical Power: Politics in American Literature, Criticism, and Theory. His previous contributions to are "Stanley Fish's ‘Interpreting the Variorum': Advance or Retreat?" (Autumn 1976) and "Truth or Consequences: On Being Against Theory" (June 1983). Nelson Goodman How Buildings Mean Arthur Schopenhauer ranked the several arts in a hierarchy, with literary and dramatic arts at the top, music soaring in a separate even higher heaven, and architecture sinking to the ground under the weight of beams and bricks and mortar.1 The governing principle seems to be some measure of spirituality, with architecture ranking lowest by vice of being grossly material. Nowadays such rankings are taken less seriously. Traditional ideologies and mythologies of the arts are undergoing deconstruction and disvaluation, making way for a neutral comparative study that can reveal a good deal not only about relations among the several arts2 but also about the kinships and contrasts between the arts, the sciences, and other ways that symbols of various kinds participate in the advancement of the understanding. In comparing architecture with the other arts, what may first strike us, despite Schopenhauer, is a close affinity with music: architectural and musical works, unlike paintings or plays or novels, are seldom descriptive or representational. With some interesting exceptions, architectural works do not denote that is, do not describe, recount, depict, or portray. They mean, if at all, in other ways. On the other hand, and architectural work contrasts with other works of art in scale. A building or park or city3 is not only bigger spatially and temporally than a musical performance or painting it is bigger even than we are. We cannot take it all in from a single point of view; we must move around and within it to grasp the whole. Moreover, the architectural work is normally fixed in place. Unlike a painting that may be reframed and rehung or a concerto that may be heard in different halls, the architectural work is firmly set in physical and cultural environment that alters slowly.   1. See Bryan Magee, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (Oxford, 1983), pp. 176-78.   Nelson Goodman,emeritus professor of philosophy at Harvard University, is the author of, among other works, The Structure of Appearance, Languages of Art, Ways of Worldmaking,andOf Mind and Other Matters. His previous contributions to are "The Status of Style" (June 1975), "Metaphor as Moonlighting" (Autumn 1979), "Twisted Tales; or, Story, Study, and Symphony" (Autumn 1980), "The Telling and the Told" (Summer 1981), and "Routes of Reference) Autumn 1981). Ken Hirschkop A Response to the Forum on Mikhail Bakhtin 's Forum on Mikhail Bakhtin [Critical Inquiry10 (December 1983): 225-319] is the latest contribution to the spectacular effort of interpretation and assimilation that is being applied to the work of this recently recovered critic. In such a situation, analysis proceeds with one eye on the work in question and the other on current debates in the field; in the case of Bakhtin, interpretation is at the same time an attempt to come to grips with challenges posed by recent literary theory to certain axiomatic critical assumptions about intentionality, textuality, and the human subject. But the matter is also complicated by the fact that we are dealing here with a critic who was active in the USSR. This brings into play additional ideological pressures, generated by the cold war, which bear on the scholarly assimilation of his work. The debate on Bakhtin is made yet more difficult by the nature of his writing: immensely varied stylistically and topically but also and more importantly, I believe writing which strives for solutions it cannot quite articulate. It moves between alternative and contradictory formulations in a single essay and thus produces a set of concepts whose explanatory importance is matched by an unnerving tendency to slide from one formulation to the next with disturbing ease. Such ambiguities are not the sign of an open and skeptical mind, but neither are they mere inconsistencies which can be safely ignored. These internal contradictions dictate that argument over concepts like "dialogism" and "heteroglossia" cannot be settled by a definitive decision as to what they ‘really' mean; instead, we must discuss how to manage these complexities and contradictions, and to what ends. Certain definite strategies of management are emerging, and the articles presented in the forum, while by no means reducible to a single position, share key lines of interpretive strategy that I think ought to be brought out into the open and contested. With the notable exception of Susan Stewart's article ["Shouts on the Street: Bakhtin's Anti-Linguistics," pp. 265- 81], the contributions share an ideological drift, the ultimate effect of which is to evade the most radical aspects of Bakhtin's work in favor of an interpretation that renders him useful in the argument against the recent advances of post- structuralism and recent literary theory in general.   Ken Hirschkop is a postgraduate student at Saint Antony's College, Oxford University, working on a book about Mikhail Bakhtin. Gary Saul Morson Dialogue, Monologue, and the Social: A Reply to_Ken_Hirschkop One particularly interesting aspect of Hirschkop's essay is the repertoire of "double-voiced words" (to use Bakhtin's terms for certain rhetorical strategies) it displays. I will enumerate just three of them: 1. The Misaddressed Word.Apparently, Hirschkop has been arguing these points with someone else, whose voice has drowned out what was actually said by myself and the other contributors to the Forum on Bakhtin. In a number of cases, Hirschkop objects that we failed to say things that were, in fact, explicitly stated and attributes to us a different, phantom position, which he then cites as evidence of "liberal," individualistic, and "cold war" biases (p. 676; and see p. 673). Likewise, I ostensibly "implied" a number of things, thought Hirschkop offers no direct quotations as evidence (p. 677). 2. The Word That Lies in Ambush(a special version of what Bakhtin called "the word with a loophole"). In a way that has become increasingly common in theoretical essays, Hirschkop contents himself with stating only what is not the case and neglects telling us his conception of the alternative, correct position. For example, Hirschkop says: "Such ambiguities [in Bakhtin] are not the sign of an open and skeptical mind, but neither are they mere inconsistencies which can be safely ignored" (p. 672). In consequence, respondents who presume to guess at his position, whether they guess rightly or wrongly, are subject to an accusation of total or partial misrepresentation of his position or, perhaps worse, of drawing typically liberal inferences. 3. The Preemptive Word(another version of "the word with a loophole"). Using a strategy familiar to most polemicists, Hirschkop attempts to discredit his adversaries by anticipating their objections within his own argument. Unfortunately, he projects responses that no one has made as if those responses were inevitable and seeks to dismiss them simply by naming them rather than answering them. Thus, he accuses my fellow contributors and me of a "kind of relativism, whose ideological affinities with the commonplaces of Western cold war discourse (the contrast of a liberal openness with a Left ‘dogmatism') cannot be missed" and which "crops up again and again when Bakhtin is interpreted" (p. 676). The phrase in parentheses and the word in quotation marks are an example of preemptive discourse.   Gary Saul Morson is the author of The Boundaries of Genre: Dostoevsky's "Diary of a Writer" and the Traditions of Literary Utopia (1981) and the editor of Literature and History: Theoretical Problems and Russian Case Studies (forthcoming). He is currently completing a book on Tolstoy, one chapter of which ("Tolstoy's Absolute Language") appeared in the Summer 1981 issue of . He was the guest editor of 's Forum on Mikhail Bakhtin, for which he wrote the introduction, "Who Speaks for Bakhtin?" (December 1983). Richard M. Berrong Finding Antifeminism in Rabelais; or, A Response to_Wayne_Booth's Call for an Ethical Criticism In his article "Freedom of Interpretation: Bakhtin and the Challenge of Feminist Criticism" (9 [September 1982]: 45-76), Wayne Booth develops an argument for "ethical" literary criticism, criticism that is concerned with the ideologies inherent in works of literature and the effects these ideologies may have on the reader. Or, as he phrases it himself: "What we are talking about [is] human ideals, how they are created in art and thus implanted in readers and left uncriticized" (p. 65). Booth's starting point, his "inspiration" for this argument, is Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of "dialogism" and, in particular, Bakhtin's use of this notion in his interpretation of François Rabelais' Gargantuaand Pantagruel narratives.1 For those not familiar with Booth's essay (and/ or Bakhtin's interpretation), I will briefly summarize his argument in support of ethical criticism. Booth begins with much praise for Bakhtin (and Rabelais, as Bakhtin saw him) because Bakhtin seems (to Booth) to have discovered in Rabelais a linguistic technic that frees the reader from the ideologies inherent in language (much less in works of literature constructed with language). As Booth paraphrases Bakhtin, any writer who employs the languages of different ideologies within one text (hence making the text "dialogic") freed the reader from the "prison-house of language" to the extent that he allows the reader to view each ideology from the outside, from these other languages, so that this reader can judge each ideology in terms other than those which the ideology builds into its own language.   1. See Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass., 1968).   Richard M. Berrong is visiting assistant professor of French at the University of Nebraska. He is the author of Every Man for Himself: Social Order and Its Dissolution in Rabelais(forthcoming, 1985) and Rabelair and Bakhtin Revisited: The Presence and Exclusion of Popular Culture in "Gargantua and Pantagruel" (forthcoming, 1986). Wayne C. Booth Reply to Richard Berrong At first I thought Richard Berrong's claim was only that I had misread Rabelais. My main point was not about Rabelais but about how, in general, we might deal with sexist classics. But it remains true that if Berrong has caught me misreading and then condemning "bits" torn from their context, I have violated my own professed standards. He and I both see Rabelais as a very great author, and we both hope to avoid the pointlessness of judging works, great or small, for faults that they do not exhibit. But I am not certain whether we agree that when, after careful reading, we find that a beloved author is in some way insensitive or unjust, we will want somehow to include that judgment in what we say about the author's genius. When I consider his conclusion closely, I begin to suspect that we are engaged in a dispute not about Rabelais but about whether we are free to appraise a literary work in terms other than "its own." I shall not attempt a detailed answer to the claim that I have misread Rabelais. Even if I chanced to persuade Berrong an unlikely outcome now, since my long article failed to win him we can be sure that many other modern readers would rise up to call Rabelais inoffensive. Disputes about his treatment of women have continued for more than four centuries, and they are not likely ever to be finally settled. So I shall just touch on four of our contrasting readings and then turn to the more important matter of how we view ethical criticism.   Wayne Booth's most recent book is Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism. A version of his critique of Rabelais will appear this year in The Company We Keep: Ethical Criticism and the Ethics of Reading. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Editor's Introduction: Writing "Race" and the Difference It_Makes What importance does "race" have as a meaningful category in the study of literature and the shaping of critical theory? If we attempt to answer this question by examining the history of Western literature and its criticism, our initial response would probably be "nothing" or, at the very least, "nothing explicitly." Indeed, until the past decade or so, even the most subtle and sensitive literary critics would most likely have argued that, except for aberrant moments in the history of criticism, race has not been brought to bear upon the study of literature in any apparent way. Since T. S. Eliot, after all, the canonical texts of the Western literary tradition have been defined as a more or less closed set of works that somehow speak to, or respond to, "the human condition" and to each other in formal patterns of repetition and revision. And while most critics acknowledge that judgment is not absolute and indeed reflects historically conditioned presuppositions, certain canonical works (the argument runs) do seem to transcend value judgments of the moment, speaking irresistibly to the human condition. The question of the place of texts written by the Other (be that odd metaphorical negation of the European defined as African, Arabic, Chinese, Latin American, Yiddish, or female authors) in the proper study of "literature," "Western literature," or "comparative literature" has, until recently, remained an unasked question, suspended or silenced by a discourse in which the canonical and the noncanonical stand as the ultimate opposition. In much of the thinking about the proper study of literature in this century, race has been an invisible quantity, a persistent yet implicit presence. This was not always the case, we know. By mid-nineteenth century, "national spirit" and "historical period" had become widely accepted categories within theories of the nature and function of literature which argued that the principal value in a great work of literary art resided in the extent to which these categories were reflected in that work of art Montesquieu's De l'esprit des lois considered a culture's formal social institution as the repository of its "guiding spirit," while Giambattista Vico's principi di una scienza nuova read literature against a complex pattern of historical cycles. Friedrich and August von Schlegel managed rather deftly to bring "both national spirit and historical period" to bear upon the interpretation of literature, as W. Jackson Bate has shown. But it was Hippolyte-Adolphe Taine who made the implicit explicit by postulating "race, moment, and milieu" as positivistic criteria through which any work could be read and which, by definition, any work reflected. Taine's History of English Literature was the great foundation upon which subsequent nineteenth-century notions of "national literatures" would be constructed.   Henry Louis Gates, Jr.is professor of English, comparative literature, and African studies at Cornell University. He has edited several books and has written Figures in Blood and The Signifying Monkey. Anthony Appiah The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion_of_Race Contemporary biologists are not agreed on the question of whether there are any human races, despite the widespread scientific consensus on the underlying genetics. For most purposes, however, we can reasonably treat this issue as terminological. What most people in most cultures ordinarily believe about the significance of "racial" difference is quite remote, I think, from what the biologists are agreed on. Every reputable biologist will agree that human genetic variability between the populations of Africa or Europe or Asia is not much greater than that within those populations; though how much greater depends, in part, on the measure of genetic variability the biologist chooses. If biologists want to make interracial difference seem relatively large, they can say that "the proportion of genic variation attributable to racial differences is … 9 11%."1 If they want to make it seem small, they can say that, for two people who are both Caucasoid, the chances of difference in genetic constitution at one site on a given chromosome are currently estimated at about 14.3 percent, while for any two people taken at random from the human population, they are estimated at about 14.8 percent. (I will discuss why this is considered a measure of genetic difference in section 2.) The statistical facts about the distribution of variant characteristics in human populations and subpopulations are the same, whichever way the matter is expressed. Apart from the visible morphological characteristics of skin, hair, and bone, by which we are inclined to assign people to the broadest racial categories black, white, yellow there are few genetic characteristics to be found in the population of England that are not found in similar proportions in Zaire or in China; and few too (though more) which are found in Zaire but not in similar proportions in China or in England. All this, I repeat, is part of the consensus (see, "GR," pp. 1-59). A more familiar part of the consensus is that the differences between peoples in language, moral affections, aesthetic attitudes, or political ideology those differences which most deeply affect us in our dealings with each other are not biologically determined to any significant degree. […] In this essay, I want to discuss the way in which W. E. B. Du Bois who called his life story the "autobiography of a race concept" came gradually, though never completely, to assimilate the unbiological nature of races. I have made these few prefatory remarks partly because it is my experience that the biological evidence about race is not sufficiently known and appreciated but also because they are important in discussing Du Bois. Throughout his life, Du Bois was concerned not just with the meaning of race but with the truth about it. We are more inclined at present, however, not to express our understanding of the intellectual development of people and cultures as a movement toward the truth; I shall sketch some of the reasons for this at the end of the essay. I will begin, therefore, by saying what I think the rough truth is about race, because, against the stream, I am disposed to argue that this struggle toward the truth is exactly what we find in the life of Du Bois, who can claim, in my view, to have thought longer, more engagedly, and more publicly about race than any other social theorist of our century.   1. Masatoshi Nei and Arun K. Roychoudhury, "Genetic Relationship and Evolution of Human Races," Evolutionary Biology 14 (1983): 11; all further references to this work, abbreviated "GR," will be included in the text.   Anthony Appiah is associate professor of philosophy, African studies, and Afro-American studies at Yale. He is the author of Assertion and Conditionals (1985) and For Truth in Semantics (forthcoming). In addition, he is at work on African Reflections: Essays in the Philosophy of Culture.   Edward W. Said An Ideology of Difference The Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 seems to have broken, for the first time, the immunity from sustained criticism previously enjoyed by Israel and its American supporters. For a variety of reasons, Israel's status in European and American public life and discourse has always been special, just as the position of Jews in the West has always been special, sometimes for its tragedy and horrendous suffering, at other times for its uniquely impressive intellectual and aesthetic triumphs. On behalf of Israel, anomalous norms, exceptional arguments, eccentric claims were (and still are) made, all of them forcibly conveying the notion that Israel does not entirely belong to the world of normal politics. Nevertheless, Israel and with it, Zionism had gained this unusual status politically, not miraculously: it merged with a variety of currents in the West whose power and attractiveness for supporters of Israel effaced anything as concrete as, for example, an Israeli policy of rigid separation between Jew and non-Jew, or a military rule over hundreds of thousands of Arabs that was as repressive as any tyranny in Latin America or Eastern Europe. There are any number of credible accounts of this, from daily fare in the Israeli press to studies by Amnesty International, to reports by various U.N. bodies, Western journalists, church groups, and, not least, dissenting supporters of Israel. In other words, even though Israel was a Jewish state established by force on territory already inhabited by a native population largely of Muslim Arabs, in a part of the world overwhelmingly Muslim and Arab, it appeared to most of Israel's supporters in the West (from which Zionism increasingly drew its greatest help) that the Palestinian Arabs who paid a large part of the price for Israel's establishment were neither relevant nor necessarily even real. What changed in 1982 was that the distance between Arab and Jew was for the first time perceived more or less universally as not so great and, indeed, that any consideration of Israel, and any perception of Israel at all, would have to include some consideration of the Palestinian Arabs, their travail, their claims, their humanity. Changes of this sort seem to occur dramatically, although it is more accurate to comprehend them as complex, cumulative, often contradictory processes occurring over a long period of time. Above all else, however, no such process can be viewed neutrally, since for better or for worse there are many interests at work in it and, therefore, many interests also at work whenever it is interpreted or reported. Moreover, while it is worthwhile and even possible to reduce and curtail the gross pressure of those interests for the purpose of analysis or reflection, it is useless to deny that any such analysis is inevitably grounded in, or inevitably affiliated to, a particular historical moment and a specific political situation.   Edward Said,Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, is the author of, among other works, The Question of Palestine (1979), The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983), and After the Last Sky(forthcoming). He will give the 1985 T. S. Eliot Lectures, on Culture and Imperialism,at the University of Kent later this year. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry include "Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community" (September 1982) and "On Professionalism: Response to Stanley Fish" (December 1983). Abdul R. JanMohamed The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of_Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature Despite all its merits, the vast majority of critical attention devoted to colonialist literature restricts itself by severely bracketing the political context of culture and history. This typical facet of humanistic closure requires the critic systematically to avoid an analysis of the domination, manipulation, exploitation, and disfranchisement that are inevitably involved in the construction of any cultural artifact or relationship. I can best illustrate such closures in the field of colonialist discourse with two brief examples. In her book The Colonial Encounter, which contrasts the colonial representations of three European and three non-European writers, M. M. Mahood skirts the political issue quite explicitly by arguing that she chose those authors precisely because they are "innocent of emotional exploitation of the colonial scene" and are "distanced" from the politics of domination.`1 We find a more interesting example of this closure in Homi Bhabha's criticism. While otherwise provocative and illuminating, his work rests on two assumptions the unity of the "colonial subject" and the "ambivalence" of colonial discourse that are inadequately problematized and, I feel, finally unwarranted and unacceptable. In rejecting Edward Said's "suggestion that colonial power and discourse is possessed entirely by the colonizer," Bhabha asserts, without providing any explanation, the unity of the "colonial subject (both colonizer and colonized)."2 I do not wish to rule out, a priori, the possibility that at some rarefied theoretical level the varied material and discursive antagonisms between conquerors and natives can be reduced to the workings of a single "subject"; but such a unity, let alone its value, must be demonstrated, not assumed. Though he cites Frantz Fanon, Bhabha completely ignored Fanon's definition of the conqueror/native relation as a "Manichean" struggle a definition that is not a fanciful metaphoric caricature but an accurate representation of a profound conflict.3   1. M. M. Mahood, The Colonial Encounter: A Reading of Six Novels (Totowa, N.J., 1977), pp. 170, 171; and see p. 3. As many other studies demonstrate, the emotional innocence and the distance of the six writers whom Mahood has chosen Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, Graham Greene, Chinua Achebe, R. K. Narayan, and V. S. Naipaul are, at best, highly debatable. 2. Homi K. Bhabha, "The Other Question The Stereotype and Colonial Discourse," Screen 24 (Nov.-Dec. 1983): 25, 19. 3. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York, 1968), p. 41.   Abdul R. JanMohamed,assistant professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa. He is a founding member and associate editor of Cultural Critique and is currently working on a study of Richard Wright. Bernard Lewis The Crows of the Arabs Aghribat al-Arab,"crows or ravens of the Arabs," was the name given to a group of early Arabic poets who were of African or partly African parentage. Of very early origin, the term was commonly used by classical Arabic writers on poetics and literary history. Its use is well attested in the ninth century and was probably current in the eighth century, if not earlier. The term was used with some variation. Originally, it apparently designated a small group of poets in pre-Islamic Arabia whose fathers were free and sometimes noble Arabs and whose mothers were African, probably Ethiopian, slaves. As the sons of slave women, they were, by Arab customary law, themselves slaves unless and until their fathers chose to recognize and liberate them. As the sons of African women, their complexions were darker than was normal among the Arabs of the peninsula. Both themes servitude and blackness occur in some of the verses ascribed to these poets and, in a sense, define their identity as a group. Professor ‘Abduh Badawī of Khartoum begins his book on the black Arab poets the first serious and extensive study devoted to the topic with this definition: This name [the crows of the Arabs] was applied to those [Arabic] poets to whom blackness was transmitted by their slave mothers, and whom at the same time was transmitted by their slave mothers, and whom at the same time their Arab fathers did not recognize, or recognized only under constraint from them.1­   Bernard Lewis is Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University and has been a long-term Member of the Institute for Advanced Study. His most recent books are The Muslim Discovery of Europeand the Jews of Islam. Israel Burshatin The Moor in the Text: Metaphor, Emblem, and_Silence The image of the Moor in Spanish literature reveals a paradox at the heart of Christian and Castilian hegemony in the period between the conquest of Nasrid Granada in 1492 and the expulsion of the Moriscos by Philip III in 1609.­­ Depictions fall between two extremes. On the "vilifying" side, Moors are hateful dogs, miserly, treacherous, lazy andoverreaching. On the "idealizing" side, the men are noble, loyal, heroic, courtly they even mirror the virtues that Christian knights aspire to while the women are endowed with singular beauty and discretion. Anti-Muslim diatribes are fairly common and predictable: they are flat and repetitive in their assertion of Old Christian superiority over every aspect of the lives of Muslims or crypto-Muslims. Any sign of cultural otherness is ridiculed; the conquering caste, insecure about its own lofty (and, more often than not, chimerical) standards of limpieza de sangre ("purity of blood"), laughs away whatever trace of old Hispano-Arab splendor might remain in the Morisco. Or, conversely, the uneasy master recasts wretched Moriscos as ominous brethren of the Ottoman Turk. The truly vexed problem, however, consists in determining the meaning of idealized Moors in historiography, ballads, drama, and the novel. Roughly speaking, modern criticism divides into two camps in attempting to explain this curious phenomenon of literary infatuation with a cultural and religious minority subjected to growing popular hostility, Inquisitional hounding, and economic exploitation. I will call one camp "aestheticist" and the other "social."   Israel Burshatin,assistant professor of Spanish at Haverford College, is currently preparing a critical edition of Pedro del Corral's Crónica sarracina. Mary Louise Pratt Scratches on the Face of the Country; or,_What_Mr._barrow_Saw_in the Land of the Bushmen If the discourse of manners and customs aspires to a stable fixing of subjects and systems of differences, however, its project is not and never can be complete. This is true if only for the seemingly trivial reason that manners-and-customs descriptions seldom occur on their own as discrete texts. They usually appear embedded in or appended to a superordinate genre, whether a narrative, as in travel books and much ethnography, or an assemblage, as in anthologies and magazines.6 In the case of travel writing, which is the main focus of this essay, manners-and-customs description is always in play with other sorts of representation that also bespeak difference and position subjects in their own ways. Sometimes these other positioning complement the ideological project of normalizing description, and sometime they do not. In what follows, I propose to examine this interplay of discourses in some nineteenth-century travel writing chiefly about Africa. While Barrow's work is not prominent on anybody's mental bookshelves these days, readers will recognize such names as David Livingstone, John Speke, James Grant, Richard Burton, Mungo Park, or Paul Du Chaillu. During the co-called opening up of central and southern Africa to European capitalism in the first half of the nineteenth century, such explorer-writers were the principal producers of Africa for European imaginations producers, that is, of ideology in connection with the European expansionist project there. What I hope to underscore in these writings is not their tendency towards single, fixed subject positions or single, fixed systems of difference. Rather, I wish to emphasize the multiplicity of ways of codifying the Other, the variety of (seemingly) fixed positions and the variety of (seemingly) given sets of differences that they posit. European penetration and appropriation is semanticized in numerous ways that can be quite distinct, even mutually contradictory. In the course of examining discursive polyphony in these travel writings, I hope to stress the need to consider ideology not only in terms of reductive simplification but also in terms of the proliferation of meanings.   6. Ethnographies would seem to be a counterexample to this claim, but in fact one can fairly easily show that ethnographic writing is inextricably tied to personal narrative. Indeed this tie is a symptom of a serious contradiction between ethnographic methods and ethnographic discourse. See my "Fieldwork in Common Places," in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography,ed. James Clifford and George Marcus (forthcoming, 1986).   Mary Louise Pratt is an associate professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Program in Comparative Literature at Stanford University. She is author of Toward a Speech-Act Theory of Literary Discourse and is a member of the editorial boards of Poetics, Signs Tabloid, and Cultural Anthropology. Homi K. Bhabha Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and_Authority under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817 How can the question of authority, the power and presence of the English, be posed in the interstices of a double inscription? I have no wish to replace an idealist myth the metaphoric English book with a historicist one the colonialist project of English civility. Such a reductive reading would deny what is obvious, that the representation of colonial authority depends less on a universal symbol of English identity than on its productivity as a sign of difference. Yet in my use of "English"  there is a "transparency"  of reference that registers a certain obvious presence: the Bible translated into Hindi, propagated by Dutch or native catechists, is still the English book; a Polish émigré, deeply influenced by Gustave Flaubert, writing about Africa, produces an English classic. What is there about such a process of visibility and recognition that never fails to be an authoritative acknowledgement without ceasing to be a "spacing between desire and fulfillment, between perpetuation and its recollection … [a] medium [which] has nothing to do with a center" (D,p. 212)? This question demands a departure from Derrida's objectives in "The Double Session"; a turning away from the vicissitudes of interpretation in the mimetic act of reading to the question of the effects of power, the inscription of strategies of individuation and domination in those "dividing practices" which construct the colonial space a departure from Derrida which is also a return to those moments in his essay when he acknowledges the problematic of "presence" as a certain quality of discursive transparency which he describes as "the production of mere reality-effects" or "the effect of content" or as the problematic relation between the "medium of writing and the determination of each textual unit." In the rich ruses and rebukes with which he shows up the "false appearance of the present," Derrida fails to decipher the specific and determinate system of address (not referent) that is signified by the "effect of content" (see D, pp. 173-85). It is precisely such a strategy of address the immediate presenceof the English that engages the questions of authority that I want to raise. When the ocular metaphors of presence refer to the process by which content is fixed as an "effect of the present," we encounter not plenitude but the structured gaze of power whose objective is authority, whose "subjects" are historical.   Homi K. Bhabhais lecturer in English literature and literary theory at the University of Sussex. He is working at present on Power and Spectacle: Colonial Discourse and the English Novel and is commissioning and editing a collection of essays entitled Nation and Narration: Post-structuralism and the Culture of National Identity. He is also writing the introduction to the new English edition of Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks. Patrick Brantlinger Victorians and Africans: The Genealogy of the Myth_of_the_Dark Continent Paradoxically, abolitionism contained the seeds of empire. If we accept the general outline of Eric Williams' thesis in Capitalism and Slavery that abolition was not purely altruistic but was as economically conditioned as Britain's later empire building in Africa, the contradiction between the ideologies of antislavery and imperialism seems more apparent than real. Although the idealism that motivated the great abolitionists such as William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson is unquestionable, Williams argues that Britain could afford to legislate against the slave trade only after that trade had helped to provide the surplus capital necessary for industrial "take-off." Britain had lost much of its slave-owning territory as a result of the American Revolution; as the leading industrial power in the world, Britain found in abolition a way to work against the interests of its rivals who were still heavily involved in colonial slavery and a plantation economy.3 The British abolitionist program entailed deeper and deeper involvement in Africa the creation of Sierra Leone as a haven for freed slaves was just a start but British abolitionists before the 1840s were neither jingoists nor deliberate expansionists. Humanitarianism applied to Africa, however, did point insistently toward imperialism.4 By mid-century, the success of the antislavery movement, the impact of the great Victorian explorers, and the merger of racist and evolutionary doctrines in the social sciences had combined to give the British public a widely shared view of Africa that demanded imperialization on moral, religious, and scientific grounds. It is this view that I have called the myth of the Dark Continent; by mythology I mean a form of modern, secularized, "depoliticized speech" (to adopt Roland Barthes' phrase) discourse which treats its subject as universally accepted. Scientifically established, and therefore no longer open to criticism by a political or theoretical opposition. In The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800-1960,Nancy Stepan writes: A fundamental question about the history of racism in the first half of the nineteenth century is why it was that, just as the battle against slavery was being won by abolitionists, the war against racism was being lost. The Negro was legally freed by the Emancipation Act of 1833, but in the British mind he was still mentally, morally and physically a slave.5 It is this "fundamental question" which a genealogy of the myth of the Dark Continent can help to answer.   Patrick Brantlinger,professor of English at Indiana University, is the editor of Victorian Studies. He has written The Spirit of Reform: British Literature and Politics, 1832-1867 (1977) and Bread and Circuses: Theories of Mass Culture and Social Decay (1983). Sander L. Gilman Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of_Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature This essay is an attempt to plumb the conventions (and thus the ideologies) which exist at a specific historical moment in both the aesthetic and scientific spheres. I will assume the existence of a web of conventions within the world of the aesthetic conventions which have elsewhere been admirably illustrated but will depart from the norm by examining the synchronic existence of another series of conventions, those of medicine. I do not mean in any way to accord special status to medical conventions. Indeed, the world is full of overlapping and intertwined systems of conventions, of which the medical and the aesthetic are but two. Medicine offers an especially interesting source of conventions since we do tend to give medical conventions special "scientific" status as opposed to the "subjective" status of the aesthetic conventions. But medical icons are no more "real" than "aesthetic" ones. Like aesthetic icons, medical icons may iconographic in that they represent these realities in a manner determined by the historical position of the observers, their relationship to their own time, and to the history of the conventions which they employ. Medicine uses its categories to structure an image of the diversity of mankind; it is as much at the mercy of the needs of any age to comprehend this infinite diversity as any other system which organizes our perception of the world. The power of medicine, at least in the nineteenth century, lies in the rise of the status of science. He conventions of medicine infiltrate other seemingly closed iconographic systems precisely because of this status. In examining the conventions of medicine employed in other areas, we must not forget this power. One excellent example of the conventions of human diversity captured in the iconography of the nineteenth century is the linkage of two seemingly unrelated female images the icon of the Hottentot female and the icon of the prostitute. In the course of the nineteenth century, the female Hottentot comes to represent the black female in nuce, and the prostitute to represent the sexualized woman. Both of these categories represent the creation of classes which correspondingly represent very specific qualities. While the number of terms describing the various categories of the prostitute expanded substantially during the nineteenth century, all were used to label the sexualized woman. Likewise, while many groups of African blacks were known to Europeans in the nineteenth century, the Hottentot remained representative of the essence of the black, especially the black female. Both concepts fulfilled an iconographic function in the perception and the representation of the world. How these two concepts were associated provides a case study for the investigation of patterns of conventions, without any limitation on the "value" of one pattern over another.   Sander L. Gilman is professor of Humane Studies in the Department of German Literature and Near Eastern Studies and professor of Psychiatry (History) in the Cornell Medical College, Cornell University. He is the author or editor of numerous studies of European cultural history with a focus on the history of stereotypes. In addition, he has coedited Degeneration (1985) with J. E. Chamberlin. His study Jewish Self-Hatred is forthcoming. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism It should not be possible to read nineteenth-century British literature without remembering that imperialism, understood as England's social mission, was a crucial part of the cultural representation of England to the English. The role of literature in the production of cultural representation should not be ignored. These two obvious "facts" continue to be disregarded in the reading of nineteenth-century British literature. This itself attests to the continuing success of the imperialist project, displaced and dispersed into more modern forms. If these "facts" were remembered, not only in the study of British literature but in the study of the literature of the European colonizing cultures of the great age of imperialism, we would produce a narrative, in literary history, of the "worlding" of what is now called "the Third World." To consider the Third World as distant cultures, exploited but with rich intact literary heritages waiting to be recovered, interpreted, and curricularized in English translation fosters the emergence of "the Third World" as a signifier that allows us to forget that "worlding," even as it expands the empire of the literary discipline.1 […] In this essay, I will attempt to examine the operation of the "worlding" of what is today "the Third World" by what has become a cult text of feminism: Jane Eyre.2 I plot the novel's reach and grasp, and locate its structural motors. I read Wide Sargasso Sea as Jane Eyre's reinscription and Frankenstein as an analysis even a deconstruction of a "worlding" such as Jane Eyre's.3   Gayatri Chakravorty Spivakis Longstreet Professor of English at Emory University. She is the translator of Jacques Derrida's De la grammatologie and is presently finishing a book entitled Master Discourse, Native Informant. Her previous contributions to are " ‘Draupadi' by Mahasveta Devi" (Winter 1981) and "The Politics of Interpretations" (September 1982). Hazel V. Carby "On the Threshold of Woman's Era": Lynching, Empire,_and_Sexuality in Black Feminist Theory My purpose in this essay is to describe and define the ways in which Afro-American women intellectuals, in the last decade of the nineteenth century, theorized about the possibilities and limits of patriarchal power through its manipulation of racialized and gendered social categories and practices. The essay is especially directed toward two academic constituencies: the practitioners of Afro-American cultural analysis and of feminist historiography and theory. The dialogue with each has its own peculiar form, characterized by its own specific history; yet both groups are addressed in an assertion of difference, of alterity, and in a voice characterized by an anger dangerously self-restrained. For it is not in the nature of Caliban to curse; rather, like Caliban, the black woman has learned from her behaviour of her master and mistress that if accommodation results in a patronizing loosening of her bonds, liberation will be more painful.   Hazel V. Carby is assistant professor of English at Wesleyan University. She is the coauthor of the Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in Seventies Britain and the author of Uplifting as They Write: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (forthcoming, 1986). Barbara Johnson Thresholds of Difference: Structures of Address in Zora_Neale Hurston In preparing to write this paper, I found myself repeatedly stopped by conflicting conceptions of the structure of address into which I was inserting myself. It was not clear to me what I, as a white deconstructor, was doing talking about Zora Neale Hurston, a black novelist and anthropologist, or to whom I was talking. Was I trying to convince white establishment scholars who long for a return to Renaissance ideals that the study of the Harlem Renaissance is not a trivialization of their humanistic pursuits? Was I trying to contribute to the attempt to adapt the textual strategies of literary theory to the analysis of Afro-American literature? Was I trying to rethink my own previous work and the re-referentialize the notion of difference so as to move the conceptual operations of deconstruction out of the realm of abstract linguistic universality? Was I talking to white critics, black critics, or myself? Well, all of the above. What finally struck me was the fact that what I was analyzing in Hurston's writings was precisely, again and again, her strategies and structures of problematic address. It was as though I were asking her for answers to questions I did not even know I was unable to formulate. I had a lot to learn, then, from Hurston's way of dealing with multiple agendas and heterogeneous implied readers. I will focus here on three texts that play interesting variations on questions of identity and address: two short essays, "How It Feels to Be Colored Me" and "What White Publishers Won't Print," and a book-length collection of folktales, songs, and hoodoo practices entitles Mules and Men.   Barbara Johnson is professor of French and comparative literature at Harvard University. She is the author of Défigurations du langage poétique and The Critical Difference,translator of Jacques Derrida's Dissemination,and editor of The Pedagogical Imperative: Teaching as a Literary Genre. Her previous contribution to ,"Rigorous Unreliability," appeared in the December 1984 issue. Jacques Derrida Racism's Last Word APARTHEID may that remain the name from now on, the unique appellation for the ultimate racism in the world, the last of many. May it thus remain, but may a day come when it will only be for the memory of man. A memory in advance: that, perhaps, is the time given for this exhibition. At once urgent and untimely, it exposes itself and takes a chance with time, it wagers and affirms beyond the wager. Without counting on any present moment, it offers only a foresight in painting, very close to silence, and the rearview vision of a future for which apartheid will be the name of something finally abolished. Confined and abandoned then to this silence of memory, the name will resonate all by itself. Reduced to the state of a term in disuse. The thing it names today will no longer be. But hasn't apartheid always been the archival record of the unnameable? The exhibition, therefore, is not a presentation. Nothing is delivered here in the present, nothing that would be presentable only, in tomorrow's rearview mirror, the late, ultimate racism, the last of many.   Jacques Derrida,professor of philosophy at the Ecole des hauts etudes en sciences socials in Paris, is the author of, among other works, Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, Margins of Philosophy,and Dissemination. His most recent contribution to ,"The Linguistic Circle of Geneva," appeared in the Summer 1982 issue. Peggy Kamuf teaches French at Miami University, Ohio. She is the author of Fiction of Feminine Desire. Frederic Jameson On Magic Realism in Film The concept of "magic realism" raises many problems, both theoretical and historical. I first encountered it in the context of American painting in the mid-1950s; at about the same time, Angle Flores published an influential article (in English) in which the term was applied to the work of Borges;1 but Alejo Carpentier's conception of the real maravilloso at once seemed to offer a related or alternative conception, while his own work and that of Miguel Angel Asturias seemed to demand an enlargement of its application.2 Finally, with the novels of Gabriel García Márquez in the 1960s, a whole new realm of magic realism opened up whose exact relations to preceding theory and novelistic practice remained undetermined. These conceptual problems emerge most clearly when one juxtaposes the notion of magic realism with competing or overlapping terms. In the beginning, for instance, it was not clear how it was to be distinguished from that vaster category generally simply called fantastic literature; at this point, what is presumably at issue is a certain type of narrative or representation to be distinguished from realism. Carpentier, however, explicitly staged his version as a more authentic Latin American realization of what in the more reified European context took the form of surrealism: his emphasis would seem to have been on a certain poetic transfiguration of the object world itself not so much a fantastic narrative, then, as a metamorphosis in perception and in things perceived (my own discussion, below, will retain some affiliations with this acceptation). In García Márquez, finally, these two tendencies seemed to achieve a new kind of synthesis a transfigured object world in which fantastic events are also narrated. But at this point, the focus of the conception of magic realism would appear to have shifted to what must be called an anthropological perspective: magic realism now comes to be understood as a kind of narrative raw material derived essentially from peasant society, drawing in sophisticated ways on the world of village or even tribal myth. (At this point, the stronger affiliations of the mode would be with texts like those of Tutuola in Nigeria or the Magunaíma [1928] of the Brazilian writer Mário de Andrade.) Recent debates, meanwhile, have complicated all this with yet a different kind of issue: namely, the problem of the political or mystificatory value, respectively, of such texts, many of which we owe to overtly left-wing revolutionary writers (Asturias, Carpentier, Márques).3 In spite of these terminological complexities which might be grounds for abandoning the concept altogether it retains a strange seductiveness which I will try to explore further, adding to the confusion with reference points drawn from the work of Jacques Lacan and from Freud's notion of the "uncanny," and compounding it by an argument that magic realism (now transferred to the realm of film) is to be grasped as a possible alternative to the narrative logic of contemporary postmodernism.4   1. See Angel Flores, "Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction," Hispania38 (May 1955): 187-92. 2. See Alejo Carpentier, "Prólogo" to his novel El Reino de este mundo (Santiago, 1971); the most useful survey of the debate remains Roberto Gonzalez Echeverria, "Carpentier y el realism magico," in Otros Mundos, otros fuegos,ed. Donald Yates, Congreso International de Literature Iberoamericana 16 (East Lansing, Mich., 1975), pp. 221-31. 3. See Angel Rama, La Novel en America Latina (Botoa, 1982), and especially Carlos Blanco Aguinaga, De Mitólogos y novelistas (Madrid, 1975), in particular the discussions of Gabriel García Márques and Alejo Carpentier. 4. My own general frame of reference for "postmodernism" is outlined in my "Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," New Left Review146 (July-Aug. 1984): 53-92.   Frederic Jameson,William A. Lane Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University, is the author of The Prison-House of Language and The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act.He is also a member of the editorial collective of Social Text. His previous contributions to are "The Symbolic Inference; or, Kenneth Burke and Ideological Analysis" (Spring 1978) and "Ideology and Symbolic Action" (Winter 1978). Stephen Greenblatt Loudun and London Several years ago, in a brilliant contribution to the Collection Archives Series, Michel de Certeau wove together a large number of seventeenth-century documents pertaining to the famous episode of demonic possession among the Ursuline nuns of Loudun.1 One of the principal ways in which de Certeau organized his disparate complex materials into a compelling narrative was by viewing the extraordinary events as a kind of theater. There are good grounds for doing so. After all, as clerical authorities came to acknowledge the incidents of possession and treat them accordingly, they ceased to be isolated, private events occurring inside the convent walls and were transformed instead into public spectacles performed for a populace deeply divided between Catholics and Huguenots. Once or twice a day the nuns were taken from their needlework or tranquil meditations and led in small groups through the streets of the town to a church or chapel, where spectators had already gathered. At first these spectators were local townspeople, many of whom must have been acquainted with or even related to the nuns, but, as word of the possession spread, crowds of the curious arrived not only from the region but from all over France and from as far away as England and Scotland. The inns of the town were filled with these visitors who traveled to Loudun expecting to witness events there that were at once beyond nature and yet performed on schedule: repeatable, predictable, and in their bizarre way decorous. At the appointed times, beneath the expectant gaze of the crowd, the possessed women would ascend a scaffold, be loosely tied to low chairs, and begin to manifest their symptoms. From within each of the tormented bodies, a particular devil would arise and be constrained by the exorcist to identify himself. If a nun were possessed by more than one demon, the exorcist could dismiss one supernatural voice and demand that another come forth and occupy the tongue of the writhing woman. If the demon refused to cooperate in the interrogation, the presiding priest would solemnly remove the Holy Sacrament from the pyx and hold it up to the mouth of the possessed while the priests and spectators would assist by chanting the Salve Regina. This would provoke screams and violent contortions. Submitting to irresistible spiritual pressure, the devil would then be compelled to speak, confirming the Christian mysteries and the power of the Catholic church. "On stage," writes de Certeau, "there are no longer human beings; in this sense, there is no longer anyone only roles" (PL, p. 133). And these "roles" in turn are revealed to be the hidden truths that underlie the masks of ordinary life; more accurately, the ceremony has the power to convert ordinary life into mere masks, precisely so that these masks may be stripped away to reveal the inward drama of spiritual warfare. The demons appear at first to dominate that drama, forcing their wretched and unwilling hosts to manifest the power of darkness, but a spectacular ecclesiastical counterforce transforms the tragedy into a comedy in which the devil confesses that he has been vanquished by Jesus Christ.   1. See Michel de Certeau, La Possession de Loudun,Collection Archives Series, no. 37 (Paris, 1980); all further references to this work, abbreviated PL, will be included in the text (translations are my own). On the relationship between exorcism and theater in this period, see also Henri Weber, "L'Exorcisme à la fin du seizième siècle, instrument de la Contre Réforme et spectacle baroque, » Nouvelle revue du seizième siècle 1 (1983) : 79-101.   Stephen Greenblatt,the Class of 1932 Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, is a founder and editor of Representations. His most recent book, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, received the British Council Prize in the Humanities. He is presently completing a study of Shakespeare and the poetics of culture. "Marlow, Marx, and Anti- Semitism," his previous contribution to , appeared in the Winter 1978 issue. Michael André Bernstein Image, Word, and Sign: The Visual Arts as_Evidence_in_Ezra_Pound's Cantos 1. To list Pound's triumphs of recognition in the realm of art, music, or literature is by itself no more enlightening than to catalog his oversights. Thus, for example, his instant and almost uncanny responsiveness to the work of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska is not more informative than his bizarre ranking of Francis Picabia's paintings above those of Picasso or Matisse. Clearly it is essential to know, with as much specificity as possible, exactly what Pound said about a particular work of art or literature and, equally important, given the frequent shifts of emphasis and interest throughout his long career, just when these opinions were first formulated. Like every reader of the The Cantos, I am conscious of the enormous service rendered by Pound scholars whose research is giving us a more complete inventory of the poet's various statements and positions, and it would be foolish to take my point here as a derogation of such efforts. But a list, no matter how complete, is not an argument, and an inventory, no matter how scrupulously assembled, is not an explanation; a recurrent problem in Pound studies is that too often the compoilation of discrete items of information is seen as a sufficient answer to problems of interpretation and understanding. In other words, I think it essential that discussions of pound and the Visual Arts (or, for that matter, of Pound and History, Pound and Economics, and so forth) move beyond the quagmire resulting from still another frain-storm of "factual atoms" chronicling his various passions and dislikes. 2. Far from implying, however, that we must therefore simply accept Pound's brilliant discoveries and pass over his "howling blunders," my position would emphasize the need to take his ideas seriously enough to confront them, to test them against the material to which they are a response and for which they often seek to provide an explanatory account. There are times, as I have argued in an analogous context, when it is less demeaning to give a man credit for his worst errors than to remove from him the capacity to err. 3. What we require, I believe, is less a catalog of all of Pound's specific statements about various artists, with each utterance assigned a positive or negative prefix depending upon our own personal and currently sanctioned hierarchy of values, than a careful study of the place of those statements in the logic and texture of Pound's own work. The attempt to focus attention on The Cantos'network of artistic references its invocation of masterpieces and privileged moments of cultural achievement will yield only trivial results unless the inner dynamic linking Pound's various exampla and the actual role these play in the poem's argument become clearer in the process.   Michael André Bernstein,associate professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic (1980) and Prima della Rivoluzione (1984), a volume of verse. He is currently completing a study of the Abject Hero and literary genealogy. His previous contribution to William Veeder The Negative Oedipus: Father, Frankenstein,and the Shelleys My study of Mary Shelley and father includes her husband because Percy Shelley's obsessions with patriarchy, with " ‘GOD, AND KIND, AND LAW,' " influenced profoundly Mary's* art and life. Percy's idealizations of father in The Revolt of Islam and Prince Athanase indicated ways or resolving familial antagonisms which Mary adopted and developed her later fiction. Percy's relationship with Frankenstein is still more intricate. Recognizing that her husband's obsessions with father and self-creation were contributing to the deterioration of their marriage, Mary represents these obsessions (among many others, including her own) in Victor Frankenstein partly to vent in art the anger which would have further damaged the marriage, and party to show Percy before it was too late the errors of his ways. It was too late. Percy responded to Frankenstein in Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci with a reaffirmation of sonship which has been largely unrecognized by scholars. Father looms so large for both Mary and Percy Shelley that no one critical approach can account for him fully. At their most idealistic and thus most traditional the Shelleys encourage a critical methodology which integrates the traditional disciplines of biographical and close textual analyses. By taking this approach to Mary's later fiction and to Percy's The Revolt of Islam, I can not only confirm the prominence of father for the Shelleys but also establish the ideal against which their most subversive and important art was created. Reading this indirect, overdetermined art in light of the negative Oedipus will help answer important questions about Frankenstein, Prometheus Unbound,and The Cenci and will, I hop, add to our understanding of the vexed role of father in the Romantic period and in subsequent generations whose children we are.   William Veeder,professor of English at the University of Chicago, has published books on Yeats, Henry James, and Victorian feminism. His Mary Shelley and "Frankenstein": The Fate of Androgyny will appear in December 1985. The Art of Criticism: Henry James on the Theory and the Practice of Fiction, coedited with Susan M. Griffin, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: The Centenary, a collection of new essays on Stevenson's novel, are also forthcoming (1986). He is currently at work on The Serpent's Tale: Anglo-American Gothic Fiction, 1885-1914. Maria Torok Unpublished by Freud to Fliess: Restoring and Oscillation The aim of the following lines is to reinstate some unpublished fragments into two letters written by Freud to Fliess on 12 and 22 December 1897, respectively. These dates refer to a period in Freud's elaborations traditionally considered subsequent to his renunciation of the seduction theory. As is well known, the interpretation of an earlier letter to Fliess, written by Freud on 21 September 1897, makes his revocation into the first stage of what has since become Freudian psychoanalysis. This "turning point" has allowed many an interpreter to grasp Freudian psychoanalysis as a theory of instinctive fantasies. Yet, the conventional dots, frequently used in The Origins of Psycho- analysis to indicate editorial omissions, raise the issue: Do hitherto unknown quantities prevent us from understanding what the precise nature of this "turning point" might be? In the English and subsequent German editions of the Freud-Fliess correspondence there are indeed some clues of uncertainty as regards Freud's definitive repeal of his seduction theory. Consider, for example, the statement from a letter dated 31 August 1898: "The secret of this restlessness is hysteria."2 Freud cannot rest on his new hypothesis about the nature of neurosis since the etiology of hysteria continues to be a secret. A particularly dense passage of the same letter seems to elaborate on the causes of Freud's agitation. True, I have a good record of successes, but perhaps they have been only indirect, as if I had applied the lever in the right direction for the line of cleavage of the substance; but the line of cleavage itself remains unknown to me. [O,p. 262]   Maria Torokis the author (with Nicolas Abraham) of The Wolf- Man's Magic Word (Le Verbier de L'Homme aux loups),forthcoming in translation, 1986. "Unpublished by Freud to Fliess" is part of a book-length study she is completing on the genesis of Freudian concepts. Nicholas Rand,assistant professor of French at the University of Wisconsin Madison, is the translator of The Wolf-Man's Magic Word. Leo Bersani "The Culture of Redemption": Marcel Proust and Melanie_Klein What is the redemptive power of art? More fundamentally, what are the assumptions which make it seem natural to think of art as having such powers? In attempting to answer these questions, I will first be turning to Proust, who embodies perhaps more clearly in a sense, even more crudely than any other major artist a certain tendency to think of cultural symbolizations in general as essentially reparative. This tendency, which had already been sanctified as a more or less explicit dogma of modern high culture by Proust's time, persists, I believe, in our own time as the enabling morality of a humanistic criticism. I will argue that the notion of art as salvaging somehow damaged experience has, furthermore, been served by psychoanalysis more specifically, by a certain view of sublimation first proposed rather disconnectedly by Sigmund Freud and later developed more coherently and forcefully by Melanie Klein. The psychoanalytic theory I refer to makes normative both for an individual and for a culture the mortuary aesthetic of A la recherché du temps perdu. As everyone knows, involuntary memories play a crucial role in the Proustian narrator's discovery of his vocation as a writer. Let's begin with a somewhat untypical example of the genre, the passage in Sodome et Gomorrhe describing the "resurrection" of Marcel's grandmother on the first evening of his second visit to Balbec. This passage reformulates the importance of memory for art in terms of another relation about which the theoretical passages that conclude Le Temps retrouvé will be at once prolific and evasive: the dependence of art on death.   Leo Bersani is professor of French at the University of California, Berkeley. The Forms of Violence/Narrative in Ancient Assyria and Modern Culture,written in collaboration with Ulysse Dutoit, is his most recent publication. Professor's The Freudian Body/ Psychoanalysis and Art will be published this winter. John Limon The Integration of Faulkner's Go Don, Moses The smallest ambition of this essay is to demonstrate that Rider, the central character in William Faulkner's short story "Pantaloon in Black," cannot be understood. This may be of some interest to Faulkner specialists. But the fact that he cannot be understood has ramifications, because "Pantaloon in Black," seems to be the anomaly of the book Go Down, Moses,which is either a collection of stories or a novel, depending on the success one has in integrating "Pantaloon in Black" into it. If Rider cannot be understood, then Go Down, Moses has an enigma at the center of its mysteries, around which it cannot be made to cohere. More important to nonspecialists is the question of why Rider cannot be understood, and, consequently, why Go Down, Moses disintegrates. To answer this I want to perform the logical operation modus tollens on Stanley Fish's idea that interpretations are produced (not by individuals directed by texts, but) by interpretive communities: if interpretations fail, then it must be because interpretive communities fail. Of course, Fish everywhere argues that interpretations must always, on the contrary, succeed; the lesson of Is There a Text in This Class?is that interpretive communities produce texts inexorably and inevitably in their own image. But Fish's idea of an interpretive community is something like the Modern Language Association, or the set of all English professors, or the Yale school bigger or smaller machines perfectly programmed (so he believes) for producing texts out of theoretical presuppositions. What is, however, even English professors are members of communities that fit the definition of an interpretive community, by virtue of the fact that they speak through our readings, but which are not chiefly engaged in the manufacture of masterful criticism? Worse: what if these communities speak a different language from those to which we professionally belong? Worse yet: what is they are disintegrating even as the MLA, or the Yale school, endures, or prevails? The point is not that Fish is wrong; it is that he has oversimplified his sense of a text by reducing it to the instrument of communication used by professor speaking to other professors. But in "Pantaloon in Black," Faulkner has formed a text in the image of a Southern Negro and invited us to join an interpretive community on the model of Yoknapatawpha County. Insofar as we take up that invitation, we fail to understand his story; insofar as we reject it, we also fail to understand his story. The paradox is the result of our being forced to join a community which does not cohere; to the degree that that community fails to cohere, so does our reading. What Faulkner says to Fish is that the American belief in the power of interpretive communities is akin to an idealist's dream of an integrated South.   John Limonis assistant professor of English at Williams College. He is currently working on a book, Half-Sight of Science,on the history of the American novel in relation to the history of science and science philosophy. Richard Shiff Remembering Impressions In his essay "Painting Memories" ( 10 [March 1984]: 510-42), Michael Fried identifies memory as the privileged thematic that structures Charles Baudelaire's Salon of 1846. But he then limits his investigation of this topic by focusing on the representation of "past" art,to the exclusion of the recollection of "past" experience. Fried thus isolates the theme of memory from the dialectic of life and art that characterizes its performance for Baudelaire. Such selective analysis not only reverses Baudelaire's priorities but deflects his pointed comments on modernity and naiveté, which in turn inform the example of Edouard Manet, Fried's exemplary modernist painter. One wonders whether too much of Baudelaire and Manet is lost to this view. Perhaps the predilections of contemporary criticism have sanctioned Fried's approach. For today we hesitate to ground art in experience, preferring to conceive of representations as signs fully engendered by and engendering other signs. Baudelaire was of a different mind; he lived through the dawning of our own age, but also in the fading light of another. He was heir to a tradition that regarded the forms of art as powerfully motivated by the experience of internalized ideas and sensations; for him, a master artist's "signs" would appear more symbolic than allegorical, more immediate than mediated or distanced. (This distinction often, and rightfully, slips away; it will become evident that Baudelaire's writing encompasses both positions, ours and his.) As we deny artistic signs motivation in extralinguistic "experience," we aggravate that perennial problem of origins which Fried himself invokes. It might be reformulated in this manner: all painting depends on a lineage of antecedent painting; yet, to succeed, a new work must transcend its filial bondage, as it compounds the effect of the "original (s)" in its own originality. Vexation follows from this issue of the artistic source. Since memories of past art (representations, conventions, signs) make possible the very creation of art, the creative event cannot assume priority over memory. And the matter of primordialmemory, like the matter of an absolutely original art, is aporia. Fried does not pursue this matter (Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, and others have); but the question necessarily implies that both representations and memories, in constituting the "past," must always be distanced. Distanced not from the present, which they enter and likewise constitute, but from those "original" experiential moments they purport to (re)present.   Richard Schiff is associate professor of art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of Cézanne and the End of Impressionism: A Study of the Theory, Technique, and Critical Evaluation of Modern Art (1984) and is currently working on a study of modernism in relation to classicism and a related study of photographic realism. His previous contributions to are "Seeing Cézanne" (Summer 1978), "Art and Life: A Metaphoric Relationship" (Autumn 1978), and, with Carl Pletsch, "History and Innovation" (Spring 1981). Michael Fried Forget It: A Response to Richard Shiff The basic disagreement between Richard Shiff and me is one of approach and ultimately of intellectual taste. What I tried to do in "Painting memories" was read Charles Baudelaire's Salon of 1846 with a view to construing its central argument as rigorously as possible, which for me meant without appealing, except in one crucial, authorized instance, to other writings by Baudelaire or indeed anyone else. (I refer here to the reading conducted in the first half of my essay and in the body of the text; a few footnotes cite passages in other writings on art by Baudelaire, and toward the end of the essay I allude briefly to The Painter of Modern Life.) This seemed to me desirable, first, because on the strength of a long familiarity with the Salon of 1846 I had become convinced that it was not the fragmented, somewhat incoherent, less than fully mature performance that many previous commentators had taken it to be (and that Shiff himself appears to think it is) but rather that it possessed a problematic consistency, even systematicness, which I wanted to explore; and second, because I had come to feel that one of the principal sources of the dreariness and predictability of much exegesis not only of that Salonbut of Baudelaire's art criticism generally was the tendency of many commentators to treat his art writing as a single, barely differentiated mass, to be supplemented when desired by selected passages from the lyric poems. Let me be as clear as I can. I am not claiming that the only fruitful approach to Baudelaire's art criticism is to consider each of his writings in isolation from the rest. I am saying that the widespread tendency to read a particular Salon or article on the visual arts in the light of others has meant that insufficient attention has been paid to the workings of individual texts, with dismaying consequences both for our understanding of those texts and for our sense of the shape of Baudelaire's intellectual career.   Michael Fried,professor of humanities and the history of art and director of the Humanities Center at the Johns Hopkins University, is the author of Morris Louisand Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot. He is currently at work on books on Gustave Courbet and on Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane. His most recent contributions to are "The Structure of Beholding in Courbet's Burial at Ornans" (June 1983) and "Paitnig Memories: On the Containment of the Past in Baudelaire and Manet" (March 1984). Henry Staten Rorty's Circumvention of Derrida Richard Rorty's "Deconstruction and Circumvention" ( 11 [September 1984]: 1-21) is a sobering reminder of how far we have to go before anything like a real dialogue between deconstruction and philosophy can take place in this country. Our literary critics ignore too much of what is specifically philosophical in philosophical texts; and our philosophers equally blind when they read literary language. Perhaps it is laughably undeconstructed to make the distinctions I had just made. But perpahs, too, it is not so easy to get beyond certain oppositions as is beginning to be widely taken for granted. It is surprising to see Rorty encouraging such complacency, for Rorty himself generally thinks hard and to good purpose. He is a figure of unique distinction on our intellectual landscape, a bridge, perhaps, our only one, between deconstruction and the American philosophical establishment. But for that very reason it is sobering to see how this philosopher reads Jacques Derrida: very much as a philosopher reads. The overall result is ambiguous (and we will trace the structure of this ambiguity), but is it not finally to "encapsulate and circumvent" Derrida, leaving the native speech community immune to his critique? Let us see.   Henry Staten is associate professor of English and adjunct professor of philosophy at the University of Utah. He is the author of Wittgenstein and Derrida (1984) and is currently working on a study of mourning and idealization in Western literature from Homer to D. H. Lawrence. Richard Rorty The Higher Nominalism in a Nutshell: A Reply_to_Henry_Staten Staten gets my intentions right when he suggests that I may simply have been saying that "the dream of philosophy is a rare but serious malady, now less common than it used to be, but currently threatening a new outbreak in the disguised form of deconstruction" (p. 455). I had thought I was urging that the appropriation of Derrida in the Anglo-Saxon "Now let's deconstruct literature" mode was a mistake and that there were some things in Derrida (not the most important things) which had encouraged this mistake notably the Heideggerian suggestion that the "text of philosophy" was at the heart of our culture. State, however, finds me more cunning and ungenerous, harsher toward Derrida, than I had imagined myself to be. He may have a point, but is hard for me to tell. No author is much good at following "the rhetorical contours" of his own writing, since his (quite possibly self-deceptive) beliefs about what he wanted to say keep leveling off the contours of what he actually wrote (p. 455). The best I can do by way of reply to the charge that I was (even if perhaps unconsciously) attempting to " ‘encapsulate and circumvent' " Derrida is to take up a central ambiguity which Staten detects (p. 453). He says that I flit back and forth between "two characterizations of the history of philosophy": (1) "a constantly changing, self- deconstructing enterprise which is therefore not characterizable in terms of any single system of metaphors," and (2) "a ‘metaphysical tradition' which has dreamed the dream of a closed, total, and transparent vocabulary which would tell the whole truth and thing but the truth" (p. 456).   Richard Rorty is Kenan Professor of Humanities at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Consequences of Pragmatism (Essays: 1972-1980),among other works, and is currently writing a book on Martin Heidegger. His previous contributions to are "Deconstruction and Circumvention" (September 1984) and "Philosophy without Principles" (March 1985). Nelson Goodman and Catherine Z. Elgin Interpretation and Identity: Can the Work Survive the_World? Predictions concerning the end of the world have proven less reliable than your broker's recommendations or your fondest hopes. Whether you await the end fearfully or eagerly, you may rest assured that it will never come not because the world is everlasting but because it has already ended, if indeed it ever began. But we need not mourn, for the world is indeed well lost, and with it the stultifying stereotypes of absolutism: the absurd notions of science as the effort to discover a unique, prepackaged, but unfortunately undiscoverable reality, and of truth as agreement with that inaccessible reality. All notions of pure givenness and unconditional necessity and of a single correct perspective and system of categories are lost as well. If there is no such thing as the world, what are we living in? The answer might be "A world" or, better, "Several worlds." For to deny that there is any such thing as theworld is no more to deny that there are worlds than to deny that there is any such thing as thenumber between two and sevenis to deny that there are numbers between two and seven. The task of describing the world is as futile as the task of describing the number between twoand seven. The world is lost once we appreciate a curious feature of certain pairs of seemingly contradictory statements: if either is true, both are. Although "The earth is in motion" and "The earth is at rest" apparently contradict each other, both are true. But from a contradiction, every statement follows. So unless we are prepared to acknowledge the truth of every statement, the appearance of contradiction in cases like these must somehow be dispelled.   Nelson Goodman is professor emeritus of philosophy at Harvard University. He has written Of Mind and Other Matters, Ways of Worldmaking, Problems and Projects, Languages of Art, The Structure of Appearance,and Fact, Fiction, and Forecast. His most recent contribution to is "How Buildings Mean" (June 1985). Catherine Z. Elgin is associate professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is the author of With Reference to Referenceand is currently writing a book entitled Philosophy without Foundations. Wayne C. Booth Pluralism in the Classroom At my university we never stop reforming the curriculum, and we're now discussing the plurality of ways in which our students fulfill our requirement of a full year of "freshman humanities." Some of us feel that we now provide too many ways: neither students nor faculty members can make a good defense of a requirement in itself an expression of power, if you will that leads to scant sharing of readings or subject matters for the students, and to no goals or methods clearly shared by increasingly diverse faculty members. As we attack and defend this kind of flabby pluralism, we naturally find ourselves discussing other kinds of pluralism, and we begin to discover the true depth of a topic that may at first seem "merely practical." There may be some nouns that can be joined to the phrase "in the classroom" without taking on a total theory of education: Shakespeare in the classroom; Romanticism in the classroom; perhaps even ironyin the classroom. But when we try to discuss "pluralism in the classroom," we throw into the discussion every belief we may have about what education should be and how it should be conducted. To ask whether or in what sense we should be pluralists in the classroom is obviously to ask, in the most fundamental way possible, "What should a teacher teach? What should we hope that every student would learn, regardless of our commitment to this or that doctrine of the moment?" Most teachers, even in a time like ours when professed relativists pluralists abound, answer that question, at least implicitly, like this: One should try very hard to teach the truth not a "dogma," of course, perhaps not even a set of propositions, but at least some single right away of doing things. Indeed in some moods any honest teacher might confess to feeling lucky if students learn even one truth or one mode of working. "They'll meet plenty of plurality just in the nature of their lives." "They'll meet plenty of other teachers, most of them with absolutely mistaken views, and my chief task is to set them straight so that when they encounter nonsense they'll know how to deal with it." Still, when you press people who talk that way they of course claim that they teach no dogmas, only an appropriately open-minded way of dealing with error in the world. They may even call themselves pluralists or relativists. But it takes no great analytical skill to detect the monisms behind their claims. When pushed, they believe that they hold=--or might someday find some one way of working, some supremely powerful "killer mode" that can dispose of all other modes with decisive proofs. They work finally in one way only, pursuing, finally, one kind of truth.   Wayne C. Booth is George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor of English and of Ideas and Methods at the university of Chicago. His previous works on pluralism include Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism (1979) and "Pluralism and Its Rivals" in Now Don't Try to Reason with Me (1970). He is now completing a book on ethical criticism. Hayden White Historical Pluralism It is as if [W. J. T.] Mitchell, who in his stance as a literary theorist is willing to admit of a plurality of equally legitimate critical modes, were unwilling to extend this pluralism to the consideration of history itself. By this I do not mean that he would be unwilling to view the history of criticism as a cacophony or polyphony of contending critical positions, as a never=ending circle of critical viewpoints, with no one of them being able finally to declare itself the winner for all time, but rather that he must feel that this is the only legitimate perspective on that history. Such a perspective on history has a name, and it is historicism the perspective associated with Ranke and Goethe in Friedrich Meinecke's great book on this subject, the perspective which, in Erich Auerbach's Mimesis, is identified with the fate of literary realism in the West. Although the name given to this perspective by Meinecke suggests that it is thehistorical perspective, contemporary historical theory and practice deny it that claim. In point of fact, if we look at contemporary historical theory and practice, we must admit that there are as many perspectives on history as there are modes of critical practice in literary studies. And this for a very good reason: the referent of the term "history" is as indeterminable, is as much a matter of principled contestation, as the term "literature" (or for that matter, "philosophy" or "science") itself. So that, if one wished to "correct" certain critical positions by reminding their proponents of the necessity of a proper "sense of history," it would be just as legitimate to correct the corrector by reminding him that the history of historiography displays the same kind of confusion over the "sense of history" that the history of criticism displays over the "sense of literature." When Mitchell characterizes the current schism in criticism as another enactment of the quarrel of ancients and moderns, he is surely right; but he fails to note that this reenactment takes place within an atmosphere made more murky by the fact that there is no generally agreed upon "sense of history" to which one can appeal in order to characterize the differences between the two camps. It is not as if the ancients and the moderns agree on some body of fact from which they draw different implications regarding the attitude that one ought to assume vis-à-vis modern as against ancient literature. For what is at issue is not the interpretation of the facts but the nature of historical factuality itself.   Hayden White is Presidential Professor of Historical Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His previous contributions to are "Historical Interpretation" (September 1982), "The Narrativization of Real Events" (Summer 1981), and "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality" (Autumn 1980). W. J. T. Mitchell Pluralism as Dogmatism It may seem a bit perverse to argue that pluralism is a kind of dogmatism, since pluralists invariably define themselves as antidogmatists. Indeed, the world would seem to be so well supplied with overt dogmatists religious fanatics, militant revolutionaries, political and domestic tyrants that it will probably seem unfair to suggest that the proponents of liberal, tolerant, civilized open-mindedness are guilty of a covert dogmatism. My only excuse for engaging in this exercise is that it may help to shake up some rather firmly fixed ideas about dogmatism held by those who advocate some version of pluralism. Dogmatism, I want to argue, has had a very had press, some of it deserved, some of it based in misunderstandings and ignorance. Much of that bad press stems, I will suggest, from the dominance of pluralism as an intellectual ideology since the Enlightenment. If "dogmatism" is a synonym for irrationality, infelixibility, and authoritarianism, the fault lies as much with pluralism as it does with any actual dogmatism. I'd like to begin, therefore, with a definition of dogmatism that comes, not from its pluralist foes, but from a historian of religion who treats it as a fairly neutral term, describing a complex and ancient feature of social institutions. This definition comes from E. Royston Pike's Encyclopedia of Religion and Religions: DOGMA(Gk., ordinance). A religious doctrine that is to be received on authority whether of a Divine revelation, a Church Council, Holy Scripture, or a great and honoured religious teacher and not, at least in the first instance, because it may be proved true in the light of reason. Almost always there is associated with dogma the element of Faith. The term comes from the Greek word for "to seem," and it meant originally that which seems true to anyone, i.e. has been approved or decided beyond cavil. In the New Testament it is applied to decisions of the Christian church in Jerusalem, enactments of the Jewish law, and imperial decrees, all of which were things to be accepted without argument. A little later it had come to mean simple statements of Christian belief and practice; and it was not until the 4th century, when the heretics were showing how far from simple the basic Christian beliefs really were, that it acquired the meaning of a theological interpretation of a religious fact. Then came the division of the Church into a Western and an Eastern branch, and never again was it possible to frame a dogma that might be universally held. The 39 Articles of the Church of England, the principles deduced from Calvin's "Institutes" and John Wesley's "Sermons," and the items that compose the Mormon creed may all be classed as dogmas.1   W. J. T. Mitchell,editor of , is professor of English and a member of the Committee on Art and Design at the University of Chicago. His most recent book is Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Ihab Hassan Pluralism in Postmodern Perspective Postmodernism once more that breach has begun to yawn! I return to it by way of pluralism, which itself has become the irritable condition of postmodern discourse, consuming many pages of both critical and uncritical inquiry. Why? Why pluralism now? This question recalls another that Kant raised two centuries ago "Was heist Aufklårung?" meaning, "Who are we now?" The answer was a signal meditation on historical presence, as Michel Foucault saw.1 But to meditate on that topic today and this is my central claim is really to inquire ‘Was heist Postmodernismus?" Pluralism in our time finds (if not founds) itself in the social, aesthetic, and intellectual assumptions of postmodernism finds its ordeal, its rightness, there. I submit, further, that the critical intentions of diverse American pluralists M. H. Abrams, Wayne Booth, Kenneth Burke, Matei Calinescu, R. S. Crane, Nelson Goodman, Richard McKeon, Stephen Pepper, not to mention countless other artists and thinkers of our moment engage that overweening query, "What is postmodernism?," engage and even answer it tacitly. In short, like a latter-day M. Jourdain, they have been speaking postmodernism all their lives without knowing it. But what is postmodernism? I can propose no rigorous definition of it, any more than I could define modernism itself. For the term has become a current signal of tendencies in theater, dance, music, art, and architecture; in literature and criticism; in philosophy, psychoanalysis, and historiography; in cybernetic technologies and even in the sciences. Indeed, postmodernism has now received the bureaucratic accolade of the National Endowment for the Humanities, in the form of a Summer Seminar for College Teachers; beyond that, it has penetrated the abstractions of "late" Marxist critics who, only a decade ago, dismissed postmodernism as another instance of the dreck, fads, and folderol of a consumer society. Clearly, then, the time has come to theorize the term, if not define it, before it fades from awkward neologism to derelict cliché without ever attaining to the dignity of a cultural concept.   1. "Maybe the most certain of all philosophical problems is the problem of the present time, of what we are, in this very moment," writes Michel Foucault in "The Subject and Power," reprinted as "Afterword" in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics,ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago, 19820, p. 210. The essay also appeared in 8 (Summer 1982): 777-96.   Ihab Hassan is Vilas Research Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. He is the author of, among other books, Radical Innocence (1961), The Dismemberment of Orpheus (1971), Paracriticisms (1975), and The Right Promethean Fire (1980). His latest work, Out of Egypt, is forthcoming in 1986. Bruce Erlich Amphibolies: On the Critical Self-Contradictions of "Pluralism" Immanuel Kant might have stated the central and urgent problem facing contemporary literary theory as the need to seek a path between dogmatism and skepticism. We confront today a multiplicity of critical methods, each filling books and journals with no doubt convincing arguments for its correctness. If we cling to one, denying others possess truth, we are dogmatists; if, however, we grant that two or three or all are equally true, we admit that each is at the same time false in relation to the others' truth, and so we are skeptics. The "dogmatic employment" of reason, Kant noted, "lands us in dogmatic assertions to which other assertions, equally specious, can always be opposed-that is, in scepticism."1 Into this professional breach steps "pluralism" (a term the reader should assume throughout is in quotation marks), claiming it can vindicate sharply limited patterns of reading which nonetheless allow for diversity in the relation of word to idea and, so, of interpreting reader to text. This would make it possible to encompass within a single theory the insights which both camps (those with one truth, those with many) find in their positions. Clearly, this entices. But do we really understand what pluralism is, if it is at all? Its critical practice already exists this essay grew from a 1984 conference which sought possible intellectual "foundations" of that practice but how are these practitioners to understand what they do? Pluralism's philosophic pedigree may have been neatly sketched by Nelson Goodman (who, however, does not use the term) as the tradition That began when Kant exchanged the structure of the world for the structure of the mind, continued when C. I. Lewis exchanged the structure of the mind for the structure of concepts, and that now proceeds to exchange the structure of concepts for the structure of the several symbols systems of the sciences, philosophy, the arts, perception, and everyday discourse. The movement is from unique truth and a world fixed and found to a diversity of right and even conflicting versions of world in the making.2   1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason,trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York, 1965), p. 57; all further references to this work, abbreviated CPR,will be included in the text. 2. Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis, 1978), p. x. Since Lewis is not often classified among pluralists, I support Goodman by calling attention to Pepper having been Lewis' student and to Lewis' observation that he and Pepper "have been, so to say, continuously aware of each other, and of a common background of thought…. I should like to think that our respective views, both in theory of value and in ethics, are mutually supplementary rather than rival theories" ("The Philosopher Replies," in The Philosophy of C. I. Lewis, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp [La Salle, Ill., 1968], pp. 670-71). Numerous essays from this volume (include one by Pepper) are useful for situating Lewis.   Bruch Erlichis associate professor of English and modern languages at the University of Nebraska Lincoln where he teaches comparative literature and literary theory. He has published on Shakespeare, Walter Benjamin, and intellectual history and is preparing a book on cognitive universals in tension with the experience of historical change, Unintelligible Limits: Time, meaning, and a Hermeneutic of Suffering. Ellen Rooney Who's Left Out? A Rose by Any Other_Name_Is_Still_Red;_Or,_The Politics of Pluralism The practical difficulties that trouble any effort to discuss "pluralism" in American literary studies can be glimpsed in the following exchange. In a 1980 interview in the Literary Review of Edinburgh, Ken Newton put this question to Derrida: It might be argued that deconstruction inevitably leads to pluralist interpretation and ultimately to the view that any interpretation is as good as any other. Do you believe this and how do you select some interpretations as being better than others? Derrida replied: I am not a pluralist and I would never say that every interpretation is equal but Ido not select. The interpretations select themselves. I am a Nietzschean in that sense. You know that Nietzsche insisted on the fact that the principle of differentiation was in itself selective. The eternal return of the same was not repetition, it was a selection of the more powerful forces. So I would say that some are more powerful than others. The hierarchy is between forces and not between true and false.1­­ The irony of Newton's identification of pluralism with the very interpretive irresponsibility that it accuses others Derrida foremost among them of embracing is certainly not lost on those critics who call themselves pluralists; it comes as no surprise to them that Derrida declines to join their company. Nevertheless, the breezy gloss of pluralism as "the view that any interpretation is as good as any other" is bound to seem plausible to the large numbers of readers for whom the word denotes a generalized tolerance the refusal of dogmatism. That Derrida should be called upon to dissociate himself from pluralism is in fact symptomatic of the profound confusion surrounding the term. At present, the pervasiveness of such loose talk compels pluralists to defend themselves regularly against this kind of misinterpretation. Thus, the colloquial reading of pluralism that construes it as mere relativism, the absence of principled constraints, is frequently acknowledged, if only to be rejected. Even Bruch Erlich must emphasize that pluralism does not want "a totally free critical market, for that involves the proliferation of a hundred flowers, what Booth dismissively terms ‘chaotic warfare.' "2   1. James Kearn and Ken Newton, "An Interview with Jacques Derrida," Literary Review 14 (18 Apr.-1 May 1980), p.21. 2. Bruce Erlich, "Amphibolies: On the Critical Self- Contradictions of ‘Pluralism,' " this volume, p. 527; all further references to this essay will be included in the text.   Ellen Rooney teaches English and women's studies at Brown University. She is currently at work on a study entitled Seductive Reasoning: Pluralism and the Problematic of General Persuasion. Nelson Goodman and Catherine Z. Elgin Interpretation and Identity: Can the Worl Survive the_World? Predictions concerning the end of the world have proven less reliable than your broker's recommendations or your fondest hopes. Whether you await the end fearfully or eagerly, you may rest assured that it will never come not because the world is everlasting but because it has already ended, if indeed it ever began. But we need not mourn, for the world is indeed well lost, and with it the stultifying stereotypes of absolutism: the absurd notions of science as the effort to discover a unique, prepackaged, but unfortunately undiscoverable reality, and of truth as agreement with that inaccessible reality. All notions of pure givenness and unconditional necessity and of a single correct perspective and system of categories are lost as well.   If there is no such thing as the world, what are we living in? The answer might be "A world" or, better, "Several worlds." For to deny that there is any such thing as theworld is no more to deny that there are worlds than to deny that there is any such thing as thenumber between two and sevenis to deny that there are numbers between two and seven. The task of describing the world is as futile as the task of describing the number between twoand seven.   The world is lost once we appreciate a curious feature of certain pairs of seemingly contradictory statements: if either is true, both are. Although "The earth is in motion" and "The earth is at rest" apparently contradict each other, both are true. But from a contradiction, every statement follows. So unless we are prepared to acknowledge the truth of every statement, the appearance of contradiction in cases like these must somehow be dispelled.   Nelson Goodman is professor emeritus of philosophy at Harvard University. He has written Of Mind and Other Matters, Ways of Worldmaking, Problems and Projects, Languages of Art, The Structure of Appearance,and Fact, Fiction, and Forecast. His most recent contribution to is "How Buildings Mean" (June 1985). Catherine Z. Elgin is associate professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is the author of With Reference to Referenceand is currently writing a book entitled Philosophy without Foundations. Richard McKeon Pluralism of interpretations and Pluralism of Objects, Actions,_and Statements Interpreted We have met in this conference to discuss "critical pluralism." It will be a conference or discussion if the participants present different conceptions of critical pluralism based on different conceptions of criticism. Pluralism will enter the discussion in two ways: in the plurality of statements, which will be easy to recognize, and in the plurality or identity of what the statements are about, which will be problematic. There are three possible conclusions to which the discussion may lead. Some of the participants may argue that only one of the opposed statements is about criticism and that the others may be about the work, but do not treat it as a literary work; these participants may so deny the possibility of critical pluralism. Some may present different modes of critical interpretation of a literary work and argue that they are different interpretations of the same work; these participants may recognize no need to differentiate different aspects in the work to which they interpretations are relevant. Finally, some may argue that the different modes of criticism apply to different aspects of the work which should be named differently and be treated by different methods, and which should be considered distinct objects of interpretation. The variety of critical methods and the variety of objects to which those methods can be applied are apparent when the reflexive relations between the pluralism of the interpretation of books and the pluralism of the circumstances and the matters that condition and constitute books are examined in a paradigm of possible forms and matters related to each other paradoxically. Many of the recurrent pairs of terms joined and differentiated in the literature of criticism (among them art and nature, and poetry and philosophy) are related paradoxically.   Richard McKeon was the editor of The Basic Works of Aristotle,coeditor of Peter Abailard, Sic et Non: A Critical Edition,and author of Thought, Action, and Passion. His previous contributions to are "Arts of Invention and Arts of Memory: Creation and Criticism" (June 1975), "Canonic Books and Prohibited Books: Orthodoxy and Heresy in Religion and Culture" (Summer 1976), and "Pride and Prejudice:Thought, Character, Argument, and Plot" (Spring 1979). Derek Longhurst A Response to Peter Rabinowitz Is Rabinowitz seriously suggesting that his "rules" of reading are equally applicable to the analysis of British and American forms of popular writing and their readerships between 1920 and the 1960s? Is he seriously suggesting that Gone with the Wind, for example, would be "read" in the same way and for the same meanings in the southern states, the northern states, in Yorkshire and London? In this particular case the issue of cultural reproduction is also crucial the complex relations between the book and film "texts" and readerships for both. Is the book now read "through" the film and the mythos of Hollywood? Can the novel's "history" of the Civil War and the period of Reconstruction be seen in relation to experience of the Depression on the one hand and to dominant historical discourses of the period privileged within American educational institutions on the other?2 Or, if we take a British example like A. J. Cronin, whose work was regarded as both "serious" and "popular" in the late 1930s, what happens to Rabinowitz's distinction? Clearly, Cronin's fiction is not "acceptable" in the literary canon but his example illustrates the weakness of any critical analysis of the popular rooted in "literary" assumptions. Very important questions are raised by the commercial success of The Citadel, not among "the people" in any generalized sense but among specific constituencies of professional, middle-class readerships in both New Deal American and in Britain during a period of history remarkable for the regrouping of the forces of social-democratic consensus politics an alliance between "sympathetic" fractions of the professional middle class and "the people" which culminated eventually in the postwar Labour party election victory. Thus readers are not only readers, and the processes of reading especially perhaps of popular fiction are not reducible to abstract rules which exclude all considerations of cultural=political institutions and discourses.   2. This example is partly indebted to discussion with Greg Gaut and Jane P. Tompkins during a University of Minnesota Conference, "On the Social Edge" (25-27 April 1985).   Derek Longhurst is principal lecturer and course leader in communication studies at Sunderland Polytechnic and general editor of the forthcoming series Culture and Popular Fiction. His publications include chapters in Re-Reading English and An Introduction to Contemporary Cultural Studies. He is currently working on a book about the political thriller. Peter J. Rabinowitz Assuming the Obvious: A Reply to Derek Longhurst Derek Longhurst's rhetorical strategies don't leave me much room to maneuver. By constructing my essay in such a way that we are opponents, he offers only two choices: I can recant or enter into battle. Actually, I would rather do neither; I agree with most of what he says and would like a chance to explore those points where we differ. But in order to do that, it is first necessary to see where our differences really lie; and Longhurst's response does not make it easy. Granted, some of his criticisms are sound. He is right that I use the word "we" too loosely and that I sketched out my argument on an extremely abstract level, which resulted in, among other things, a blurring of the differences between American and British literature. But more often than not, Longhurst attacks me for taking positions that I do not in fact hold. For instance, he suggests that I believe the categories "popular" and "serious" to be fixed, and that my scheme would therefore shatter when confronted with a text like The Citadel, which was regarded as "both ‘serious' and ‘popular.' " Yet my essay was intended precisely to offer a way to talk about such cases of which The Glass Key is one and while my solution may have its flaws, the rigidity of categories that Longhurst attacks it for is surely not one of them.   Peter J. Rabinowitz is associate professor of comparative literature at Hamilton College. He is the author of Before Reading (forthcoming), a book about the conventions of reading, and is also active as a music critic for such publications as Fanfareand Ovation. His previous contributions to are "Truth in Fiction: A Reexamination of Audiences" (Autumn 1977), "Who Was That Lady? Pluralism and Critical Method" (Spring 1979), and "The Turn of the Glass Key: Popular Fiction as Reading Strategy" (March 1985). James L. Battersby and James Phelan Meaning as Concept and Extension: Some Problems Hirsch's revision results from his attempt to think through the difficult question that underlies the whole essay: How does the movement of time and circumstance affect the stability of meaning? The first part of his answer is that the relation between original meaning and subsequent understanding or applications of that meaning is analogous to the relation between a concept and its extension. For example, if he reads Shakespeare's sonnet 55 ("Not marble nor the gilded monuments") and applies it to his beloved, and one of us reads it and applies it to his beloved, "that does not make the meaning of the sonnet different for us, assuming that we both understand (as of course we do) that the text's meaning is not limited to any particular exemplification but rather embraces many, many exemplifications" (p. 210). That is, the sonnet has a status analogous to that of the concept "bicycle," and the two applications have a status analogous to that of a three-speed and a ten-speed bicycle. Whereas Hirsch formerly considered such exemplifications (for that is what these, though not all, applications are) part of a text's significance, he now considers them part of its meaning. This revision indicates that for Hirsch meaning is not the product of a consciousness producing an intrinsic genre but of a consciousness communicating something broader and more general than an intrinsic genre an intention-concept that can have numerous extensions or exemplifications, including many that the originating consciousness could not have anticipated. Formerly, Hirsch used intrinsic genre to describe that sense of the whole which governed the horizon of developing meaning and which, when the work was completed when all the blanks were filled in gave the work its specific determinate meaning. That is, determinacy of meaning was in large part a function of narrowing the class of implications; when the work was completed, the class of implications was restricted to those synonymous with expressed meaning. In short, in the old theory, meaning-intention is a "narrow," not a broad "concept."   James L. Battersby,professor of English at Ohio State University, is the author of Rational Praise and Natural Lamentation: Johnson, Lycidas, and Principles of Criticism and Elder Olson: An Annotated Bibliography. He is currently at work on a study of the relationship between "thought" and structure in various genres. James Phelan is associate professor English at Ohio State University and the author of Worlds from Words: A Theory of language in Fiction. His work in progress concerns character and narrative progression. Michael Leddy Validity and Reinterpretation In a recent piece in E. D. Hirsch devotes himself to the reinterpretation of a distinction that he first made in 1960 between meaning and significance. I suspect that it will be a while before we feel comfortable deciding what significance "Meaning and Significance Reinterpreted" (Critical Inquiry 11 [December 1984]: 202-25) has for us. Indeed, Hirsch seems uncertain as to what significance this reinterpretation has for him. At first he modestly proposes a "revision of that distinction" (p. 202), implying that he will give us essentially the same distinction in a somewhat different form, and two-thirds into the essay he notes that aside from one change, his account of meaning "has stayed what it was" (p. 216). Toward the close of the piece, he speaks of his "revised account of meaning" (p. 223), but in the next (and final) paragraph, he opines that this account is "a new and different theory" (p. 223). Yet this is not the last word, for Hirsch concludes by talking about "this change in my theory" (p. 224), again giving the reader the impression that it's still the same old theory, only somewhat different. But as Hirsch himself asks, "How far can an existing theory be adjusted before it loses its self-identity" (p. 221)? And as I will now ask, how well does "Meaning and Significance Reinterpreted" cohere with the theory of meaning that Hirsch proposes in Validity in Interpretation?The most curious aspect of this reinterpretation of meaning and significance is that Hirsch remains silent about more fundamental changes in his theory of meaning that his revision brings with it. I want to note three such changes, which involve key terms in Hirsch's thought either dropping out of the argument or finding notably different replacements.   Michael Leddyis assistant professor of English at Eastern Illinois University. He has published on William Burroughs and Geoffrey Hill and is currently working on a study of authors, readers, and meaning. E. D. Hirsch, Jr. Coming with Terms to Meaning Professors Battersby and Phelan have presented a lively challenge. They urge readers to reject the later, fuzzy Hirsch, in favor of an earlier, truer Hirsch. Their first objection is that Hirsch 2 has mistaken the nature of literary meaning. Battersby and Phelan reject the view that a literary work carries a general meaning analogous to the concept of "bicycle" that can be exemplified by all bicycles. They propose that a literary work is "more appropriately conceived as … a Schwinn or even a red Schwinn three-speed with a blue seat and two flat tires" (p. 612). They object to my adoption of Sir Philip Sidney's claim that literature provides both the general concept and the particular example simultaneously. By saying that literature does both things at once I conflate and confuse, they say, two different intentions, because, as they aver, an exemplified concept cannot be further exemplified" (p. 613).This claim reinstates the familiar New Critical doctrine that a literary concept is unique among concepts in that it can never be dissevered from its particular embodiment.   E. D. Hirsch, Jr.,professor of English at the University of Virginia, is the author of numerous works including Validity in Interpretationand The Aims of Interpretation. His previous contributions to include "Against Interpretation?" (June 1983) and "The Politics of Theories of Interpretation" (September 1982). His most recent contributions is "Meaning and Significance Reinterpreted" (December 1984). Sacvan Bercovitch The Problem of Ideology in American Literary History For my present purposes, and in terms of my immediate concerns, the problem of ideology in American literary history has three different though closely related aspects: first, the multivolume American literary history I have begun to edit; then, the concept of ideology as a constituent part of literary study, and, finally, the current revaluation of the American Renaissance. I select this period because it has been widely regarded as both the source and the epitome of our literary tradition; because it has become, accordingly, the focal point of the critical revision now under way in American studies; and because, from either of these perspectives, literary or critical, it seems to me a particularly fitting subject for the occasion. For one thing, we owe the idea of an American Renaissance to F. O. Matthiessen, who was a prime mover of the Salzburg Seminar, and a member of its first faculty in 1947. Moreover, American Renaissance was a classic work of revisionist criticism. It reset the terms for the study of American literary history; it gave us a new canon of classic texts; and it inspired the growth of American studies in the United States and abroad. It is not too much to say that Matthiessen, American Renaissance, and the Salzburg Seminar brought American literature to postwar Europe. What followed, from the late forties through the sixties, was the flowering of a new academic field, complete with programs of study, periodicals, theses, conferences, and distinguished procession of scholarly authorities, including many graduates of the Salzburg Seminar. Matthiessen figures as a watershed in this development. For if American Renaissance marked the seeding-time of a new academic field, it was also the harvest of some three decades of literary study. I refer, first of all, to the dual legacy that Matthiessen acknowledges of T. S. Eliot and Vernon Parrington which is to say, the partnership in American Renaissance between the terms "literary" and "history"; or, in the words of Matthiessen's subtitle, between Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman:"art," meaning a small group of aesthetic masterpieces, and "expression," meaning representative works, reflecting and illuminating the culture at large. It was the remarkable achievement of Matthiessen that his book yokes these concepts gracefully together. Somehow, one concept seems to support the other. The historical designation American seems richer for its association with an aesthetic renaissance; Emerson's and Whitman's art gains substance by its capacity to express the age. Matthiessen himself did not feel it necessary to explain the connection. But we can see in retrospect that what made it work what made it, indeed, unnecessary for Matthiessen to explain the connection was an established consensus, or rather a consensus long in the making, which American Renaissance helped establish. I mean a consensus about the term "literary" that involved the legitimation of a certain canon, and a consensus about the term "history" that was legitimated by a certain concept of America.   Sacvan Bercovitch is Carswell Professor of English and American Literature at Harvard University. He is the Author of The Puritan Origins of the American Self and The American Jeremiad, among other works. He has also edited several collections of essays, most recently Reconstructing American Literary History (1986). Norman N. Holland I-ing Film Film theorists talk enthusiastically these days in terms of semiotics, sutures, and systems of meaning. I think we can usefully frame these theories by some evidence as to how some actual readers make actual theories from an actual film. To that end, I would like to explore here what three people, Agnes, Norm, and Ted, said about The Story of O.It seems to me that if any film should demonstrate the fixity of semiotic and other codes, surely a pornographic film should. You might call this essay, then, the story of this I storying three other I's storying The Story of O.1 "Storying" is Audrey Grant's verb, and by it she intends the representing of an event in your own mind and telling somebody about it.2In this essay, then, I propose to tell you how I represent in my mind how these three individuals represented in their minds The Story of O. Sometimes we felt or thought about the film more or less alike, and sometimes we squarely contradicted one another. I want to ask two questions of these responses. First, how can we relate their variety to the singleness of the film? Second, how can we relate their variety to the generality of any codes that govern the seeing of films?   Norman N. Hollandis Milbauer Eminent Scholar at the University of Florida. His most recent book, The I (1985), develops a widely useful model for thinking about humans' perceiving, interpreting, reading, and generally I-ing. His most recent contribution to is "Interactive Fiction" (with Anthony J. Niesz) in the September 1984 issue. Geoffrey Ward Dying to Write: Maurice Blanchot and Tennyson's "Tithonus" The customary assumption about dying is that one would rather not. The event of death itself should be postponed for as long as possible, and comfort may be gained from doctrines which promise a victory over it. We celebrate those who try to cheat it. The dying Henry James thought he was Napoleon, and there is something in that, over and above the pathos of a wandering mind, that exemplifies, however parodically, the mental set we expect to find and what we relish in those who attempt to press their own strong case against the disintegrative flow of time and change. We assume that one should struggle against death, setting such a stamp on life that even if the body must die, something the mind has done may not. Attitudes that run counter to this stubbornness are thought defeatist or unwholesome. In his own decline, Charles Baudelaire, catching sight of himself in a mirror, bowed, thinking himself a stranger. That confusion is more chilling than Jams' because it undermines the treasured integrity of the self: it shows that death is not an invader attacking suddenly from outside. We are in one sense always in its keeping. In this essay I shall argue that whatever revolt against death may catalyse the act of writing poetry, poems are intimately tied to death in ways that complicate and even undermine that revolt. Indeed, since the inception of Romanticism (within which poetry still comes into being), a poem in order to be a poem has had to engage not only with the fact that in the midst of life we are in its negation, but also with death's analogues: madness, trance, divisions and questionings of the self. The relationship between poetry and the disruption of the customary self may even be celebratory. But before investigating the relationship between poetry and death, we had better be sure that one can indeed die: At first glance, the preoccupation of the writer who writes in order to be able to die is an affront to common sense. It would seem we can be sure of at least one event: it will come without any approach on our part, without our bestirring ourselves at all; yes, it will come. That is true, but at the same time it is not true, and indeed quite possibly it lacks truth altogether. At least it does not have the kind of truth which we feel in the world, which is the measure of our action and of our presence in the world. What makes me disappear from the world cannot finds its guarantee there; and thus, in a way, having no guarantee, it is not certain. This explains why no one is linked to death by realcertitude. No one is sure of dying.1 No one can think to cheat death, but to contemplate death is to introduce into thought the epitome of doubt. The one thing I can never know in advance or know demonstrably, by my very nature and by its, is the actual instant of my own death. Conventionally, "I will go when my time comes": the phrase gestures toward the privacy of each human death, and the Protestant tone of "my time" part predestination, part ownership barely hides the inaccessibility of death inside that privacy. There are two certainties in life. One is that death will come. The other is that no one can be sure of this. Perhaps no one has truly died yet.   1. Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln, Nebr., 1982), p. 95; all further references to this work, abbreviated SL,will be included in the text.   Geoffrey Ward is lecturer in English at the University of Liverpool. He is at present completing his first critical book, The Poetry of Estrangement.His published articles include essays on symbolism in John Ashbery, Conrad's English, metaphor in Shelley's longer poems, the novels of Henry Green, and Wyndham Lewis. He has also published five volumes of poetry, mot recently Not the Hand Itself(1983). Charles L. Griswold The Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Washington Mall: Philosophical Thoughts on Political Iconography My reflections on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (VVM) were provoked some time ago in a quite natural way, by a visit to the memorial itself. I happened upon it almost by accident, a fact that is due at least in part to the design of the Memorial itself (see fig. 1). I found myself reduced to awed silence, and I resolved to attend the dedication ceremony on November 13, 1982. It was an extraordinary event, without question the most moving public ceremony I have ever attended. But my own experience of the Memorial on that and other occasions is far from unique. It is almost commonplace among the many visitors to the VVM now the most visited of all the memorials in Washington a fact so striking as to have compelled journalists, art historians, and architects to write countless articles about the monument. And although philosophers traditionally have had little to say about architecture in general or about that of memorials in particular, there is much in the VVM and its iconography worthy of philosophical reflection. Self-knowledge includes, I hazard to say, knowledge of ourselves as members of the larger social and political context, and so includes knowledge of that context. Architecture need not memorialize or symbolize anything; or it may symbolize, but not in a memorializing way, let alone in a way that is tied to a nation'shistory. The structures on the Washington Mall belong to a particular species of recollective architecture, a species whose symbolic and normative content is prominent. After all, war memorials by their very nature recall struggles to the death over values. Still further, the architecture by which a people memorializes itself is a species of pedagogy. It therefore seeks to instruct posterity about the past and, in so doing, necessarily reaches a decision about what is worth recovering. It would thus be a mistake to try to view such memorials merely "aesthetically," in abstraction from all judgments about the noble and the base. To reflect philosophically on specific monuments, as I propose to do here, necessarily requires something more than a simply technical discussion of the theory of architecture or of the history of a given species of architecture. We must also understand the monument's symbolism, social context, and the effects its architecture works on those who participate in it. That is, we must understand the political iconography which shapes and is shaped y the public structure in question. To do less than this if I may state a complex argument in hopelessly few words is to fall short of the demands of true objectivity, of an understanding of the whole which the object is. To understand the meaning of the VVM requires that we understand, among other things, what the memorial means to those who visit it. This is why my observations about the dedication of the VVM and about the Memorial's continuing power over people play an important role in this essay.   Charles L. Griswold,associate professor of philosophy at Howard University, is the author of Self-Knowledge in Plat's "Phaedrus"(1986) and has published widely in the areas of Greek philosophy, German Idealism, hermeneutics, and political philosophy. He is an editor of the Independent Journal of Philosophy and a recipient of numerous awards and fellowships. Currently he is working on a project which centers on Adam Smith's notion of the "self" and Smith's relationship to Stoicism and to the American Founding. Henry Staten Conrad's Mortal Word Heart of Darkness is the story of a quest for truth but a quest, we discover, that is veiled in ironies. But just how radical are these ironies? When Marlow tells us that Kurtz's dying whisper enunciates a truth, does he give us a solid kernel around which we can build our further questioning, concerning, for example, whether Marlow preserves or betrays the truth he has been given?" This has been the assumption of most critics; regardless of the ingenuities by which the varieties of interpretation has shown that Marlow in the end lies or does not lie, the axis of interpretation has almost always been defined by Kurtz's presumed truth. Why should this be so? Why should Kurtz's whisper be more significant than, say, the cry of the Intended with which the story culminates? But there are presuppositions in force here so strong that it seems senseless to ask this question. Classic presuppositions: the woman is dominated by emotion and desire, and her cry is at the other pole from the nonlibidinal utterance of truth. Marlow would agree with this assessment for him, women are "out of touch with the truth" which you have to be "man enough" to face. So our truth-seeking criticism, which doubts much of what Marlow says, does not doubt the terms in which Marlow conceives of truth and its authority. Let us consider an example of the truth-seeking reading of Heart of Darkness,examining the ideology that sanctions this form of interpretation and showing how its presuppositions cooperate with Marlow's. Our specimen will be a fairly recent PMLA article by Garrett Stewart called "Lying as Dying in Heart of Darkness." Stewart's "existential" reading invokes an economics of truth: Kurtz truthfully confronts death, facing and passing judgment upon the corruption of his being that emerges as fulfilled in his final moment; Marlow "lives through" Kurtz's death and has the opportunity to preserve and transmit Kurtz's "legacy of insight"; his lie, however, "kills the meaning of a death," "squandering … Kurtz's delegated revelation on a squeamish deceit."1   1. Garrett Stewart, "Lying as Dying in Heart of Darkness," PMLA 95 (May 1980): 330, 329, 326; all further references to this essay, abbreviated "L," will be included in the text.   Henry Staten is associate professor of English and adjunct associate professor of philosophy at the University of Utah. He is the author of Wittgenstein and Derrida.The present essay is part of a book in progress on mourning and idealization in Western literature. Lee Bartlett What is "Language Poetry"? W. H. Auden, the sometimes Greta Garbo of twentieth-century poetry, once told Stephen Spender that he liked America better than England because in America one could be alone. Further, in his introduction to The Criterion Book of Modern American Verse Auden remarked that while in England poets are considered members of a "clerkly caste," in America they are an "aristocracy of one." Certainly it does seem to be the individual poet Whitman, Williams, Olson, Plath, O'Hara, Ginsberg who has altered the landscape of American poetry and prosody, not the group. And most American literary "movements," as Robert Creeley has pointed out, are simply comprised of a few people who on occasion drink together, and who are as likely as not to end the evening in violent argument over an aesthetic or political point. Yet the notion of schools or movements remains, in mainstream historical criticism at least, a vital one. How many introductions to anthologies of American poetry, for example, continue to use such rubrics as the Transcendentals, the Populists, the Black Mountain poets, the Beats, the New York group? And while established poets often rebel from any sense that they are part of a larger community, which by definition is self-limiting, they are often complicit in their initial categorization. For poets as well as critics the idea of a school is often a useful fiction (Emerson knew this, as did Pound and Rexroth) serving as both a kind of protective hothouse and a platform for getting a hearing. The most recent "group" of American poets the first since the anthology wars of the early sixties (when many powerful aesthetics were scrambling for position) really to be of more than passing interest and perhaps to be actually capable of bringing about a major shift of attention in American poetry and poetics is the so-called "Language" school. Individual volumes by poets often considered part of this group number well into three figures now and there have been important journals and anthologies produced in a serious and sustained fashion by these writers. Yet in part because of what seems the essentially hermetic character of the project (which is too multifaceted and diffuse to be called a project at all), there has been little notice of this activity by academic critics or reviewers.1 What I'd like to do here is briefly map a few major aspects of the territory, describing some of the practical and theoretical questions which seem to occupy many of these writers in their ongoing critique of the "workshop poem."   1. Two important exceptions are discussions of some of this work in Stephen Fredman, Poet's Prose: The Crisis in American Verse (Cambridge, 1983) and Marjorie Perloff's review "The Word as Such: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry in the Eighties," American Poetry Review 13 (May/June 984): 15-22. All further references to Perloff's article, abbreviated "WS," will be included in the text. For a discussion of the various Language poetry journals and anthologies, see my chapter "American Poetry, 1940s to the Present" in American Literary Scholarship: An Annual/1983,ed. Warren French (Durham, N.C., 1985), pp. 349-74.   Lee Bartlett,an associate professor of English, has directed the University of New Mexico's creative writing program for five years. Coeditor of the critical journal American Poetry, his Talking Poetry: Conversations in the Workshop with Contemporary Poets will be published this fall. Currently he is writing a biography of William Everson. David Carrier The Presentness of Painting: Adrian Stokes as Aestheticism Adrian Stokes (1902-72), long admired by a small, highly distinguished, mostly English circle, was the natural successor to Pater and Ruskin. But though his place in cultural history is important, what is of particular interest now to art historians is his theory of the presentness of painting, a theory which offers a challenging critique of the practice of artwriting. From Vasari to the present, the most familiar rhetorical strategy of the art historian is the narrative of "the form, prophet-saviour- apostles," in which the first artist poses some problem that his successors develop and their successors solve.1 Such very different books as Art and Illusion and Art and Culture deploy that plan. The three periods of naturalism in E. H. Gombrich's narrative antiquity, Renaissance religious narrative, nineteenth-century landscape function like Clement Greenberg's sequence old master art, early French modernism, American abstract expressionism. Gombrich and Greenberg disagree about how to narrate art's history and about which works to include in that narrative Gombrich asserts that cubism closes the canon while for Greenberg analytical cubism anticipates Jackson Pollock but in each case, the art historian aims, as the novelist does, to tell a satisfying story and achieve narrative closure, and so how we think of the artworks the historian discusses depends in part upon the structure of the narrative. In a certain mood, we may find this fact intolerable. Why should a mere text tell us how to see the painting we may stand before? Stokes' attempt to respond to this mood belongs to a tradition of early twentieth-century antihistorical thinking. For Rainer Maria Rilke, Rodin's sculpture aimed to "refer to nothing that lay beyond it." For Ezra Pound, an image "is real because we know it directly"; Henri Gaudier- Brzeska could read Chinese ideograms without knowing that language because those ideograms are transparently meaningful images. For Wyndham Lewis, a musical piece is inferior to a statue, "always there in its entirety before you."2 Such an artwork need not be interpreted because it contains "within itself all that is relevant to itself."3 All art is accessible to the gifted observer, and time is, in an interesting double sense, irrelevant. We see directly the meaning of works even from distant cultures; the visual artwork is experienced all at once, outside of time. If these claims are correct, what is the artwriter to do? Speaking of the Tempio Malatestiana, Hugh Kenner points to this issue: There is no description of the Tempio in accordance with good Vorticist logic: one art does not attempt what another can do better, and the meaning of the Tempio has been fully explicated on the spot by Agostino di Duccio with his chisel.4   1. Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition 1350- 1450 (Oxford, 1971), p. 75. 2. Rainer Maria Rilke, Rodin,trans. Jessie Lemont and Hans Trausil (London, 1948), p. 19; Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (New York, 1970), p. 86; Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man (Boston, 1957), p. 174. 3. Frank Kermode, Romantic Image (London and Glasgow, 1971), p. 107. 4. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1971), p. 428.   David Carrier,associate professor of philosophy at Carnegie-Mellon University, is coauthor, with Mark Roskill, of Truth and Falsehood in Visual Images and author of the forthcoming Artwriting, a study of recent American art criticism. He is working on a history of art history. Jerome Christensen "Like a Guilty Thing Surprised": Deconstruction, Coleridge, and_the Apostasy of Criticism In his recent book Criticism and Social Change Frank Lentricchia melodramatically pits his critical hero Kenneth Burke, advocate of the intellect's intervention in social life, against the villainous Paul de Man, "undisputed master in the United States of what is called deconstruction." Lentricchia charges that "the insidious effect of [de Man's] work is not the proliferating replication of his way of reading … but the paralysis of praxis itself: an effect that traditionalism, with its liberal view of the division of culture and political power, should only applaud."1 He goes on to prophesy that The deconstruction of deconstruction will reveal, against apparent intention, a tacit political agenda after all, one that can only embarrass deconstruction, particularly its younger proponents whose activist experiences within the socially wrenching upheavals of the 1960s and early 1970s will surely not permit them easily to relax, without guilt and self-hatred, into resignation and ivory tower despair. [CSC, p. 40] Such is Lentricchia's strenuous conjuration of a historical moment in which he can forcefully intervene a summons fraught with the pathos excited by any reference to the heady days of political enthusiasm during the war in Vietnam. Lentricchia ominously figures a scene of rueful solitude where de Manian lucidity breaks into the big chill. And maybe it will. But Lentricchia furnishes no good reason why it should. De Manian deconstruction is "deconstructed" by Lentricchia to reveal "against apparent intention, a tacit political agenda." And this revelation is advertised as a sure embarrassment to the younger practitioners of deconstruction sweepingly characterized as erstwhile political activists who have, wide-eyed, opted for a critical approach that magically entangles its proponents in the soul- destroying delights of rhetoric and reaction. Left unexamined in Lentricchia's story, however, is the basis for the initial rapport between radicalism and deconstruction. Why should collegiate activists have turned into deconstructionsists? Is not that, in Lentricchia's terms, the same question as asking why political activists should have turned to literary criticism (or indeed literature) at all? If we suppose this original turn (to criticism, the deconstruction) to be intentional, how could the initiates of this critical approach ever be genuinely betrayedinto embarrassment by time or by its herald, Frank Lentricchia? On the face of it, the traducement of a secret intention would be unlikely to come as a surprise, since deconstructing deconstruction is not only the enterprise of Marxist critics like Lentricchia but also of Jacques Derrida, archdeconstructor, who unashamedly identified the embarrassment of intention as constitutive of the deconstructive method. If deconstruction is at once a natural outlet for activists and the first step on a slippery slope that ends in apostasy (for surely it is that hard word which Lentricchia politely suppresses), it suggests a phenomenon with contours more suggestively intricate, if not less diabolically seductive, than the program Lentricchia outlines. And it is a phenomenon as worrisomely affiliative as it is bafflingly intricate. We need to know whether the relations between deconstruction and radical politics, between deconstruction and apostasy between deconstruction and criticism, and between apostasy and criticism are necessary or contingent, or neither and both at once.   1. Frank Lentricchia, Criticism and Social Change(Chicago, 1983), p. 38; all further references to this work, abbreviated CSC,will be included in the text.   Jerome Christensen,professor of English at the Johns Hopkins University, is the author of Coleridge's Blessed Machine of Language and the forthcoming Hume's Practice: The Career of an Enlightenment Man of Letters. He is currently at work on a study of Byron and the issue of strong romanticism. Stephano Rosso An Interview with Paul de Man Rosso: Can you say something more about the differences between your work and Derrida's? De Man: I'm not really the right person to ask where the difference is, because, as I feel in many respects close to Derrida, I don't determine whether my work resembles or is different from of Derrida. My initial engagement with Derrida which I think is typical and important for all that relationship (to the extent that I can think or want to think about it at all) which followed closely upon my first encounter with him in Baltimore at the colloquium on "The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man" had not to do with Derrida nor with me, but with Rousseau. It happened that we were both working on Rousseau and basically on the same text, by sheer coincidence. It was in relation to Rousseau that I was anxious to define, to try to work out some … not discrepancies … but some change of emphasis between what Derrida does and what I'm doing. And there may be something in that difference between us that remained there, to the extent that in a very genuine sense not as denegation or as false modesty (though whenever one says "not out of denegation" one is awaking the suspicion to be even more denying than before … so you can't get out of that bind … ) my starting  point, as I think I already told you, is not philosophical but basically philological and for that reason didactical, text-oriented. Therefore I have a tendency to put upon texts an inherent authority, which is stronger, I think, than Derrida is willing to put on them. I assume, as a working hypothesis (as a working hypothesis, because I know better than that), that the text knows in an absolute way what it's doing. I know this is not the case, but it is a necessary working hypothesis that Rousseau knows at any time what he is doing and as such there is no need to deconstruct Rousseau. In a complicated way, I would hold to that statement that "the text deconstructs itself, is self-deconstructive" rather than being deconstructed by a philosophical intervention from the outside of the text. The difference is that Derrida's text is so brilliant, so incisive, so strong that whatever happens in Derrida, it happens between him and his own text. He doesn't need Rousseau, he doesn't need anybody else; I do need them very badly because I never had an idea of my own, it was always through a text, through the critical examination of a text … I am a philologist and not a philosopher: I guess there is a difference there … I think that, on the other hand, it is of some interest to see how the two different approaches can occasionally coincide, at the point that Gasché in the two articles he as written on this topic (and which are together with an article by Godzich certainly the best things that have been written on it) says that Derrida and myself are the closest when I do not use his terminology, and the most remote when I use terms such as deconstruction:I agree with that entirely. But, again, I am not the one to decide on this particular matter and I don't claim to be on that level …   Stephano Rossoteaches English literature at the University of Verona (Italy) and is writing a dissertation in comparative literature at SUNY Binghamton. Among other works, he has coedited, with Naurizio Ferraris, Decostruzione tra filosofia e letteraturaand Estetica e decostruzione. He is presently translating Paul de Man's Resistance to Theory into Italian. Edwin Martin On Seeing Walton's Great-Grandfather Kendall Walton says that photographs are "transparent" ("Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism," 11 [December 1984]: 246-77). By this he means that "we see the world through them" (p. 251). That is, With the assistance of the camera, we can see not only around corners and what is distant or small; we can also see into the past. We see long deceased ancestors when we look at dusty snapshots of them…. We see,quite literally, our dead relatives themselves when we look at photographs of them. [Pp. 251, 252] Walton is explicit on one point: he does not mean merely that we have the impression of seeing ancestors, or that photographs supplement vision, or that they are duplicates or reproductions or substitutes or surrogates. Rather, "the viewer of a photograph sees, literally, the scene that was photographed" (p. 252). In what follows I will urge that Walton's argument for this view is insufficient. Walton is led to his conclusion by an account of the nature of seeing. He claims that "part of what it is to see something is to have visual experiences which are cause by it in a purely mechanical manner" (p. 261). The mechanical connection is important here. For "to perceive things is to be in contactwith them in a certain way. A mechanical connection with something, like that of photography, counts as contact" (pp. 269-70). Paintings and other "handmade" representations fail to have the required mechanical connection; they are humanly mediated rather than mechanically produced. Consequently, Walton thinks, paintings are not transparent. On the other hand, "objects cause their photographs and the visual experiences of viewers mechanically." And "so we see the objects through the photographs" (p. 261).   Edwin Martin is associate professor of philosophy at Indiana University. He is currently completing a photographic portrait of American tent circus life. Kendall L. Walton Looking Again through Photographs: A Response to Edwin_Martin My great-grandfather died before I was born. He never saw me. But I see him occasionally when I look at photographs of him. They are not great photographs, by any means, but like most photographs they are transparent. We see things through them. Edwin Martin objects. His response consists largely of citing examples of things which, he thinks, are obviously not transparent, and declaring that he finds no relevant difference between them and photographs: once we slide down the slippery slope as far as photographs there will be not stopping short of absurdity. The examples fail in their purpose, but they will help to clarify the reasons for the transparency of photographs. Several of them can be disposed of by noting that they jeopardize the transparency of (ordinary) photographs only if they jeopardize the very possibility of perception. The others appear to reflect a misconception of the issue before us and the nature of my claim. To perceive something is, in part, to have perceptual experiences caused by the object in question. This is scarcely controversial. It is also uncontroversial that additional restrictions are needed not all causes of one's visual experiences are objects of sight although exactly what the required restrictions are is a notoriously tricky question. One important restriction is that the causation must be appropriately independent of human action ("mechanical," if you like), in a sense which I explained (pp. 263-64). This, I argued, is what distinguishes photographs from "handmade" pictures, which are not transparent. Seismographs and footprints are caused just as "mechanically" as ordinary photographs are. So are photographs that are so badly exposed or focused that they fail to present images of the objects before the camera. So, also, are the visual experiences of those who look at seismograms, footprints, and such badly focused or exposed photographs. Yet we obviously do not see the causes of these things through them, Martin claims. How is it, then, that we see through ordinary photographs?   Kendall L. Walton is professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan and author of a book on representation in the arts (forthcoming). His previous contribution to Critical Inquiry,"Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism," appeared in the December 1984 issue. Richard Stern Penned In "Writers don't have tasks," said Saul Bellow in a Q-and-A. "They have inspiration." Yes, at the typewriter, by the grace of discipline and the Muse, but here, on Central Park South, in the Essex House's bright Casino on the Park, inspiration was not running high. Not that attendance at the forty-eight PEN conference was a task. It was rather what Robertson Davies called "collegiality." "A week of it once every five years," he said, "should be enough." He, Davies, had checked in early, Saturday afternoon, and attended every session. In black overcoat and black fur cap, he had a theatrical, Man-Who-Came-to-Dinner look. (He'd been an actor and worked in Minneapolis with the Guthrie Theater.) In the lobby he made a great impression. Why not? After all, weren't writers here to be seen as well as to see each other, to make as well as take impressions? A month before, I'd spent a couple of hours at the Modern Language Association convention. There were thousands and thousands of scholars and critics there. Some of the most noted make a career of squeezing authors out of their texts. An author, wrote one tutelary divinity, "constitutes the privileged moment of individualization in the history of ideas, knowledge, [and] literature…."1 Not content with auctoricide, deconstructionist critics went after texts. "Il n'y a pas de hors-texte."2 Since there's nothing that doesn't belong to the text, texts are interchangeable. And it's not that superfluous, mythical being, the author, who decides they are, but his readers, at least those readers capable of erecting on his miserable pedestal the poem, the story, the novel a memorable explication. Ah well, was my thought, for some people a corpse will serve as well as a person. Indeed, for intellectual undertakers, hit-men, and cannibals, as well as for those who suffer the tyranny of authority, corpses are preferable to their living simulacra. Few authors at the PEN conference were troubled by these critical corpse-makers. They were here to see the authors behind the books they'd read, to swap stories and opinions, and to make clear to each other what splendid thinkers and noble humans they were outside of the poems and stories which had brought them here in the middle of winter and New York. In this city, more than any other in the history of the word, the word had been turned into gold. If one were going to abandon the typewriter for the podium, what better place to do it?   In 1985, Richard Stern was given the Medal of Merit, awarded every six years to a novelist by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He is the author of, among other works, the novels A Father's Words(1986), Other Men's Daughters (1973), and Stitch (1965). His third "orderly miscellany," The Position of the Body,will be published in September 1986. This essay is part of a longer work. Stern is professor of English at the University of Chicago. Peter Schwenger Writing the Unthinkable It was a novel, among other things, which originated the atomic bomb. H. G. Wells dedicated The World Set Free,published in 1913, to Frederick Soddy, a pioneer in the exploration of radioactivity. Using Soddy's research as a base, Wells predicted the advent of artificial radioactivity in 1933, the year in which it actually took place; and he foresaw its use for what he named the "atomic bomb." In Wells' novel these bombs are used in a world war that erupts in mid-century and is so catastrophic that a world government is formed, initiating a new age powered by the peaceful use of the atom. The physicist Leo Szilard, a long-time admirer of Wells, read this novel in 1932, the year before he first intuited the possibility of a nuclear chain reaction. The novel seems to have become part of his own mental chain reaction. One that took place at an almost unconscious level during the spring that Szilard spent at the Strand Palace Hotel in London, by his own admission doing nothing. He would only monopolize the bath from around nine to twelve in the morning, since "there is no place as good to think as a bathtub."1 The theories that resulted from this prolonged immersion were introduced by references to Wells; and Szilard, having realized the atomic bomb, spent the rest of his life trying to realize the world government which, in the Wells novel, was its consequence. Literature, which was part of the genesis of nuclear weaponry, continues to be an inextricable aspect of its nature. For Derrida, in fact, we are facing a phenomenon whose essential feature is that of being fabulously textual,through and through. Nuclear weaponry depends, more than any weaponry in the past, it seems, upon structures of information and communication, structures of language, including non- vocalizable language, structures of codes and graphic decoding. But the phenomenon if fabulously textual also to the extent that, at the moment, a nuclear war has not taken place: one can only talk and write about it.2 The linguistic nature of the arms race, of peace talks and negotiations, has been thoroughly analyzed. Likewise there is a growing number of books on the nature of nuclear war. But there is also a growing body of novels, poems, and plays making up a literature of nuclear holocaust. As the example of Wells' novel shows, this is not altogether unprecedented; nuclear literature predates Hiroshima. But the subject of nuclear war has, up till now, mainly served the purposes of science fiction; only rarely as in the cases of A Canticle for Leibowitz and On the Beach have science fiction authors risen above the lowest common denominator of that genre. In the 1980s, every year sees the publication of works which demand serious attention both as literature and as fictive strategies for comprehending a subject that is commonly called "unthinkable." Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker,Bernard Malamud's God's Grace,Maggie Gee's The Burning Book,Tim O'Brien's Nuclear Age these works explicitly preoccupied with nuclear holocaust may be supplemented by other works of the eighties with a persistent apocalyptic undertone, works such as Doris Lessing's Canopus in Argos series, Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose,and Mario Vargas Llosa's War of the End of the World. And these are only the literary manifestations of a widespread movement in all the arts aimed at expressing the dominant condition of our time.3   1. Leo Szilard, Leo Szilard: His Version of the Facts: Selected Recollections and Correspondence,ed. Spencer R. Weart and Gertrud Weiss Szilard (Cambridge, Mass., 1978), p. 19. 2. Jacques Derrida, "No Apocalypse, Not Now (full speed ahead, seven missiles, seven missives)," Diacritics 14 (Summer 1984), p. 23. 3. Examples can be found in painting (Robert Rosenquist, Five New Clear Women), mixed media (Robert Morris, Restless Sleepers/Atomic Shroud), opera (Philip Glass, Einstein on the Beach), oratorio (Michael Berkeley and Ian MacEwan, Or Shall We Die?), dance (Danny Grossman, Endangered Species), film (Testament), television (The Day After), and popular music (U-2, Unforgettable Fire).   Peter Schwenger is associate professor of English at Mount St. Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The author of Phallic Critiques: Masculinity and Twentieth-Century Literature,he is working on a book-length study of nuclear holocaust literature. Mary Ann Caws Literal or Liberal: Translating Perception Any even cursory examination of what it is to exchange words about X or to exchange views about Y requires hard thought about what it is to exchange,period. How do we invest in what we give out, and how do we get it back? In kind, or differently moneyed? And, more crucial to the topic into which I am about to make a foolhardy plunge, is there such a thing as free exchange? And if so, what is it worth? How do we perceive worth anyway? What relation does such perception of the invisible system of the initially visible coinage of exchange bear to present visual perception, and then to seeing? And what does perception matter anyway, in relation to writing, reading, and exchanging words? Which is primary? All these questions in their institutional setting, or then in their freedom from context can themselves be related to and gathered up into the notion of translation, or the carrying over from one side to, and into, another. All we can learn about speaking and the ways it is taught, reading and the ways we learn it, seeing and the ways it teaches us is translated and transported from sight and its constraints and choices to language and its own. How we read both is itself a subject of choice and constraint, of freedom and explicit value-placing, of variety and fidelity to certain ends.   Mary Ann Caws is professor of English, French, and comparative literature in the Graduate School, City University of New York. She is past president of the Modern Language Association and the author of, among other works, The Eye in the Text: Essays on Perception, Mannerist to Modern (1981), Architextures in Surrealism and After (1981), Reading Frames in Modern Fiction (1985), and Interferences (in progress). Dorothy Mermin The Damsel, the Knight, and the Victorian Woman_Poet The association of poetry and femininity … excluded women poets. For the female figures onto whom the men projected their artistic selves Tennyson's Mariana and Lady of Shalott, Browning's Pippa and Balaustion, Arnold's Iseult of Brittany represent an intensification of only a part of the poet, not his full consciousness: a part, furthermore, which is defined as separate from and ignorant of the public world and the great range of human experience in society. Such figures could not write their own poems; the male poet, who stands outside the private world of art, has to do that for them. The Lady of Shalott could not imagine someone complex and experienced enough to imagine the world beyond range of her windows, or to imagine her. A woman poet who identified herself with such a stock figure of intense and isolated art would hardly be able to write at all. Or, like the Lady of Shalott preparing her death-ship, she could write only her own name, only herself. For a man, writing poetry meant an apparent withdrawal from the public sphere (although honor and fame might in time return him to it), but for a woman it meant just the opposite: a move toward public engagement and self-assertion in the masculine world. She could not just reverse the roles in her poetry and create a comparable male self-projection, since the male in this set of opposites is defined as experienced, complexly self- conscious, and part of the public world and therefore could not serve as a figure for the poet. (When Elizabeth Bishop makes the reversal in "The Gentleman of Shalott" the result is a very un-Victorian sort of comedy.) We can formulate the problem like this: a man's poem which contains a female self- projection shows to distinctly different figures, poet and projection; in a woman's poem on the same model, the two would blur into one. Furthermore, it's not really poets that are women, for the Victorians: poems are women. The cliché that style is the man arises more readily and with much greater literalness and force when the stylist is a woman, and it is often charged with erotic intensity. The young lovers in Gilbert and Sullivan's Iolanthe describe their perfect love by singing that he is the sculptor and she the clay, he the singer and she the song. Ladislaw in Middlemarch tells Dorothea that she needn't write poems because she isa poem. Edgar Allan Poe remarks in a review of Barrett Browning's works that "a woman and her book are identical." In her love letters Barrett Browning herself worried about the problem of her identity was she her poems, were they she, which was Browning in love with? "I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett," he had written disconcertingly in his first letter, "… and I love you too." […] As we can see in Tennyson's The Princess, the lyric in particular seemed female to Victorians private, nonlogical, purely emotional and it is surely no accident that large numbers of English and American women began to publish poetry in the nineteenth century, when the lyric established its dominance. Victorian poems like Victorian women were expected to be morally and spiritually uplifting, to stay mostly in the private sphere, and to provide emotional stimulus and release for overtasked men of affairs.9 All this may have encouraged women to write poetry, but at the same time it made writing peculiarly difficult because it reinforced the aspects of conventional Victorian femininity narcissism, passivity, submission, silence most inimical to creative activity. Since women already are the objects they try to create, why should they write?   9. John Woolford points this out in "EBB: Woman and Poet," Browning Society Notes9 (Dec. 1979): 4.   Dorothy Merminis professor and chairman in the department of English at Cornell University. She is the author of The Audience in the Poem and is currently working on a critical study of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Robert P. Harrison The Italian Silence During the latter half of the thirteenth century there arose around Tuscany a strange and unprecedented poetry, erudite, abstract, and arrogantly intellectual. It sang beyond courtly conventions about the wonders of the rational universe whose complex secrets the new speculative sciences were eagerly systematizing. Appropriating the language of natural philosophy, Aristotelian psychology, and even theology, love poetry developed a new theoretical understanding of its enterprise which allowed it to redefine love as spiritualized search for knowledge. This intellectualization of erotic desire culminates in the Florentine sitlnovisti, a handful of learned poets who turned love poetry into an eclectic philosophical affair. Guido Cavalcanti's famous canzone "Donna me prega" was universally considered to be not only the technically most perfect canzone ever written but also a rigorous philosophical treatise. As much as in our own day, exegeses of the poem were forced into the arcana of Scholastic Aristotelianism in order to make sense of its abstract, psychologistic definition of love's essence. While Cavalcanti lyricized an Averroistic logic of the unified intellect, his younger friend Dante was preparing to put all of medieval philosophy, theology, and science into terza rima.It was in this terza rima that medieval Paris found perhaps its most felicitous expression, for the Divine Comedyrepresents, among other things, a creative transfiguration of the critical discourses Paris was diffusing throughout Europe. What recalls that situation today is the way Paris again marks the center of critical thought, while in Italiy a new generation of poets has emerged that translates the lessons of contemporary philosophy into poetry. In this essay I plan to discuss some of the most radical or, by analogy, "stilnovistic" of these lyricists. For purposes of convenience I will refer to them as the "favorite malice" poets. The phrase comes from the title of an anthology of select contemporary Italian poetry, recently published in a bilingual English edition: The Favorite Malice: Ontology and Reference in Contemporary Italian Poetry.2 The title alludes to a passage of Friedrich Nietzsche: "It is my favorite malice and art that my silence has learned not to betray itself through silence." These words from Thus Spoke Zarathrustra ("Upon the Mount of Olives") serves as the anthology's epigraphs and signal the peculiar poetics that brings the poets together in one volume. They are not brought together as a "school" but as a loose convergence of individual practices. The most illustrious name among the group is that of Andrea Zanzotto (born 1921), who belongs to an older generation but whom the other poets call their "youngest traveling companion." The "older" companions include Nanni Cagnone, Luigi Ballerini, Raffaele Perrotta, and Angelo Lumelli.   Robert P. Harrison is assistant professor of Italian at Stanford University. He has published a book of poems, The Murano Workshop (1979), and articles on Dante, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and liberal philology. The Body of Beatriceis the title of his work in progress. Jane Tompkins "Indians": Textualism, Morality, and the Problem of History This essay enacts a particular instance of the challenge post- structuralism poses to the study of history. In simpler, language, it concerns the difference that point of view makes when people are giving account of events, whether at first or second hand. The problem is that if all accounts of events are determined through and through by the observer's frame of reference, then one will never know, in any given case, what really happened. I encountered this problem in concrete terms while preparing to teach a course in colonial American literature. I'd set out to learn what I could about the Puritans' relations with American Indians. All I wanted was a general idea of what had happened between the English settlers and the natives in seventeenth-century New England; post-structuralism and its dilemmas were the furthest things from my mind. I began, more or less automatically, with Perry Miller, who hardly mentions the Indians at all, then proceeded to the work of historians who had dealt exclusively with the European-Indian encounter. At first, it was a question of deciding which of these authors to believe, for it quickly became apparent that there was no unanimity on the subject. As I read one, however, I discovered that the problem was more complicated than deciding whose version of events was correct. Some of the conflicting accounts were not simply contradictory, they were completely incommensurable, in that their assumptions about what counted as a valid approach to the subject, and what the subject itself was, diverged in fundamental ways. Faced with an array of mutually irreconcilable points of view, points of view which determined what was being discussed as well as the terms of the discussion, I decided to turn to primary sources for clarification, only to discover that the primary sources reproduced the problem all over again. I found myself, in other words, in an epistemological quandary, not only unable to decide among conflicting versions of events but also unable to believe that any such decision could, in principle, be made. It was a moral quandary as well. Knowledge of what really happened when the Europeans and the Indians first met seemed particularly important, since the result of that encounter was virtual genocide. This was the kind of past "mistake" which, presumably, we studied history in order to avoid repeating. If studying history couldn't put us in touch with actual events and their causes, then what was to prevent such atrocities from happening again?   Jane Tompkinsis professor of English at Duke University. She is the author of Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (1985) and editor of Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism (1980). Her current work concerns the construction of male identity in American popular culture. Christopher L. Miller Theories of Africans: The Question of Literary Anthropology Literary criticism at the present moment seems ready to open its doors once again to the outside world, even if that world is only a series of other academic disciplines, each cloistered in its own way. For the reader of black African literature in French, the opening comes none too soon. The program for reading Camara Laye, Ahmadou Kourouma, and Yambo Ouologuem should never have been the program prescribed for Rousseau, Wordsworth, or Blanchot. If one is willing to read a literature that might not be a rewriting  of Hegel (or even of Kant), and if the negative knowledge of recent theoretical criticism is questioned in the universality of its applications, then what is really open to a Western reader of non- Western literature? Claiming a break with his/her own culture and critical upbringing, can he/she the Other, the African, as if from an authentically African point of view, interpreting Africa in African terms, perceiving rather than projecting? The goal of breaking through the nets of Western criticism, of reading African literature in a nonethnocentric, nonprojective fashion, will remain both indisputably desirable and ultimately unattainable. No matter how many languages I learn or ethnologies I study, I cannot make myself into an African. The Western scholar's claim to mastery of things African, albeit motivated by xenophilia rather than xenophobia, risks subjugation of the object to a new set of Western models. J. P. Makouta- M'Boukou rightly scolds Western critics who refuse to take into account the distance between themselves and African culture, and who read African literature only in function of their own cultural context.1 Wole Soyinka, more forbiddingly, complains: "We black Africans have been blandly invited to submit ourselves to a second epoch of colonisation this time by a universal-humanoid abstraction defined and conducted by individuals whose theories and prescriptions are derived from the apprehension of their world and their history, their social neuroses and theirvalue systems."2   1. See J. P. Makouta-M'Boukou, Introduction à l'étude du roman négro-africain de langue française(Abidjan, Ivory Coast, 1980), p. 9. 2. Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature, and the African World (Cambridge, 1976), p. x.   Christopher L. Miller,Charles B. G. Murphy Assistant Professor of French and of African and Afro-American Studies at Yale University, is author of Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French (1985). He is working at present on a study of francophone black African literature, for which he will have a Fulbright Africa Research grant. Anne McClintock and Rob Nixon No Names Apart: The Separation of Word and_History_in_Derrida's_"Le Dernier Mot du Racisme" As it stands, Derrida's protest is deficient in any sense of how the discourses of South African racism have been at once historically constituted and politically constitutive. For to begin to investigate how the representation of racial difference has functioned in South Africa's political and economic life, it is necessary to recognize and track the shifting character of these discourses. Derrida, however, blurs historical differences by conferring on the single term apartheid a spurious autonomy and agency: "The word concentrates separation…. By isolating being apart in some sort of essence or hypostasis, the word corrupts it into a quasi-ontological segregation" (p. 292). Is it indeed the word, apartheid, or is it Derrida himself, operating here in "another regime of abstraction" (p. 292), removing the word from its place in the discourse of South African racism, raising it to another power, and setting separation itself apart? Derrida is repelled by the word, yet seduced by its divisiveness, the division in the inner structure of the term itself which he elevates to a state of being. The essay's opening analysis of the word apartheid is, then, symptomatic of a severance of word from history. When Derrida asks, "Hasn't apartheid always been the archival record of the unnameable?" (p. 291), the answer is a straightforward no. Despite its notoriety and currency overseas, the term apartheidhas not always been the "watchword" of the Nationalist regime. (p. 291). It has its own history, and that history is closely entwined with a developing ideology of race which has not only been created to deliberately rationalize and temper South Africa's image at home and abroad, but can also be seen to be intimately allied to different stages of the country's political and economic development. Because he views apartheid as a "unique appellation" (p. 291), Derrida has little to say about the politically persuasive function that successive racist lexicons have served in South Africa. To face the challenge of investigating the strategic role of representation, one would have to part ways with him by releasing that pariah of a word, apartheid,from its quarantine from historical process, examining it instead in the context of developing discourses of racial difference.   Anne McClintock is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Columbia University. She is working on a dissertation on race and gender in British imperial culture and is the author of a monograph on Simon de Beauvoir. Rob Nixon,in the same program at Columbia, is working on the topic of exile and Third World-metropolitan relations in the writing of V. S. and Shiva Naipaul. Jacques Derrida But, beyond ... (Open Letter to Anne McClintock_and_Rob_Nixon) Reading you, I very quickly realized that you had no serious objections to make to me, as I will try to demonstrate in a moment. So I began to have the following suspicion: what if you had only pretended to find something to reproach me with in order to prolong the experience over several issues of this distinguished journal? That way, the three of us could fill the space of another twenty or so pages. My suspicion arose since you obviously agree with me on this one point, at least: apartheid,the more it's talked about, the better. But who will do the talking? And how? These are the questions. Because talking about it is not enough. On such a grave subject, one must be serious and not say just anything. Well, you, alas, are not always as serious as the tone of your paper might lead one to think. In your impatient desire to dispense a history lesson, you sometimes say just anything. The effect you produce is quite determined, but in order to arrive at it, you are willing to put forward any kind of countertruth, especially when, in your haste to object,you projectinto my text whatever will make your job easier. This is a very familiar scenario, as I will try to demonstrate as briefly as possible.   Jacques Derrida,Directeur d'Etudes at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, is the author of, among other works, Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, Margins of Philosophy,and Dissemination. His most recent contribution to ,"Racism's Last Word," appeared in the Autumn 1985 issue. Peggy Kamuf teaches French at Miami University, Ohio. She is the authorFictions of Feminine Desire. Tzvetan Todorov "Race," Writing, and Culture "Racism" is the name given to a type of behavior which consists in the display of contempt or aggressiveness toward other people on account of physical differences (other than those of sex) between them and oneself. It should be noted that this definition does not contain the word "race," and this observation leads us to the first surprise in this area which contains many: whereas racism is a well-attested social phenomenon, "race" itself does not exist! Or, to put it more clearly: there are a great number of physical differences among human groups, but these differences cannot be superimposed; we obtain completely divergent subdivisions of the human species according to whether we base our description of the "races" on an analysis of their epidermis or their blood types, their genetic heritages or their bone structures. For contemporary biology, the concept of "race" is therefore useless. This fact has no influence, however, on racist behavior: to justify their contempt or aggressiveness, racists invoke not scientific analyses but the most superficial and striking of physical characteristics (which, unlike "races," do exist) namely, differences in skin color, pilosity, and body structure. Thus, it is with good cause that the word "race" was placed in quotes in the title of this issue: "races" do not exist. I am less sure, however, that all the contributors managed to avoid postulating the existence, behind this word as behind most words, of a thing. In his introduction Gates remarks that "race, in these usages, pretends to be an objective term of classification, when in fact it is a dangerous trope," and he goes on to describe as follows the goal of the special issue: "to deconstruct, if you will, the ideas of difference inscribed in the trope of race, to explicate discourse itself in order to reveal the hidden relations of power and knowledge inherent in popular and academic usages of ‘race' " ("Writing ‘Race' and the Difference It Makes," pp. 5, 6). Up to a point, I agree with him, even if I cannot help pointing out (cultural difference oblige) the insistent allusions to certain contemporary critical theories ("deconstruct" and "difference," "power" and "knowledge") allusions which furnish proof that the author of these lines possesses a particular knowledge and thereby sets up a particular power relationship between himself and the reader. This, however, is not the problem. The problem arises on page 15, when the same author declares, "We must, I believe, analyze the ways in which writing relates to race, how attitudes toward racial differences generate and structure literary texts by us and about us." What bothers me about this sentence is not so much that "generate" and "structure" allude to yet another critical theory as that its author seems to be reinstating what he himself referred to as the "dangerous trope" of "race": if "racial differences" do not exist, how can they possibly influence literary texts?   Tzvetan Todorov works at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. His most recent book in translation is The Conquest of America (1984). Criticism of Criticism is forthcoming. Loulou Mack is a free-lance writer and translator living in Paris. Houston A. Baker, Jr. Caliban's Triple Play One legacy of post-Enlightenment dualism in the universe of academic discourse is the presence of two approached to notions of duality championed by two differing camps. One camp might arbitrarily be called debunkers; the other might be labeled rationalists. The strategies of the camps are conditioned by traditional notions of inside and outside. Debunkers consider themselves outsiders, beyond a deceptive show filled with tricky mirrors. Rationalists, by contrast, spend a great deal of time among mirrors, listening to explanations from the overseers, attempting to absorb sideshow language, hoping to provide acceptable analytical accounts. If debunkers are intent on discovering generative and, presumably, hidden ideological inscriptions of a given discourse its situation on what Amiri Baraka calls the "real side" of economic exchange and world exploitative power rationalists are concerned to study discursive products, to decode or explain them according to forms and formulas that claim to avoid general views or judgments of ideology. Differentiating the camps also is what might be called a thermal gradient: the heat of the debunker's passion is palpable. It is unnecessary to command him, in the manner of the invisible man's tormentor, to "Get hot, boy! Get hot!" Rationalists, by contrast, do not radiate. They appear to have nothing personal at stake and remain coolly instructive and intelligently unflappable in their analyses. This tale of an Enlightenment legacy, as I have told it, contrasts a debunking body and rationalist soul. As I have suggested in my opening sentence, however, what is at issue is not so much two actual and substantially distinctive camps as two metonyms for dual approaches to a common subject namely, notions of duality. My claim is that the Enlightenment reflexivity of academic discourse, devoted to, say, "the Other" and conceived in dualistic terms of self-and-other, expresses itself as an opposition. Thos whom I have called debunkers gladly accept the Other's sovereignty as a bodily and aboriginal donnée; rationalists work to discover the dynamics of "othering" engaged in by a self-indulgent Western soul. The difficulty of producing usefully analytical or political results for either camp is occasioned by their joint situation within a post-Enlightenment field (indeed, one might say, after the manner of deconstruction, a field full of Western metaphysical folk).   Houston A. Baker, Jr. is the Albert M. Greenfield Professor of Human Relations at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a poet whose recent volume Blues Journeys Home appeared in 1985. He is also the author of a number of studies of Afro-American literature and culture, including the forthcoming Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Harold Fromm The Hegemonic Form of Othering; or, The Academic's_Burden I knew I was in for trouble, that the going would be rough, when I removed the wrapper from the "Race," Writing, and Difference issue of and observed the word "race" in quotation marks. Something deep was clearly brewing. And any doubts were quickly removed when I turned to the opening remarks of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. "Who," he asked me, "has seen a black or a red person, a white yellow, or brown?" ("Writing ‘Race' and the Difference It Makes," p. 6). There was a question that spelled trouble, a glove in the face if I ever saw one. Here I was, crude, unregenerate, lacking the hypersensitivity that prevents someone like Gates from making such infra dig distinctions; here I was, daring to use words without quotation marks, actually believing that I referred to something identifiable when I spoke of black people, Americans, musicians, and whatnot, and being told that it was all just my own narcissistic and preemptive fantasy. Here I was, faced with the impossible choice of keeping permanently quiet or of perpetuating ruthless violence of denying the individuality of all of God's creation not only by referring to knives, cats, my brother, or Indians, but simply by referring at all. But why, I wondered, was only the word "race" in quotation marks? Why not every single word in the entire issue of ? For to refer, it seems, is to colonize, to take things over for one's own brutal use, to turn everything else into a mere Other. There was Gates engaging in the academic's favorite pastime, épater les bourgeois, and here was I, a hopeless bourgeois, just asking for a put-down.   Harold Fromm is an independent scholar who has taught for many years in university English departments. He has published articles on Leonard and Virginia Woolf as well as on literary theory, politics, and professionalism. His most recent work concerns the Brontës. Mary Louise Pratt A Reply to Harold Fromm Though I doubt it has put a Rolls Royce in anybody's garage, the criticism industry is a reality not to be overlooked. Academics have a responsibility to stay self-aware and self-critical about their own and their profession's interests. All academic activity has a careerist dimension, but it obviously cannot be explained by that dimension alone, and in this sense Fromm's point is simply reductive. But of course it is not all academic activity that Fromm is objecting to, only some and notably mine. The image of academic colonization suggests one has stepped beyond some legitimate borders and laid claim to territory rightfully inhabited by others. Whose world was invaded by my essay, or by the "Race," Writing, and Difference issue in general? Mr. Fromm's, evidently. Fromm wants a world where words stand still and refer, and don't get changed. In particular, to use his own examples, he wants a world where blacks are blacks, whites are whites, Americans are Americans, knives are knives, brothers are brothers, and Indians are Indians (Is it the wild west? or maybe just Chicago).   Mary Louise Prattis an associate professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Program in Comparative Literature at Stanford University. She is the author of Toward a Speech-Act Theory of Literary Discourse. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Talkin' That Talk Our decision to bracket "race" was designed to call attention to the fact that "races," put simply, do not exist, and that to claim that they do, for whatever misguided reason, is to stand on dangerous ground. Fromm understands this all too well, it seems, judging from the satirical tone of his response. Were there not countries in which the belief in racial essences dictates social and political policy, perhaps I would have found Fromm's essay amusing and our gesture merely one more token of the academic's tendency to create distinctions which common sense alone renders unnecessary. The joke, rather, is on Fromm: one's task is most certainly not to remain "permanently quiet"; rather, our task is to utilize language more precisely, to rid ourselves of the dangers of careless usages of problematic terms which are drawn upon to delimit and predetermine the lives and choices of human beings who are not "white." Fromm's response only reinforces Todorov's worry about not bracketing "race" every time it occurs in our texts, because "race" (as each essay subtly shows) simply does not exist.   Henry Louis Gates, Jr.is professor of English, comparative literature, and African studies at Cornell University. He has edited several books and has written Figures in Black and The Signifying Monkey. Françoise Meltzer Editor's Introduction: Partitive Plays, Pipe Dreams There is the famous anecdote about Freud: upon being reminded by a disciple that to smoke cigars is clearly a phallic activity, Freud, cigar in hand, is said to have responded, "Sometimes a good cigar is just a good cigar." The anecdote demonstrates, it seems to me, a problematic central to psychoanalysis: the discipline which insists on transference and, perhaps even more significantly, on displacement as fundamental principles, ultimately must insist in turn on seeing everything as being "really" something else. Such an ideology of metamorphosis is so much taken for granted that unlike the rest of the world, which generally has difficulty in being convinced that a pipe, for example, is not necessarily a pipe at all, psychoanalysis needs at times to remind itself, in a type of return to an adaequatio, that it is possible for a cigar really to be a cigar. Psychoanalysis, in other words, has not only an economy which is hydraulic (mirroring the nineteenth-century physics from which it springs), but has as well an economy of seepage: each apparent object, whether in dream, literature, or psychic narrative, splashes over onto at least one "something else." Not only is there always a remainder, but the remainder generally proliferates, multiplies, from more than one quotient, such that the original "thing" in question becomes merely the agent for production. Its status as thing-in-the-world is easily lost. Such seepage has, of course, appeared almost everywhere. Psychoanalysis has infiltrated such diverse areas as literature (to which it owes its myths), linguistics, philosophy, anthropology, history, feminism, psychology, archeology, neurology, to name some. And it is in the notion of "some," perhaps, that lies the crux of the problem. For there is in psychoanalysis an overt conviction that it exists as the ultimate totality, of which everything else is a part. Not content to see itself as one in a number of enterprises, the psychoanalytic project has at its foundation a vision of itself as the meaning which will always lie in wait; the truth which lies covered by "the rest." Jacques Derrida has, of course, pointed to this tendency. Psychoanalysis, he noted, wishes a peculiar logic for itself, one in which "the species would include the genus."1 Moreover, says Derrida in the same essay, once psychoanalysis has discovered itself, what it then again proceeds to discover around it is always itself.2 What happens, then, is that psychoanalysis becomes a ubiquitous subject, assimilating every object into itself. But it is also a Subject which sees itself as omnipresent, omniscient, and without a center precisely the terms in which God has been described. It is not then by chance that the unconscious is likened to a divinity: always present but revealing itself only obliquely and at privileged moments, the unconscious takes the place of the Judeo-Christian God. It is within every being, but inaccessible unless it "chooses" to manifest itself. And in a peculiar reversal of the notion of the partitive, psychoanalysis would have the unconscious reveal itself in fleeting moments and fragments, thereby suggesting its fullness and totality; and it would have "other" intellectual enterprises be only apparent totalities which are revealed through psychoanalysis alone to be "really" incomplete because they exist without recognizing the unconscious and its mother, psychoanalysis itself.   1. Jacques Derrida, "Graphesis," "The Purveyor of Truth," trans. Willis Dominggo et al., Yale French Studies52 (1975): 32. 2. See the syllogism with which Derrida opens his "Purveyor of Truth," p. 31. Part of what I am calling the "syllogism" appears at the beginning of Stephen Melville's article in the present issue. Dominick LaCapra History and Psychoanalysis The focus of this essay will be on Freud, although my approach is informed by certain aspects of "post-Freudian" analysis. In the works of Freud, however, history in the ordinary sense often seems lost in the shuffle between ontogeny and phylogeny. When Freud, in the latter part of his life, turned to cultural history, he was primarily concerned with showing how the evolution of civilization on a macrological level might be understood through or even seen as an enactment of psychoanalytic principles and processes. And he openly acknowledged the speculative nature of his inquiry into prehistory, "archaic" society, and their putative relation to the civilizing process. One might nonetheless argue that throughout Freud's work there are theoretical bases and fruitful leads for a more delimited investigation of specific historical processes for which documentation is, to a greater or lesser extent, available. This kind of investigation is, moreover, required to test the pertinence of Freud's speculative and at times quasi-mythological initiatives. At present one can perhaps do little more than tentatively suggest how such an investigation might proceed and the sorts of issues it might conceivably illuminate. For its elaboration has been relatively underdeveloped in the research of those who looks to Freud for guidance.   Dominick LaCapra is GGoldwin Smith Professor of European Intellectual History at Cornell University. His most recent books are "Madame Bovary" on Trial(1982), Rethinking Intellectual History (1983), and History and Criticism (1985). He has just completed a book-length manuscript entitled "History, Politics, and the Novel." Arnold I. Davidson How to Do the History of Psychoanalysis: A_Reading_of_Freud's_Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality I have two primary aims in the following paper, aims that are inextricably intertwined. First, I want to raise some historiographical and epistemological issues about how to write the history of psychoanalysis. Although they arise quite generally in the history of science, these issues have a special status and urgency when the domain is the history of psychoanalysis. Second, in light of the epistemological and methodological orientation that I am going to advocate, I want to begin a reading of Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,one whose specificity is a function of my attachment to this orientation, to a particular way of doing the history of psychoanalysis. Despite the enormous number of pages that have been written on Freud's Three Essays,it is very easy to underestimate the density of this book, a density at once historical, rhetorical, and conceptual. This underestimation stems in part from historiographical presumptions that quite quickly misdirect us away from the fundamental issues. In raising question about the historiography of the history of science, I obviously cannot begin at the beginning. So let me begin much further along, with the writings of Michel Foucault. I think of the works of Foucault, in conjunction with that of Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem, as exemplifying a very distinctive perspective about how to write the history of science. In the English-speaking world, perhaps only the work of Ian Hacking both shares this perspective and ranks with its French counterparts in terms of originality and quality. No brief summary can avoid eliding the differences between Bachelard, Canguilhem, Hacking, and Foucault; indeed, the summary I am going to produce does not even fully capture Foucault's perspective, which he called "archaeology."1 But this sketch will have to do for the purposes I have in mind here, whose ultimate aim is to reorient our approach to the history of psychoanalysis.   1. The sketch that follows reproduces, with some omissions and additions, the beginning of my "Archeology, Genealogy, Ethics," in Michel Foucault: A Critical Reader, ed. David Hoy (London, 1986), pp. 221-34.   Arnold I. Davidsonis assistant professor in the department of philosophy, the Committee on the Conceptual Foundations of Science, and the Committee on General Studies in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. He is currently writing a book on the history and epistemology of nineteenth-century psychiatric theories of sexuality. Nicholas Rand and Maria Torok The Secret of Psychoanalysis: History Reads Theory All disciplines have their histories in addition to their theories. In general, the history of a set of problems is treated separately from the nature of the problems themselves. The axioms of a given discipline may be the object of external inquiry but are not usually subject to historical examination. In this way, psychoanalysis has been investigated, even challenged, by a variety of other disciplines: biology, linguistics, history, philosophy, literature, and so forth. One may ask whether psychoanalysis can also become its own object, effectively distancing itself from itself. Will historical scrutiny provide criticism from within and thereby alter the nature of psychoanalysis? It has been our observation that the history of the creation of psychoanalysis and of the psychoanalytic movement suggests deficiencies and omissions within psychoanalytic theory. This implies something far beyond the simple idea that no serious examination of theoretical problems can occur without an understanding of their history. Not only the past but the future of psychoanalysis, both as a theory and as a clinical practice, may well depend on the conscious assessment and assimilation of its own history. "The Secret of Psychoanalysis: History Reads Theory" is intended in part as an introduction to Nicolas Abraham's "Notes on the Phantom" which will, in turn, illuminate the theoretical and practical scope of this essay. A history of Freudian psychoanalysis could be written based on the voices of dissenting insiders, without including schismatics such as Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, Wilhelm Stekel, and others who eventually developed independent systems of thought. The detailed interpretation of such firsts is already a consecrated approach to psychoanalytic history. But much remains to be learned from the internal criticism of those who have participated in Freud's movement or have sought sympathetically to understand the birth and progress of Freudian psychoanalysis. Most of the disagreements concern theoretical and clinical issues or the clocked access to documents that are essential to the history assessment of psychoanalysis. This is Ludwig Marcuse's case as he writes to Ernest Jones on 10 October 1957.1   1. Ludwig Marcuse is the author of Freud und sein Bild vom Menschen [Freud and his image of man] (Frankfurt, 1956).   Nicholas Rand, assistant professor of French at the University of Wisconsin Madison, is completing a book on the notion of hiding in literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. Maria Torok is the author (with Nicholas Abraham) of The Wolf Man's Magic Word (Le Verbier de L'Homme aux loups),recently published in translation. "The Secret of Psychoanalysis" is part of a book-length study Rand and Torok are writing on Freud and psychoanalytic theory. Nicolas Abraham Notes on the Phantom: A Complement to Freud's_Metapsychology The belief that the spirits of the dead can return to haunt the living exists either as a tenet or as a marginal conviction in all civilizations, whether ancient or modern. More often than not, the dead do not return to reunite the living with their loved ones but rather to lead them into some dreadful snare, entrapping them with disastrous consequences. To be sure, all the departed may return, but some are predestined to haunt: the dead who have been shamed during their lifetime or those who took unspeakable secrets to the grave. From the brucolacs, the errant sprits of outcasts in ancient Greece, to the ghost of Hamlet's vengeful father, and on down to the rapping spirits of modern times, the theme of the dead who, having suffered repression by their family or society, cannot enjoy, even in death, a state of authenticity appears to be omnipresent (whether overtly expressed or disguised) on the fringes of religions and, failing that, in rational systems. It is a fact that the "phantom," whatever its form, is nothing but an invention of the living. Yes, an invention in the sense that the phantom is meant to objectify, even if under the guise of individual or collective hallucinations, the gap that the concealment of some part of a loved one's life produced in us. The phantom is, therefore, also a metapsychological fact. Consequently, what haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others. Because the phantom is not related to the loss of a loved one, it cannot be considered the effect of unsuccessful mourning, as is the case of melancholics or of all those who carry a tomb within themselves. It is the children's or descendants' lot to objectify these buried tombs through diverse species of ghosts. What comes back to haunt are the tombs of others. The phantoms of folklore merely objectify a metaphor active within the unconscious: the burial of an unspeakable fact within the loved one. Here we are in the midst of clinical psychoanalysis and still shrouded in obscurity, an obscurity, however, that the nocturnal being of phantoms (if only in the metapsychological sense) can, paradoxically, be called upon to clarify.   The most recently published book of essays by Nicolas Abraham(1919- 75) is Rythmes de l'oeuvre, de la traduction et de la psychanalyse (1985). "Notes on the Phantom" is the preliminary statement of his theory of transgenerational haunting. Nicholas Rand,assistant professor of French at the University of Wisconsin Madison, is the English-language editor of Abraham's works. Sander L. Gilman The Struggle of Psychiatry with Psychoanalysis: Who Won? What if Wittgenstein and Popper were right after all? What is psychoanalysis is not "scientific," not scientific by any contemporary definition including Adolf Grünbaum's but what if it works all the same?1 What if psychoanalysis is all right in practice, but the theory isn't scientific? Indeed, what if "science" is defined ideologically rather than philosophically? If we so redefine "science," it is not to dismiss psychoanalysis but to understand its origin and impact, to follow the ideological dialectic between the history of psychiatry, its developing as a medical "science," and the evolving self-definition of psychoanalysis which parallels this history.   We know that Freud divided psychoanalysis into three quite discrete areas first, a theory, a "scientific structure"; second, a method of inquiry, a means of exploring and ordering information; and last, but certainly not least, a mode of treatment. Let us, for the moment, follow the actual course of history, at least the course of a history which can be described by sorting out the interrelationship between psychoanalysis and psychiatry, and assume that we can heuristically view the mode of treatment as relatively independent of the other two aspects of psychoanalysis. What if the very claims for a "scientific" basis for psychoanalytic treatment and by extension the role of the psychoanalyst as promulgated by Freud and his early followers were rooted in an ideologically charged historical interpretation of the positivistic nature of science and the definition of the social role of the scientist? This may seem an odd premise to begin an essay on the mutual influence of psychoanalysis and psychiatry, but it is not stranger than the actual historical practice.   Psychoanalysis originated not in the psychiatric clinic but in the laboratories of neurology in Vienna and Paris.2 Its point of origin was not nineteenth-century psychiatry but rather nineteenth-century neurology. That origin points to a major difference between the traditional practice of nineteenth-century psychiatry and modern clinical psychiatry in our post-positivistic age. Psychiatry in nineteenth-century Europe, in Vienna as well as in Paris, was an adjunct to the world of the asylum. Indeed, the second great battle (after Pinel's restructuring of the asylum) which nineteenth- century psychiatry waged was the creation of the "alienist" as a new medical specialty. The alienist was the medical doctor in administrative charge of the asylum, rather than a medical adjunct to the lay asylum director as had earlier, in the age of "moral treatment," been the practice.   Sander L. Gilman is professor of human studies in the departments of German literature and Near Eastern studies, Cornell University, and professor of psychiatry (history) at the Cornell Medical College. He is the author of numerous books on intellectual and literary history. His most recent study is Jewish Self-Hatred (1986). Forthcoming is his study Oscar Wilde's London and the English edition of his Conversations with Nietzsche.His previous contribution to is "Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature" (Autumn 1985). Jane Gallop Reading the Mother Tongue: Psychoanalytic Feminist Criticism In the early seventies, American feminist literary criticism had little patience for psychoanalytic interpretation, dismissing it along with other forms of what Mary Ellmann called "phallic criticism."1 Not that psychoanalytic literary criticism was a specific target of feminist critics, but Freud and his science were viewed by feminism in general as prime perpetrators of patriarchy. If we take Kate Millett's Sexual Politics2 as the first book of modern feminist criticism, let us remark that she devotes ample space and energy to attacking Freud, not of course as the forerunner of any school of literary criticism, but as a master discourse of our, which it to say masculinist, culture. But, although Freud may generally have been a target for feminism, feminist literary critics of the early seventies expended more of their energy in the attack on New Criticism. The era was, after all, hardly a heyday for American psychoanalytic criticism; formalist modes of reading enjoyed a hegemony in the literary academy in contrast with which psychoanalytic interpretation was a rather weak arm of patriarchy. Since then, there have been two changes in this picture. In the last decade, psychoanalytic criticism has grown in prestige and influence, and a phenomenon we can call psychoanalytic feminist criticism has arisen.3 I would venture that two major factors have contributed to this boom in American psychoanalytic criticism. First, the rise of feminist criticism, in its revolt against formalism, has rehabilitated thematic and psychological criticism, the traditional mainstays of psychoanalytic interpretation. Because feminism has assured the link between psychosexuality and the socio-historical realm, psychoanalysis now linked to major political and cultural questions. Glistening on the horizon of sociopolitical connection, feminism promises to save psychoanalysis from its ahistorical and apolitical doldrums. The second factor that makes psychoanalytic reading a growth industry in the United States is certainly more widely recognized: it is the impact of French post-structuralist thought on the American literary academy. There is, of course, the direct influence of Lacanian psychoanalysis which promotes language to a principal role in the psychoanalytic drama and so naturally offers fertile ground for crossing psychoanalytic and literary concerns. Yet I think, in fact, the wider effect in this country has come from Derridean deconstruction. Although deconstruction is not strictly psychoanalytic, Freud's prominent place in Derridean associative networks promises a criticism that is, finally, respectably textual and still, in some recognizable way, Freudian. Although this second, foreign factor in the growth of American psychoanalytic criticism seems far away from the realm of homespun feminist criticism, I would content that there is a powerful if indirect connection between the two. I would speculate that the phenomenal spread of deconstruction in American departments of English is in actuality a response to the growth of feminist criticism. At a moment when it was no longer possible to ignore feminist criticism's challenge to the critical establishment, deconstruction appeared offering a perspective that was not in opposition to but rather beyond feminism, offering to sublate feminism into something supposedly "more radical."   Jane Gallop,professor of humanities at Rice University, is the author of Intersections: A Reading of Sade with Bataille, Blanchot, and Klossowski (1981), The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis(1982), and Reading Lacan (1985). She wrote the present essay while awaiting the birth of her first child. Ernesto Laclau Psychoanalysis and Marxism To think the relationships which exist between Marxism and psychoanalysis obliges one to reflect upon the intersections between two theoretical fields, each composed independently of the other and whose possible forms of mutual reference do not merge into any obvious system of translation. For example, it is impossible to affirm though it has often been done that psychoanalysis adds a theory of subjectivity to the field of historical materialism, given that the latter has been constituted, by and large, as a negation of the validity and the pertinence of any theory of subjectivity (although certainly not of the category of "subject"). Thus, no simple model of supplement or articulations is of the slightest use. The problem is rather that of finding an index of comparison between two different theoretical fields, but that, in turn, implies the construction of a new field, within which the comparison would make sense. This new field is one which may be characterized as "post- Marxist" and is the result of a multitude of theoretico- political interventions whose cumulative effect in relation to the categories of classical Marxism is similar to what Heidegger called a "de-struction of the history of ontology." For Heidegger, this "de-struction" did not signify the purely negative operation of rejecting a tradition, but exactly the opposite: it is by means of a radical questioning which is situated beyond this tradition but which is only possible in relation to it that the originary meaning of the categories of this tradition (which have long since become stale and trivialized) may be recovered. In this sense, effecting a "de-struction" of the history of Marxism implies going beyond the deceptive evidence of concepts such as "class," "capital," and so on, and re-creating the meaning of the originary synthesis that such concepts aspired to establish, the total system of theoretical alternatives in regard to which they represented only limited options, and the ambiguities inherent in their constitution itself the "hymen" in the Derridean sense which, although violently repressed, rise up here and there in diverse discursive surfaces. It is the systematic and genealogical outline of these nuclei of ambiguity which initially allows for a destruction of the history of Marxism and which constitutes post-Marxism as the field of our current political reflection. But it is precisely in these surfaces of discursive ambiguity that it is possible to detect the presence of logics of the political which allows for the establishment of a true dialogue, without complacent metaphorization, between Marxism and psychoanalytic theory. I would like to highlight two points, which I consider fundamental, concerning these discursive surfaces.   Ernesto Laclau is a lecturer in the Department of Government and director of the Graduate Program in Ideology and Discourse Analysis at the University of Essex. He is the author of Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (1977) and, with Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (1985). Amy G. Reiter-McIntoshis a lecturer and Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago. Peter Brooks The Idea of a Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism Psychoanalytic literary criticism has always been something of an embarrassment. One resists labeling as a "psychoanalytic critic" because the kind of criticism evoked by the term mostly deserves the bad name it largely has made for itself. Thus I have been worrying about the status of some of my own uses of psychoanalysis in the study of narrative, in my attempt to find dynamic models that might move us beyond the static formalism of structuralist and semiotic narratology. And in general, I think we need to worry about the legitimacy and force that psychoanalysis may claim when imported into the study of literary texts. If versions of psychoanalytic criticism have been with us at least since 1908, when Freud published his essay on "Creative Writers and Day-dreaming," and if the enterprise has recently been renewed in subtle ways by post-structuralist versions of reading, a malaise persists, a sense that whatever the promises of their union, literature and psychoanalysis remain mismatched bedfellows or perhaps I should say playmates. The first problem, and the most basic, may be that psychoanalysis in literary study has over and over again mistaken the object of analysis, with the result that whatever insights it has produced tell us precious little about the structure and rhetoric of literary texts. Traditional psychoanalytic criticism tends to fall into three general categories, depending on the object of analysis: the author, the reader, or the fictive persons of the text. The first of these constituted the classical locus of psychoanalytic interest. It is now apparently the most discredited, though also perhaps the most difficult to extirpate, since if the disappearance of the author has been repeatedly announced, authorial mutants ceaselessly reappear, as, for instance, in Harold Bloom's psychomachia of literary history. Like the author, the fictive character has been deconstructed into an effect of textual codes, a kind of thematic mirage, and the psychoanalytic study of the putative unconscious of characters in fiction has also fallen into disrepute. Here again, however, the impulse resurfaces, for instance in some of the moves of a feminist criticism that needs to show how the represented female psyche (particularly of course as created by women authors) refuses and problematizes the dominant concepts of male psychological doctrine. Feminist criticism has in fact largely contributed to a new variant of the psychoanalytic study of fictive characters, a variant one might label the "situational-thematic": studies of Oedipal triangles in fiction, their permutations and evolution, of the roles of mothers and daughters, of situations of nurture and bonding, and so forth. It is work often full of interest, but nonetheless methodologically disquieting in its use of Freudian analytic tools in a wholly thematic way, as if the identification and labeling of human relations in a psychoanalytic vocabulary were the task of criticism. The third traditional field of psychoanalytic literary study, the reader, continues to flourish in ever-renewed versions, since the role of the reader in the creation of textual meaning is very much on our minds at present, and since the psychoanalytic study of readers' responses willingly brackets the impossible notion of author in favor of the acceptable and also verifiable notion of reader. The psychoanalytic study of the reader may concern real readers (as in Norman Holland's Five Readers Reading) or the reader as psychological everyman (as in Simon O. Lesser's Fiction and the Unconscious). But like the other traditional psychoanalytic approaches, it displaces the object of analysis from the text to some person, some other psychodynamic structure a displacement I wish to avoid since, as I hope to make clear as I go along, I think psychoanalytic criticism can and should be textual and rhetorical.   Peter Brooks is the Tripp Professor of the Humanities at Yale University, where he is also director of the Whitney Humanities Center and chairman of the French department. His most recent book is Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative,which has recently been reissued in paperback. His work in progress concerns psychoanalysis and story-telling. Stephen Melville Psychoanalysis and the Place of Jouissance Psychoanalysis has, in the very nature of its object, an interest in and difficulty with the concept of place as well as an interest in and difficulty with the logic of place, topology. The Unconscious can thus seem to give rise to a certain prospect of mathesis or formalization; and such formalization, achieved, would offer a ground for the psychoanalytic claim to scientific knowledge relatively independent of empirical questions and approaching the condition of mathematics. This might then seem to have been Lacan's wager in organizing the researches of his écolearound works of theoretical elaboration rather than clinical study; certainly some such notion must underlie Miller's claim to be "axiomatic."1 In this paper I want to explore some of Lacan's formalizations as they are unfolded in the seminar Encore.(I will also draw some material from the interview transcript Télévision and Lacan's appearances at Yale University in 1975.)2 I will in effect be looking at the place of place or places in psychoanalysis in particular, I will be looking at the place of jouissance in Lacan's psychoanalysis and at the places of what Lacan punningly calls jouis-sens. The joint problematic here might be called one of "enjoymeant," combining the logic of pleasure with the pleasure of logic. For Lacan, questions of jouissance,however punned, are questions of unity and selfhood, so in examining the reciprocal play of pleasure and sense I will be examining how Lacanian psychoanalysis secures itself in place. This last topic touches implicitly in Encoreon questions of legacy and inheritance, so in the end I will also have something to say about the limits Lacan's formalizations would impose on our enjoyment of Freud. I should note in advance that Encore,Lacan's seminar of 1972-73, is an extraordinarily compact and involuted text, even by his standards, and of a corresponding richness, weaving sustained meditations on such figures as Georges Bataille, Roman Jakobson, Kierkegaard, and Aquinas with "mathemystical" digressions on sexuality, discourse, Borromean knots, and the like. The reading offered here is perforce schematic.   1. By and large the evidences of the Lacanian clinic are closed to us in consequence of Lacan's insistence on theoretical elaboration. But it should not go unremarked that much of the work of Lacan's school seems to have focused on areas traditionally recalcitrant to psychoanalytic treatment alcoholism, retardation, and psychosis and that such an emphasis is responsive to traditional empirically minded critiques of the limits of psychoanalysis. 2. It should perhaps be noted in this context that the project of a genuinely public presentation of Lacan's seminars seems to have been abandoned in favor of the more circumscribed circulation of texts through the Lacanian journal Ornicar?   Stephen Melvilleis assistant professor of English at Syracuse University. He is the author of Philosophy Beside Itself: On Deconstruction and Modernism (1986) and is currently completing a series of essays on postmodern art and criticism. Michael Riffaterre The Intertextual Unconscious Literature is open to psychoanalysis as is any other form of expression this much is obvious. Less so is the relevancy of analysis to the specificity of literary texts, to what differentiates them from other linguistic utterances; in short, the literariness of literature. The analyst cannot avoid this problem of focus. If he did, he would treat verbal art as a document for purposes other than an understanding of its defining difference. He would simply be seeking one more set of clues to the workings of the human mind, as the sociologist or historian exploits literature to explore periods or societies through their reflection in its mirror. The only approach to the proper focus must be consistent both with the analyst's method and with the natural reader's practice. The analyst requires free association on the part of the analysand, and he matches this free flow of information with an attention equally open to all that is said. It is only after a passive stage of "evenly-hovering attention," or, as the French nicely call it, écoute flottante,that he seizes upon clues to build a model of interpretation. These clues are revealed to him by anomalies such as parapraxes and repetitions or deviant representations, as well as formal coincidences between what he hears and the corpus of observations on linguistic behavior accumulated since Freud. The reader, on the other hand, is faced with a text that is strongly organized, overdetermined by aesthetic, generic, and teleological constraints, and in which whatever survives of free association is marshaled toward certain effects. The reader himself is far from passive, since he starts reacting to the text as soon as his own way of thinking, and of conceiving representation, is either confirmed or challenged. The text tends therefore not to be interpreted for what it is, but for what is selected from it by the reader's individual reactions. A segmentation of the text into units of significance thus occurs, and it is the task of the critic to verify the validity of this process. In pursuing this goal he must restrict himself to a segmentation that can be proven as being dictated by textual features rather than by the reader's idiosyncrasies, by those elements the perceptions of which does not depend on the latter and that resist erasure when they are in conflict with such individual quirks. The analyst's advantage in identifying such features is that he is trained to recognize the above- mentioned anomalies and to explain them by repression and displacement, that is, by the traces left in the surface of the text by the conflict between its descriptive and narrative structures and the lexicon and grammar that we call the unconscious.   Michael Riffaterre,University Professor at Columbia University and a senior fellow of the School of Criticism and Theory, is the editor of Romantic Review.His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are "Syllepsis" (Summer 1980) and "Intertextual Representation: On Mimesis as Interpretive Discourse" (September 1984). Stanley Cavell Freud and Philosophy: A Fragment Other of my intellectual debts remain fully outstanding, that to Freud's work before all. A beholdenness to Sigmund Freud's intervention in Western culture is hardly something for concealment, but I have until now left my commitment to it fairly implicit. This has been not merely out of intellectual terror at Freud's achievement but in service of an idea and in compensation for a dissatisfaction I might formulate as follows: psychoanalytic interpretations of the arts in American culture have, until quite recently, on the whole been content to permit the texts under analysis not to challenge the concepts of analysis being applied to them, and this seemed to me to do injustice both to psychoanalysis and to literature (the art that has attracted most psychoanalytic criticism). My response was to make a virtue of this defect by trying, in my readings of film as well as of literature and of philosophy, to recapitulate what I understood by Freud's saying that he had been preceded in his insights by the creative writes of his tradition; that is, I tried to arrive at a sense for each text I encountered (it was my private touchstone for when an interpretation had gone far enough to leave for the moment) that psychoanalysis had become called for, as if called for in the history of knowledge, as if each psychoanalytic reading were charged with rediscovering the reality of psychoanalysis. This still does not seem to me an irrelevant ambition, but it is also no longer a sufficient response in our altered environment. Some of the most interesting and useful criticism and literary theory currently being produced is decisively psychoanalytic in inspiration, an alteration initiated for us most prominently by the past two or so decades of work in Paris and represented in this country by to pick examples from which I have profited in recent months Neil Hertz on the Dora case, Shoshana Felman on Henry James' "The Turn of the Screw," and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick on homophobia in Our Mutual Friend.1 And now my problem has become that I am unsure whether I understand the constitution of the discourses in which this material is presented in relation to what I take philosophy to be, a constitution to which, such as it is, I am also committed. So some siting of this relation is no longer mine to postpone.   1. See Neil Hertz, "Dora's Secrets, Freud's Techniques," in In Dora's Case: Freud Hysteria Feminism,ed. Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane (New York, 1985), pp. 221-42; Shoshana Felman, "Turning the Screw of Interpretation," Yale French Studies 55/56 (1977): 94-207; and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "Homophobia, Misogyny, and Capital: The Example of Our Mutual Friend," Raritan2 (Winter 1983): 126-51.   Stanley Cavell,professor of philosophy at Harvard University, is the author of many works, including Must We Mean What We Say?, The Senses of "Walden," The Claim of Reason,and, most recently, Themes Out of School.He spent last spring at Hebrew University in Jerusalem as a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies. His most recent contributions to are "Politics as Opposed to What?" (September 1982) and "The Division of Talent" (June 1985). Jean Starobinski Acheronta Movebo It is doubtless appropriate to read The Interpretation of Dreams according to the image of the journey which Sigmund Freud describes in a letter to Wilhelm Fliess: The whole thing is planned on the model of an imaginary walk. First comes the dark wood of the authorities (who cannot see the trees), where there is no clear view and it is easy to go astray. Then there is a cavernous defile through which I lead my readers my specimen dream with its peculiarities, its details, its indiscretions and its bad jokes and then, all at once, the high ground and the open prospect and the question: "Which way do you want to go?"1 This walk has nothing of the nonchalant about it. Rather, it is strewn with tests and trials, as is usually the case in the "myth of the hero" or of the "conquistador," which we know played a major role in Freud's thought and in that of his disciples. The progress, in epic poetry, moves toward a discovery, the founding of a city, by means of difficult stages and combats. Every "discourse" capable of attaining a goal distant from its prolegomena finds its appropriate metaphor in the hero's progress, or in the voyage of initiation. Discursivity then becomes the intellectual equivalent of the epic's trajectory. At the time of its publication, Freud found his book insufficiently probing, and imperfect in its discursivity. He criticized himself for having failed to link properly his arguments (Beweisführung). Doubt was momentarily cast on the achievement of the main goal…. But such severity was not to persist. But one can also read the work by discerning its framing devices. Several authors mentioned in the first chapter reappear at the work's conclusion. Such a return is far from fortuitous; it is the result of an extremely well-calculated strategy. Another framing system which has been noticed by many readers is the one, shortly before the end of the book, which returns to a line from Virgil that Freud had placed as an epigraph on the title page: Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo.This line, because of its repetition at two crucial points in the book, traces its message in the form of an emblem. When it breaks in, it makes explicit that the dream mechanism is the return of the repressed: In waking life the suppressed material in the mind is prevented from finding expression and is cut off from internal perception owing to the fact that the contradictions present in it are eliminated one side being disposed of in favor of the other; but during the night, under the sway of an impetus towards the construction of compromises, this suppressed material finds methods and means of forcing its way into consciousness. Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo.2   1. Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 6 Aug. 1899, Freud, The Origins of Psychoanalysis: Letters to Wilhelm Fliess, Drafts and Notes, 1887-1902,ed. Marie Bonaparte, Anna Freud, and Ernst Kris, trans. James Strachey (New York, 1954), p. 290. 2. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams,ed. and trans. Strachey (New York, 1965), p. 647; my emphasis. The Latin is translated in n. 1 on that page of Freud's text: "If I cannot bend the High Powers, I will move the Infernal Regions." All further references to this work, abbreviated I,will be included in the text. Another framing device is created by the theme of the prophetic dream, discussed at the outset of the first chapters and taken up again, with the ambivalence of denial and concession, in the final paragraph of the book.   Jean Starobinski,professor emeritus at the University of Geneva, has devoted studies to Montaigne, Diderot, Rousseau, Saussure, and modern French poets. As an M.D., he is familiar with psychoanalysis and participates in the editorial board of La Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse (Paris). Some of his recent research deals with the history of melancholia; his most recent books are Montaigne in Motion (1985) and Rousseau (forthcoming). He was awarded the Balzan Prize in 1984. Robert von Hallberg Editor's Introduction In recent literary interpretation there is renewed interest in the political meaning, explicit or implicit, intentional or inadvertent, of all sorts of texts. One often now reads that some novel, play, poem, or essay is only apparently unrelated to political issues contemporary with either the text's production or our current reading of it. This sort of interpretation, which is fast becoming conventional, sometimes slides too easily, I think, toward evaluation: on the one hand, insofar as a text is shown to veil its author's self-interest (often understood as the interest of a class or gender) with claims to larger concerns, the critic nudges this title a little out of the canon of currently engaging texts; on the other, a text expressive of a progressive political position is retrieved from the neglect it suffered from critics who veiled their self-interest (that is, the interest of their class or gender) with misleading talk of aesthetic standards. Either way, self-interest is now thought of as the most authentic motive an interpreter can divulge in a text. This kind of political interpretation can be defended as a healthy reaction to what is remembered as a time, now more than twenty years gone, when extrinsic criteria were disavowed and literature was said to be valuable primarily as literature.But how far has this reaction gone beyond formalism on the one hand and ideological conformity on the other toward fresh, rich terms for evaluative criticism? Not far, I think. Without strong evaluative criticism it seems unlikely, as E. D. Hirsch has argued, that academic literary criticism can intervene in the institutions of literary instruction, or indeed in the production and reception of the poetry of our contemporaries, which is my own large interest (insofar as I have any). It should be said too that the current trend toward political interpretation owes a good deal to our own narrow professional self-interest: as fewer institutional and economic resources have been directed toward the study of literature in the 1970s and 1980s, we can all remember fondly the importance that ideas, especially political ideas, seemed to hold in the 1960s. Some recent political interpretation seems to be motivated not just by a desire to maintain faith with the concerns of the 1960s, but as well by a need of scholars of humanities to generate terms that render the study of literature or culture generally obviously important. The political shifts of the late 1960s and early 1970s took money, jobs, and even a sense of consequence away from humanities departments. The recent move is to restore at least a sense of consequence to literary criticism. However worthy that objective, there is no reason to think that self-legitimation will lead to the development of evaluative standards appropriate to the study and enjoyment of poetry in American in 1987. Robert Pinsky Responsibilities of the Poet Certain general ideas come up repeatedly, in various guises, when contemporary poetry is discussed. One of these might be described as the question of what, if anything, is our social responsibility as poets. That is, there are things writers owe the art of poetry work, perhaps. And in a sense there are things writers owe themselves emotional truthfulness, attention toward one's own feelings. But what, if anything, can a poet be said to owe other people in general, considered as a community? For what is the poet answerable? This is a more immediate though more limited way of putting the question than such familiar terms as "political poetry." Another recurring topic is what might be called Poetry Gloom. I mean that sourness and kvetching that sometimes come into our feelings about our art: the mysterious disaffections, the querulous doubts, the dispirited mood in which we ask ourselves, has contemporary poetry gone downhill, does anyone at all read it, has poetry become a mere hobby, do only one's friends do it well, and so forth. This matter often comes up in the form of questions about the "popularity" or "audience" of poetry. Possibly the appetite for poetry really was greater in the good old days, in other societies. After the total disaster at Syracuse, when the Athenians, their great imperialist adventure failed, were being massacred, or branded as slaves with the image of a horse burned into the forehead, a few were saved for the sake of Euripides, whose work, it seems, was well thought of by the Syracusans. "Many of the captives who got safe back to Athens," writes Plutarch, Are said, after they reached home, to have gone and made their acknowledgments to Euripides, relating how some of them had been released from their slavery by teaching what they could remember of his poems and others, when straggling after the fight, had been relieved with meat and drink for repeating some of his lyrics.   Robert Pinskyteaches at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent book of poems, History of My Heart,was awarded the William Carlos Williams Prize. His other books include Sadness and Happiness, An Explanation of America,and a volume of criticism, The Situation of Poetry. Mindwheel,his narrative entertainment for computer, has been issued by Brøderbund Software. Anne Burnett The Scrutiny of Song: Pindar, Politics, and Poetry Pindar's songs were composed for men at play, but his poetry was political in its impulse and in its function. The men in question were rich and powerful, and their games were a display of exclusive class attributes, vicariously shared by lesser mortals who responded with gratitude and loyalty (for example, Pythia 5.43- 44). Victories were counted as princely benefactions (compare Olympia5.3 and 15, 7.94, 8.87, Isthmia6.69) and laid up as city treasure like the wealth deposited in the treasuries at Delphi (Pythia6.5). Athletic victory was thus both a manifestation and an enhancement of aristocratic domination, which meant that the poet who praised those who boxed and raced in pan-Hellenic games necessarily praised the social structure that depended on them. Pindar understood his political function and was proud of it "I would consort with victors" (Olympia1.115b).1 He believed in athletic contest as a model for all human life. He believed in the aristocratic system: "Inherited governance of cities lies properly with the nobility" (Pythia 10.71-72). He believed also that praise poetry could regulate as well as laud that system, and he believed finally that such poetry was itself incorruptible. Games, song, and princely rulers were all parts of a single brilliant order, and this truth had a linguistic reflection, for the bit that tames a horse, the meter of a poetic line, and the moderation of a ruler were all called by the same name metron."Measure (metron) inheres in everything" (Olympia13.47 and throughout).   1. All translations are my own.   Anne Burnettis professor of classical languages and literature at the University of Chicago. Her most recent publications are Three Archaic Poets: Archilochus, Alcaeus, Sappho (1983) and The Art of Bacchylides(1985). A monograph on choral poetry, with focus on the Sicilian poet Stesichorus, is forthcoming. Michael André Bernstein "O Totiens Servus": Saturnalia and Servitude in Augustan_Rome To pose the question of evaluating political poetry is, of course, itself already a polemical move, since it insists on distinctions that command neither general critical consent nor methodological specificity. Repudiating the pertinence of such concerns to poetry has been, after all, the principal thrust of some of the most influential texts in modern literary theory. Indeed, considered historically, the struggle to separate aesthetic from both moral and political considerations can be seen as constituting the inaugural, grounding act of poetics as a distinct discipline. In such a view, the words of a poem, by their very nature, are radically divorced from their usage in the quotidian world of shared human activities, so that although a text may contain political themes among its material poetica,insofar as it succeeds as a work of art these must function purely as internal and autonomous elements in the structure of the piece, not as arguments seeking to participate in a wider discourse. Because the language of poetry is unique and self-sufficient, thematic considerations are strictly irrelevant, and the issue of evaluation is identical regardless of the ostensible subject matter of the poem. Political poetry, in other words, is a meaningless term: a work is either a poem or it is not, and any attempt to include political concerns in its creation or evaluation is simply to abandon the domain of art for what Mallarmé dismissed as the debased idiom of "les journaux."1 Yet the very need to keep insisting on so categorical a distinction reveals that contamination is always possible, that the chasm may prove only a threshold habitually traversed by the words of any poem. And in fact, for every instance of a Mallarméan insistence upon the autonomy of the poem, there exists a counterpolemic stressing the link between word and world and, more pertinently still, between the language of verse and a search for values applicable to the communal experiences of both author and readers.2 But as I remarked earlier, the very heterogeneity of these arguments tends to deprive them of any methodological specificity, and all too often discussions of political poetry have done little more than catalog judgments about the ideological stance of a given work according to a critic's fixed conception of which attitudes merit approval and which deserve censure. There is a crucial distinction between reading political poetry and reading poetry politically. In the latter case, the concern is less with the characteristics, let alone the evaluation, of political poetry per se than which judging how effectively the poem either champions or contests positions whose independent authority is always already guaranteed and which, in principle, are only to be illustrated, not questioned or modified, by literary texts.   1. Mallarmé's formulation here is both categorical can powerful: "cette donnée exacte, quíl faut, si l'on fait de la literature, parler autrement que les journaux" (Stéphane Mallarmé, Correspondence,ed. Henri Mondor and Lloyd James Austin, 11 vols. [Paris, 1959-85], 3:67).   Michael André Bernstein,associate professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic(1980) and Prima della Rivoluzione (1984), a volume of verse. He is currently completing a book on the Abject Hero and a study, Talent and the Individual Tradition in Modern Poetry.His previous contributions to are "When the Carnival Turns Bitter: Preliminary Reflections upon the Abject Hero" (Winter 1983) and "image, Word, and Sign: The Visual Arts as Evidence in Ezra Pound's Cantos" (Winter 1986). Janel Mueller The Mastery of Decorum: Politics as Poetry in_Milton's_Sonnets If we supply a missing connection in the master text of English Renaissance poetic theory, we can bring the dilemma posed by political poetry into sharp relief. Sidney's Defence of Poesie seeks to confirm the supremacy of the poet's power over human minds by invoking the celebrated three-way distinction between poetry, philosophy, and history in the Poetics.According to Sidney, the proper question to ask of poetry is not "whether it were better to have a particular act truly or falsely set down" but "whether it be better to have it set down as it should be, … for your own use and learning." On this criterion, the philosopher shows himself too devoted to "knowledge" that "standeth upon the abstract and general," to the "precept," to "what should be." The historian attends too much to "the particular truth of things and not to the general reason of things," to the "example," to "what is." Only the poet "coupleth the general notion with the particular example" in "the speaking picture of poesy," thus synthesizing through his "imaginative and judging power" the best that the philosophical and historical domains can offer. "Aristotle himself," concludes Sidney, "plainly determineth this question, saying that poetry … is more philosophical and more studiously serious than history … because poesy dealeth with … the universal consideration, and the history with … the particular." Yet in mounting his Defence of Poesie,Sidney fails to give due force to a related and equally important distinction drawn from the Poetics.Aristotle ranks poetry below philosophy and, by implication, history as well at the crucial juncture where ontology and epistemology meet. He exclusively credits philosophical universals with rational "necessity." Poetic universals are recognized as having imaginative "likelihood," but no more than this.1 Under this second three-way distinction, the domain proper to poetry turns out to be neither the realm of historical fact nor that of philosophical truth but some half-region of the truthlike, the verisimilar, disjoint from the plane of knowledge. […] Milton coped with the questions intrinsic to political poetry during the decade from 1642 to 1652 when he rose to prominence as a pamphleteer on public issued and concurrently pioneered the writing of political sonnets in English. This essay examines the responses he made, in part in his prose but mainly in the composition of seven sonnets. Political poems in a root sense, these sonnets concern themselves with human agency channeled into the functions of the state, with power manifested through governance. After exploratory and uneven beginnings, the group as a whole goes a fair way toward vindicating the enterprise of political poetry and offering one set of criteria for a good political poem.   1. The core distinctions are drawn by Aristotle in chap. 9, secs. 2-4, of the Poetics;also see chap. 1, sec. 1 of the Topicson the distinction between demonstration, based on reasoning from true knowledge, and dialectic, based on reasoning from what is generally accepted as probable. The quotations in this paragraph are from Sidney: A Defence of Poetry,ed. J. A. Van Dorsten (Oxford, 1966), pp. 35, 32, 33, 35.   Janel Muelleris professor of English and humanities at the University of Chicago. She has published mainly on poetry and prose of the earlier English Renaissance, culminating in her book The Native Tongue and the Word: Developments in English Prose Style, 1380-1580.An interest in Milton, however, has drawn her more recently to work in the later part of this period. She is writing a book on nature, culture, and gender in Milton's major poems. Elizabeth Helsinger Clare and the Place of the Peasant Poet One might say that Clare is almost by virtue of that label alone a political poet. "Peasant poet" is a contradiction in terms from the perspective of English literary history, or of the longer history of the literary pastoral. The phrase must refer to two different social locations, and as such makes social place an explicit, problematic concern for the middle-class readers of that poet's work. To Clare's publisher and patrons in the 1820s, as to his editors in the 1980s, the language, the forms, the sentiments, and even the punctuation of his poetry are further markers of class difference for an audience invited to read him as a peasant poet. In recent collections concerned to recover the politics of English poetry these signs of difference are highly valued.2 They seem to mark Clare's work as what Fredric Jameson terms "strong" political art, that is, "authentic cultural creation … dependent for its existence on authentic collective life, on the vitality of the ‘organic' social group."3 At the time his poems were published class difference in English rural life was a political issue sufficiently charged to make publisher and patrons wish to minimize (though not obliterate) its marks in Clare's poetry. On the one hand, a clearly understood hierarchy was the form of social stability that rural scenes staged for their urban middle-class audiences. Evidence of class difference confirmed the survival of this hierarchy and the reader's position in it. Clare's poetry of place affirmed a system of social as well as geographical differences felt as a traditional and essential aspect of English national identity. On the other hand, however, the countryside was precisely where the erosion of the hierarchical relations of deference and responsibility was particularly noticeable, and disturbing, in the years after 1815. Sporadic outbreaks of protest against low wages and unemployment in 1816, 1822, and 1830 realized dramatically for the middle and upper classes what one might call a rural version of the process Marx was later to term alienation: the known and familiar inhabitants of the rural scene laborers, village artisans were suddenly made strange to their middle- and upper-class neighbors, so much so that many observers were convinced that they must be strangers, intruders from another pace (and another class).4 The elements of difference, or strangeness, in Clare's poetry the marks of his identity as rural laborer thus also risked awaking specific anxieties among his early readers. Clare's editor and publisher, John Taylor, punctuated, regularized meter, and replaced some (though not all) of Clare's unfamiliar local vocabulary. Nonetheless, his two most important early patrons, the evangelical aristocrat Lord Radstock and the middle-class Mrs. Emmerson, objected to some lines as "radical slang" and others as "vulgar." The language of class risked rejection as politically (and sexually) subversive. Especially in an already politicized rural scene, the peasant poet could not be a neutral figure.   2. Both A Book of English Pastoral Verse,ed. John Barrell and John Bull (new York, 1975) and The Faber Book of Political Verse,ed. Tom Paulin (London, 1986) restore Clare's original orthography and lack of punctuation to support the label "peasant poet." 3. Fredric Jameson, "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture," Social Text 1 (Winter 1979): 140.   Elizabeth Helsinger is associate professor of English and general studies at the University of Chicago and a coeditor of Critical Inquiry.Her Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder was published in 1982. The present essay is part of a book in progress on representations of the rural scene in Victorian England. Susan Schweik Writing War Poetry Like a Woman In World War II, however, that lonely masculine authority of experience the bitter authority derived from direct exposure to violence, injury, and mechanized terror was rapidly dispersing among generally populations. Graves, notes, with some discomfort, that the Second World War soldier "cannot even feel that his rendezvous with death is more certain than that of his Aunt Fanny, the firewatcher."5 American culture was, obviously, characterized by far greater disjunctions between male and female "experience" of war than the British blitz society Graves describes, and the modern tradition of soldier poetry, with its ironic emphasis on unmendable gaps between the soldier author and the civilian reader, retained its strong influence. Still, public discussions of war and literature in the United States dwell frequently on the new conjunctions between civilians and soldiers, front and home front, and men and women, focusing on their shared morale or effort as well as on their common deprivation and vulnerability. In a war newly perceived as "total," [Marianne] Moore's work could exemplify the power of a representative civilian voice. It could also represent modernism provisionally embracing realist and didactic functions, coming round to correcting earlier trends toward self-referentiality. Thus Richard Eberhart, arguing in his introduction to a well-known anthology of war poetry that "the spectator, the contemplator, the opposer of war have their hours with the enemy no less than uniformed combatants," praises Moore for abandoning the "complacencies of the peignoir" to write "In Distrust of Merits."6 His phrasing links Moore with another civilian war poet, Wallace Stevens; by dressing Moore in Stevens' Peignoir in order to show her doffing it, he represents her as a formerly feminine object of desire who has emerged from the coquetries of her sex into a new, superior, gender-free authority Now, Eberhart argues, "the bloodshed of which she writes has caused her to break through the decorative surface of her verse" to a "different kind of utterance." For Eberhart, the poem's value lies in its violation of Moore's usual mannered aestheticism. She "breaks through" a feminine surface, as if puncturing skin, but the result is not a wound but a mouth: a "different kind of utterance," in which "the meaning has dictated the sincerity."7Oscar Williams, in the preface to a comparable anthology, also reads the poem as a model of transparent earnestness, offering it as a solution to the problem of Edna St. Vincent Millay, the "bad" woman war poet who is excoriated in these discussions as often as Moore is extolled. Describing one of Millay's war poems as "a sentimental piece of verse written by an American civilian, designed to be read by … people themselves out of danger because they are protected by a wall of living young flesh, much of which will be mangled," Williams contrasts Moore's "In Distrust of Merits":             But with true poets the poetry is in the pity … I ask the reader to study closely a war poem peculiarly fitted to illustrate my present thesis. It is also written by a woman, a civilian. "In Distrust of Merits," by Marianne Moore, is the direct communication of honest feeling by one ready to search her own hear to discover the causes of war and accept her full share of responsibility for its effects.8   5. Graves, "The Poets of World War II," p. 310. 6. Richard Eberhart, "Preface: Attitudes to War," in War and the Poet: An Anthology of Poetry Expressing Man's Attitudes to War from Ancient Times to the Present,ed. Eberhart and Selden Rodman (New York, 1945), pp. xv, xiii. 7. Ibid., p. xiii. 8. Oscar Williams, ed., The War Poets: An Anthology of the War Poetry of the Twentieth Century (New York, 1945), p. 6.   Susan Schweik is assistant professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. She is at work on a book manuscript entitled A Word No Man Can Say for Us: American Women Poets and the Second World War. Rob Nixon Caribbean and African Appropriations of The Tempest The era from the late fifties to the early seventies was marked in Africa and the Caribbean by a rush of newly articulated anticolonial sentiment that was associated with the burgeoning of both international back consciousness and more localized nationalist movements. Between 1957 and 1973 the vast majority of African and the larger Caribbean colonies won their independence; the same period witnessed the Cuban and Algerian revolutions, the latter phase of the Kenyan "Mau Mau" revolt, the Katanga crisis in the Cong, the Trinidadian Black Power uprising and, equally important for the atmosphere of militant defiance, the civil rights movement in the United States, the student revolts of 1968, and the humbling of the United States during the Vietnam War. This period was distinguished, among Caribbean and African intellectuals, by a pervasive mood of optimistic outrage. Frequently graduates of British or French universities, they were the first generation from their regions self-assured and numerous enough to call collectively for a renunciation of Western standards as the political revolts found their cultural counterparts in insurrections against the bequeathed values of the colonial powers. In the context of such challenges to an increasingly discredited European colonialism, a series of dissenting intellectual chose to utilize a European text as a strategy for (in George Lamming's words) getting "out from under this ancient mausoleum of [Western] historic achievement."1 They seized upon The Tempest as a way of amplifying their class for decolonization within the bounds of the dominant cultures. But at the same time these Caribbeans and Africans adopted the play as a founding text in an oppositional lineage which issued from a geopolitically and historically specific set of cultural ambitions. They perceived that the play could contribute to their self- definition during a period of great flux. So, through repeated, reinforcing, transgressive appropriations of The Tempest,a once silenced group generated its own tradition of "error" which in turn served as one component of the grander counterhegemonic nationalist and black internationalist endeavors of the period. Because that era of Caribbean and African history was marked by such extensive, open contestation of cultural values, the destiny of The Tempestat that time throws into uncommonly stark relief the status of value as an unstable social process rather than a static and, in literary terms, merely textual attribute.   Rob Nixon is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Columbia University. He is working on the topics of exile and Third World-metropolitan relations in the writing of V. S. and Shiva Naipaul. His previous contribution to (with Anne McClintock) is "No Names Apart: The Separation of Word and History in Derrida's ‘Le Dernier Mot du Racisme' " (Autumn 1986). Alicia Ostriker Dancing at the Devil's Party: Some Notes on_Politics_and_Poetry My education in political poetry begins with William Blake's remark about John Milton in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: "The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it."1 The statement is usually taken as a charming misreading of Milton or as some sort of hyperbole. We find it lumped with other readings which supposedly view Satan as the hero of Paradise Lost,such as Percy Bysshe Shelley's in A Defence of Poetry,although neither Blake nor Shelley says anything of the kind.2 I consider Blake's statement simply accurate. I think it the best single thing anybody has ever said about Paradise Lost.If not clear as a bell, then at least as compressed as diamonds. The insouciant opening gesture takes for granted what to Blake (and to me) is obvious" that the poetry qua poetry is better, more exciting, more energetic in the sections dominated by Stan, worse, duller, less poetic in the sections dominated by God. As a lover of poetry Blake has evidently struck a perplexity. Why (he asks himself) does Milton's Satan excite me and this God bore me even though he plainly intends me to adore God and scorn Satan? The answer could have been that Milton "wrote in fetters" where constrained by theology and the danger of lapsing into inadvertent sacrilege, but "at liberty" otherwise. Other critics have claimed that it is impossible to make God talk successfully in a poem, but the Book of Job is enough to refute that position. Why did Milton choose to make God talk at all? Dante cleverly avoided that difficulty. The second half of Blake's sentence not only solves the Paradise Lost problem but proposes a radical view of all poetry which might be summarized as follows: All art depends on opposition between God and the devil, reason and energy. The true poet (the good poet) is necessarily the partisan of energy, rebellion, and desire, and is opposed to passivity, obedience, and the authority of reason, laws, and institutions. To be a poet requires energy; energetic subjects make the best material for poems; the truer (better) the poetry, the more it will embody the truths of Desire. But the poet need not think so. He can be of the devil's party without knowing it.   1. William Blake, "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell," Complete Poems,ed. Alicia Ostriker (New York, 1977), p. 182. 2. Let one instance serve: Marjorie Hope Nicolson wonders whether the members of the "‘Satanic School' of Milton criticism" (Blake, Shelley, Byron) have read past books 1 and 2 of Paradise Lost(John Milton: A Reader's Guide to His Poetry [New York, 1963], p. 186).   Alicia Ostriker,professor of English as Rutgers University, is the author of Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America. Her most recent book of poetry is Imaginary Lover. Anne McClintock "Azikwelwa" (We Will Not Ride): Politics and Value_in_Black_South African Poetry On the winter morning of 16 June 1976, fifteen thousand black children marched on Orlando Stadium in Soweto, carrying slogans dashed on the backs of exercise books. The children were stopped by armed police who opened fire, and thirteen-year-old Hector Peterson became the first of hundreds of schoolchildren to be shot down by police in the months that followed. If, a decade later, the meaning of Soweto's "year of fire" is still contested,1 it began in this way with a symbolic display of contempt for the unpalatable values of Bantu education, a public rejection of the "culture of malnutrition" with which blacks had been fed.2 The local provocation for the Orlando march was a ruling that black children be taught arithmetic and social studies in Afrikaans the language of the white cabinet minister, soldier, and pass official, prison guard, and policeman. But the Soweto march sprang from deeper grievances than instruction in Afrikaans, and the calamitous year that passed not only gave rise to a rekindling of black political resistance but visibly illuminated the cultural aspects of coercion and revolt. The children's defacement of exercise books and the breaking of school ranks presaged a nationwide rebellion of uncommon proportion. The revolt spread across the country from community to community, in strikes, boycotts, and street barricades. It represented in part the climax of a long struggle between the British and Afrikaans interlopers for control over an unwilling black populace and was at the same time a flagrant sign of the contestation of culture, an open declaration by blacks that cultural value, far from shimmering out of reach in the transcendent beyond, would now be fought for with barricades of tires, empty classrooms, and precocious organization.   1. At least three general analyses of the Soweto uprising have emerged: deeper African National Congress involvement in the community; strains on the educational system, unemployment and recession, with greater industrial militancy stemming from the strikes in the early seventies; and the emergence of Black Consciousness ideology. See Tom Lodge, Black Politics in South Africa Since 1945 (Johannesburg, 1983), pp. 321-62. 2. See M. K. Malefane, " ‘The Sun Will Rise': Review of the Allahpoets at the Market Theatre, Johannesburg," Staffrider (June/July 1980); reprinted in Soweto Poetry,ed. Michael Chapman, South African Literature Studies, no. 2 (Johannesburg, 1982), p. 91. Soweto Poetry will hereafter be cited as SP.   Anne McClintockis a Ph.D. candidate in English at Columbia University. She is the author of a monograph on Simone de Beauvoir and is working on a dissertation on race and gender in British imperial culture. Her previous contribution to (with Rob Nixon), "No Names Apart: The Separation of Word and History in Derrida's ‘Le Dernier Mot du Racisme,' " appeared in the Autumn 1986 issue. Jerome J. McGann Contemporary Poetry, Alternate Routes What is the significance of that loose collective enterprise, sprung up in the aftermath of the sixties, known as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Writing? To answer this question I will be taking, initially, a somewhat oblique route. And I shall assume an agreement on several important social and political matters: first, that the United States, following the Second World War, assumed definitive leadership of a capitalist empire; second, that its position of leadership generated a network of internal social contradictions which persist to this day (the collision of imperialist demands with the isolationist and revolutionary nationalism of American ideology); third, that this postwar period has been characterized, at the international level, by an extended cold war shadowed by the threat of a global catastrophe, whether deliberate or accidental. Whatever one's political allegiances, these truths, surely, we hold as self-evident. Postwar American poetry is deployed within that general arena, and to the degree that it is "political" at all, it reflects and responds to that set of overriding circumstances.1 In my view the period ought to be seen as falling into two phases. The first phase stretches from about 1946 (when Robert Lowell's Lord Wear's Castle appeared) to 1973 (when Lowell capped his career with the publication of History). This period is dominated by a conflict between various lines of traditional poetry, on one hand, and the countering urgencies of the "New American Poetry" on the other. In the diversity of this last group Donald Allen argued for a unifying "characteristic": "a total rejection of all those qualities typical of academic verse."2 Of course, this representation of the conflict between "tradition" and "innovation" obscures nearly as much as it clarifies. The New American poets were, in general, must moe inclined to experimentalism than were writers like Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, Louis Simpson, or Donald Justice. But Allen's declaration can easily conceal the academic and literary characteristics of the innovators. Robert Duncan and Charles Olson, for example, key figures in the New American Poetry, can hardly not be called "literary" or even "academic" poets. If they opened certain new areas in the field of poetic style, no less could and has been said of Lowell, even in his early work. And if Frank O'Hara seems the antithesis of academic work, John Ashbery is, in his own way, its epitome. Yet both appear in Allen's New American Poetry anthology. Moreover, who can say, between O'Hara and Ashbery, which is the more innovative of the two so different are their styles of experimentation?   1. Black and feminist writing in the United States often confines the focus of the political engagement to a more restricted national theater. Nevertheless, even in these cases engagement is necessarily carried out within the global framework I have sketched above. 2. The New American Poetry: 1945-1960,ed. Donald M. Allen (New York, 1960), p. xi.   Jerome J. McGann is Commonwealth Professor of English, University of Virginia. His most recent critical work, Buildings of Loss: The Knowledge of Imaginative Texts,will appear in 1987. "Some Forms of Critics Discourse" (March 1985) and "The Religious Poetry of Christina Rosetti" (September 1983) are among his previous contributions to . Reginald Gibbons Political Poetry and the Example of Ernesto Cardenal In Latin America Cardenal is generally regarded as an enduring poet. He brought a recognizably Latin American material into his poetry, and he introduced to Spanish-language poetry in general such poetic techniques as textual collage, free verse lines shaped in Poundian fashion, and, especially, a diction that is concrete and detailed, textured with proper names and the names of things in preference to the accepted poetic language, which was more abstract, general, and vaguely symbolic. But what is notable in Spanish-language poetry is not only Cardenal's "craft," in the sense given this word by Seamus Heaney to mean manipulation of poetic resources; there is also this poet's "technique," which in Heaney's sense means a "definition of his stance toward life."2 Cardenal's characteristic poetic stance has been admired because he addresses the political and social pressures that shape and often distort, damage, or destroy life and feeling. This is apparent even in the earliest poems Cardenal has chosen to preserve. "Raleigh," for example, is a dramatic meditation from 19493 in which the treasure-hunting explorer marvels at the expanse and wealth of the American continents and out of sheer pleasure recounts some of the triumphs and hardships of his travels. Although his alertness and wonder make him sympathetic, this Raleigh's vision of the New World as a limitless source of wealth is forerunner to the economic exploitation of the land and people. One might ask, What are the political and social circumstances which, rather than distorting and damaging life and feeling, nurture and preserve them? Perhaps one might answer that, paradoxically, destructive conditions of life have many times proven insufficiently powerful to prevent the creation of poetry. And some poetry has even arisen in reaction to the destructive: such conditions produce resistance, which, if it cannot heal the spirit, can lend it strength. One might answer further that it is not Cardenal's or any artist's responsibility to establish what circumstance will form a fruitful matrix for art, but only to work as honestly and as hard as political, social, and artistic circumstances will permit.   2. Seamus Heaney, Preoccupations: Selected Prose, 1969-1978 (New York, 1980), p. 47. 3. The date is from Joaquín Martin Sosa, "Breve guía (para uso) de lectores," preface to Poesía de uso,p. 9.   Reginald Gibbonsis the editor of TriQuarterly magazine and teaches at Northwestern University. His most recent books are his third volume of poems, Saints,one of the winning books in the National Poetry Series (1986), and two edited collections of essays The Writer in Our World (1986) and, with Gerald Graff, Criticism in the University(1985). He is at work on a critical study of modern and contemporary poetry, as well as new poems and fiction. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry,"Poetic Form and the Translator," appeared in the June 1985 issue. Rudolf Arnheim Art among the Objects With the emergence of man from nature art emerged among the objects. There was nothing to distinguish or exalt it in the beginning. Art did not separate one kind of thing from the others but was rather a quality common to them all. To the extent to which things were made by human beings, art did not necessarily call for the skill of specialists. All things took skill, and almost everybody had it. This is the way an essayist in the eighteenth century might have begun a treatise on our subject. By now his recourse to a mythical past would sound naïve and misleading, mainly because we have come to pride ourselves on defining things by what distinguishes them from the rest of the world. Thus art is laboriously separated from what is supposed not to be art a hopeless endeavor, which has more and more disfigured our image of art by extirpating it from its context. We have been left with the absurd notion of art as a collection of useless artifacts generating an unexplainable kind of pleasure. Rescue from this impasse of our thinking is not likely to come primarily from those of us who, established on the island of artistic theory and practice, look around at what else there is in the world to see; rather it will come from those who are curious about what human beings meet, make, and use, and who in the course of their explorations run into objects prominently displaying the property we call art. Psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists have been driven to view art in the context of nature, ritual, shelter, and the whole furniture of civilization. As a characteristic recent example I mention a thorough interview study, The Meaning of Things,by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton, in which three generations of families from the Chicago area were questioned about their favorite possessions.1­ Pictures, sculptures, and all sorts of craft work turned up at a more or less modest place in the inventory of the home, and the reasons given for their value make wholesome reading for specialists in aesthetics.   1. See Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton, The Meaning of Things: Symbols in the Development of the Self (Cambridge, 1981).   Rudolf Arnheim retired from Harvard University as professor emeritus of the psychology of art. He then taught as a visiting professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor until 1983. His most recently published book is New Essays on the Psychology of Art. At present he is preparing a new edition of The Power of the Center,a theory of visual composition first published in 1982. E. H. Gombrich "They Were All Human Beings--So Much Is Plain":_Reflections_on Cultural Relativism in the Humanities In the fourth section of Goethe's Zahme Xenien we find the quatrain from which I have taken the theme of such an old and new controversy, which, as I hope, concerns both Germanic studies and the other humanities:             "What was it that kept you from us so apart?"             I always read Plutarch again and again.             "And what was the lesson he did impart?"             "They were all human beings so much is plain."1             In the very years when Goethe wrote these lines, that is in the 1820s, Hegel repeatedly gave his lectures on the philosophy of history. Right at the beginning he formulated the opposite view which I should like briefly to characterize as "cultural relativism." Every age has such peculiar circumstances, such individual conditions that it must be interpreted, and can only be interpreted, by reference to itself…. Nothing is shallower in this respect than the frequent appeal to Greek and Roman example which so often occurred among the French at the time of their Revolution. Nothing could be more different than the nature of these peoples and the nature of our own times.2             What is at issue here is not, of course, Hegel's assertion that ages and peoples differ from each other. We all know that, and Goethe, the attentive reader and traveler, also knew, for instance, that the Roman carnival differed in its character from the celebrations of the Feast of Saint Rochus at Bingen, both of which he had described so lovingly. What makes the cultural historian into a cultural relativist is only the conclusion which we saw Hegel draw, that cultures and styles of life are not only different but wholly incommensurable, in other words that it is absurd to compare the peoples of a region or an age with human beings of other zones because there is no common denominator that would justify us in doing so.   1.                                 ‘Was hat dich nun von uns entfernt?'                                     Hab immer den Plutarch gelesen.                                     ‘Was has du den dabei gelernt?'                                     Sind eben alles Menschen gewesen.'   Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Såmtlich Werke. Jubilåums-ausgabe in 40 Bånden(Stuttgart, 1902-7) 4:73; with commentary. 2. See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorselungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, Werke,20 vols. (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1969-79), 12:17.   E. H. Gombrichwas director of the Warburg Institute and Professor of the History of the Classical Tradition at the University of London from 1959 to 1976. His many influential works include The Story of Art, Art and Illusion, Meditations on a Hobby Horse, The Sense of Order, Ideals and Idols, The Image and the Eye, Tributes, Aby Warburg,and New Light on Old Masters.His previous contributions to include "The Museum: Past, Present and Future" (Spring 1977), "Standards of Truth: The Arrested Image and the Moving Eye" (Winter 1980), and "Representation and Misrepresentation" (December 1984). Paul Feyerabend Creativity--A Dangerous Myth According to one of the rivals, "poets do not create from knowledge but on the basis of certain natural talents and guided by divine inspiration, just like seers and the singers of oracles."1 There is "a form of possession and madness, caused by the muses, that seizes a tender and untouched soul and inspires and stimulates it so that it educates by praising the deeds of ancestors in songs and in every other mode of poetry. Whoever knocks on the door of poetry without the madness of the muses trusting that technique alone will make him a whole poet does not reach his aim; he and his poetry of reason disappear before the poetry of the madman."2 Even knowledge cannot arise in a purely rational way. In his seventh letter Plato explains how "from a long and dedicated pursuit of the subject and from close companionship, [understanding] suddenly, like fire being kindled by a leaping spark, is born in the soul and straightaway finds nourishment in itself."3 Thus understanding or building a work of art contains an element that goes beyond skill, technical knowledge, and talent. A new force takes hold of the soul and directs it, toward theoretical insight in one case, toward artistic achievement in the other. The view adumbrated in these quotations is very popular today. Interestingly enough it seems to receive support form the most rigorous and most advanced parts of the sciences. This rigor, it is pointed out, is but a transitory stage in a process which has much in common with what Plato envisaged. Of course, it is necessary to make some changes: Plato's knowledge was stable while scientific knowledge progresses. Plato assumed that outside forces madness, divine inspiration impinge on the soul while the moderns let the appropriate ideas, images, emotions arise from the individual soul itself. But there seem to exist many reasons to recommend a Platonism that has been modified in this way. In the following essay I shall try to show that the reasons that have been given are invalid and that the view itself the view that culture needs individual creativity is not only absurd but also dangerous. To make my criticism as concrete as possible I shall concentrate on e specific group of arguments in its favor. And to make it as clear as possible I shall use arguments trying to show the role of individual creativity in the sciences. If these clear and detailed arguments fail, then the rhetoric emerging from more foggy areas will altogether lose its force.   1. Plato, Apology of Socrates 22c. Translations, unless otherwise noted, are my own 2. Plato, Phaedrus 245a. 3. Plato, Epistles 341c, d.   Paul Feyerabendstudied singing and opera production in Vienna, history of theater and theatrical production at the Institute for the Methodological Reform of the German Theater in Weimar, and physics, astronomy, and philosophy in Vienna. He has lectured on aesthetics, the history of science, and philosophy in Austria, Germany, England, New Zealand, and the United States. At the moment he holds a joint appointment at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. His books include Against Method (1975), Erkenntnis für freie Menschen (1981), and Philosophical Papers (1981). Forthcoming works are Farewell to Reason and Stereotypes of Reality. Susan Gubar Representing Pornography: Feminism, Criticism, and Depictions of Female Violation It is hardly necessary to rent I Spit on Your Graveor Tool Box Murders for your VCR in order to find images of sexuality contaminated by depersonalization or violence. As far back as Rabelais' Gargantua,for example, Panurge proposes to build a wall around Paris out of the pleasure-twats of women [which] are much cheaper than stones": "the largest … in front" would be followed by "the medium-sized, and last of all, the least and smallest," all interlaced with "many horney joy-dinguses" so that fortification would be impregnable, except for the "ordure and excretions" of the flies it would doubtlessly attract.1 Two centuries later, one of Rabelais' compatriots, the Marquis de Lade, described the rage of a sexually initiated daughter against a woman who refuses to consider her "pleasure-twat" "cheaper than stones." The Sadeian heroine first sodomizes her puritanical mother with an artificial penis, then has her infected with syphilis, and finally performs infibulations to prevent the infected semen from leaking out: "Quickly, quickly, fetch me needle and threat! … Spread your thighs, Mama, so I can stitch you together."2 One century later in England, the author of My Secret Life explained that, when in a state of sexual excitement, "he is ready to fuck anything," from his sister to his grandmother, from a ten-year-old, to a woman of sixty, for a standing prick has no conscience." To this credo, he adds the admonition, "Woe be to the female whom he gets a chance at, if she does not want him,for he will have her if he can."3 The sexually aroused man in the contemporary American film Looking for Mr. Goodbar curses the woman who does not want him as much as she wants a room of her own and the freedom to choose a succession of male lovers. After he resentfully determines to have her when he gets the chance ("All you got to do is lay there. Guy's got to do all the work"), he rapes her and finally knifes her to death, exclaiming "That's what you want, bitch, right? That's what you want." However these individual works are labeled, such passages remind us of the long history of pornography, a gender-specific genre produced primarily by and for men but focused obsessively on the female figure. In their depictions of female sexuality, narratives from Gargantua to La Philosophie dans le boudoir, My Secret Life,and Looking for Mr. Goodbar explain why definitions of the pornographic have recently moved away from "obscenity," a term that generally refers to the sexually stimulating effects of a picture, a novel, or a film on the male reader/observer, and toward "dehumanization," a word that is used to evoke the objectification of women. As Irene Diamond has demonstrated, during the past decade the generally held assumption that pornography is about male sexuality has been qualified by those who argue that "the ‘what' of pornography is not sex but power and violence, and the ‘who' of concern are no longer male consumers and artists but women."4   1. François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel,trans. Jacques Le Clercq (New York, 1936), bk. 2, chap. 15. I have used this translation because it is employed in Helene Iswolsky's translation of Mikhail Bakhtin's Rabelais and His World (Cambridge, Mass., 1968). With no analysis of gender, Bakhtin's exclusive focus on the grotesque wipes out the significance of Rabelais' sexual imagery. 2. Marquis de Sade, quoted in a brilliant reading of this text by Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography (New York, 1978), p. 127; all further references to this work , abbreviated SW,will be included in the text. 3. My Secret Life ([1984?]; New York, 1966), p. 361. 4. Irene Diamond, "Pornography and Repression: A Reconsideration," in Women: Sex and Sexuality,ed. Catharine Stimpson and Ethel Spector Person (Chicago, 1980), p. 132.   Susan Gubar is professor of English and women's studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. Together with Sandra M. Gilbert, she has coauthored The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination and co-edited both Shakespeare's Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets and the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Tradition in English.This fall they will publish the first volume of a three- volume work, No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century. Her previous contribution to Critical Inquiry is " ‘The Blank Page' and the Issues of Female Creativity" (Winter 1981). Frank Lentricchia Patriarchy Against Itself--The Young Manhood of Wallace Stevens In what is advertised as a "controversial coast to coast bestseller," most men who were asked "How would you feel if something about you were described as feminine or womanly?" said (surprise) they'd be angry. Consider these voices from The Hite Report on Male Sexuality: Enraged. Insulted. Never mind what women are really like I know what he's saying: he's saying I should be submissive to him. To be called "like a woman" by another man is to be humiliated by him, because most men consider women to be weak, and a man doesn't want to be considered weak. Chagrined. I may appear soft, but I carry a big stick. So watch out. If I was described as having something "like a woman's," I would be outraged. I would defend my masculinity almost automatically. I wouldn't like being compared to a woman's anything.1 About two seconds of reflection should be enough to convince most of us that what is offered in The Hite Report on Male Sexuality as the representative testimony of contemporary American men is, in fact, representative: our relations with women are problematic, those with ourselves something worse. What Shere Hite does not call attention to is an intriguing recurrence in many of the responses: the question is heard as a charge and it is imagined to be coming from another male. The basic point now seems to me inescapable, though to say "inescapable" is in no way to say that the history of literary theory and criticism has found it so (or that I have always found it so). One way of understanding that history is to read it as a series of ingenious escapes from the basic point which is economic and sexual (in that order: the order of repression) and which goes something like this: What we know as "femininity" is internally linked to what we know as "masculinity" because both designations are highly motivated cultural constructions of biological difference that do powerful social work at the moment when they are lived, when they constitute the barely conscious and barely reflected upon substance of belief. The political synonym for "belief" is "ideology" in the particular sense of "ideology" as a constructed thing which nevertheless feels natural and is never (or is only rarely) experienced as a thing bearing interested human intention. The basic ideological point has to do with social engenderment, and it means, among other things, if you're male, that you must police yourself for traces of femininity. If you're male it means, among other things, that the great dread is not so much that another man might call you feminine or womanly (in our culture, a pretty dreadful prospect), but that you might have to call yourself feminine or womanly. The political issue of gender has recently been the special concern of feminist criticism and eventually, after a long look at Wallace Stevens, I'll address feminism directly, in what may be its institutionally most potent form.   1. Shere Hite, The Hite Report on Male Sexuality (New York, 1982), p. 64.   Frank Lentricchia is professor of English at Duke University. This essay is part of a forthcoming book, Ariel and the Police: Michel Foucault, William James, Wallace Stevens.He has also published Criticism and Social Change (1983) and After the new Criticism (1980). Joan DeJean Fictions of Sappho I would like to end this questioning of canonical origins by returning to my point of departure, [Lawrence] Lipking's notion of a "poetics of abandonment." Lipking's article was included in an issue of entitled Canons,in which it seemingly was held to represent a feminist perspective on canon formation. Lipking centers his attention on literary theory, a domain that has been granted new prominence, sometimes even the status of literature, in the most recent reformulation of the canon. It may be, as Viktor Shklovsky suggested in Zoo, or Letters Not about Love,that literary theory is the novel's successor, in which case the resurrection of Ovid's abandoned women would make generic sense. Furthermore, for the first time in the history of literary criticism, there are today numbers of influential female literary critics, many of whom have called for a major reorganization of literary canons. Given the strategies deployed during previous moments of canon formation, it is perhaps inevitable that some of today's male literary critics would instigate a debasement of theoretical mothers. Contemporary literary critics are no longer attempting to consign women writers to abandonment. However, even as they promote the cause of women writers, some may also be responding in a manner that reveals their perception that feminist literary theory has provided the most forceful recent challenge not only to literary canons but to critical canons as well. In the final development in his attempt to prove that a mimetic investment in female pain is the basic theoretical strategy deployed by all female readers, Lipking provides an analysis of recent feminist theorists ending with this characterization of the authors of The Madwoman in the Attic:"Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar gaze at the mad and outcast heroines of the nineteenth century as if into a mirror" ("AS," p. 68; my emphasis). Thus Gilbert and Gubar Lipking also cites the examples of Kate Millett and Ellen Moers become the most recent incarnations of the abandoned literary woman, the literary critic whose views originate in her fear of abandonment. If my analysis of strategies of canon formation deployed in earlier centuries is correct, then the pronouncement from Lipking's article with which I opened this essay may be a red herring. "In the absence of mothers, a father must raise the right issues." Lipking may be calling for "a poetics of abandonment" not in response to a perceived maternal deficiency, but in order to consign strong female critics to abandonment, out of a Phaeton complex, a fear that, unless female theorists are cast off, critical sons may have an increasingly difficult time proving their legitimacy.   Joan DeJeanis professor of French at Princeton University. Her most recent book is Literary Fortifications: Rousseau, Laclos, Sade,and she is currently at work on a study to be titled Fictions of Sappho: Sappho's Presence in French Literature, 1546-1937. Joyce Carol Oates Soul at the White Heat: The Romance of_Emily_Dickinson's_Poetry Emily Dickinson is the most paradoxical of poets: the very poet of paradox. By way of voluminous biographical material, not to mention the extraordinary intimacy of her poetry, it would seem that we know everything about her; yet the common experience of reading her work, particularly if the poems are read sequentially, is that we come away seeming to know nothing. We could recognize her inimitable voice anywhere in the "prose" of her letters no less than in her poetry yet it is a voice of the most deliberate, the most teasing anonymity. "I'm Nobody!" is a proclamation to be interpreted in the most literal of ways. Like no other poet before her and like very few after her Rilke comes most readily to mind, and, perhaps, Yeats and Lawrence Dickinson exposes her heart's most subtle secrets; she confesses the very sentiments that, in society, would have embarrassed her dog (to paraphrase a remark of Dickinson's to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, explaining her aversion for the company of most people, whose prattle of "Hallowed things" offended her). Yet who is this "I" at the center of experience? In her astonishing body of 1,775 poems Dickinson records what is surely one of the most meticulous examinations of the phenomenon of human "consciousness" ever undertaken. The poet's persona the tantalizing "I" seems, in nearly every poem, to be addressing us directly with perceptions that are ours as well as hers. (Or his: these "Representations of the Verse," though speaking in Dickinson's voice, are not restricted to the female gender.) The poems' refusal to be rhetorical, their daunting intimacy, suggests the self-evident in the way that certain Zen koans and riddles do while being indecipherable. But what is challenged is, perhaps, "meaning" itself:             Wonder is not precisely Knowing And not precisely Knowing not A beautiful but bleak condition He has not lived who has not felt Suspense is his maturer Sister Whether Adult Delight is Pain Or of itself a new misgiving This is the Gnat that mangles men                                         [1331, ca. 1874]1   1. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson,ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston, 1960); subsequent references in the text to the poems will cite the Johnson number and the date assigned by Johnson to each poem.   Joyce Carol Oates is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Lecturer at Princeton University and the author most recently of the booklength essay On Boxing. "Soul at the White Heat" will be included in her book of essays, (Woman) Writer: Occasions and Opportunities,to be published in the spring of 1988. Helen Vendler The Poems of Elizabeth Bishop Bishop was both fully at home in, and fully estranged from, Nova Scotia and Brazil. In Nova Scotia, after Bishop's father had died, her mother went insane; Bishop lived there with her grandparents from the age of three to the age of six. She then left to be raised by an aunt in Massachusetts, but spent summers in Nova Scotia till she was thirteen. Subsequent adult visits north produced poems like "Cape Breton," "At the Fishhouses," and "The Moose"; and Bishop responded eagerly to other poets, like John Brinnin and Mark Strand, who knew that landscape. Nova Scotia represented a harsh pastoral to which, though she was rooted in it, she could not return. Brazil, on the other hand, was a place of adult choice, where she bought and restored a beautiful eighteenth-century house in Ouro Prêto. It was yet another pastoral, harsh in a different, tropical way a pastoral exotic enough to interest her noticing eye but one barred to her by language and culture (though she made efforts to learn and translate Portuguese and was influenced by the Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade). Foreign abroad, foreign at home, Bishop appointed herself a poet of foreignness, which (as Rich justly says) is, far more than "travel," her subject. Three of her books have geographical names "North and South," "Questions of Travel," and "Geography III" and she feels a geographer's compulsions precisely because she is a foreigner, not a native. Her early metaphor for a poem is a map, and she scrutinized that metaphor, we may imagine, because even as a child she had had to become acquainted through maps with the different territories she lived in and traveled back and forth between. In the poem "Crusoe in England," Bishop's Robinson Crusoe, shipwrecked on his island, has nightmares of having to explore more and more new islands and of being required to be their geographer:                                     I'd have                         nightmares of other islands                         stretching away from min, infinities                         of islands, islands spawning islands,                         …………………………………………                                     knowing that I had to live                         on each and every one, eventually,                         for ages, registering their flora,                         their fauna, their geography. This recurrent anxiety marks the end of one of Bishop's earlier dreams that one could go home, or find a place that felt like home. In "A Cold Spring," a book recording chiefly some unhappy years preceding her move to Brazil, there had yet survived the dream of going home, in a poem using the Prodigal Son as surrogate. He deludes himself, by drinking, that he can be happy away, but finally his evening horrors in exile determine him to return:                         Carrying a bucket along a slimy board,                         he felt the bats' uncertain staggering flight,                         his shuddering insights, beyond his control,                         touching him. But it took him a long time                         finally to make his mind up to go home.                                                                         ["The Prodigal Son"]   Helen Vendler is Kenan Professor of English at Harvard University. She has written books on Yeats, Stevens, Herbert, and Keats, and is now working on a study of Shakespeare's sonnets. She has recently edited the Harvard Book of Contemporary American Poetry. Leo Lowenthal Sociology of Literature in Retrospect I soon discovered that I was quite isolated in my attempts to pursue the sociology of literature. In any case, one searched almost in vain for allies if one wanted to approach a literary text from the perspective of a critical theory of society. To be sure, there were Franz Mehring's articles which I read with interest and profit; but despite the admirable decency and the uncompromising political radicalism of the author, his writings hardly went beyond the limits of a socialist journalist who wrote in essentially the same style about literature as about political and the economy. George Lukács had not yet published his impressive series of essays on Marxist aesthetics and interpretation of literature. Of course, I was deeply touched and influenced by his fine little book, The Theory of the Novel (1920), which I practically learned by heart. Besides Levin Schücking's small volume on the sociology of literary taste, the only other major influence I can recall was George Brandes' monumental work on the literary currents of the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, I had the courage, not to say hubris, to plan an ambitious, socially critical series on French, English, Spanish, and German literature, the beginning of which was to be formed by the above-mentioned studies. My attention was especially focused on the writes and literary schools which the German literary establishment either punished by total silence (for example, "Young Germany" and Friedrich Spielhagen) or raised up into the clouds of idealistic babble (Goethe and the Romantics) or relegated to quasi-folkloric anthropology (C. F. Meyer and Gottfried Keller). In these studies, I limited myself to the narrative forms of literature; for reasons which I hold to be sociologically and artistically valid, I believe that novels and stories represent the most significant aspect of German literature in the nineteenth century. While I in no way feel ashamed of these documents of my youth, I am conscious of their weaknesses. If I were to write them over again, I would certainly be less sure of some of the direct connections I drew between literature and writers on the one hand, and the social infrastructure on the other. In later publications I attempted to analyze with greater circumspection the mediation between substructure and superstructure, between social currents and ideologies; but my views on the social world and the necessity to combine social theory and literary analysis have not changed in any essential way. In the last decades the sociology of literature has become progressively more fashionable. The writings of my contemporaries have often amazed me because some frequently in unnecessarily complicated and esoteric language are so concerned with "mediation" that the connections between social being and social consciousness became almost obscured.   Leo Lowenthal is professor emeritus of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also professor emeritus at the University of Frankfurt in West Germany. His collected works have been published in five volumes in German (1980-87) and in a parallel English edition. Lowenthal's autobiographical writings, edited by Martin jay, will appear in the fall of 1987 under the title An Unmastered Past.Lowenthal's present studies deal with German postmodernism. Ted. R. Weeksis a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, specializing in imperial Russian history. Arnold I. Davidson Sex and the Emergence of Sexuality Some years ago a collection of historical and philosophical essays on sex was advertised under the slogan: Philosophers are interested in sex again. Since that time the history of sexuality has become an almost unexceptionable topic, occasioning as many books and articles as anyone would ever care to read. Yet there are still fundamental conceptual problems that get passed over imperceptibly when this topic is discussed, passed over, at least in part, because they seem so basic or obvious that it would be time badly spent to worry too much about them. However, without backtracking toweard this set of problems, one will quite literally not know what one is writing the history of when one writes a history of sexuality. An excellent example of some of the most sophisticated current writing in this field can be found in Western Sexuality,a collection of essays that resulted from a seminar conducted by Philippe Ariès at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in 1979-80.1 As one would expect, Western Sexualityis characterized by a diversity of methodological and historiographical approaches social history, intellectual history, cultural history (which one historian I know refers to as the history of bad ideas), historical sociology, the analysis of literary texts, and that distinctive kind of history practiced by Michel Foucault and also in evidence in the short essay by Paul Veyne. One perspective virtually absent from this collection is the history of science, and since I believe that the history of science has a decisive and irreducible contribution to make to the history of sexuality, it is not accident that I am going to focus on that connection. But the history of sexuality is also an area in which one's historiography or implicit epistemology will stamp, virtually irrevocably, one's first-order historical writing. It is an arena in which philosophical and historical concerns inevitably run into one another.   1. Philippe Ariès and Adnré Béjin, eds., Western Sexuality: Practice and Percept in Past and Present Times(Oxford, 1985).   Arnold I. Davidson,a coeditor of ,is assistant professor of philosophy and member of the Committees on General Studies in the Humanities and on the Conceptual Foundations of Science at the University of Chicago. His previous contribution to ,"How to Do the History of Psychoanalysis: A Reading of Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality," appeared in the Winter 1987 issue. Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels Against Theory 2: Hermeneutics and Deconstruction In "Against Theory" we argued that a text means what its author intends it to mean. We argued further that all attempts to found a method of interpretation on a general account of language involve imagining that a text can mean something other than what its author intends. Therefore, we concluded, all such attempts are bound to fail; there can be no method of interpretation. But the attempt to imagine that a text can mean something other than what its author intends is not restricted to writers interested in interpretive method. In fact, the denial that meaning is determined by intention is central to projects as indifferent to method as hermeneutics and deconstruction. For hermeneutics, a text means that its author intends but also necessarily means more, acquiring new meanings as readers apply it to new situations. For deconstruction, an author can never succeed in determining the meaning of a text; every text participates in a code that necessarily eludes authorial control. Since both these projects are committed to the view that a text from mean something other than what its author intends, they are also committed to the view that a text derives its identity from something other than authorial intention. The text is what it is, no matter what meaning is assigned to it by its author and no matter how that meaning is revised by its readers. What gives a text its autonomous identity? On most accounts, the answer is linguistic conventions the semantic and syntactic rules of the language in which the text is written. One of our aims in the present essay is to criticize the particular notions of textual identity advanced by hermeneutics and deconstruction, but our more general target is the notion that there can be any plausible criteria of textual identity that can function independent of authorial intention. Because there can be no such criteria, nonmethodological versions of interpretive theory are as incoherent as methodological ones and, like the methodological ones, should be abandoned.   Steven Knapp is associate professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, and is the author of Personification and the Sublime: Milton to Coleridge.Walter Benn Michaels,professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism. Robert Zaller Philip Guston and the Crisis of the Image The twentieth century began with the deconstruction of the image, as it is ending with the effort to restore it. Cubism, dada, and abstract expressionism took apart what, in their various ways, pop art, magic realism, and neoexpressionism have tried to put back together. Tonality in music and narrative in literature have undergone similar change.1 What has been at stake in each case has been the redefinition of a center, a normative or ordering principle as such. Yeats intuited this general phenomenon in his famous observation that "the center cannot hold," and though whether one applauds or, with Yeats, condemns the result, it is undeniable that the crisis of contemporary culture has been in large part experienced as a deprivation of norms. This sense of deprivation has been most apparent in the plastic arts. The fashioning of images has been one of the primary impulses of human art. It has been the basis of most systems of visual representation and constitutes the earliest record we have off art itself. Its loss or abandonment has been in good part responsible for the bewilderment and hostility much of the general public continues to express toward modern art. The experience of this loss, however, has not been confined to the public alone. For many artists, the sense of modern art's expressive potential has been tempered by an anxiety about its ultimate direction.2 For these artists, the image had not been transcended but rather rendered inaccessible, and implicitly or explicitly they sought its restoration. At the same time, they were keenly aware that there could be no return to exhausted modes of representation, no looking back except as parody or quotation.3   1. Among the studies comparing changes across the arts in the early twentieth century are Georges Edouard Lemaître, From Cubism to Surrealism in French Literature (Cambridge, Mass., 1941), and Bram Dijkstra, The Hieroglyphics of a New Speech: Cubism, Stieglitz, and the Early Poetry of William Carlos Williams (Princeton, N.J., 1969). More recently, visualization in cubist art and relativity theory has been compared in Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art(Princeton, N.J., 1983). For a general overview, see Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918 (Cambridge, Mass., 1983). Marxist critics, notably Walter Benjamin, have long insisted on the relationship between modernism in the arts and the crisis of the traditional order. 2. This is clearly visible in the work and writing of pioneers such as Kandinsky and Klee or, to take a later case, Adolph Gottlieb. The correspondence between Kandinsky and Schönberg is illuminating as well. 3. Much of the neoimagistic art of the past twenty-five years falls into these categories, and thus signals a prolongation rather than a resolution of the crisis. Pop art was clearly an art of parody, while work of an artist such as Malcolm Morley might almost be taken as an illustration of Benjamin's thesis about the work of art in an age of mechanical reproduction. His "imitations," like those of Robert Lowell in verse, betray a deep anxiety about mastery and tradition. Much the same can be said for such musical compositions as Lukas Foss' "Baroque Variations" and "Phorion" or Luciano Berio's "Sinfonia," to name but a random few among many.   Robert Zaller is professor of history and head of the department of history and politics at Drexel University. He was formerly on the faculties of Queens College (CUNY), the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Miami. His books include The Parliament of 1621: A Study in Constitutional Conflictand The Cliffs of Solitude: A Reading of Robinson Jeffers. James Lawler Daemons of the Intellect: The Symbolists and Poe Poe's influence on the Symbolists has been traced on many occasions, though not in detail. The classical study in English is Eliot's "From Poe to Valéry," a Library of Congress lecture delivered three years after Valéry's death.2 Eliot defines Poe as irresponsible and immature irresponsible in style, immature in vision. He had, Eliot comments, "the intellect of a highly gifted young person before puberty"; "all of his ideas seem to be entertained rather than believed" ("FPV," p. 335). How, then, we ask, did he hoax the sophisticated French? Although Eliot raises the issue of their relative ignorance of English, he prudently does not make much of it: after all, we know that Baudelaire spent seventeen years on the tales, Mallarmé still longer on the poems thirty years for the definitive text; while Valéry, to whom Baudelaire and Mallarmé left little to translate, managed a version of the Marginalia.Each might have said, as Mallarmé did in 1885, that he had learned English for one sole reason: "to read Poe better."3 In the matter of linguistic competence, then, Eliot is content to remark that the French poets "were not disturbed by weaknesses of which we are very much aware" ("FPV," p. 336). He underlines, however, that Poe showed different facets of himself to each of his readers who adopted him in various ways: Baudelaire focused on the Poète maudit,Mallarmé on the prosodist, and Valéry on the theoretician in whom he discovered "a method and an occupation that of observing himself write" ("FPV," p. 341). So Poe had a diverse effect, which Eliot accepts more readily in respect of Baudelaire and Mallarmé than he does of Valéry. To explain this last case which intrigues him especially, he introduces a paradox: "with Poe and Valéry, extremes meet," he writes, "the immature mind playing with ideas because it had not developed to the point of convictions, and the very adult mind playing with ideas because it was too skeptical to hold convictions" ("FPV," p. 341). Thus Eliot damns Poe with faint praise. The distance between cause and effect, master and disciples is so vast that it can only be thought the product of monstrous error. And yet "from Poet to Valéry" and the complementary studies in English or French of the past thirty-five years neglect some deeper factors that drew the Symbolists. Misreadings there were no doubt since such are in the nature of things, but these authors were sensitive to currents that others overlooked. They attempted to go to first principles, not only because Poe was "ce poète incomparable, ce philosophe non refute" (Baudelaire)4 and, therefore, worthy of scrutiny, but because they held him to be vital to their future thought. In a period of great social and aesthetic change they found a figure of radical independence classicist, visionary, logician supreme whom they explained by convergent tropes of daemonic power. In this regard the newly published correspondence of Mallarmé and the massive Valéry notebooks have added to our knowledge. I would like, then, to consider the nature of Poe's action, this submerged dialogue in time and successive rewriting by which "à l'égal de nos maître les plus chers ou vénérés," as Mallarmé put it5 he entered the mainstream of French poetry.   2. The lecture was later published in Hudson Review2 (Autumn 1949): 335; all further references to this work, abbreviated "FPV," will be included in the text. 3. Mallarmé, "Autobiographie," Oeuvres completes,p. 662. 4. Baudelaire, "Le Poème du hachisch," Oeuvres complètes,1:427. 5. Mallarmé, "Scolies," Oeuvres completes,p. 223.   James Lawler,Edward arson Waller Distinguished Service Professor of French at the University of Chicago, has written extensively on nineteenth- and twentieth-century French poetry. Among his books are Lecture de Valéry, The Language of French Symbolism, The Poet as Analyst,and René Char: The Myth and the Poem.He is currently completing a study of Buadelaire's Les Fleurs du mal. Conrad L. Rushing "Mere Words": The Trial of Ezra Pound The charge of treason and the judgment of insanity have left questions that invariably intrude on an assessment of Pound's life and work. Critics frequently adopt a strategy of separating the life and the work, but tactical review is often necessary. There is a lightness in Pound's writing that speaks of a being detached from the concerns of the world. Yet with his economic theory of social credit, his political and racial views, as well as his concern for other writers, he is of the world inthe world and part of it. He was decidedly not tied to geography. He had no region or period, and he was as comfortable in Confucian China as in Dante's Florence or twentieth- century Rome. He could work anywhere. He wrote The Pisan Cantoswhile jailed in Italy. The Cantos were published while he was in a mental wart at St. Elizabeths, yet a court found that he could not understandthe charges against him. Can such an impairment and such achievement occur at the same time? If you say no, then what of the treason? Did he feign madness to escape punishment? Could Pound have been convicted of treason? In this paper, I intend to examine what has been loosely referred to as "the trial of Ezra Pound" and to show that Pound's case should have been brought to trial within one or two years after his commitment to St. Elizabeths because he had a reasonable chance of being found not guilty of treason; even if found guilty, the circumstances in mitigation of a long prison term would have been so evident that he would have likely spent considerably less time in prison than he spent locked up at the mental institution. I will do this, in part, by reviewing the similarities and differences between Pound's case and three other treason cases that came to trial within the first years after World War II. The English case, Rex v. Joyce,was tried shortly after the close of the war and well before Pound's competency hearing on 13 February 1945.3 The law applied in Joyce would have led Pound's lawyer to seek some postponement of trial until the American courts decided whether to follow the English lead. The other two cases involve the Americans, Douglas Chandler and Robert Best, employees of German radio, who were indicted with Pound in 1943.   3. William Joyce was an American who came to be known as "Lord Haw Haw." He was hanged at Wandsworth, England, 3 Jan. 1946. He was the best known of the "radio traitors." He began his programs, "This is Jairmany calling," and would then prophesy the destruction of English towns and cities. The name "Lord Haw Haw" was created by the English journalist, Jonah Barrington, to ridicule Joyce and to make him appear idiotic.   Conrad L. Rushing is a Superior Court Judge in California and an occasional lecturer in law at the University of California, Berkeley. He teaches a course in law and literature at the California Judges College and is a founder of the Sane Jose Poetry Center. William M. Chace Ezra Pound: "Insanity," "Treason," and Care The British journalist Christopher Hitchens has recently noted that the extraordinary excitement created by l'affaire Pound,an excitement sustained for now some forty years, is partly the result of having no fewer than three debates going on whenever the poet's legal situation and his consequent hospitalization are discussed. As Hitchens says, those questions are: "First, was Pound guilty of treason? If not, or even if so, was he mad? Third, was he given privileged treatment for either condition?"1   I propose to discuss all three issues in a way that fairly reflects the fact that I am neither a physician nor a lawyer. What I know of the state of medical expertise, both today and in the period of time from 1943 (when Pound was indicted on nineteen counts of treason) to 1958 (when he left St. Elizabeths), leads me, as a layman, to believe that there is an enormous latitude of understanding among medical professionals as to the precise meaning of "insanity." At one extreme, for some distinguished physicians, the term means almost nothing. They see it as a legal term and as therefore irrelevant to them; some of them follow the line of reasoning developed by Thomas Szasz over his long writing career, namely that "mental illness" if not illness in any ordinary sense of the term.2 For other medical practitioners, it does mean something, but only when it is redefined into much smaller subcategories and enriched with much more precise terminology, and when the given patient and his full range of circumstances are considered. What I know of the legal understanding of insanity (and here I speak as a Californian who has seen some of the most unusual kinds of terrible crime explained away as "madness" while other, apparently similar, crimes have not been eligible for that designation) is that there has been and is now little firm agreement about "insanity" or "madness." Equally competent juries and courts have been able to set down findings that are more or less plausible on their face but do not seem to comport at all with each other. I tentatively conclude that whatever "insanity" now is in the United States, and whatever it was when Pound was found unfit to stand trial in 1945, the standard is not the lucid simplicity of the M'Naghten test, namely, the ability of the accused to understand the difference between "right" and "wrong." Human mind, self-awareness, and motivations are vastly more complicated than such a test would imply.   1. Christopher Hitchins, "American Notes," Times Literary Supplement,21 Oct. 1983, p. 1160. 2. See Thomas Szasz, Insanity (New York, 1987) for a synthesis of his ideas as formulated in some eighteen books.   William M. Chace is professor of English and Vice Provost for Academic Planning and Development at Stanford University. He is author of The Political Identities of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot (1973), Lionel Trilling: Criticism and Politics(1980), and scholarly essays on writers including Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence, T. E. Lawrence, and James Joyce. He is now working on a study of the ways in which American culture in this century has been subjected to critical analysis. Richard Sieburth In Pound We Trust: The Economy of Poetry/The_Poetry_of_Economics … Pound's Imagist economy often mixes metaphors of capitalization with metaphors of expenditure. Words, he writes in an early essay, are like cones filled with energy, laden with the accumulated (or capitalized?) "power of tradition." When correctly juxtaposed, these words "radiate" or "discharge" or spend this energy (SP,p. 34), just as the Image (in one of Pound's most famous formulations) releases "an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time" (LE,p. 4). The precise relation of accumulation to expenditure in Pound's Imagism is never really elaborated. For clarification one would probably have to look toward his theories of sexuality, which hint at a proportion between spermatic retention and intensity of ejaculation. "The liquid solution [of sperm and/or thought]," he writes in his 1921 "Postscript" to Gourmont's Natural Philosophy of Love,"must be kept at right consistency; one would say the due proportion of liquid to viscous particles, a good circulation; the actual quality of the sieve or separator, counting perhaps most of all; the balance of ejector and retentive media" (PD,p. 214).13 Similar physiological metaphors will shape Pound's later economic writings of the thirties and forties. Money will function as a kind of "sieve" or "separator" (depending on how porous its mediation is), and usury will be described as malevolent form of retention, an "obstruction" to the proper circulation of money and goods. Economic justice will therefore involve the institution of a correct "balance" or "measure" between accumulation and expenditure, between "ejector" and "retentive media." From Pound's later Confucian perspective, excess in either direction whether it take the form of "smeary hoarding" or extravagant squandering always leads to evil and disorder.14 Excess is of course what Pound's Imagist economy most militantly seeks to eliminate from contemporary poetry. Pound writes in 1912, "As to Twentieth-century poetry … it will be harder and saner … ‘nearer the bone.' It will be as much like granite as it can be … It will not try to seem forcible by rhetorical din, and luxurious riot. We will have fewer painted adjectives impeding the shock and stroke of it…. I want it austere, direct, free from emotional slither" (LE,p. 12). The vocabulary of this passage combines a discernibly American, puritanical suspicion of ornament with a functionalist asceticism that we have come to recognize as a characteristic feature of the international style of high modernism.15 From a postmodernist vantage point, however, we might well question just why the category of excess or surplus represented by "rhetorical din," "luxurious riot," or "emotional slither" should be so inevitably construed as negative or uneconomic. Georges Bataille, for one, provides a provocative refutation of this ideology in La Part maudite.The economics he there seeks to define (which is at the same time a linguistics, an erotics, and an anthropology) would instead be based on the valorization of excess, or of what he terms "la dépense improductive," nonproductive expenditure. Bataille's "economy of excess" turns on "la perte du proper," that is, the loss of the literal (or "proper") to the figurative, the loss of purity (or propriety) to scatological defilement, and the loss of personal identity (one's "proper" self) to a sacred expropriation by the Other.   13. See also Kevin Oderman's comments on the importance of delay and deferral to Pound's troubadour "eroticism of dalliance" in " ‘Cavalcanti': That the Body Is Not Evil," Paideuma 11 (Fall 1982): 257-79. If, according to Pound, the "classic aesthetic" involves "plastic to coitus, plastic plus immediate satisfaction," Cavalcanti's cult of Amor instead privileges mental (or spermadic) reterntion, "the fine thing held in the mind," that is, erotic or mnemonic capitalization. See LE,pp. 150-53. 14. Rabaté, Language, Sexuality, and Ideology,pp. 217-23, similarly links Pound's "Postscript" to Gourmont to his later economics. 15. Herbert Schneidau, Ezra Pound: The Image and the Real (Baton Rouge, La., 1969), pp. 177-78.   Richard Sieburth is associate professor of French at New York University. He is the author of Instigations: Ezra Pound and Remy de Gourmont(1978) and translator of Friedrich Hölderlin's Hymns and Fragments(1984). He is currently preparing an edition of Pound's writings on France. Mark Roskill Van Dyck at the English Court: The Relations_of_Portraiture_and Allegory Anthony van Dyck's period of service to the Stuart court stretches from 1632, when he was appointed "principalle Paynter in ordinary to their Majesties" and knighted, to his death at the end of 1641. After an earlier visit of a few months, beginning in December 160, van Dyck had gone to Italy to improve himself; there he had defected from the service of James I. On his return to England this was forgiven, and in the early years he was mainly employed in making portraits of the royal family and household. Later he was again absent from England, spending an entire year beginning in July 1634 back in Antwerp. During the last six years van Dyck spent in England, his clientele widened further; it is chiefly the portraits of this latter period that I will consider here. These portraits have been approached and evaluated in two basic ways. First of all, they have been taken to demonstrate the adaptation of van Dyck's preexisting skills, especially his command of the "grand style," to the requirements of a court and aristocracy which prized grace and elegance as hallmarks of breeding and quality, and which at the same time welcomed the trappings of grandeur and the subtleties of variation, in costume, post, and gesture, that the artist could build into his presentation for their predilection.1 Second, where critical considerations have come up, these paintings have been evaluated in terms of whether the adoption of mannered and decorative traits now betokens a decline from the artist's previous work, or whether it represents rather a different kind of achievement which gave rise, at its best, to equally outstanding successes in conveying refined and subtly enhanced distinction.2 But both these approaches agree in finding no intellectual content in the works in question, either of van Dyck's own devising or based on interests and concerns in which his subjects partook. This absence of implication to the portraits is seem as fitting with thea rtist's tendency to make creative decisions on an ad hoc basis, as evidenced by his preference for rapidly made drawings from the life over the use of oil sketches and by the pentimenti that his finished works reveal.3 It is also seen as fitting with the whole pattern cultural as well as social and economic of his relationship to the Stuart aristocrazy, for which these images were fashioned.   1. See esp. Ellis Water house, Painting in Britain, 1530-1790 (Harmondsworth, 1953), pp. 49-50 (where the basic documentation for the years in England is given); and cf. more recently Christopher Brown, Van Dyck(Oxford, 1982 , p. 192 (on Lord John and Lord Bernard Stuart). 2. See, for example, Erik Larsen, intro. to L'opera completa di Van Dyck 1626-1641 (Milan, 1980), p. 8 and Oliver Millar, intro. to exhibition catalog Van Dyck in England(National Portrait Gallery, London, Nov. 1982-Mar. 1983), p. 27 and esp. p. 31 (attributing a decline, only toward the close of a long career, to illness and the pressure of commissions). 3. See Millar, Van Dyck in England,p. 31, citing the miniaturist Richard Gibson on the "Sketches made from the life," mainly lost, and cat. no. 12, on the pentimenti found in the 1633 Charles I on Horseback.   Mark Roskill is professor of the history of modern art at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. His most recent book is The Interpretation of Cubism (1985). Previous contributions to Critical Inquiry include "On the Recognition and Identification of Objects in Paintings" (Summer 1977) and "A Reply to John Reichert and Stanley Fish" (Winter 1979). Alan Shapiro The New Formalism […] Open the pages of almost any national journal or magazine, and where ten years ago one found only one or another kind of free verse lyric, one now finds well rhymed quatrains, sestinas, villanelles, sonnets, and blank verse dramatic monologues or meditations.1 In a recent issue of the New Criterion,Robert Richman describes this rekindled interest in formal verse among younger poets as a return to the high seriousness, eloquence, and technical fluency that characterized the best achievements of American poetry forty years ago.2 As Mr. Richman numbers me among the younger poets working in form, I ought to be as cheered by these developments as he is. Yet I am anything but cheered. And not because I don't want to belong to club that would have me as a member, though this may be a part of it; but because I suspect that what Mr. Richman hails as a development may in fact be nothing but a mechanical reaction, and that the new formalists, in rejecting the sins of their experimental fathers may end up merely repeating the sings of their New Critical grandfathers, resuscitating the stodgy, overrefined conventions of the "fifties poem," conventions which were of course sufficiently narrow and restrictive to provoke rebellion in the first place. Any reform, carried to uncritical extremes by lesser talents who ignore rather than try to assimilate the achievements of their predecessors, will itself require reformation. If James Wright, say, or Robert Bly, produced more than their fair share of imitators, if they even imitate themselves much of the time, they nonetheless have written poems all of us can and ought to learn from. Maybe we have had too much of the "raw" in recent years. But the answer to the raw is not the overcooked. Besides, it's dangerous to think we have to choose exclusively between free verse and form. The wider the range of styles and forms that we avail ourselves of, the more enriched, more flexible and inclusive our expressive resources will be. It's as important for those who work in form to be familiar with the experiments and innovatins of the last hundred years as it is for those who work in looser measures to be familiar with traditional verse forms that go back beyond the twentieth century.   Alan Shapiro's most recent book of poems, Happy Hour,was published this year. Catharine R. Stimpson Nancy Reagan Wears a Hat: Feminism and Its_Cultural_Consensus Like every great word, "representation/s " is a stew. A scrambled menu, it serves up several meanings at once. For a representation can be an image visual, verbal, or aural. Think of a picture of a hat. A representation can also be a narrative, a sequence of images and ideas. Think of the sentence, "Nancy Reagan wore a hat when she visited a detoxification clinic in Florida." Or, a representation can be the product of ideology, that vast scheme for showing forth the world and justifying its dealings. Think of the sentence, "Nancy Reagan, in her hat, is a proper woman." In the past twenty years, feminist thinking about representation has broken apart. This fracture is both cause and symptom of the larger collapse of a feminist cultural consensus. Some of the rifts have been thematic. That is to be represented? Others have been theoretical. What is the nature of representation itself? I wish to map these rifts, especially those in the United States, and to wonder about the logic of a new cultural consensus. In the late 1960s, feminists began to share a cultural consensus about the representation of women and gender. Few who built up that consensus were village idiots. Even without being semioticians, everyone more or less knew that the marriages between the signifier and the signified in that odd couple, the sign, were ones of convenience. Everyone more or less knew that the marriages between the sign and the referent, that hubbub out there, or somewhere, were also ones of convenience. Some survived. Others were obsolete, cold, hostile, ending in separation or divorce. Everyone more or less knew that when I exclaimed, "Nancy Reagan wears a hat," it was easier for a fellow citizen of my linguistic community to understand me than for a stranger to do so. Nevertheless, the consensus offered a rough, general theory of representation that extolled the possibility of a fit between "reality" and its "description"  or "image."   Catharine R. Stimpsonis professor of English and dean of the Graduate School at Rutgers University. She is presently at work on a book about Gertrude Stein. Yve-Alain Bois Piet Mondrian, New York City The association between New York City's all-over structure and the play that unfolds within it relative to difference and identity is very pertinent but is not specific enough, in my opinion. On the one hand, all of Mondrian's neoplastic works are constituted by an opposition between the variable (position, dimension, and color of the plane) and the invariable (right angle, the so-called "constant rapport"). On the other hand, the type of identity produced in New York City relies on repetition,a principle which, we know, explicitly governs a whole range of paintings predating neoplasticism. New York City differs from the "classic" neoplastic works, as well as from the 1918-19 modular paintings with which it seems to have a good deal in common. It is, in part, because he never discusses this last point that Masheck doesn't entirely grasp the amplitude of the reversal that Mondrian effected in his New York works. In fact, as James Johnson Sweeney realized quite early, one must go backthe 1917 works, which gave rise to modular grids for the two years that followed, in order to understand what happens not only in New York City but also in the two Boogie-Woogie paintings.3Everyone is aware of the extraordinarily rapid evolution of Mondrian's work during the years immediately preceding the foundation of neoplasticism: under the influence of Bart van der Leck, he dopted the colored plane and the black dash on a white background as elements of his composition for the two Compositions in Color, A and B (1917, Seuphor 290-914). Mondrian, who had not yet found a means of perspicuously relating these diverse elements (which are the result of a cubist disjunction between line and color), tied both plane and dashes together by way of an optical dynamism, based largely on their superimposition. The immediate consequence was to make the background recede optically. The next step was the five Compositions (also in 1917), all entitled "With Colored Planes" (Seuphor 285-89). Here all superimposition was eliminated, as well as all "line." In the last two of these canvases, the background itself is divided without remainder in to planes of different shades of white. The colored rectangles (less numerous) are on the way to alignment. In spite of this, the rectangles fluctuate and, consequently, the background is hollowed out behind them.   3. See James Johnson Sweeney, "Mondrian, the Dutch and De Stijl," Art News 50 (Summer 1951): 63. Meyer Schapiro made a similar remark, at about the same time, in his courses. (However, his article on Mondrian appeared much later. See "Mondrian," in Schapiro, Modern Art, 19th and 20th Centuries: Selected Papers [New York, 1978], p. 256.) 4. When I refer to a number accompanied by "Seuphor," it refers to the "catalog by group" included in Michel Seuphor's book on the artist. See Seuphor [Ferdinand Louis Berckelaers], Piet Mondrian; sa vie, son oeuvre,2d ed. (Paris, 1970).   Yve-Alain Bois is associate professor of art history at the Johns Hopkins University. He has published a number of essays on twentieth-century art, architecture, and criticism and is currently working on Mondrian's neoplastic years and on a history of axonometric perspective. Amy Reiter-McIntosh is a lecturer at the University of Chicago. Her previous contribution to Critical Inquiry was a translation of Ernesto Laclau's "Psychanalyse et marxisme" (Winter 1987). Robert Scholes Deconstruction and Communication "Signature Event Context" (which I henceforth, following Derrida himself, refer to as "Sec") offers a critique of previous theories of communication, a critique of previous theories of communication, a critique that seems to open the way toward a new and freer notion of reading. My response to this view will be to point out that the proffered freedom is quite illusory, partly because off certain problems in the theory itself but especially because there is no path open from that theory to any practice, a point that is merely underscored by Derrida's own practice in response to being read by Searle. Derrida's argument in "Sec" can be summarized in the following way: A written text can survive the absence of its author, the absence of its addressee, the absence of its object, the absence of its context, the absence of its code and still be read. The argument also includes the stipulation that, as argued more fully elsewhere but briefly here as well, what is true of writing is also true of all other forms of communication: that they are all marked, fundamentally, by the differencethat constitutes arche-writing and is so palpable in actual written texts. My summary is, I hope, at least tolerably fair and accurate. (It is impossible to hope for more, since, as Richard Rorty admiringly remarks, Derrida "is … so skillful at fishing both sides of every stream."2) I believe that this summary of "Sec"'s argument also describes, in however compressed a form, what many American teachers and critics think they have learned from Derrida: namely, that reading can be freed from responsibility to anything prior to the act of reading, and, specifically, from those things named in the summary. As Derrida puts it himself: "writing is read, and ‘in the last analysis' does not give rise to a hermeneutic deciphering, to the decoding of a meaning or truth" ("SecM," p. 329).   2. Richard Rorty, "The Higher Nominalism in a Nutshell: A Reply to Henry Staten," 12 (Winter 1986): 464.   Robert Scholesis Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities at Brown University, where he directs the Center for Modern Culture and Media. His last book was Textual Power. His next, with Nancy R. Comley and Gregory L. Ulmer, will be a text book called Text Book. Susan Gillman "Dementia Americana": Mark Twain, "Wapping Alice," and the_Harry_K. Thaw Trial My argument is that faced with such reversal of stereotypical female roles, the culture (whether in the discourse of the Thaw trial itself, or of the journalistic accounts of the trial, of Twain's autobiographical tale) relies on both the institution of the law and the custom of storytelling to reassure itself about boundary confusions between guilt and innocence, man and woman, seductress and seducer, fact and fiction. The Thaw trial, however, shows that the law itself could not resolve any of those ambiguities, a predicament which, I will argue, Twain entertains and creates in his own fictional courtroom but flees from in his response to the actual trial. My argument thus depends upon establishing particular dialogue between these two cases of seduction, for neither Twain's nor the journalistic accounts alone tell the story that the two together do. Both cases speak in common to two aspects of fictionality. One is a mode of social differentiation, the sexual and legal categories (passive/aggressive, victim/victimizer, innocence/guilt) essential to both cases, but whose actual application was, for different reasons in each, momentarily suspended. It was impossible to decide, for example, whether Evelyn Thaw or Alice or Twain himself, for that matter, should be classified as victim or victimizer, as playing the active or passive role in their respective narratives. The temporary suspension of these categories, I will argue, does not invalidate them or brand them as "fictive," but rather reveals them as culturally constructed and culturally applied, in Twain's words "fictions of law and custom" (a phrase applied to racial difference in The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson,published in 1984). In both cases, the response to this moment when cultural categories cannot be definitively applied is a process of storytelling a second aspect of fictionality that attempts to construct coherent narratives about those suspended "fictions of law and custom." Although Twain's "Alice" case opens in 1877, not until it connects with the Thaw trial in 1907 does the full story, as I have just briefly outlined it, emerge. It is precisely that double story that this esay will tell: the story of how Twain's personal compulsions met up with his culture's in the act of reporting, representing, interpreting, and finally making its own events mean.   Susan Gillman is assistant professor of literature and American studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. This essay is part of a forthcoming book, Dark Twins: Imposture and Identity in Mark Twain's America. Robin Sheets Pornography and Art: The Case of "Jenny" In contrast to [Susan] Sontag, who used the tools of literary criticism to evaluate sexually explicit fiction, I will use the conventions of pornography to interpret a dramatic monologue in which an expected sexual encounter fails to take place. In analyzing Rossetti's "Jenny," I will employ an interpretive model based on the work of [Steven] Marcus, [Susan] Griffin, and [Andrea] Dworkin. Despite different assumptions about sexuality Marcus is a Freudian, Griffin believes in a mystical eros residing in the psyche and waiting to be rediscovered, Dworkin regards heterosexuality as a construct for subjugating women and masking men's homoerotic drive they share several ideas applicable to "Jenny." (1) Although pornography features, and indeed perpetuates, various kinds of masculine power, especially the powers of money, class, and culture, it purports to be ahistorical in order to obscure its status as ideology. (2) It depicts male sexuality as fear-laden aggression resulting in very little pleasure; thus it is not liberating on either a political or a personal basis. (3) Pornography does not include "others." Women are present only to be silenced, objectified, treated as screens on which a man projects his fantasies. Marcus, Griffin, and Dworkin are all concerned with what Suleiman calls "the representational or fantasmatic content" of pornography and "the political (in the sense of sexual politics) implications of that content." The risks of emphasizing the representational most especially, the denigration of language and style that result from Dworkin's approach can, as Suleiman says, be mitigated by careful attention to a particular text (see P,pp. 122-30). In Rossetti's poem, a young man attempts to purchase a night's pleasure with a London prostitute named Jenny. After she thwarts his plans by falling asleep, he spends the night meditating about her beauty, speculating about her past, present, and future, and thinking about the causes of prostitution. Although Rossetti's subject matter is consistent with the etymological definition of pornography as "writing about prostitutes," he avoids the explicit depiction of sexual activity which has been the common element in most modern accounts of the genre. Indeed, the only physical contact between the narrator and Jenny occurs at daybreak when he places coins in her hair and gives her a parting kiss.   Robin Sheets is associate professor of English at the University of Cincinnati. She has written on Thackeray, George Eliot, and other Victorian writers and is coauthor of The Woman Question: Society and Literature in Britain and American, 1837-1883. Oscar Kenshur Demystifying the Demystifiers: Metaphysical Snares of Ideological Criticism An attempt to warrant specific readings and to discredit others through appeal to the authority of the "text itself" … must be recognized for what it is: a political strategy for reading in which the critic's own construction of the "text itself" is mobilized in order to bully other interpretations off the field.   This passage, from an article by a contemporary English literary theorist, is typical of a genre of assertions that may, at first glance, seem to have less to do with critical theory than with pop psychology. For the writer, like other writers in this genre, may appear to be making a psychological observation to the effect  that the disposition to claim that one's interpretations of texts are "correct" and other interpretations are "incorrect" is the function of an arrogant belligerence (and perhaps, by implication, that those who eschew such objectivist claims are characterized by meekness and humility). But such a psychological observation is closely related to a somewhat more dignified and elaborate sort of claim, namely, that the objectivist notion that there can be a standard of correctness in the interpretation of texts can be shown to have specific and unsavory political implications. And although contemporary polemicists who refer to connections between objectivist theory and right-wing tendencies generally omit to demonstrate the existence of such a relationship, it is possible to suppose that their omission, rather than reflecting a preference for invective over analysis, is tied to implicit references to analyses that have already been carried out.   An ideal arena for such ideological analysis is the seventeenth century, the period during which early modern epistemology and the scientific movement laid the foundations for modern notions about objective knowledge, and during which philosophers were quite willing to discuss both their epistemological principles and their political convictions. Provided with such a wealth of raw materials, the contemporary scholar with an interest in ideological analysis need not attribute political opinions to theorists, but need only uncover the deeper ideological connections between views that were publicaly expressed. And if the relationship between objectivism and politics is one that can be revealed by darwing out the implications of the epistemological theory itself, then the results of an ideological analysis of early modern objectivism should, mutatis mutandis,be applicable to twentieth-century varieties. In the light of these considerations, it is quite apt that Michael Ryan, in attempting to merge deconstruction with ideological analysis in his Marxism and Deconstruction,uses as his paradigmatic case an analysis of Hobbes' views on metaphor and on sovereignty.   Oscar Kenshur is associate professor of comparative literature at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is the author of Open Form and the Shape of Ideas: Literary Structures as Representations of Philosophical Concepts in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (1986), and he is currently at work on Dilemmas of Enlightenment,a study of tensions between epistemological and ethico-political commitments during the early-modern period. James Elkins Art History without Theory The theories I have outlined suggest that by displacing but not excluding theory, art historical practice at once grounds itself in empiricism and implies an acceptance of theory's claim that it cannot be so grounded. But beyond descriptions like this, the theories are not a helpful way to understand practice because they cannot account for its persistence except by pointing to its transgressions and entanglements in self-contradiction. Nor does it help to say, pace Steven Knapp, Walter Benn Michaels, and Stanley Fish, that strong theory can have no consequences, because the reason theory has no consequences in this instance is not the impossibility of theory's transcendence (practice believes it to be transcendent), but a combination of the conventions, desires, and beliefs of practicing historians.14 Theoretical approaches must bypass the concerns of practice because practice has no position which can be argued alongside theory's positions. There are two reasons why a "Defense of Empiricism in Art History" has not been written. First, art historical practice does not incorporate even a local or heuristic theory to explain or discuss itself. Second, its "position" is not a latent theory, waiting to be eloquently stated, but something which is presupposed in a vague and variable manner by the art historical texts themselves. (The conventions, desires, and beliefs are not positions but inferences, conjectures based on the texts and the ways we speak about them.) Art historical practice, for example, has an objectivist intention: it takes itself to be (or to approach) "a science, with definite principles and techniques," which can exclude theory and generate texts by appealing only to previous nontheoretical texts and to the facts.15 This intention is rarely stated, exasperatingly slippery to formulate clearly, and even incoherent when it is applied to existing texts; but this is so precisely because it works by not being included in the texts. If some version of it were stated at the outset of a monograph, it would cast doubt on the entire enterprise and lead the reader to conclude incorrectly that practice is dependent on theory, and uncertain theory at that. In its unstated form, the objectivist intention allows narrative practice to continue unimpeded.   James Elkins is a doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago. This article is from a work in progress concerned with the influence of writing conventions on the history of art. Donald E. Pease Patriarchy, Lentricchia, and Male Feminization So Lentricchia has fulfilled one of his purposes in this essay. He has subverted the patriarchy from within: that is, he has subverted Bloom's literary history as well as the essentialist feminism associated with it. But he has not fulfilled his affiliated purpose of establishing a dialogue between feminists and feminized males. The "feminization" of literary studies by patriarchal figures like Bloom does not account for the feminization of Stoddard, Gilder, Van Dyke, Woodberry, or Stedman. Their feminization, like that of the Stevens who felt positivelylady- like, was not the result of patriarchal oppression. And it will not disappear as the result of the subversion of the patriarchy by a feminized male. Mistaking the work of feminization with the work of the patriarch eradicates the feminine. By identifying the difference between a feminization produced by the patriarchy and a feminine cultural sphere, Lentricchia has made room for the different cultural conversation he wants to develop. But this conversation can take place only after the backdrop of an oppressive patriarch can drop away. This conversation might begin with an account of that cultural sphere in which women are the agency to which Lentricchia alludes. It might begin when we recall that the model for the culture's "Emmeline Grangerfords" was Harriet Beecher Stowe's Little Eva. The social change Little Eva helped effect was the emancipation of both slaves and slaveholders.   Donald E. Pease is professor of English and American literature at Dartmouth College. His articles on nineteenth-century authors and literature have appeared in a number of journals. He is the coeditor, with Walter Benn Michaels, of American Renaissance Reconsidered,and is the author of Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writings in Cultural Contexts,which won the Mark H. Ingraham Prize in 1987. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar The Man on the Dump versus the United_Dames_of_America;_or,_What Does Frank Lentricchia Want? That the pattern into which Lentricchia seeks to assimilate Stevens is politically charged becomes clearest when we turn to the following oddly incomprehensible statement: "In the literary culture that Stevens would create, the ‘phallic' would not have been the curse word of some recent feminist criticism but the name of a limited, because male, respect for literature" (p. 767). At the point where he makes this assertion, Lentricchia has been persuasively demonstrating that Stevens was "encouraged … to fantasize the potential social authority of the literary as phallic authority" (p. 767). But suddenly the critic's measured discourse is disrupted by obviously personal feelings about the "curse word of some recent feminist criticism" and by a dazzlingly illogical definition of "respect for literature." (If male respect for literature is limited, does that mean that female respect for literature is unlimited? If respect for literature is limited and male, do women unlimitedly disrespect literature?) Such a disruption suggests that, in making his apparently objective argument about Stevens, Lentricchia has some other not so hidden agenda and, of course, his peculiar decision to link his discussion of Stevens with an attack on The Madwoman in the Attic further supports this conclusion. What most strikingly reinforces the point, however, is the hysterical or perhaps, with some recent feminist linguists, we should say "testerical" rhetoric in which he couches his assault on our work.14   14. The term "testeria," for male "hysteria," is proposed by Juli Loesch in "Testeria and Penisolence A Scourge to Humankind," Aphra: The Feminist Literary Magazine,4, 1 (Winter 1972-73): 43-45; quoted in Casey Miller and Kate Swift, Words and Women: New Language in New Times(New York, 1977), pp. 60- 61.   Sandra M. Gilbert,professor of English at Princeton University, and Susan Gubar,professor of English at Indiana University, are coauthors of No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, Volume I: The War of the Words(1987), the first installment of a three-part sequel to their Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination(1979). They have also coedited The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Tradition in English. Frank Lentricchia Andiamo! fl: Dad, what's testeria? Dad: Figlio! What happened to your Italian? It's TesaREEa! Capisce? fl: Yes. Dad: Tell me. fl: A store where they sell that stuff. Dad: In big jars! fl: Let's go there!   Frank Lentricchia is professor of English at Duke University. His latest book, Ariel and the Police: Michel Foucault, William James, Wallace Stevens,has just been published. He is also general editor of the Wisconsin Project on American Writers. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Philippe Desan, and Wendy Griswold Editors' Introduction: Mirrors, Frames, and Demons: Reflections on the Sociology of Literature The sociology of literature, in the first of many paradoxes, elicits negations before assertions. It is not an established field or academic discipline. The concept as such lacks both intellectual and institutional clarity. Yet none of these limitations affects the vitality and rigor of the larger enterprise. We use the sociology of literature here to refer to the cluster of intellectual ventures that originate in one overriding conviction: the conviction that literature and society necessarily explain each other. Scholars and critics of all kinds congregate under this outsize umbrella only to differ greatly in their sense of what they do and what sociology of literature does. They subscribe to a wide range of theories and methods. Many would not accept the sociology of literature as an appropriate label for their own work; other would refuse it to their colleagues. Nevertheless, every advocate agrees that a sociological practice is essential to literature. For the sociology of literature does not constitute just one more approach to literature. Because it insists upon a sociology of literary knowledge and literary practice within the study of literature, the sociology of literature raises questions basic to all intellectual inquiry. The sociology of literature begins in diversity. The way that is combines the ancient traditions of art with the modern practices of social science makes the very term something of an oxymoron. There is not one sociology of literature, there are many sociological practices of literature, each of which operates within a particular intellectual tradition and specific institutional context. These practices cross basic divisions within the contemporary intellectual field, especially within the university. Inherently interdisciplinary, the sociology of literature is subject to constant reformulation as scholars re-evaluate their disciplines. In consequence, disciplinary boundaries seem less rigid, less logical, and, hence, less authoritative than ever before. Even so and this is another paradox of the sociology of literature any sociological conception of literature is best situated in terms of an original discipline and its institutional setting. However frequently individual scholars cross over disciplinary lines, the fundamental divisions retain their force.   Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson is professor of French at the University of Illinois at Chicago; she is author of Literary France: The Making of a Culture. Philippe Desan,whose Naissance de la method: Machiavelle, la Ramée, Bodin, Montaigne, Descartes was published in 1987, is an assistant professor at the University of Chicago. Wendy Griswold,associate professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, recently published Renaissance Revivals: City Comedy and Revenge Tragedy in the London Theatre, 1576-1980. Robert Weimann Text, Author-Function, and Appropriation in Modern Narrative: Toward a Sociology of Representation To talk about the sociology of literary representation is, first and foremost, to propose to historicize representational activity at that crucial point where its social and linguistic dimensions intersect.1 The troublesome incongruity between these two dimensions need not be minimized, but it can be grappled with as soon as the presuppositions of either the hegemony of the subject or that of language itself are questioned. In this view, the position of George Lukács (not to mention that of Erich Auerbach or even that of the more traditional sociologist of literary referentiality) tends to ignore the state of extreme vulnerability and recurrent jeopardy in which representation has always found itself, just as Michel Foucault's diametrically opposed view of the ultimate hegemony of discourse obliterates or displaces a lot of unbroken contemporary representational practice. Even more important, both these quite different approaches may be said to appear monistic in that the gaps and links between what is representing what is represented are viewed either in terms of closure and continuity or in terms of rupture and discontinuity. But as I shall proceed to glance at some representational strategies in the late modern period, the question needs to be faced whether it is not precisely in these gaps and links, and in the way in which, simultaneously, the gaps are closed and the links are broken up, that historical activity can be seen to assert itself. If the contradiction of system and event, of predetermination and performance can be seen to affect representational activity, and if this contradiction can at all be formulated in terms of a sociological Erkenntnisinteresse,issue of historicity must be discussed on more than one level: not only on the level of what is represented (which would reduce this project to some genealogy of the signified) but also on the level of rupture between them as well as their interdependence) together and to attempt to interconnect the semiotic problematic of signification and the extratextual dimension of representativeness, as involving changeful relations of writing, reading, social reproduction, and political power. In this view, the use of signs, although never quite reducible to a referential function, must be reconsidered and this question needs to be asked: under which conditions and in which respects would it be possible to talk of sociology in that area of instability itself which marks the relations between signifier and signified, between the author's language and the reader's meaning?   Robert Weimann is professor of English and American literature at the Zentralinstitut für Literaturgeschichte, Akademie der Künste, Berlin DDR. His books in English include Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in Theater and Structure and Society in Literary History. His most recent book-length study in German is Shakespeare und die Macht der Mimesis: Repråsentation und Autoritåt im Elisabethanischen Theater. Sandy Petrey The Reality of Representation: Between Marx and Balzac The starting point for my reading of the exchanges between Marx and Balzac is the repetition in The Eighteenth Brumaireof a striking image employed in Colonel Chabert to represent the force of ideology as experienced by a man forcibly set outside the conventions it endorses. Balzac first: "The social and judicial world weighted on his breast like a nightmare."3 Marx's appropriation occurs in a much-quoted meditation on the past as impediment to the future. Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.4 What is the (material) weight of an (immaterial) nightmare, and why do Balzac and Marx agree that invoking it is a valid means to express humanity's relation to its history?5   4. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York, 1963), p. 15; my emphasis. Further references to this work, abbreviated EB,will be included in the text. 5. In French and German: "Le monde social et judiciare lui pesait sur la poitrine comme un cauchemar"; "Die Tradition aller toten Geschlechter lastet wie ein Alp auf dem Gehirne der Lebenden." This strikes me as so obvious a borrowing that I have to wonder why it does not seem to be generally known. On contributing factor may be that the standard French translation of The Eighteenth Burmairegives a fanciful version of the sentence in Marx: "La tradition de toutes les generations mortes pèse d'un poids très lourd sur le cerveau des vivants" (Marx, Le 18 brumaire de Louis Bonaparte [Paris, 1969], p. 15). Does this poids très lourd come from a misreading of ein Alpas eine Alp?   Sandry Petrey is professor of French and comparative literature at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. The author of History in the Text: Quatrevingt-Treize and the French Revolution,he is completing a book entitled Realism and Revolution. Terry Eagleton Two Approaches in the Sociology of Literature There are two main ways in which an interest in the sociology of literature can be justified. The first form of justification is (in the epistemological sense of the term) realist: literature is in fact deeply conditioned by its social context, and any critical account of it which omits this fact is therefore automatically deficient. The second way is pragmatist: literature is in fact shaped by all kinds of factors and readable in all sorts of contexts, but highlighting its social determinants is useful and desirable from a particular political standpoint. Both of these cases would seem to have something going for them. Hardly anybody would want to deny that literature is in an important sense a social product; but this claim is so general that a specifically "sociological" treatment of literary works does not necessarily follow from it. Metaphors and line endings, after all, are also in some sense social products, so that to attend to these elements of a literary text is not necessarily to deny the work's sociality. "Social product" would seem too comfortably broad a category, just as "economic product" would seem too crippingly narrow. A problem with the realist case about the sociology of literature, then, is that it is not very clear what exactly is being claimed. The pragmatist case would seem a persuasive rationale for, say, a feminist reading of Alexander Pope's Essay on Criticism,since few people would want to claim that the poem was in some central way about patriarchal relations in the sense that The Rape of the Lock is. A Marxist critic who attended to questions of social class in Treasure Island,perhaps placing Long John Silver in the context of the British shop stewards' movement and celebrating his antagonism to the gentry, would not necessarily be committed to holding that these issues were "in fact" crucial to the text; he or she would insist instead that they should be brought to light because they were crucial to history and society in general.   Terry Eagleton's recent works include collected essays Against the Grainand William Shakespeare as well as a novel, Saints and Scholars. His work in progress is on the ideology of the aesthetic. Jean-Marie Apostolidès Molière and the Sociology of Exchange The method chosen here draws on concepts borrowed from sociology and anthropology. This double conceptual approach is necessary for a society divided between values inherited from medieval Christianity and precapitalist practices. Seventeenth-century France did not think of itself as a class society but as a society of orders. Since sociology is a system of knowledge whose concepts are taken from an imaginary construct, it is thus more suited to analyzing bourgeois society than societies in transition.6 In trying to measure the past with the aid of tools forged in and for contemporary societies, the sociologist runs the risk of only measuring an artifact, produced by his theories in the field of history. Hence the need for the anthropological concepts, including the notion of exchange, among others, whether material (the exchange of goods), symbolic (the exchange of signs), or sexual (the exchange of women). This approach will bring to light the contradictions underlying the society of the ancient régime. Whereas an ordinary sociohistorical approach views the reign of Louis XIV as unified under a dogmatic classicism, the socioanthropological approach stresses the tensions and oppositions running through this society. Classicism appears then as a façade covering up the change that it cannot imagine. This "spectacle"7 makes it possible to unite contradictory social practices, both those produced by consumption and which originate in the medieval economy (based on the gift/ countergift and service) and those belonging to the early accumulation of capital which sketch future bourgeois economic practices.   6. See Cornelius Catoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society,trans. Kathleen Blamey (Cambridge, Mass., 1987). 7. See Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle,rev. English ed. (Detroit, 1977).   Jean-Marie Apostolidès is professor of French literature at Stanford University. His publications include Le roi-machine, Les metamorphoses de Tintin,andLe prince sacrifié.Alice Musick McLean,a Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago, is specializing in medieval narrative and the literature of the fantastic. J. Paul Hunter "News, and new Things": Contemporarneity and the Early_English Novel The novel represents a formal attempt to come to terms with innovation and originality and to accept the limitations of tradition; it reflects the larger cultural embracing of the present moment as a legitimate subject not only for passing conversation but for serious discourse. For at least a half century before the novel emerged, the world of print had experimented in assuming, absorbing, and exploiting that new cultural consciousness based on human curiosity on the one hand "preparing" readers for novels and on the other offering later writers of novels some sense of potential subject matter and potential form, a sense of how the present could be won over to serious literature. The process was a curious and unstructured one; in its early manifestations it hardly seemed destined to lead to a significant new literary form. Even in retrospect, the print novelties of the turn of the century hardly seem part of a teleology of form or thought, but the broad ferment that authenticated the new, together with the apparent permanence that print seemed to bestow on accounts of the temporary and passing, ultimately led to a mind and art that transcended occasions and individuals even though it engaged them first of all energetically, enthusiastically, evangelically. The first fruits of the modern moment-centered consciousness were not very promising, but the emergence of that consciousness enabled, when other cultural contexts were right, an altogether new aesthetic and a wholly different relation between life and literature.   J. Paul Hunter,professor of English at the University of Chicago, is the author of The Reluctant Pilgrim, Occasional Form,and of a forthcoming book on literacy, readership, and the contexts of early English fiction, Before Novels. Janice Radway The Book-of-the-Month Club and the General Reader: On_the_Uses_of "Serious" Fiction If one accepts the social hierarchy that this taste structure masks, it is easy to accept the validity of the particular criteria which serve as the working test of excellence. In fact, the high value placed on rationality, complexity, irony, reflexivity, linguistic innovation, and the "disinterested" contemplation of the well-wrought artifact makes sense within cultural institutions devoted to the improvement of the individuality, autonomy, and productive competence of the already privileged individuals who come to them for instruction and advice.8 Appreciation for the technical fine points of aesthetic achievement is also understandable among people whose daily work centers on the business of discrimination. But it is worth keeping in mind that the critical dismissal of literary works and institutions that do not embody these values as failures is an exercise of power which rules out the possibility of recognizing that such works and institutions might be valuable to others because they perform functions more in keeping with their own somewhat different social position, its material constraints, and ideological concerns. The essay critical dismissal of the Club and other "popularizers" is an act of exclusion that banishes those who might mount even the most minimal of challenges to the culture and role of the contemporary intellectual by proclaiming their own right to create, use, and value books for different purposes. My preoccupation with the Book-of-the-Month Club arises, then, out of a prior interest in the way books are variously written, produced, marketed, read, and evaluated in contemporary American culture. My subjects might best be described as ways of writing rather than Literature, ways of reading rather than texts.9 I have begun to examine the Club's editorial operation with the intention of eventually comparing the manner, purpose, and substance of the editors' choice of books with the choices of actual Book-of-the-Month Club members. Such a comparison seems potentially interesting for a variety of reasons.   8. For a discussion of the connections between the social position and role of literary academics and the values they promote through the process of canonization, see Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (New York, 1985), esp. pp. 186-201. 9. See, for instance, my earlier effort to specify how a group of women actually read and evaluate individual books in the much- maligned romance genre, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Culture (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1984). I am indebted to Mary Pratt's discussion ("Towards a Critical Cultural Practice," paper presented at the Conference on the Agenda of Literary Studies, Marquette University, 8-9 Oct. 1982) of the concept of "literariness" and the way it disciplines ideologically this particular way of describing my own interests.   Janice Radway is an associate professor of American civilization at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature(1984) and is a former editor of American Quarterly.This article is part of a larger study, the working title of which is "The Book-of-the- Month Club and the General Reader: The Transformation of Literary Production in the Twentieth Century." Pierre Bourdieu Flaubert's Point of View The break necessary to establish a rigorous science of cultural works is something more and something else than a simple methodological reversal.1 It implies a true conversion of the ordinary way of thinking and living the intellectual enterprise. It is a matter of breaking the narcissistic relationship inscribed in the representation of intellectual work as a "creation" and which excludes as the expression par excellence of "reductionist sociology" the effort to subject the artist and the work of art to a way of thinking that is doubly objectionable since it is both genetic and generic. It would be easy to show what the most different kinds of analysis of the work of art owe to the norms that require treating works in and for themselves, with no reference to the social conditions of their production. Thus in the now-classic Theory of Literature,René Wellek and Austin Warren seem to advocate "an explanation in terms of the personality and the life of the writer." In fact, because they (no doubt along with most of their readers) accept the ideology of the "man of genius" they are committed, in their own terms, to "one of the oldest and best-established methods of literary study" which seeks the explanatory principle of a work in the author taken in isolation (the uniqueness of a work being considered a characteristic of the "creator").2 In fact, this explanatory principle resides in the relationship between the "space" of works in which each particular work is taken and the "space" of authors in which each cultural enterprise is constituted. Similarly, when Sartre takes on the project of specifying the meditations through which society determined Flaubert, the individual, he attributes to those factors that can be perceived from that point of view that is, to social class as refracted through a family structure what are instead the effects of generic factors influencing every writer in an artistic field that is itself in a subordinate position in the field of power and also the effects specific to all writers who occupy the same position as Flaubert within the artistic field.   1. See Pierre Bourdieu, "Intellectual Field and Creative Project," trans. Sian France, Social Science Information 8 (Apr. 1969): 89-119; originally published as "Champ intellectual et projet créateur," Les Temps moderns no. 246 (Nov. 1966): 865-906. See also Bourdieu, "Champ du pouvoir, champ intellectual et habitus de classe," Scolies1 (1971): 7- 26, and Bourdieu, "The Genesis of the Concepts of Habitus and Field," trans. Channa Newman, Sociocriticism no. 2 (Dec. 1985): 11-24. 2. René Welleck and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (New York, 1956) p. 69.   Pierre Bourdieu holds the chair of sociology at the Collège de France and is director of the Centre de Sociologie européenne at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Among his most recent works are Distinction (1984), Homo Academicus (1984), and Choses Dites (1987). Alain Viala Prismatic Effects In recent years the sociology of literature has developed on the basis of another formula: literature is part of the larger social order. It is not the "expression of society" but an integral part of it. The idea is simple, the implications are great. Literature as part of the social order goes beyond a study of the external social manifestations of literature, beyond the sociology of the book, author, and reader practiced, for example, by Robert Escarpit a sociology which leads inevitably to a positivist outlook.5 Nor can we be satisfied with a wholesale borrowing of sociological concepts that does no more than provide the tools for arguments in favor of one or another theory of literature.6 Whatever the interest of these theories (and sometimes it is very great), a sociology of literature becomes possible only when it includes the sociology of the theories elaborated on the subject itself. (So far my purpose has led me gradually to substitute the term "sociology of literature" for "literature and society." Philosophical or political theories can be propounded on the relations between literature and society, but these relations can be studied scientifically only in sociological terms.)   5. See Robert Escarpit, Sociologie de la literature (Paris, 1958). See also Escarpit et al., Le Littéraire et le social: Éléments pour une sociologie de la literature (Paris, 1970). 6. Pierre V. Zima's presentations of the sociology of literature seem to be taking him toward this failing. See Zima, Pour une sociologie du texte littéraire (Paris, 1978).   Alain Viala is a professor of the Université de Paris II Sorbonne Nouvelle. Author of Naissance de l'écrivain: Sociologie de la literature à l'âge classique (1985) and Les Institutions de la vie littéraire en France au XVIIe siècle (1985), he is currently working on studies of the sociology of literature, Racine, and literary strategies. Paula Wissing is a free-lance translator and editor. John Sutherland Publishing History: A Hole at the Centre of_Literary_Sociology For most literary sociologists serious modern work starts with Robert Escarpit's Sociologie de la Littérature (1958), a book which proposes that sociology (or a sociological perspective) can usefully explain how literature operates as a social institution. Subsequent Escarpit-inspired work on the literary enterprise covers topics such as the profession of authorship; the stratified "circuits" (Escarpit's hallmark concept) of production, distribution, and consumption; and the commodity aspect of literature. Critics have objected that Escarpit's increasingly macroquantitative and statistics-bound procedures bleach out literary and ideological texture. And his model of literature as discrete social system encourages the abstract model making which Raymond Williams despises.1 But, whatever its shortomcings, Escarpit's definition of literary product and practice as social faits (not facts, but things made) forms an essential starting point for the sociologist intending to investigate the apparatuses of literature. In what follows, I shall mainly fix on a problem currently disabling constructive research on the literary-sociological lines projected by Escarpit: namely, scholarly ignorance about book trade and publishing history technicalities. This sets up, I shall suggest, a large and troubling hole at the centre of the subject, and there is little indication, at this stage, how or when the hole is to be filled.   1. See Raymond Williams, "Literature and Sociology," Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays (London, 1980), pp. 11-30.   John Sutherlandis professor of literature at the California Institute of Technology. His books include Fiction and the Fiction Industry (1978), Bestsellers (1980), and Offensive Literature (1982). He is currently completing an encyclopedia of Victorian fiction. Jacques Derrida Like the Sound of the Sea Deep within_a_Shell:_Paul_de_Man's_War Unable to respond to the questions, to all the questions, I will ask myself instead whether responding is possible and what that would mean in such a situation. And I will risk in turn several questions prior to the definition of a responsibility. But is it not an act to assume in theory the concept of a responsibility? Is that not already to take a responsibility? One's own as well as the responsibility to which one believes one ought to summon others? The title names a war. Which war? Do not think only of the war that broke out several months ago around some articles signed by a certain Paul de Man, in Belgium between 1940 and 1942. Later you will understand why it is important to situate the beginning of things public,that is the publications, early in 1940 at the latest, during the war but before the occupation of Belgium by the Nazis, and not in December 1940, the date of the first article that appeared in Le Soir,the major Brussels newspaper that was then controlled, more or less strictly, by the occupiers. For several months, in the United States, the phenomena of this war "around" Pula de Man have been limited to newspaper articles. War, a public act, is by rights something declared. So we will not count in the category of war the private phenomena meetings, discussions, correspondences, or telephonic conclaves however intense they may have been in recent days, and already well beyond the American academic milieu.   Jacques Derrida is Directeur d'Études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris) and also teaches at the University of California, Irvine. A teacher at Yale for ten years, he is the author of Mémoires: for Paul de Man (1986). Peggy Kamuf is associate professor of French at Miami University. She is the author of Fictions of Feminism Desire: Disclosures of Heloise (1982) and Signature Pieces: On the Institution of Authorship (forthcoming). Her article "Pieces of Resistance" is forthcoming in Reading de Man Reading. Londa Schiebinger Feminine Icons: The Face of Early Modern Science In early modern science, the struggle between feminine and masculine allegories of science was played out within fixed parameters. Whether science itself was to be considered masculine or feminine, there never was serious debate about the gender of nature, one the one hand, or of the scientist, on the other. From ancient to modern times, nature the object of scientific study has been conceived as unquestionably female.5 At the same time, it is abundantly clear that the practitioners of science, scientists, themselves, overwhelmingly have been men. But what about science? What gender was it as an activity and set of ideals to have? In one tradition the answer was clear: science was a woman. This tradition, stretching back at least to Boethius' sixth-century portrayal of Philosophy as a woman, was codified and explained in Cesare Ripa's Iconologia,the Renaissance bible of iconography.6 In this work, Ripa portrayed each of the sciences as a woman. "Scientia" knowledge or skill was portrayed as a woman of serious demeanor, wearing stately robes (fig. 2). "Physica" physical science was a goddess with a terrestrial globe at her feet. Geometry was a woman holding a plumb line and compass. Astrology, too, was a woman, dressed in blue, with a crown of stars and wings signifying the elevation of her thoughts to the distant stars. With a compass in her right hand and the celestial sphere in her left, she studied the movement and symmetry of the skies.   5. See Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco, 1980). 6. Boethius describes female Philosophy as she appeared to him in a dream in his De consolatione philosophiae.See also Cesare Ripa, Iconologia (Rome, 1593), first illustrated in 1603.   Londa Schiebinger is an assistant professor of history at Pennsylvania State University. Her book, "The Mind has no Sex": Women in the Origins of Modern Science,will be published next spring. Gérard Genette Structure and Functions of the Title in Literature Wishing to contribute to the brief history of title science, I would argue that the difference in terminology between "secondary title" and "subtitle" is too weak for the mind to grasp; and since, as Duchet has noted, the principal feature of his "subtitle" is to contain a more or less explicit generic indication, it would be simpler and more vocative to rebaptize it as such, thereby freeing the term "subtitle" to resume its usual present meaning. Hence these three terms: "title" (Zadig), "subtitle" (ou la Destinée), "generic indication" (Histoire orientale). This is the most complete state of a de facto system in which the only mandatory element, in our present culture, is the first one. Nowadays, we find most frequently incomplete combinations, such as title plus subtitle (Madame Bovary, Moeurs de province) or title plus generic indication (La Nausée, roman) without counting the really simple titles that are reduced to the single "title" element, without subtitle or generic indication, such as Les Mots or, a little differently, statements such as the following, clearly parodic: Victor Shklovskii, Zoo / Letters not about Love / or The Third Heloise.   Gérard Genetteis professor of history and theory of literary forms at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. His principal works in French include Figures (1966), Figures II (1969), Figures III (1972), Introduction à l'architexte(1979), Nouveau discours du récit (1983), and, most recently, Seuils (1987). Bernard Crampé is assistant professor of romance languages and literatures at the University of Chicago. His principal work is in the history of rhetoric. David Simpson Literary Criticism and the Return to "History" If any emergent historical criticism will tend by its own choice toward inclusiveness and eclecticism, it is also likely to be constrained by more subtle forms of complicity with the theoretical subculture within which it seeks its audience. It is not in principle impossible that we might choose to set going an initiative that is very different indeed from the methods and approaches already in place. But is nonetheless clear that we must be aware, in some propaedeutic way, of the predispositions for or against such change that are latent in the horizons of the field as they are presently conceived and transmitted. An account of these predispositions will take up most of the following essay. Whether or not the particular texts I shall discuss constitute anything as firm as an establishment in the absolute sense does not matter much: they neither sum up the ongoing careers of their particular authors, in the diachronic sense, nor do they represent any simple totality in the critical culture of the late 1960s. All we need here is the weaker assumption: that these writings by Derrida, Paul de Man, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Macherey (with the later case of Fredric Jameson) do offer, by virtue of their very notoriety, evidence of the priorities within the discipline that have afforded them their reputations in the first place. Thus, while they do not in themselves prohibit the emergence of alternatives, they do give us clues about the residual pressures that might constrain those alternatives, and they signal the questions that the historical party must respond to if it is to be recognized as making an important contribution to a debate. My argument will be that the influential critics of the late 1960s have made it very hard indeed to find a place for history, so much so that the avowedly Marxist alternative set forth by Jameson finds itself making disabling concessions to those very influences. I do not claim to describe the entire range of options and alternatives, and indeed offer no discussion of the most excitingly contested field of all, that represented by contemporary feminisms. I mean instead to demonstrate, through a reading of those methodologies that have become authoritative, that the status of historical inquiry has been so eroded that its reactive renaissance, in whatever form, threatens to remain merely gestural and generic. "History" promises thus to function as legitimating any reference to a context beyond literature exclusively conceived, whether it be one of discourse, biography, political or material circumstance. In particular, given the current popularity of discourse analysis, it seems likely that for many practitioners the historical method will remain founded in covertly idealist reconstructions.   David Simpson is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is the author of various books and essays, most recently The Politics of American English, 1776-1850 (1986) and Wordsworth's Historical Imagination: The Poetry of Displacement (1987). Hazard Adams Canons: Literary Criteria/Power Criteria W. B. Yeats' poem "Politics" has as its epigraph Thomas Mann's remark, "In our time the destiny of man presents its meaning in political terms."1 Yeats chose the epigraph in 1938, just before World War II, for a poem proclaiming that sexuality holds his interest more than politics. This still may be true for poets, but by the looks of things, not for many contemporary critics, who, if they do not choose one over the other, subsume one under the other. For them everything is political (no more so than when it is sexual), which is to hold that everything is reduced to questions of power. So it is, in their eyes, with canons. The first canonization of note for western culture seems to have been that of the Hebrew Scriptures; and although there is much dispute about the whole matter of how that occurred, it is interesting to observe that in a 1971 book entitled The Shaping of Jewish History: A Radical New InterpretationEllis Rivkin presents the development of that canon in political terms, arguing that production of the Hebrew Scriptures "was not primarily the work of scribes, scholars, or editors who sought out neglected traditions about wilderness experience, but of a class struggling to gain power."2 In a very interesting article on this subject, Gerald L. Bruns observes that the lesson of this is that the concept of canon is not literary but a "category of power" ("CP," p. 478). Rivkin himself decides, as Bruns remarks, to treat "the promulgation of canonical texts of the Scriptures, not according to literary criteria but according to power criteria" ("CP," p. 475). Presumably it is this program that warrants Rivkin's subtitle Radical New Interpretation.But what would the literary criteria that are opposed to power criteria here be? Are there any longer believers in the more than trivial existence of such criteria? Does the destiny of literature now present its meaning political terms? If there are no longer thought to be such things as literary criteria, is there, can there be, literature? We have heard answers in the negative to the last question; and the notion of canon has recently been addressed almost always in terms of politics and power, most notably, of course, but certainly not exclusively, by feminist and minority critics. The destiny of women's writing has certainly presented its meaning in political terms.   Hazard Adams is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Washington. He has recently completed The Book of Yeats' Poems and a collection of critical essays. Daniel Cottom On the Dignity of Tables Soon after modern spiritualism announced itself with the "Rochester knockings" of 1848, tables took on a new and controversial life. No longer were they content to live out their days impassively upholding dishes and glasses and silverware, vases, papers and books, bibelots, elbows, or weary heads. They were changed: they began to move. Tables all over the United States and then in England, France, and other countries commenced rapping, knocking, tilting, turning, tapping, dancing, levitating, and even "thrilling" though this last was uncommon. So Mrs. Sophia Elizabeth De Morgan said in her discussion of Daniel Dunglas Home, probably the most famous nineteenth-century medium: It is only in Mr. Home's presence that I have witnessed that very curious appearance, or process, the thrilling of the table. This takes place for some seconds, perhaps more, before it rises from the floor. The last time I witnessed this phenomenon, an acute surgeon present said that this thrilling,the genuineness of which was unmistakable, was exactly like what takes place in that affection of the muscles called subsultus tendinum.2 And the tables did still more. Their actions were a language; and so they came to symbolize "the ‘movement,' as it has been called,"3 of modern spiritualism. Spirits had chosen the table as an organ of speech. Tables were customarily viewed as objects of economics, aesthetics, utility, diversion, tradition, even theology (in the case of church artifacts). Now, though, as Professor De Morgan jokes, "London and Paris were running after tables in a new sense."4 Tables had become a different kind of thing. Whatever one might think about reports of spiritual communications, the conception of tables had changed. They had become moral objects.   2. C. D. [Mrs. Sophia Elizabeth De Morgan], From Matter to Spirit. The Result of Ten Years' Experience in Spirit Manifestations,with a preface by A. B. [Augustus De Morgan] (London, 1863), p. 27.   Daniel Cottom is an associate professor of English at the University of Florida. His most recent books are Social Figures: George Eliot, Social History, and Literary Representation (1987) and Text and Culture: The Politics of Interpretation(forthcoming). This essay is adapted from a work in progress on spiritualism and surrealism. Daniel A. Herwitz The Security of the Obvious: On John Cage's_Musical_Radicalism That [John] Cage's challenge to our musical beliefs, attitudes, and practices is posed from the difficult perspective of a Zen master has often been discussed. What has been neglected both by Cage himself and by others is another equally potent challenge to the ordinary which Cage formulates in a related but distinct voice: that of the philosopher. Through his relentless inquiry into new music, Cage had defined certain radical possibilities for musical change. What is in effect his skepticism about music as we know it contains a cogent analysis of our musical concepts and practices: of what it is for us ordinarily to believe that something is music as opposed to not music, and of how those beliefs about music connect with styles of feeling and treating what we hear when we hear it as music. Indeed it is Cage's genius to have established the topic of skepticism about music as an issue for philosophy and cultural criticism. Cage's radical perspective on our musical beliefs allows us to consider both what those beliefs are and whether and how they might be justified. This invitation to philosophical response is an important feature of the avant-garde which Cage shares with Duchamp in plastic art, Gordon Matta-Clarke in architecture, and others. I wish to give it its due by outlining and addressing Cage's skepticism about music.   Daniel A. Herwitz is an assistant professor of philosophy at California State University, Los Angeles. He is currently at work on a book exploring philosophical tendencies in twentieth-century music, art, and architecture. Charles Altieri John Ashbery and the Challenge of Postmodernism in_the_Visual_Arts It is an irony perhaps worthy of John Ashbery that the critics who made his reputation as our premier contemporary poet have virtually ignored the innovations which in fact make his work distinctively of our time. The received terms show us how Ashbery revitalizes the old wisdom of Keats or the virile fantasies of Emersonian strength but they do so at the cost of almost everything about the work deeply responsive to irreducibly contemporary demands on the psyche. Such omissions not only distance Ashbery from the urgencies of the present, they also make it far more difficult to appreciate just how the best contemporary art actually defines the challenges and possibilities created by that present. By banishing writers like Ashbery to literary tradition, we leave the domain of the postmodern to two dominant discourses. One is driven by post- structural theory's idealization of the nomadic, the undecidable, and the profusion of simulacra. The other champions Marxist values which cast as the most significant contemporary art the rather slight oppositional devices of artists like Sherrie Levine, Hans Haacke, and Barbara Kruger. These critical idealizations then ignore what might be the central historical problem facing contemporary art. Can it continue to elaborate new dimensions of that late fifties postmodernism which set the values of Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, and Robert Rauschenberg against the increasingly formalist versions of modernism that then dominated the art world and the poetry workshops? Or does the age demand the emergence of a new sensibility, strands of which are being woven in post-structuralist mills?   Charles Altieri is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Washington. Author of books on contemporary poetry and literary theory, he has just completed a book on abstraction in modern poetry and painting. This essay lays some groundwork for a book, Bourgeois Utopians,attempt to keep the arts central to our discussion of postmodernism. Lauren Berlant Race, Gender, and Nation in The Color Purple The Color Purple problematizes tradition-bound origin myths and political discourse in the hope of creating and addressing an Afro- American nation constituted by a rich, complex, and ambiguous culture. But rather than using patriarchal language and logics of power to describe the emergence of a postpatriarchal Afro-American national consciousness, Celie's narrative radically resituates the subject's national identity within a mode of aesthetic, not political, representation. These discursive modes are not "naturally" separate, but The Color Purple deliberately fashions such a separation in its attempt to represent a national culture that operates according to "womanist" values rather than patriarchal forms.5 While political language is laden with the historical values and associations of patriarchal power, aesthetic discourse here carries with it a utopian force that comes to be associated with the spirit of everyday life relations among women.   5. Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (San Diego, 1983), p. xi. "Womanist" is a neologism of Walker's invention. Much more than an idiosyncratic translation of "feminist" into a black/third-world female tradition, the term describes the "woman" in a range of personal and social identities: "Usually referring to outrageous, audacious, courageous or willful behavior. Wanting to know more and in greater depth than is considered ‘good' for one…. Also: A woman who loves other women, sexually and/or nonsexually…. Sometimes loves individual men, sexually and/or nonsexually…. Traditionally universalist, as in … ‘the colored race is just like a flower garden, with every color flower represented.' " In calling the new nationalist epistemology imaged and advocated in The Color Purple an "aesthetic/symbolic" logic, I mean to honor the careful historical and categorical distinctions that operate in the novel and in Walker's critical work around it. Central to her practice is a delegitimation of traditionally patriarchal-racist political practices, institutions, and language.   Lauren Berlant is assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago. She is currently working on Nathaniel Hawthorne's readings of the cultural/sexual politics of national identity. Richard Stern Some Members of the Congress In most groups, there's a sort of commedia del l'arte distribution of roles. In families, factories, universities, corporations, people are known not only for their work, their looks, their social and economic status, but also for the characters they assume in the organization. So there are clowns and those who laugh at them, there are leaders and there are followers; some followers are worshipful, some resentful. Most people put on their organization-character as they put on their uniforms. It doesn't mean that the character isn't related to their temperament they have, after all, chosen it as they have chosen what they wear but it never represents all of what they are and often represents very little. It is a convenience, a way of smoothing the roughness of interaction. At a congress of writers, things are somewhat different. At the PEN Congress there were the clowns writers, say, like Salman Rushdie, the young Anglo-Indian novelist; there were dour, dynical observers from the periphery I think of Sven Delblanc, the Swedish novelist; there were writers who's pulled themselves out of Pleistocene social pockets which they'd barely survived and which they record: here I think of Kenji Nakagami, the Japanese novelist, screenwriter, and critic.   Richard Stern's Noble Rot, Stories 1949-88,will be published in the fall of 1988. Jerome J. McGann The Cantosof Ezra Pound, the Truth in Contradiction … [T]he scandals surrounding the work of these men are as nothing compared to the scandal of Ezra Pound's Cantos.We are amused to think that anyone ever felt Byron might have been mad, bad, and dangerous to know. We are not amused by the Cantos. Like Pound's letters and so much of his prose, the Cantos is difficult to like or enjoy. It is a paradigm of poetic obscurity because its often cryptic style is married to materials which are abstruse, learned, even pedantic. The poem also makes a mockery of poetic form; and then there are those vulgar and bathetic sinking which it repeatedly indulges through its macaronic turns of voice. All that is scandalous, but the worst has not been said. For the Cantosis a fascist epic in a precise historical sense.1 Its racism and anti-Semitism are conceived and pursued in social and political terms at a particular point in time and with reference to certain state policies. Those policies led to a holocaust for which the murder of six million Jews would be the ultimate exponent. That is truly scandalous For anyone convinced that works of imagination are important to human life, however, the scandal takes a last, cruel twist. Pound's magnum opus is one of the greatest achievements of modern poetry in any language. That is more a shocking than a controversial idea. It shocks because it is outrageous to think so; but it is in fact a commonplace judgment passed on the poem by nearly every major writer and poet of this century. The greatness of the Cantoswas an apparent to Pound's contemporaries as it has been to his inheritors, to his enemies as to his friends, to those who have sympathized with Pound's ideas and to those who have fought against them.   1. See John Lauber, "Pound's Cantos: A Fascist Epic," Journal of American Studies12 (1978): 3-21; Victor C. Ferkiss, "Ezra Pound and American Fascism," Journal of Politics 17 (May 1955): 173-97.   Jerome J. McGann is Commonwealth Professor of English, University of Virginia. This essay was originally one of the Clark Lectures delivered at Trinity College, Cambridge, and subsequently one of the Carpenter Lectures at the University of Chicago. Terry Castle Phantasmagoria: Spectral Technology and the Metaphorics of Modern Reverie In what follows I would like to uncover part of this history [of the phantasmagoria], not just as an exercise in romantic etymology (or for the sake of a certain Carlylean local color) but as a way of approaching a larger topic, namely, the history of the imagination. For since its invention, the term phantasmagoria,like one of Freud's ambiguous primary words, has shifted meaning in an interesting way. From an initial connection with something external and public (an artificially produced "spectral" illusion), the word has now come to refer to something wholly internal or subjective: the phantasmic imagery of the mind. This metaphoric shift bespeaks, I think, a very significant transformation in human consciousness over the past two centuries what I shall call here the spectralization or "ghostifying" of mental space. By spectralization (another nonce word!) I mean simply the absorption of ghosts into the world of thought. Even as we have come to discount the spirit- world of our ancestors and to equate seeing ghosts and apparitions with having "too much" imagination, we have also come increasingly to believe, as if through a kind of epistemological recoil, in the spectral nature of our own thoughts to figure imaginative activity itself, paradoxically, as a kind of ghost- seeing. Thus in everyday conversation we affirm that our brains are filled with ghostly shapes and images, that we "see" figures and scenes in our minds, that we are "haunted" by our thoughts, that our thoughts can, as it were, materialize before us, like phantoms, in moments of hallucinations, waking dream, or reverie.   Terry Castle,associate professor of English at Stanford University, is the author of two books: Clarissa's Ciphers: Meaning and Disruption in Richardson's "Clarissa"(1982) and Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in 18th-Century English Culture and Fiction (1986). She is currently working on a study of the literature and psychology of apparitions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries entitled "Spectropia: Ghost-Seeing and the Modern Imagination." Naomi Scheman Missing Mothers/Desiring Daughters: Framing the Sight of Women Connecting the issues of the female gaze and of the female narrative is the issue of desire. As [Stanley] Cavell repeatedly stresses, a central theme of these films is the heroine's acknowledgment of her desire of its true object frequently the man from whom she mistakenly thought she needed to be divorced. The heroine's acknowledgment of her desire, and of herself as a subject of desire, is for Cavell what principally makes a marriage of equality achievable. It is in this achievement (or the creation of the grounds for the hope of it) that Cavell wants to locate the feminism of the genre: it is the "comedy of equality" (PH,p. 82). There is, therefore, an obvious explanation in Cavell's terms for the anomalous nature of these films: if their vision is explicitly feminist in embracing an ideal of equality, in approvingly foregrounding female desire, and in characterizing that desire as active and as actively gazing, then they would not be expected to fit an analysis based on films whose view of female desire and the female gaze is passive, absent, or treacherous. If we accept Cavell's readings, these films provide genuine counterexamples to feminist claims of the normative masculinity of film (in general or in Hollywood). My affection for these films, and the ways in which Cavell accounts for that affection, leads me to want to believe that his account, or something like it, is true: that there did briefly emerge a distinctively feminist sensibility in some popular Hollywood movies, one which unsurprisingly succumbed to the repressive redomestication of women in the postwar years. But, for a number of reasons, I can't quite believe it. Some version of the feminist critical theory of popular cinema does, in an odd way, apply to these movies: they are, to use a frequent phrase of Cavell's, the exceptions that prove the rule. Though they do have some claim to being considered feminist, their feminism is seriously qualified by the terms in which it is presented, by the ways in which female desire and the female gaze are framed.   Naomi Scheman is associate professor of philosophy and women's studies at the University of Minnesota. She is currently working on the roles played by bodies and by differences in modern and feminist postmodern accounts of knowledge. Henri Meschonnic Rhyme and Life Poetry turns everything into life. It is that form of life that turns everything into language. It does not come to us unless language itself has become a form of life. That is why it is so unquiet. For it does not cease to work on us. To be the dream of which we are the sleep. A listening, awakening that passes through us, the rhythm that knows us and that we do not know. It is the organization in language of what has always been said to escape language: life, the movement no word is supposed to be able to say. And in effect words do not say it. That is why poetry is a meaning of time more than the meaning of words. Even when its course is ample, it is contained in what passes from us through words. It does not have the time of glaciers and ferns. It tells about a time of life. Through everything that it names. Even its haste transforms. Since it is a listening that compels a listening. But traditionally poetry suffers from the effect of the separation between the order of language and the order or disorder of life. It is that the order in which the thought of language is found is an order against chaos. The fabulous is not found in chaos. It is found in order. A mythic thought about language is charged with the maintaining of order. Thus there is an impassable barrier between poetry in terms of life and language in terms of the forms of poetry. Its meters and its rhymes. That is what we have to think about. Through and for poetry, language, life. Against sentimental poetizations of poetry and of life. As much as against formalizations.   Henri Meschonnic is professor of linguistics at the University of Paris VIII at Vincennes. His penultimate book of poems, Voyageurs de la voix (1985), was awarded the Prix Mallarmé. His other books include Critique du rythme, anthropologie historique du langage (1982) and Modernité, modernité(1988). Gabriella Bedetti,associate professor of English at Eastern Kentucy University, is completing A Meschonnic Reader. Zhang Longxi The Myth of the Other: China in the_Eyes_of_the_West For the West … China as a land in the Far East becomes traditionally the image of the ultimate Other. What Foucault does in his writing is, of course, not so much to endorse this image as to show, in the light of the Other, how knowledge is always conditioned in a certain system, and how difficult it is to get out of the confinement of the historical a priori, the epistemes or the fundamental codes of Western culture. And yet he takes the Borges passage seriously and remarks on its apparent incongruity with what is usually conceived about China in the Western tradition. If we are to find any modification of the traditional image of China in Foucault's thought, it is then the association of China not with an ordered space but with a space without any conceivable arrangement or coherence, a space that makes any logical ordering utterly unthinkable. Significantly, Foucault does not give so much as a hint to suggest that the hilarious passage from that "Chinese encyclopaedia" may have been made up to represent a Western fantasy of the Other, and that the illogical way of sorting out animals in that passage an be as alien to the Chinese mind as it is to the Western mind. In fact, the monstrous unreason and its alarming subversion of Western thinking, the unfamiliar and alien space of China as the image of the Other threatening to break up ordered surfaces and logical categories, all turn out to be, in the most literal sense, a Western fiction. Nevertheless, that fiction serves a purpose in Foucault's thought, namely, the necessity of setting up a framework for his archaeology of knowledge, enabling him to differentiate the self from what is alien and pertaining to the Other and to map out the contours of Western culture recognizable as a self-contained system. Indeed, what can be a better sign of the Other than a fictionalized space of China? What can furnish the West with a better reservoir for its dreams, fantasies, and utopias?   Zhang Longxi,author of A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century Theories of Literature (1986), is currently writing a dissertation in comparative literature at Harvard University. His previous contribution to is "The Tao and the Logos: Notes on Derrida's Critique of Logocentrism" (March 1985). David Stern Midrash and Indeterminacy Literary theory, newly conscious of its own historicism, has recently turned its attention to the history of interpretation. For midrash, this attention has arrived none too soon. The activity of Biblical interpretation as practiced by the sages of early Rabbinic Judaism in late antiquity, midrash has long been known to Western scholars, but mainly as either an exegetical curiosity or a source to be mined for facts about the Jewish background of early Christianity. The perspective of literary theory has placed midrash in a decidedly new light. The very nature of midrash (as recorded in the Talmud as well as in the more typical midrashic collections) has now come to epitomize precisely that order of literary discourse to which much critical writing has recently aspired, a discourse that avoids the dichotomized opposition of literature versus commentary and instead resides in the dense shuttle space between text and interpreter. In the hermeneutical techniques of midrash, critics have found especially attractive the sense of interpretation as play rather than as explication, the use of commentary as a means of extending a text's meanings rather than as a mere forum for the arbitration of original authorial intention. Some theoreticians have gone so far as to invoke midrash as a precursor, in a spiritual if not a historical sense, to more recent post-structuralist literary theory, in particular to deconstruction with its critique of logocentrism and the metaphysics of presence   David Stern is assistant professor of medieval Hebrew literature in the department of Oriental Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Parables in Midrash: The Intersection of Narrative and Exegesis in Rabbinic Literature (forthcoming) and coauthor, with Mark Jay Mirsky, of Rabbinic Fantasies: Imaginative Narratives from Classical and Medieval Hebrew Literature (forthcoming). Susan Stewart The Marquis de Meese The pornography debate occupies a prominent site of apparent contradiction in contemporary culture: a site where the interests of cultural feminism merge with those of the far Right, where an underground enterprise becomes a major growth industry, and where forms of speculation turn alarmingly practical. Another more problematic confluence occurs as a result of this debate. That is, by juxtaposing the 1986 Final Report of the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography (known informally as the Meese Commission's Report) and the Marquis de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom,we will see how pornography and the public discourse on pornography share the same comparative logic. An examination of such a logic shows how the pleasures of comparison its gestures toward control, limit, and transcendence are always balanced by its failures, even tragedies: the realization of the situated nature of all measurement, juxtaposition, subordination, and hierarchization. Thus this essay is designed to both discuss and illustrate a series of issues implicit in pornography's predicament: the impossibility of describing desire without generating desire; the impossibility of separating form and content within the process of sublimation; and, most important, the impossibility of constructing a metadiscourse on pornography once we recognize the interested nature of all discursive practices. We cannot transcend the pornography debate, for we are in it. But by writing through it, by examining its assumptions, we can learn a great deal about the problems of representing desire and the concomitant problems of a cultural desire for unmediated forms of representation.   Susan Stewart,whose most recent contribution to was "Shouts on the Street: Bakhtin's Anti- linguistics" (December 1983), is the author of two books of literary theory, Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature(1979) and On Longing: Narrative of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (1984), and two books of poetry, Yellow Stars and Ice (1981) and The Hive (1987). She is finishing a book on "crimes of writing," of which this essay is a part, and a study of the five senses. Edward W. Said Representing the Colozined: Anthropology's Interlocutors At this point I should say something about one of the frequent criticisms addressed to me, and to which I have always wanted to respond, that in the process of characterizing the production of Europe's inferior Others, my work is only negative polemic which does not advance a new epistemological approach or method, and expresses only desperation at the possibility of ever dealing seriously with other cultures. These criticisms are related to the matters I've been discussing so far, and while I have no desire to unleash a point-by-point refutation of my critics, I do want to respond in a way that is intellectually pertinent to the topic at hand. What I took myself to be undertaking in Orientalism was an adversarial critique not only of the field's perspective and political economy, but also of the sociocultural situation that makes its discourse both so possible and so sustainable. Epistemologies, discourses, and methods like Orientalism are scarcely worth the name if they are reductively characterized as objects like shoes, patched when worn out, discarded and replaced with new objects when old and unfixable. The archival dignity, institutional authority, and patriarchal longevity of Orientalism should be taken seriously because in the aggregate these traits function as a worldview with considerable political force not easily brushed away as so much epistemology. Thus Orientalism in my view is a structure erected in the thick of an imperial contest whose dominant wing it represented and elaborated not only as scholarship but as a partisan ideology. Yet Orientalism hid the contest beneath its scholarly and aesthetic idioms. These things are what I was trying to show, in addition to arguing that there is no discipline, no structure of knowledge, no institution or epistemology that can or has ever stood free of the various sociocultural, historical, and political formations that give epochs their peculiar individuality.   Edward W. Said is Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His most recent contribution to is "An Ideology of Difference" (Autumn 1985). W. J. T. Mitchell Editor's Introduction: Essays toward a New Art History The following articles are best described as essays "in," not "on," the New Art History. They exemplify what we regard as some of the most interesting new directions in the practical understanding of art: the discourse of art historical description (David Summers); the materiality of the pictorial surface (Charles Harrison); the role of genre (Norman Bryson); the relation of visual representation and language (Robert Morris, Jan Baetens, and W. J. T. Mitchell); and the mediation of social and economic history through painting (Elizabeth Helsinger). These essays constitute a kind of first installment of work resulting from out call for papers on "The Disciplines of the Eye." This call continues to go out, and we shall welcome contributions that attempt to take stock of current thinking in the visual arts in a more general way essays "on" as well as "in" the patterns of thought emerging in the study of visual representation. Norman Bryson Chardin and the Text of Still Life It can sometimes be that when a great artist works in a particular genre, what is done within that genre can make one see as if for the first time what that genre really is, why for centuries the genre has been important, what its logic is, and what, in the end, that genre is for.I want to suggest that this is so in the case of Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, and in the case of still life. Chardin's still life painting can reveal, as almost no other classical painting of still life can, what is at stake in still life, and what is that made still life one of the enduring categories of classical European painting. Understanding Chardin can force us right back to the fundamentals of the genre, to still life's origins in antiquity, and to the extraordinary development of the genre in the seventeenth century. Here I will be trying to investigate the genre of still life in the light of what Chardin's work reveals about it. In a sense I will be treating hardin as a critic, and not only as a painter, though everything he has to say about the genre is said in paint, and not as argument. If we can see Chardin's work with eyes fresh enough, we can let Chardin reveal to us still life's inner logic, its specific problems and solutions, and not only his solutions, but the solutions other still life painters look towards. In fact we probably have to turn to a painter to understand what still life is concerned with. It has always been the least discussed and the least theorised of the classical genres, and even today it is hard to find discussions of still life at a level of sophistication comparable to that of history painting, landscape, or portraiture. It is the genre farthest from language, and so the hardest for discourse to reach. There is no obvious tradition of theoretical work on still life, and in these circumstances it is appropriate to turn to a painter's practice for guidance. But first I need to make some preliminary observations about a striking and defining feature of the genre: its exclusion of the human form, and its seeming assault on the value and prestige of the human subject.   Norman Bryson is professor of comparative literature at the University of Rochester and editor of the series Cambridge New Art History and Criticism.He is the author of Tradition and Desire: From David to Delacroix (1984) and the editor of Calligram: Essays in New Art History from France (1988). He is currently completing a study of still life painting, Looking at the Overlooked (1989). Elizabeth Helsinger Constable: The Making of a National Painter John Constable is one of England's best-known landscape painters and greatest artists. While few will object to this statement, what it means will depend on when it was made. In the 150 years since his death in 1837, the terms of Constable's greatness have shifted several times. In the nineteenth century his scenes of the Stour Valley in Suffolk were valued as images of a particularly English countryside: the placid river with its locks and barges, great overhanging trees, and distant green water- meadows beneath massive cloudy skies. In this century, though the popular conviction of his Englishness persists, Constable is better known as "The Natural Painter."1 As modernism rewrote the history of art, Constable was rediscovered as the man who excited Eugène Delacroix and other French artists in the 1820s: the natural painter whose freedom of technique, color, and chiaroscuro suggested a new way of representing the truth of landscape. The happy accident of his reception in France in the 1820s anchors English claims to participate in the development of an international style that moves through impressionism toward the more purely painterly and formal values of modernism. This Constable probably still dominates contemporary critical discussions of his work: the truthful student of nature who is also a painter's painter.2 There is more than a little chauvinism in this view of Constable, but it is the national feeling of a less confident age, always looking over its shoulder to other countries like France.   1. This is the title of Graham Reynolds' seminal book, Constable, the Natural Painter (London, 1965). 2. See, for example, Malcolm Cormack's recent book, Constable (New York and Oxford, 1986); hereafter abbreviated C.   Elizabeth Helsinger is professor of English at the University of Chicago and coeditor of .Her Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder was published in 1982. This essay is part of a book in progress on representations of the rural scene in Victorian England. Jan Baetens The Intermediate Domain, or the Photographic Novel and_the_Problem of Value In recent years, the problem of value has been drastically pushed away towards the periphery of the discipline of literary studies. More and more, this fact has come to be experienced as a source of frustration and misunderstandings.1 In this article, I would like to show the great extent to which a value-oriented approach is in fact inevitable. By the same token, however, I will also indicate the disturbing ambiguities that the consideration of the value- dimension may reveal. The example I will use for my demonstration, the case of the French photographic novel (figs. 1-3), is fairly straightforward (as all examples ought to be), but at the same time it betrays my slightly polemical intentions, since this genre is undoubtedly held in low esteem both within and without the domain of literary scholarship. It seems reasonable to assume that our twentieth century, with its turbulent successions of competing fashions and trends, has radically affected the concept of value, that is, the dialectical game of valorization and devalorization. The notion of value has of course become subject to "devaluations" on the content- level, as the mixtures and the instabilities of the criteria called on clearly lattest.2 In addition and more important value has been disobjectified,that is, snatched from the object of the judgment and located on the side of the judging subject.   Jan Baetens teaches French at the Vlaamse Economische Hogeschool (Flemish High School for Economic Studies). He is the author of three books: Aux frontiers du récit: "Fable" de Robert Pinget comme "nouveau nouveau roman"(1987); Hergé écrivain: microlectures de Tintin(forthcoming); and Les Mesures de l'excès: notes pour un traverse de "Eglogues" de Renaud Camus et al. (forthcoming). He is currently at work on the various aspects of grammatextuality in literature and the comics. Charles Harrison On the Surface of Painting Lucas van Valckenborch's Winter Landscape (fig. 1) hangs in the Kinsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. It was painted four hundred years ago as one of a set of the four seasons. Measured by sales of reproductions, it is one of the most popular paintings in the museum, though it is by no means the most distinguished example of the genre to which it belongs. The picture is a snow scene. In the long series of represented planed that recede from foreground to horizon, fallen snow covers fields and roves. Across the surface of the canvas and scarcely diminishing in scale from bottom to top, touches of white paint represent falling snow. It is not a small painting, and these are not mere feathery indications, but palpable dabs from a loaded brush. To a taste fed on Modernist painting or, for the pedantic, to a prejudice fuelled by Modernist accounts of painting it is by virtue of this surprising frankness that the painting achieves more than mere anecdotal charm. It is not the illusion of depth in the picture that holds our sophisticated attention, nor the atmospheric re- creation of a leaden sky, nor do we admit to being engaged by the over-rehearsed animation of the peasants. What gives us pleasurable pause is the strange and distinctive form of skepticism about appearances that is set in play when the allure of imaginative depth meets resistance from the vividness of decorated surface.5   5. Wollheim (Painting as an Art,p. 21) uses the term ‘twofoldness' for ‘this strange duality of seeing the marked surface, and of seeing something in the surface.' In his account this experience leads to a thematizing of the image, which ‘ushers in representation.' Translated into his terminology, my suggestion would be that the Winter Landscape can be seen as catering to a Modernistic taste for the thematizing of ‘twofoldness' itself.   Charles Harrison is staff tutor and reader in the history of art at the Open University. He is the author of English Art and Modernism 1900-1939 (1981), and he is now completing a second volume, English Art and Modernism 1940-1985.He is co-author (with Fred Orton) of A Provisional History of Art & Language (1982), and his most recent book Essays on Art and Language is due out in 1989. He has been associated with the Art & Language group since 1971 and is editor of the journal Art-Language. Robert Morris Words and Images in Modernism and Postmodernism To speak of the nature of an image is to initiate a problematic second only to that raised by considerations of the nature of language. To inquire into the relations between image and language is to step into a very old philosophical problem. Nevertheless, I would hope at least to approach the edge of such an encounter in the attempt to see what relevance it might have for recent past art. Certainly the term "image" has had a long and embattled history. A taxonomy and a genealogy of the term might be in order. Do we wish to speak of mental images or of optical ones? What about perceptual images or the verbal images of descriptions and metaphors? To consider the sense data and appearances of the perceptual, or the dreams, fantasies, memories, and ideas of the mental image is to review an entire Western philosophical discourse. We might consider the issue of what may or may not be in the mind as an image; or the relation of visual images to linguistic terms; or the relation between objects and visual images that stand for them. Certainly the ways of formulating such relations have decided the divisions of Western metaphysics. Representational theories of the mind revolve around such issues and imply the persistent division of mind from body, subject from object. Let me say right away that my interests here are not to review an entire philosophical discourse with the hope of establishing a clarity of distinctions between the imagistic (whatever it is) and the linguistic. Rather the assumption here is that the two are inextricably entangled, and the interest is to see how certain art in this century has resisted or embraced this entanglement.   Robert Morris is an artist and a professor at Hunter College. A collection of his writings is forthcoming. W. J. T. Mitchell Ut Pictura Theoria:Abstract Painting and the Repression of_Language This may be an especially favorable moment in intellectual history to come to some understanding of notions like "abstraction" and "the abstract," if only because these terms seem so clearly obsolete, even antiquated, at the present time. The obsolescence of abstraction is exemplified most vividly by its centrality in a period of cultural history that is widely perceived as being just behind us, the period of modernism, ranging roughly from the beginning of the twentieth century to the aftermath of the Second World War.1 Abstract art is now a familiar feature of our cultural landscape; it has become a monument to an era that is passing from living memory into history. The experiments of cubism and abstract expressionism are no longer "experimental" or shocking: abstraction has not been associated with the artistic avant-garde for at least a quarter of a century, and its central masterpieces are now firmly entrenched in the tradition of Western painting and safely canonized in our greatest museums. That does not mean that there will be no more abstract paintings, or that the tradition is dead; on the contrary, the obsolescence we are contemplating is in a very precise sense the precondition for abstraction's survival as a tradition that resists any possible assault from an avant-garde. Indeed, the abstract probably has more institutional and cultural power as a rearguard tradition than it ever did as an avant-garde overturning of tradition. For that very reason its self-representations need to be questioned more closely than ever, especially its account of its own nature and history. This seems important, not just to set the record straight about what abstract art was, but to enable critical and artistic experimentation in the present, and a more nuanced account of both pre-and postmodern at, both of which are in danger of being swallowed up by the formulas (and reactions against the formulas) of abstract formalism. If art and criticism are to continue to play an oppositional and interventionist role in our time, passive acceptance and reproduction of a powerful cultural tradition like abstract art will simply not do.   1. I define modernism and "the age of abstraction" here in familiar art historical terms, as a period extending from Kandinsky and Malevich to (say) Jasper Johns and Morris Louis. There are other views of this matter which would trace modernism back to the emergence of an avant-garde in the 1840s (T. J. Clark), or to romanticism (Stanley Cavell), or to the eighteenth century (Robert Rosenblum, Michael Fried). My claim would be that "the abstract" as such only becomes a definitive slogan for modernism with the emergence of abstract painting around 1900.   W. J. T. Mitchell,editor of ,is professor of English and a member of the Committee on Art and Design at the University of Chicago. His most recent book is Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. David Summers "Form," Nineteenth-Century Metaphysics, and the Problem of Art Historical Description It will be useful to consider briefly how the ideas surrounding "form" work in practice. Such ideas rapidly developed to a high stage of sophistication, subtlety, and complexity, but they did not, I believe, stray from the foundations I have tried to indicate for them. Let us consider the example of Wilhelm Worringer, who, like Alois Riegl, found it preferable to discuss ornament rather than images because ornament is a purer expression of form and therefore provides a less encumbered view into form's spiritual meaning. Concerning interlace ornament of the first millennium in Northern Europe, Worringer wrote that it is "impossible to mistake the restless life contained in this tangle of lines"; it is "the decisive formula for the whole medieval North." The "need for empathy of this inharmonious people" requires the "uncanny pathos which attaches to the animation of the inorganic"; the "inner disharmony and unclarity of these peoples … could have borne no clearer fruit."4 Here forms mostly lines and edges and their relations are compared to a natural outgrowth, a fruit, and are interpreted in such a way as to permit the characterization of all peoples among whom artifacts with such forms were made and used. The range of formal style becomes coextensive with the range of the deep principles of the worldview of races, nations, and epochs. It is not necessary to follow the ideas of form and expression to quite the hypertrophied consequences Worringer did, although many authors have done so and many more have done so less systematically. The important thing for my purposes is the pattern of inference from form to historical statements and conclusion.   4. Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style,trans. Michael Bullock (Cleveland and New York, 1967), p. 77.   David Summers is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of the History of Art at the University of Virginia. The author of Michelangelo and the Language of Art (1981) and The Judgment of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics (1987), he is currently writing a book to be titled The Defect of Distance: Toward a University History of Art. Arnold I. Davidson Questions Concerning Heidegger: Opening the Debate Through the thickets of recent debates, I take two facts as clear enough starting points. The first is that Heidegger's participation in National Socialism, and especially his remarks and pronouncements after the war, were, and remain, horrifying. The second is that Heidegger remains of the essential philosophers of our century; Maurice Blanchot testifies for several generations when he refers to the "veritable intellectual shock" that the reading of Being and Time produced in him.5 And Emmanuel Levinas, not hesitating to express his reservations about Heidegger, can nevertheless bring himself to say that a person "who undertakes to philosophize in the twentieth century cannot not have gone through Hiedegger's philosophy, even to escape it."6 In this century, perhaps only Ludwig Wittgenstein has had a comparable impact and influence on philosophy. I do not mean to deny that one can reject the over seventy volumes of Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe as worthless, that one can, as with Wittgenstein, find that his work is obscure, indulgent, impossible to read, that nothing in it contributes to philosophy. But both Heidegger and Wittgenstein write in anticipation of this reaction, recognizing that their desires, differently articulated, to overcome philosophy will help to determine how their writing is received. Stanley Cavell's characterization of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations describes (not by chance) Heidegger as well: Philosophical Investigations,like the major modernist works of the past century at least, is, logically speaking, esoteric. That is, such works seek to split their audience into insiders and outsiders (and split each member of it); hence they create the particular unpleasantness of cults (at best as a specific against the particular unpleasantness of indifference or intellectual promiscuousness, combating partialness by partiality); hence demand for their sincere reception the shock of conversion.7 When combined with Heidegger's political engagement, the particular unpleasantness of cults and indifference are more than joined. Thus it can seem as though one must either exculpate Heidegger, explain away his relation to Nazism as an aberration from the outside, or reject his thought entirely, declare that his books should no longer be read. In an attempt to begin to confront these issues, is publishing this symposium.   5. Maurice Blanchot, "Thinking the Apocalypse: A Letter from Maurice Blanchot to Catherine David," trans. Paula Wissing, p. 479 of this issue. 6. Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo,trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh, 1985), p. 42. See also the last line of Gadamer, " ‘Back from Syracuse?' " p. 430. 7. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (New York and Oxford, 1979), p. xvi; hereafter abbreviated CR.   Arnold I. Davidson,a coeditor of ,is associate professor of philosophy and member of the Committees on General Studies in the Humanities and on the Conceptual Foundations of Science at the University of Chicago. His most recent contribution to is "Sex and the Emergence of Sexuality" (Autumn 1987). Hans-Georg Gadamer "Back from Syracuse?" It has been claimed, out of admiration for the great thinker, that his political errors have nothing to do with his philosophy. If only we could be content with that! Wholly unnoticed was how damaging such a "defense" of so important a thinker really is. And how could it be made consistent with the fact that the same man, in the fifties, saw and said things about the industrial revolution and technology that today are still truly astonishing for their foresight? In any case: no surprise should be expected from those of us who, for fifty years, have reflected on what dismayed us in those days and separated us from Heidegger for many years: no surprise when we hear that in 1933 and for years previous, and for how long after? he "believed" in Hitler. But Heidegger was also no mere opportunist. If we wish to dignify his political engagement by calling it a "standpoint," it would be far better to call it a political "illusion," which had notably little to do with political reality. If Heidegger later, in the face of all realities, would again dream his dream from those days, the dream of a "people's religion" [Volksreligion], the later version would embrace his deep disappointment over the actual course of affairs. But he continued guarding that dream and kept silent about it. Earlier, in 1933 and 1934, he thought he was following his dream, and fulfilling his deepest philosophical mission, when he tried to revolutionize the university from the ground up. It was for that that he did everything that horrified us at that time. For him the sole issue was to break the political influence of the church and the tenacity of academic bossdom. Even Ernst Jünger's vision of "the worker" [der Arbeiter] was given a place beside his own ideas about overcoming the metaphysical tradition via the reawakening of Being. Later, as is known, Heidegger wandered all the way to his radical talk of the end of philosophy. That was his "revolution."   Hans-Georg Gadamer is professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Heidelberg. His books include Truth and Method, Philosophical Hermeneutics, The Idea of the Good in Platonic- Aristotelian Philosophy,and The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays. John McCumber,associate professor of philosophy at Northwestern University, is the author of Poetic Interaction: Language, Freedom, Reason (forthcoming). Jürgen Habermas Work and Weltanschauung: The Heidegger Controversy from a_German Perspective From the perspective of a contemporary German reader, one consideration is particularly important from the start. Illumination of the political conduct of Martin Heidegger cannot and should not serve the purpose of a global depreciation of his thought. As a personality of recent history, Heidegger comes, like every other such personality, under the judgment of the historian. In Farias' book as well, actions and courses of conduct are presented that suggest a detached evaluation of Heidegger's character. But in general, as members of a later generation who cannot know how we would have acted under conditions of a political dictatorship, we do well to refrain from moral judgments on actions and omissions from the Nazi era. Karl Jaspers, a friend and contemporary of Heidegger, was in a different position. In a report that the denazification committee of the University of Freiburg at the end of 1945, he passed judgment on Heidegger's "mode of thinking": it seemed to him "in its essence unfree, dictatorial, uncommunicative."7 This judgment is itself no less informative about Jaspers than about Heidegger. In making evaluations of this sort Jaspers, as can be seen from his book on Friedrich Schelling, was guided by the strict maxim that whatever truth a philosophical doctrine contains must be mirrored in the mentality and lifestyle of the philosopher. This rigorous conception of the unity of work and person seems to me inadequate to the autonomy of thought and, indeed, to the general history of the reception and influence of philosophical thought. I do not mean by this to deny all internal connection between philosophical works and the biographical contexts from which they come or to limit the responsibility attached to an author, who during his lifetime can always react to unintended consequences of his utterances.   7. Ott, "Martin Heidegger und der Nationalsozialismus," p. 65.   Jürgen Habermas is professor of philosophy at the University of Frankfurt. His most recent books include the two-volume work Theory of Communicative Action (1984) and The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures (1987). John McCumber is an associate professor of philosophy at Northwestern University. He is the author of Poetic Interaction: Language, Freedom, Reason (forthcoming). Jacques Derrida Of Spirit I shall speak of ghost [revenant], of flame and of ashes. And of what, for Heidegger, avoiding means. What is avoiding? Heidegger on several occasions uses the common word Vermeiden:to avoid, to flee, to dodge. What might he have meant when it comes to "spirit" or the "spiritual"? I specify immediately: not spirit or the spiritual but Geist, geistig, geistlich,for this question will be, through and through, that of language. Do these German words allow themselves to be translated? In another sense: are they avoidable? Sein und Zeit (1927): what does Heidegger say at that time? He announces and he prescribes. He warns [avertit]: a certain number of terms will have to be avoided (vermeiden). Among them, spirit (Geist). In 1953, more than twenty-five years later and this was not just any quarter-century in the great text devoted to Georg Trakl, Heidegger notes that Trakl always took care to avoid (vermeidenagain) the word geistig.And, visibly, Heidegger approves him in this; he thinks the same. But this time, it is not Geist nor even geistlich that is to be avoided, but geistig. How are we to delimit the difference, and what has happened? What of this meantime? How are we to explain that in twenty-five years, between these two warning signals ("avoid," "avoid using"), Heidegger made a frequent, regular, marked (if not remarked) use of all this vocabulary, including the adjective geistig?And that he often spoke not only of the word "spirit" but, sometimes yielding to the emphatic mode, in the name of spirit?   Jacques Derrida is Directeur d'Études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris) and also teaches at the University of California, Irvine. His most recent contribution to is "Like the Sound of the Sea Deep within a Shell: Paul de Man's War" (Spring 1988). An English translation of De l'espirit: Heidegger et la question is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press. Geoff Bennington,author of Lyotard: Writing the Event,is a lecturer in French at the University of Sussex. Rachel Bowlby,author of Virginia Woolf: Feminist Destinations,is a lecturer in English at the University of Sussex. Maurice Blanchot Thinking the Apocalypse: A Letter from Maurice Blanchot_to Catherine David I prefer to put this in a letter to you instead of writing an article that would lead one to believe that I have any authority to speak on the subject of what has, in a roundabout way, become the H. and H. affair (just as there was Luchaire affair, a Chaumet affair, and so on). In other words, a cause of extreme seriousness, already discussed many times although certainly endless in nature, has been taken up by a storm of media attention, which has brought us to the lowest of passions, intense emotions, and even violence. I understand why people are talking about Victor Farias, who has contributed some unpublished information with a polemical intent, it is true, that does not help one to appreciate its true value. But how has it happened that Philippe Lacoue- Labarthe's book, published in 1987, was greeted by a silence that I am perhaps the first to break?1 It is because he avoids anecdotal accounts, all the while citing and situating most of the facts mentioned by Farias. He is severe and rigorous. He lays essential questions before us.   1. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, La Fiction du politique: Heidegger, l'art et la politique(Paris, 1987). I also cite Lacoue- Labarthe's book, La Poésie comme experience (Paris, 1986), devoted to Paul Celan.   Maurice Blanchot,one of France's preeminent writers, has written, among many other books, The Last Man, Death Sentence, The Madness of the Day,and The Gaze of Orpheus and Other Literary Essays.Paula Wissing,a free-lance translator and editor, has recently translated Paul Veyne's Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe Neither an Accident nor a Mistake Something … happened … in the first half of this century, and the second half, hovering between nightmare and parody, is only its shadow. Even so we must take its measure. Not on a small scale, based on the last three or four centuries…. But since philosophy, even in its possibility, is at stake, the true assessment, incalculable as it is, of the entire history of the West is needed. And that is another matter altogether. We know that this other matter was, at the time, the Heidegger affair…. Since Nietzsche no thinker has delved so deeply and so far into the question of the essence of philosophy (and consequently, the essence of thought), nor has there been anyone who has opened a dialogue of such breadth and rigor with the tradition of the West. Nonetheless, a detail concerning this subject requires our attention: to subscribe, as I do, to Heidegger's theses (and particularly to his theses about philosophy), or even to grant a primary place to his thought, does not amount to any kind of declaration or profession of "Heideggerianism," as it is called…. Strictly speaking, the idea of a "Heideggerianism" is meaningless. It is not out of coyness or inconsistency that Heidegger constantly reminded us that "there is no philosophy of Heidegger." This clearly was an expression of his own question in condensed form: the question of Being could not in any way produce a new thesis on Being or, even less, give rise to any sort of "concept of the world." …   Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe teaches philosophy at the University of Strasbourg. His books include The Literary Absolute (with Jean-Luc Nancy), Le Sujet de la philosophie, L'imitation des moderns,and, most recently, La Fiction du politique,forthcoming in an English translation from Basil Blackwell Press. Paula Wissing is a free-lance translator and editor. She has recently translated Paul Veyne's Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? Emmanuel Levinas As If Consenting to Horror I learned very early, perhaps even before 1933 and certainly after Hitler's huge success at the time of his election to the Reichstag, of Heidegger's sympathy toward National Socialism. It was the late Alexandre Koyré who mentioned it to me for the first time on his return from a trip to Germany. I could not doubt the news, but took it with stupor and disappointment, and also with the faint hope that it expressed only the temporary lapse of a great speculative mind into practical banality. It cast a shadow over my firm confidence that an unbridgeable distance forever separated the delirious and criminal hatred voiced by Evil on the pages of Mein Kampf from the intellectual vigor and extreme analytical virtuosity displayed in Sein und Zeit,which had opened the field to a new type of philosophical inquiry. Could one question the incomparable impression produced by this book, in which it immediately became apparent that Heidegger was the interlocutor and equal of the greatest those very few founders of European philosophy? that here was someone, this seemed obvious, all modern thought would soon have to answer?   Emmanuel Levinas has been professor of philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure Israélite de Paris and at the University of Paris I (Sorbonne). Among his books that have been translated into English are Totality and Infinity, Ethics and Infinity,and Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence. Paula Wissing,a free-lance translator and editor, has recently translated Paul Veyne's Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? Garry Wills Message in the Deoderant Bottle: Inventing Time I have on my desk an artifact of wonderful contrivance. Though its outer skin is of flimsy cardboard standing over half a foot high, it is squarely based, making it nearly untippable on shelves. It is a deodorant product called ban a box containing a bottle containing a liquid. But this simple division of the artifact into three components gives no idea of the complex relationships sustained between part and part, or within each part taken separately. Study, first, the bottle. It emerges from the box a tall and shapely miracle of ballast. It emerges from the box a tall and shapely miracle of ballast. Its most prominent feature, the revolving-ball applicator on top, is airy enough not to destabilize the three-and-one-half ounces of liquid in the bottle's pyramidal base. It looks like one of those skirted Egyptian statues with no waist to speak of bulbous of headdress or hairstyle above, firm-footed below, pinched in the middle. The box, despite artfully cutout windows, gives little suggestion of the Nefertiti-like interior. On the contrary: the box suggests that the bottle is bulkier than, unclothed, it turns out to be. Still, one could argue that the box is almost suicidally candid. It not only confesses but proclaims how much of the interior is taken up by the applicator (leaving, obviously, less space for the stuff that is to be applied). The upper window space on the bottle is intruded on by a semicircle of cardboard the lower half of a full yellow circle boldly marked off from the green and white product colors that reign everywhere else. Inside the circle, wide letters boast: WIDE BALL. The circle is, in fact, exactly the size of the wide ball as seen in section, giving us what seems an almost geometrical regard for truth in advertising. The circle is repeated, at full size, on both ends of the box; but there it is white, with WIDE BALL printed in green. Why this emphasis on an empty ball, on the fact that one is being sold a great content of air? The ball is shrouded by a huge plastic cover, a screw-on cowl that gives the Egyptian figure its impressive headdress.   Garry Wills,adjunct professor of history at Northwestern University, is the author of Reagan's America (1987). His previous contribution to was "Washington's Citizen Virtue: Greenough and Houdon" (March 1984). Michael Rogin The Great Mother Domesticated: Sexual Difference and Sexual Indifference in D. W. Griffith's Intolerance A giant statue of the mother goddess, Ishtar, presides over Intolerance (1916), the movie D. W. Griffith made after his triumph with The Birth of a Nation(1915). Ishtar sits above Babylon's royal, interior court, but the court itself is constructed on so gigantic a scale that is diminishes the size of the goddess. Perhaps to establish Ishtar's larger-than-life proportions, Griffith posed himself alongside her in a production still from the movie (fig. 1). The director is the same size as the sculptured grown man who sucks at Ishtar's breast; both males are dwarfed by the goddess' dimensions. Ishtar connects Griffith to the concern with originary female power current at the turn of the twentieth century. The appearance of the New Woman and the attention to the matriarchal origins of culture were signs of a crisis in patriarchy. But the great mother could support masculine reassertion as well as female power. Ishtar will show us how.   Michael Rogin is professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent books are Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville(1985), and "Ronald Reagan," the Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (1987). Stanley Fish Spectacle and Evidence in Samsom Agonistes When the chorus at the end of Samson Agonistesdeclares that "all is best," what it means is that the best of all possible things, the thing everyone in the play most desires, has finally happened: Samson is dead. This is, of course, not quite fair. What the chorus most wants is that things once more be as they were, and its moment of highest joy in the play involves the speculation that a revived Hebrew hero may "now be dealing dole among his foes / And over heaps of slaughtered walk his way" (ll. 1529-30).1 "That were a joy presumptuous to be through" (l. 1531), responds Manoa, indicating that he too wishes for nothing more than the return of the days when his son "walked about … / On hostile ground" "like a petty god" (ll. 530-31, 529). This is also what Harapha wants for different reasons when he says of Samson's change of fortune, I "wish it had not been, / Though for no friendly intent" (ll. 1077-78); and it is what Dalila wants for more reasons than Samson can shake a stick at when she laments an event more "perverse … than I foresaw" (l. 737) and attempts to mitigate if she cannot cancel the effects of her "rash but more unfortunate misdeed" (l. 747). Everyone, in short, wants to turn back the clock, and this, of course, includes Samson, who is obsessed with the disparity between his present and his past states: "Why was my breeding ordered and prescribed / … / … if I must die / Betrayed, captive[?]" (ll. 30-33); "Promise was that I / Should Israel from Philistian yoke deliver; / Ask for this great deliverer now, and find him / Eyeless in Gaza" (ll. 38-41); "The base degree to which I now am fall'n" (l. 414); "I was his nursling once and choice delight" (l. 633).   1. John Milton, Samson Agonistes, The Poems of John Milton,ed. John Carey and Alastair Fowler (London and New York, 1968); hereafter cited by line number.   Stanley Fishis Arts and Sciences Professor of English and Professor of Law and chairman of the English department at Duke University. His most recent book is Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Legal and Literary Studies. David Van Leer The Beast of the Closet: Homosociality and the_Pathology_of_Manhood [Eve] Sedgwick examines from an explicitly feminist, implicitly Marxist perspective the relation of homosexuality to more general social bonds between members of the same sex ("male homosocial desires"). She argues that the similarity between (socially acceptable) homosocial desire and (socially condemned) homosexuality lies at the root of much homophobia. Moreover, she sees this tension as misogynist to the extent that battles fought over patriarchy within the homosocial world automatically exclude women from that patriarchal power. Thus she places homosexuality and its attendant homophobia within a wider dynamic of social relationships.1 Yet even as Sedgwick invents a more sophisticated definition of "homophobia," she may permit misreading of a more elementary sort. Her use of vocabulary is troubling. In a slangy prose that regularly juxtaposes James Hogg and Louis Lepke, Tennyson and Howard Keel, references to the "campiness" of Thackeray's "bitchy" bachelors or the "feminized" cuckolds of Wycherley's The Country Wife seem tame enough. Yet there is a political difference between the jokes. One can burlesque fifties musicals or organized crime with impunity; to refer to sexually embattled men with feminine adjectives, however, is to reinforce a sexual stereotype that sees in the supposed effeminacy of homosexuals a sign of their deviance. Nor are women empowered when terms of female degradation like "bitch" are turned back against men: the ironic reversal does not challenge the terms' validity but reaffirms it, showing they have an even wider range of applicability than had been thought.   1. Throughout my analysis, I use "homosexual" and "gay" exclusively in reference to male sexuality. I do so in part to echo Sedgwick's emphasis and in part because the logic of my own argument does not empower me to speak on female homosexuality.   David Van Leer is associate professor of English and American literature at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of Emerson's Epistemology: The Argument of the Essays(1986) and articles on American literature and popular culture. Stanley Cavell Who Disappoints Whom? Can one conceive something to say about Allan Bloom's view of America and the American university that he hasn't already heard? Setting aside the perhaps undiscussable differences in what we each saw in our students of the 1960s, I find two regions in which Bloom's experience and mine differ systematically that are specific and clear enough to be stated briefly, perhaps usefully: first, our experience of the position of philosophy in the intellectual economy we were presented with in the two decades prior to the 1960s; second, our experience of the modern and the popular in the arts. My citing of these differences can only prove worthwhile, however, against a background of agreement I find with his work over the centrality of a cluster of issues, of which I specify five: a first agreement concerns the illustriousness (in Emerson's sense, which includes illustrativeness) of the university in the life of a democracy; a second concerns the irreplaceability of Great Books what Thoreau calls scriptures in (let's call it) a humanistic education; a third concerns the unaware imbibing of European thought by a chronically unprepared American constitution a condition that is as live for us, or should be, as when Emerson was founding American thinking by demonstrating his knack of inheriting, by transfiguring, European philosophy; a fourth moment of agreement concerns the goal of a democratic university education as keeping open the idea of philosophy as a way of life, call it the life of the mind, a name for which might be Moral Perfectionism (Bloom speaks of the longing for completeness, Emerson speaks instead of a capacity for partiality, and of the courage to become both see in the goal a desire for the world's human possibilities, and both are aware that the aspiration is always threatening to turn into debased narcissism or foolish imitation); a fifth sense of my agreement with Bloom concerns the threat that a discourse about such issues, such as the prose fashioned in Bloom's book (manifestly the product of a lifetime of reading and of a devotion to teaching), is becoming unintelligible to the culture that has produced it, and not alone to the young (in my experience, less to them than to others).   Stanley Cavell is the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. His most recent works include In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism and This New Yet Unapproachable America: Essays after Emerson after Wittgenstein Robert J. Griffin Ideology and Misrepresentation: A Response to Edward Said The gist of Edward Said's attack on Israel ("An Ideology of Difference," 12 [Autumn 1985]: 38-58) is that Zionism is racism. The very appearance of his essay in a special issue devoted to racism is an interesting fact in itself. But the fact that the editors up until now received no responses to Said carries special significance. It signals, or can be read as signaling, that the literary-critical establishment has reached a consensus and that liberal supporters of Israel in our discipline have retreated from the field. I may be wrong about this, of course, for other explanations are possible, but Houston A. Baker, Jr.'s observations a year later on that special issue would seem to reinforce my view. Baker describes Said's (and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's) method as aiming "to prove that ‘A' is as good as‘B' and to induce shame in defenders of ‘B' who have made other axiological choices." Baker protests against this method, however, since it gives too much play to "B," so that "it is difficult to hear a Palestinian voice separate from the world of Jewish discourse." Then he adds in parentheses: "(Of course, Jews are not likely to feel this way, and will probably call for Said's head on a platter. But that is the necessary reaction of well-financed client states.)"2 In Baker's language, only Jews are likely to disagree, and these "Jews," conceived as a unitary group, are a client state (no doubt of some evil empire) and are compared by means of allusion to the corrupt, libidinous king who executed the true prophet (in this case, Said), the herald of Jesus. These comments are remarkable in any context, but especially so in a forum on racism.   Robert J. Griffin is a lecturer in English at Tel Aviv University. He is currently working on two books, one on Samuel Johnson and one on literary historiography. Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin Toward a Dialogue with Edward Said As critics, a vital part of our task is to examine the ways in which language mystifies and reveals, serves and disserves human desires and aspirations. In that spirit we feel that engaging the leading Palestinian intellectual in the United States in a critical dialogue is a vital task. Although this reply takes issue with several points in Edward Said's paper, "An Ideology of Difference" ( 12 [Autumn 1985]: 38-58), our critique is intended as part of the struggle for increased mutual empathy. We in no way wish to deny Said's claims regarding the legitimacy of Palestinian aspirations, nor the validity of Said and other Palestinian intellectuals' efforts to counter the destructive military, political, and ideological forces that stand in the way of the Palestinians' achievement and self- determination. Said's critiques of the idea that Israel is somehow above criticism, and of the elimination of the Palestinians from "Western" discourse, are both valid.2 We wish to make our own perspective clear at the start. We are both Jewish nationalists. We believe that it's a good thing to be Jewish. We believe that those of Jewish heritage who fail to explore and re-create that heritage lose something of themselves. We think that Judaism still has a role to play in the healing of the world. By making this statement, we are not claiming that our views are identical,3 nor that they are the same from day to day, nor, a fortiori, that they are identical or even similar to those of many or most other people who would define themselves in that way. This, we note, touches on one of the aspects of Said's paper of which we are most critical: The statements that he makes at several points, which seem to reify Zionists and Zionism into one model of theory and social practice, as well as his occlusion of the fact that other options for Jewish self-renewal were obviated by genocide or Soviet repression.   2. We are hardly alone among Jewish intellectuals in concurring with this point. Compare the recent comments by the American Jewish leader Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg: In memory of the Holocaust we have been reminded by you that silence is a sin. You have spoken out against indifference and injustice. Why are you making a special exception of Israel? Do you think that our silence will help Israel? The texts that we study and restudy teach the contrary. (Arthur Hertzberg, "Open Letter to Elie Wiesel," New York Review of Books,18 Aug. 1988, 14.)   Daniel Boyarin is associate professor of midrash at Bar-Ilan University. His articles on midrash and theory have appeared in Poetics Today and Representations,and a monograph on the subject is forthcoming this year. Jonathan Boyarin is a fellow of the Max Weinreich Center at the VIVO Institute for Jewish Research. He edited and translated, with Jack Kugelmass, From a Ruined Garden: The Memorial Books of Polish Jewry,and is currently completing an ethnography of Polish Jews in Paris. He is active in the International Jewish Peace Union. Edward W. Said Response Since neither of these two inordinately long responses deals seriously with what I said in "An Ideology of Difference" (written in 1984, published in 12 [Autumn 1985]: 38-58), both the Boyarins and Griffin are made even more absurd by actual events occurring as they wrote. The Israeli army has by now been in direct and brutal military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza for twenty-one years; the intifadah,surely the most impressive and disciplined anticolonial insurrection in this century, is now in its eleventh month. The daily killings of unarmed Palestinians by armed Israelis, soldiers and settlers, numbers several hundred; yesterday two more Palestinians were killed, the day before (7 October 1988) four were killed. The beatings, expulsions, wholesale collective punishments, the closure of schools and universities, as well as the imprisonment of dozens of thousands in places like Ansar III, a concentration camp, continue. A V sign flashed by a young Palestinian carries with six months in jail; a Palestinian flag can get you up to ten years; you risk burial alive by zealous Israel Defense Forces soldiers; if you are a member of a popular committee you are liable to arrest, and all professional, syndical, or community associations are now illegal. Any Palestinian can be put in jail without charge or trial for up to six months, renewable, for any offense, which needn't be revealed to him or her. For non-Jews, approximately 1.5 million people on the West Bank and Gaza, there are thus no rights whatever. On the other hand, Jews are protected by Israeli law on the Occupied Territories. In such a state of apartheid so named by most honest Israelis the intifadah continues, as does the ideology of difference vainly attempting to repress and willfully misinterpret its significance.   Edward W. Saidis Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His most recent contribution to is "Representing the Colonized: Anthropology's Interlocutors" (Winter 1989). Robert Markley What Isn't History: The Snares of Demystifying Ideological Criticism Oscar Kenshur's "Demystifying the Demystifiers: Metaphysical Snares of Ideological Criticism" (Critical Inquiry14 [Winter 1988]: 335-53) should go a long way toward convincing most readers that the cure for "ideological" (or Marxist) criticism is worse than the disease. His attempt to uncouple ideology and epistemology in Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan and Michael Ryan's Marxism and Deconstruction belongs to an increasingly popular subgenre of metacriticism, the "more-historical-than-thou" offensive against Marxists and new historicists for their alleged essentialist procedures.1 There is no question that Kenshur raises significant issues about the nature of ideological analysis that should be debated. However, he has neither interrogated the basis of his own assumptions about seventeenth-century views of language theory and epistemology nor convincingly demonstrated, to my mind, that Ryan is somehow wrong in his reading of Hobbes. The weakness of Kenshur's argument is that he seems intent on erecting the windmills at which he wants to tile most damagingly for his argument a simplistic notion of ideology that he assumes both Hobbes and Ryan share. By accepting a deterministic notion of ideology, Kenshur offers a "corrective" to overzealous claims for the significance of ideological criticism that has the effect not of "sav[ing history] from its friends" (p. 353) but of returning it to the status of "background" or "context" that it had been for a previous generation of New Critics. The terms in which he casts his argument epistemology and/or (but not as) ideology redefine "ideological criticism" in a polemical manner designed, it seems, to discourage anyone from wanting to practice it. His ultimate purpose is not simply to save "history" from the Ryans of the world but to inoculate his versions of literature and philosophy against the ideological virus. To respond fully to the various issues that Kenshur raises would require detailed analyses of seventeenth-century literary and political culture and of the institutionalization of twentieth- century criticism; simply to discuss the differences between Hobbes and Ryan on epistemology or ideology would require a full-length study of the various discourses in which and against which their works are situated. Given the limitations of a critical response, I shall confine my remarks to two suspect areas of Kenshur's argument: his characterization of seventeenth-century notions of the relationships among language, epistemology, and ideology and his assumptions about the nature of claims currently made for ideological analysis.   1. See, for example, Edward Pechter, "The New Historicism and Its Discontents: Politicizing Renaissance Drama," PMLA 102 (May 1987): 292-303.   Robert Markley teaches in the English department of the University of Washington and is editor of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation.He is the author of Two-Edg'd Weapons: Style and Ideology in the Comedies of Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve (1988) and coauthor, with Kenneth J. Koespel, of Newton and the Failure of Messianic Science: A Postmodern Inquiry into the Discourses of Natural Philosophy (forthcoming). Oscar Kenshur (Avoidable) Snares and Avoidable Muddles The subtitle of the essay that Robert Markley attacks had, in its penultimate version, a parenthetical word that was ultimately dropped. It read, "(Avoidable) Metaphysical Snares of Ideological Criticism." The editor of ,W. J. T. Mitchell, politely suggested that my subtitle was redundant: snares, he observed, are by nature avoidable. Indeed they are. In fact, my parentheses were intended to indicate that the word didn't really need to be there. The self-conscious redundancy was intended to underlines the fact that the essay was not attacking ideological criticism in general, but only certain tendencies that seemed especially prevalent in ideological critiques of abstract ideas. Seeking support for my redundancy, I appealed to a sagacious friend, who promptly urged me to follow Mitchell's suggestion and drop the "avoidable," parentheses or no parentheses. I was asking my title to do too much, he observed; the essay itself would make it quite clear that I was undertaking to refine and strengthen the techniques of ideological criticism by urging that its pitfalls be avoided. If I had declined to follow this eminently reasonable advice and had retained the word "avoidable," would that have kept Markley from so radically misconstruing my project? After all, near the end of his rebuttal, he acknowledges that "Kenshur is right … in one respect," that there is a "lot of not particularly interesting pseudo-Marxist criticism being written" (p. 656). If I had underscored my own sympathy toward and links with the new historicism something that I could have done in all good conscience would that have disarmed him? Or if I now undertook, after the fact, to offer assurances that I, like Markley, was working from within the capacious and self-critical Marxist tradition and trying to distinguish its strengths from its weaknesses, would that impel him, like Gilda Radner's Emily Litella (another launcher of overheated attacks based on misapprehensions), meekly to say, "Never mind"? Perhaps, but somehow I doubt it.   Oscar Kenshur is associate professor of comparative literature at Indiana University. He is author of Open Form and the Shape of Ideas (1986) and is completing Dilemmas of Enlightenment,a study that traces shifts in the ideological significance of early modern ideas about intellectual method, religious toleration, and female chastity. Simon During After Death: Raymond Williams in the Modern Era Like all deaths, Raymond Williams' must touch most profoundly those who were closest to him; it belongs first to his private circle. But it also belongs to his fame: to those who have read his books, heard him speak in public, were taught by him, and, then, to those who have been taught by those he taught, and so on. Because Williams was so committed and important politically writing not just as an academic but as a leftist his death also enters public history. One can ask: does it mark the end of an era? Or, on the contrary, is it the sign of a beginning set in motion by the programs, the shifts of emphasis, he urged? Such questions are all the most insistent because the left, as a political force and as an idea, is so fragile today. Indeed, no other theme seems as urgent in thinking about Williams' life and work now; for, to put it rather glibly, it is no longer easy to tell left from right. If we regard "being on the left" as requiring the belief that state control of the economy and the ideological apparatus and the empowerment of the proletariat are steps demanded by the journey towards real, rather than illusory or formal, freedom, then who is still on the left? And if "being on the left" does not require such beliefs, if there is a left that is not statist, how does it differ from liberalism, from a Deleuzian or Foucauldian micro-politics or a mere insistence on "social justice"?2   2. This is not to approach the question of what it means to be a "Marxist" (as against just "one the left") in cultural/literary studies. Historically, one of the clearest demarcations of Marxism within and from the left in general was its willingness to theorize and imagine revolution. The difficulties faced by Williams' work and career are very much those posed by a nonrevolutionary Marxism. (And, to anticipate, this problematic, strangely enough, also connects him to Maurice Blanchot.)   Simon During is a lecturer in English at the University of Melbourne. His Foucault and Literature will appear in 1990, and he is currently working on a book entitled Literature without Culture Shoshana Felman Paul de Man's Silence The responses to this discovery, in the press and elsewhere, seem to focus on the act of passing judgment, a judgment that reopens with some urgency the question of the ethical implications of de Man's work and, by extension, of the whole school of critical approach known as "deconstruction." The discourse of moral judgment takes as its target three distinct domains of apparent ethical misconduct: 1. the collaborationist political activities themselves; 2. de Man's apparent erasure of their memory his radical "forgetting" of his early past; 3. the silence that de Man chose to keep about his past: the absence of public confession and public declaration of remorse. The question of ethics thus seems to be linked to the separate questions of the nature of political activities, of the nature of memory, and of the nature of silence. It is judged unethical, of course, to engage in acts that lent support to Germany's wartime position; but it is also judged unethical to forget; and unethical, furthermore, to keep silent in relation to the war and to the Holocaust. The silence is interpreted as a deliberate concealment, a suppression of accountability that can only mean a denial of responsibility on de Man's part.   Shoshana Felman,the Thomas E. Donnelley Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Yale University, is the author of The Literary Speech Act: Don Juan with Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages (1984), Writing and Madness: Literature/Philosophy/ Psychoanalysis(1985), and Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture: Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight(1987). She is also the editor of Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading Otherwise (1982). She is currently working on a book entitled Testimony in History, Literature and Psychoanalysis. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Tide and Trust Many things are frightening in the process by which people identify against and resist oppressions. One of the worst is how easy it is for people to be made to feel, by some intervention from another, that their own identity and their standing from which to resist that oppression have been foreclosed or annihilated: their voices delegitimated, the authority of their grounding in an indispensable identity threatened with erasure. Anyone who has worked in feminist groups, for instance, knows the moment when a woman or group of women announce that they have sat silent through a discussion, not because they had nothing to say, but because they felt silenced,felt radically denegated by some act or speech or some perceived dynamic of the group. These announcements make shifty moments in the power relations of a group. They bring to the surface, by rupturing it, how far from impartial or inclusive is the normal, "neutral" decorum of conversational exchange, and how far from detached are the needs and dreads that people have invested in it. The fabric of trust that gives a nominally egalitarian texture to activist interactions is it is always shocking to have once more to learn a fragile one that a multitude of unacknowledged presumptions can suddenly leave gaping.   Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is professor of English at Duke University. She is the author of Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire and the forthcoming Epistemology of the Closet.Her most recent contribution to is "Sexualism and the Citizen of the World: Wycherley, Sterne, and Male Homosocial Desire" (December 1984). David Van Leer Trust and Trade As presidential campaigns and "Saturday Night Live" have repeatedly demonstrated, debate is an uninteresting mode of communication, imitating dialogue without engaging in it. Formally it encourages infinite regress: my misreading of your misreading of my misreading of your misreading. Intellectually its conclusions are in some ways predetermined. In the short run, the winner is whoever speaks last; in the long run, whoever has the greater power. Rather than occasion or remark on further "shifty moments" (p. 745), then, I will try to review some general areas of contention suggested in my exchange with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Although Sedgwick and I value the personal and the theoretical both, we disagree on the lines of intersection. I am struck by her initial situation of "Van Leer" in the ranks of those who feel silenced. The complaint might just as easily have been that he has entirely too much to say. Nor, if autobiography is really the issue, do I in any way regret the notoriety of Sedgwick's work? From what I take to be my point of view, Sedgwick's book has opened up for me a far more visible space in the academy than has my own. And I attribute to myself at least enough self-consciousness to recognize the disingenuousness of "feeling silenced" in .   David Van Leer is associate professor of English and American literature at the University of California, Davis. The author of Emerson's Epistemology: The Argument of the Essays (1986), he is currently examining the issue of contextualism in a book to be called The Queening of America Jean-Marie Apostolidès On Paul de Man's War In 1982-83, I was preparing my volume on the Belgian cartoonist Hergé. During the Second World War, Hergé's comic strips appeared daily in the newspaper Le Soir.Since I wanted to analyze the influence of the rightist thought on Hergé and Tintin, I borrowed most of the copies of Le Soir available in this country through interlibrary loan. Examining the newspaper, I came across Paul de Man's articles, which were sometimes on the same page as the comic strips. I showed these articles to some colleagues related to or teaching at Harvard University. I specifically recall an afternoon with a colleague from Boston University whose specialty is the hunting of presumed French fascist intellectuals; we discussed together the possible bridges between de Man's contemporary thought (he was still alive at that time) and his former intellectual engagement during the Second World War. That is to say that, as far as I know, several people at Harvard and in the Boston area (where deconstruction and feminism were and continue to be a recurrent theme) were aware of de Man's former affiliation with rightist circles. One can ask why it took five more years for the "scandal" to appear: why this "sudden" revelation after several years of silence and dissimulation? Compared to the fact that Hergé had constantly been confronted with his political past, one can wonder how strongly Paul de Man's "secret" was kept.   Jean-Marie Apostolidèsis professor of French at Stanford University. He is currently writing an essay on the anthropological reading of literature. His article "Molière and the Sociology of Exchange" appeared in the Spring 1988 issue of Critical Inquiry. Marjorie Perloff Response to Jacques Derrida Derrida's quite uncharacteristic literalism is surprising: he takes de Man and Dosogne at their word,6 thus boxing himself into a peculiar corner. If indeed there was no censorship of de Man's articles written prior to August 1942, why is his "discourse … constantly split, disjointed, engaged in incessant conflicts"? If the young de Man could speak freely, why do "all the propositions [in his texts] carry within themselves a counterproposition" (p. 607)? If, on the other hand, as Denuit and others have made amply clear, there was in fact censorship all along, the Führerprinzipoperating from the day de Becker took over Le Soir,then we have to conclude that de Man is not telling the truth in his letter to Poggioli. Either way, the statement is compromised. As for the word Nazi,it is not at all surprising that de Man didn't use it in his texts for Le Soir.Hitler's strategy, at the time, was to try to convince the Belgians that annexation to Germany was no more than an inevitable return to the glorious German fatherland, the home of Culture, the Arts, Philosophy. Indeed, if the Nazis could be seen as simply equivalent to the Germans of tradition, the Belgians had nothing to fear!   6. See Culler, "Letter to the Editor," p. 4: "De Man ceased writing for Le Soir in the fall of 1942, when the Nazis extended censorship to the cultural section of the paper."   Marjorie Perloff,professor of English and comparative literature at Stanford University, is the author of Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (1986). A collection of her recent essays, Of Canons and Contemporaries,is forthcoming. Jonathan Culler "Paul de Man's War" and the Aesthetic Ideology While debates about the relations to fascism exhibited in de Man's newspaper articles will no doubt continue (although whatever interpretation one gives them, de Man is guilty of having written an anti-Semitic article and of working in the collaborationist press), the important question is what value his critical and theoretical writings have for us, the productivity of his critical and theoretical work for our thinking. The wartime writings give a new dimension to much of de Man's work in America, helping one to understand more plainly what is implied by his critique of the aesthetic ideology, as in late essays on Kleist and on Kant and Schiller. Walter Benjamin called fascism the introduction of aesthetics into politics. De Man's critique of the aesthetic ideology now resonates also as a critique of the fascist tendencies he had known.   Jonathan Culler,Class of 1916 Professor of English and comparative literature at Cornell University, is the author of Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions (1989). W. Wolfgang Holdheim Jacques Derrida's Apologia The central theme of the prologue is the notion of responsibility, as well it might be, given the subject, Accordingly, those first seven pages swamp the reader with the word "responsibility" to the point where they could be described as "variations on the theme." Inundation, alas, is not elucidation, and all closer references to the notion remain impenetrability elliptic: Derrida possesses the unique art of combining extreme ellipsis with extreme verbosity. In fact these "variation" are more musical than analytic: "responsibility" comes close to being a Wagnerian leitmotiv. Like a characteristic melody, the word winds through the text in a constant sequence of appearances and temporary disappearances, ever expected, always ready to reemerge. Although there is no clear-cut line of argument, there does seem to be a general direction of development. The question of de Man's responsibility, which we might have thought to be crucial, is touched on only briefly and vaguely; we read much more about responsibility to de Man. Ours and Derrida's: "responsibility" is associated with "responding," which is increasingly read as Derrida's obligation to respond for de Man. From the outset, this emphasis evokes the danger of an apologia rather than the conscientious quest for truth that is demanded in the same breath. There are further suggestions of this nature when Derrida later (p. 639) briefly returns to this subject and this style. "Responding for the other" is here connected with transference, allegory (standing for narrative), and prosopopeia that is, connected with two rhetorical categories and psychoanalytic one. To write about responsibility with so little reference to ethical categories is something of a tour de force.   W. Wolfgang Holdheim,professor of comparative literature and romance studies and Frederic J. Whiton Professor of Liberal Studies at Cornell University, has published numerous articles on literature and literary theory as well as a number of books, including The Hermeneutic Mode (1984). Jon Wiener The Responsibilities of Friendship: Jacques Derrida on Paul_de Man's Collaboration But of course Derrida's appeal to context and to authorial intention constitutes an abandonment of the deconstructive method. As Christopher Norris has written of de Man, "we read in defiance of his own repeated counsel" if we read his work "by asking what might have been the motives, political or otherwise, that led to his adopting the stance they exhibit."2 Derrida emphasizes repeatedly that de Man's objectionable acts were committed almost half a century ago, when he was twenty- one and twenty-two years old. That's an important argument. But the moral problems de man poses do not end in 1942 when he stopped writing for Le Soir;a second and in some ways more serious moral problem recurs throughout his adult-life, during which de Man kept his youthful pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic writings a secret.   John Wiener is professor of history at the University of California, Irvine. His articles "Deconstructing de Man" and "Debating de Man" appeared in The Nation. John Brenkman and Jules David Law Resetting the Agenda Jacques Derrida offers his recent commentary ("Like the Sound of the Sea Deep within a Shell: Paul de Man's War," 14 [Spring 1988]: 590-652) on the early career of Paul de Man as an urgent intervention in a discussion he fears is going awry. The most pressing danger he sees in the recent revelations is that they have played into the hands of de Man's antagonists, who are now ready to denounce the whole of his career and even deconstruction itself. Against such indiscriminate critiques Derrida hurls the epithet: totalitarian. He is attempting to reseize the initiative in the discussion and to reset the terms of the debate. His agenda extends across historical, theoretical, and political questions. He wants to affirm that a radical, indeed absolute break separates the later from the earlier de Man. He also wants to show that the young de man, however firmly committed to fascist ideology and however much an accomplice of the Nazis occupying Belgium, at the same time regularly distanced himself from that ideology and even undermined its meanings. Moreover, Derrida boldly takes up the challenge that these revelations have cast on the intellectual movement he and de Man have shaped. Can deconstruction come to grips with the political and intellectual history of its own leading American proponent? And can deconstruction in the process make a distinctive contribution to the understanding of fascism and intellectuals' participation in it?   John Brenkmanis associate professor of English at Northwestern University. He is the author of Culture and Domination (1987). Jules David Law is assistant professor of English at Northwestern University. He is currently working on a book-length study of the metaphors of surface, depth, and reflection in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British prose. Jacques Derrida Biodegradables: Seven Diary Fragments Those who have read me, in particular those who have read "Paul de Man's War," know very well that I would have quite easily accepted a genuine critique, the expression of an argued disagreement with my reading of de Man, with my evaluation (theoretical, moral, political) of these articles from 1940-42, and so on. After all, what I wrote on this subject was complicated enough, divided,tormented, most often hazarded as hypothesis, open enough to discussion, itselfdiscussing itself enough in advance (on every page, indeed within every sentence, and from the very first sentence) for me to be able to welcome questions, suggestions, and objections. Provided this was done so as to demonstrate and not to intimidate or inflict wounds, to help the analysis progress and not to score points, to read and to reason and not to pronounce massive, magical, and immediately executor verdicts. Five of the six "responses" that I reread last night are written, as one used to say, with a pen dipped in venom. Less against the de Man of 1940-42, perhaps, then against me (I who said things that were nevertheless judged by Culler "exceedingly severe" against de Man and who have nothing whatever to dowith everything that happened; I who, at the time, was rather on the side of the victims shall I dare to recall this once again and will they forgive me for doing so? struck by a numerous clauses that it will be necessary to talk about again). Less against me, in truth, than against "Deconstruction" (which at the time was at year minus twenty-five of its calendar! This suffices to shed light on this whole scene and its actual workings). How can the reader tell that these five "critical responses" are not "responses," critical texts or discussions, but rather the documents of a blinded compulsion? First of all, the fact that they are all monolithic.They take into account none of the complications of which my text, this is the very least one can say, is not at all sparing. They never seek to measure the possibility, the degree, or the form, as always happens in an honest discussion, of a partial agreement on this or that point. No, everything is rejected as a block; everything is a block and a block of hatred. Even when, here or there, someone makes a show of being moved by my sadness or my friendship for de Man, it is in order to get the better of me and suggest that I am inspired only by friendship, which will appear ridiculous to all those who have read me. Inspired by friendship means for those people misled by friendship. How foreign this experience must be to them!   Jacques Derrida is Directeur d'Études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris) as well as professor at the University of California, Irvine, and visiting professor at the Graduate School of the City University of New York. His most recent publication in English is the collection Limited Inc (1988), which includes a new afterword, "Toward an Ethic of Discussion." Peggy Kamuf is professor of French at the University of Southern California. Her most recent book is Signature Pieces: On the Institution of Authorship (1988). She has also contributed essays to Reading de Man Reading(1989) and Responses: On Paul de Man's Wartime Journalism (1989), and is currently editing A Derrida Reader. Peter Brooks Storied Bodies, or Nana at Last Unveil'd A major preoccupation of that novel [Zola's Nana] is the undressing of the courtesan Nana. One could even say that a major dynamic of the novel is stripping Nana, and stripping away at her, making per progressively expose the secrets of this golden body that has Paris in thrall. The first chapter of the novel provides, quite literally, a mise-en-scène for Nana's body, in the operetta La Blonde Vénus.When she comes on stage in the third act, a shiver passes over the audience, for, we are told, she is nude. Yet, we quickly discover, not quite nude: she is covered by a filmy shift under which her splendid body lets itself be glimpsed: se devinait."It was Venus born from the waves, having only her hair as a veil."2 The denuding of nana progresses in chapter 5 when Comte Muffat and the Prince make their way backstage to her dressing room (her undressing room). They surprise her naked to the waist, and she then covers herself with a bodice, which only half hides her breasts. Despite the repeated references to nana as nude, it is only in chapter 7, at the very midpoint of the novel, that Nana is finally completely naked. In this scene, she undresses before her mirror while Comte Muffat watches, especially looking at her looking at herself. Thus she is fully unveiled, frontally in the mirror, and from the backside in Muffat's direct view. And yet, as we shall see in a moment, even the completely naked woman's body bears a troubling veil.   2. Émile Zola, Nana (Paris, 1977), p. 47; hereafter abbreviated N.I wish to thank Helen Chillman, Librarian of the Slides and Photography Collection, Art and Architecture Library, Yale University, for her help in assembling the illustrations accompanying this essay.   Peter Brooks is Tripp Professor of Humanities and Director of the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University. The author of The Melodramatic Imagination (1976) and Reading for the Plot (1984), he is currently working on a study of narrative and the body, tentatively called "Storied Bodies." Jay Clayton Narrative and Theories of Desire The hope of moving beyond formalism is one of two things that unites an otherwise diverse group of literary theorists who have begun to explore the role of desire in narrative. Peter Brooks, for example, in Reading for the Plot,says in more than one place that his interest in desire "derives from my dissatisfaction with the various formalisms that have dominated critical thinking about narrative."3 Leo Bersani sees desire as establishing a crucial link between social and literary structures. Teresa de Lauretis faults structuralist models for their inability to disclose the ways in which narrative operates, through the desire it excites and fulfills, to construct the social world as a system of sexual differences. Other names could be added, both within and outside the field of narrative theory Nancy Armstrong, Roland Barthes, Georges Bataille, Jessica Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, René Girard, Luce Irigaray, Fredric Jameson, Peggy Kamuf, Linda Kauffman, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Jean Laplance, Catharine A. McKinnon, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick for desire has become one of the master tropes of contemporary criticism.   3. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York, 1984), p. 47; hereafter abbreviated RP. 4. Leo, Bersani, A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature (Boston, 1976), p. 13; hereafter abbreviated FA. 5. Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, The Forms of Violence: Narrative in Assyrian Art and Modern Culture (New York, 1985), p. v; hereafter abbreviated FV.Although Bersani coauthored this book with Dutoit, for convenience I refer to it by Bersani's name alone. This practice is justified by two considerations: first, most of the arguments about narrative, violence, and desire are elaborations of positions that Bersani has taken in earlier works; second, passages and examples in the sections with which I shall be dealing (chiefly those on narrative and psychoanalysis) are reprinted with only minor changes from an article that Bersani published under his own name.   Jay Clayton,associate professor of English at Vanderbilt University, is the author of Romantic Vision and the Novel (1987) and coeditor of Contemporary Literature and Contemporary Theory (forthcoming). He is currently completing a study of contemporary American literature and theory, Narrative Power. Linda Seidel "Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait": Business as Usual? This essay had its beginnings in my desire to reexamine the Arnolfini portrait from the perspective of Giovanna Cenami, the demure young woman who stands beside the cloaked and hated man on the fifteenth-century panel in London. Even though she shares the formal prominence with the man in Jan van Eyck's unprecedented composition, she has been paid scant attention in the literature on the painting. I anticipated, as I began my work that inspection of the female subject of the panel would, of necessity, amend the authoritative count of the Arnolfini portrait that Panofsky first published in 1934. That narrative, which focused on the event portrayed, had been recited to me by my teachers as an example of interpretive truth; I had committed it to memory as a model of our discipline's search for meaning. I never dreamed back then that it might be "wrong." Yet, the material I encountered as I pursued my inquiry into Giovanna's life contradicted Panofsky's assumptions on several key points; amendment alone would not do. It seemed necessary for me to challenge the venerable interpretation others were starting to question,4 even though two generations of students, including my own, had learned from it all they thought there was to know about "Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait."   4. See, for example, Peter H. Schabacker, "De Matrimonio ad Morganaticam Conracto:Jan van Eyck's ‘Arnolfini' Portrait Reconsidered," Art Quarterly35 (Winter 1972): 375- 98, hereafter abbreviated "DM"; Lucy Freeman Sandler, "The Handclasp in the Arnolfini Wedding:A Manuscript Precedent," Art Bulletin 66 (Sept. 1984): 488-91, hereafter abbreviated "H"; and Jan Baptist Bedaux, "The Reality of Symbols: The Question of Disguised Symbolism in Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait," Simiolus16 (1986): 5-28, hereafter abbreviated "RS."   Linda Seidel,associate professor in the department of art at the University of Chicago, is the author of Songs of Glory (1981), a study of twelfth-century French architectural sculpture. She is currently completing a work on medieval doorway design as an art of entry and pursuing a collaborative project with Michael Camille and Robert Nelson, Medieval Art and Its Audiences. Richard Moran Seeing and Believing: Metaphor, Image, and Force One way in which the characteristic gestures of philosophy and criticism differ from each other lies in their involvements with disillusionment, with the undoing of our naivete, especially regarding what we take ourselves to know about the meaning of what we say. Philosophy will often find less than we thought was there, perhaps nothing at all, in what we say about the "external" world, or in our judgments of value, or in our ordinary psychological talk. The work of criticism, on the other hand, frequently disillusions by finding disturbingly more in what is said than we precritically thought was there. In our relation to the meaningfulness of what we say, there is a disillusionment of plentitude as well as of emptiness. And no doubt what is "less" for one discipline may be "more" of what someone else is looking for. In recent years, metaphor has attracted more than its share of both philosophical and critical attention, including philosophical denials of the obvious, as well as critical challenges to the obviousness of the ways we talk about metaphor. In this paper I discuss a problem of each sort and suggest a complex of relations between them. The particular denial of the obvious that I'm interested in is the claim recently made by Donald Davidson that "a metaphor doesn't say anything beyond its literal meaning (nor does its maker say anything, in using the metaphor, beyond the literal)," nor is it even correct to speak of metaphor as a form of communication.1 There's disillusionment with a vengeance; and even if not strictly believable, it is still not without its therapeutic value, as we shall see.   1. Donald Davidson, "What Metaphors Mean," in On Metaphor,ed. Sheldon Sacks (Chicago, 1979), p. 30; hereafter abbreviated "WMM." Davidson's view has found supporters among both philosophers and literary theorists. It is, for example, important to the early argument of Richard Rorty's recent book. See his Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity(Cambridge, 1989), p. 18.   Richard Moran is an assistant professor of philosophy at Princeton University. He is currently working on a book on subjectivity and contemporary concepts of personhood. Michael Ragussis Representation, Conversion, and Literary Form: "Harrington" and the Novel of Jewish Identity It was [Maria] Edgeworth's deeply personal motive in writing Harrington that made possible the special self-reflexive quality that informs her novel. In the act of reviewing her role as a reader and a writer of anti-Semitic portraits, she was able to recognize a tradition of discourse she had at once inherited and perpetuated. And only by recognizing such a tradition was she able both to subvert it in Harrington and to articulate for future writers the way to move beyond it. In short, she boldly turned her personal self-examination into a cultural critique: she diagnosed a disorder in "the imaginations of the good people of England,"4 and in so doing she issued a challenge and founded a new tradition. In Harrington Edgeworth inquires into the trials that the English imagination must undergo if it is to exorcise the powerful figure of Shylock, and thereby issues a challenge taken up in subsequent novels (including Ivanhoe, Our Mutual Friend, Daniel Deronda, and Ulysses): the tradition I am designating "the novel of Jewish Identity" attempts to articulate, investigate, and subvert The Merchant of Venice'sfunction as the English master text for representing "the Jew."   Maria Edgeworth, Harrington,vol. 9 of Tales and Novels (New York, 1967), p. 148; hereafter cited by page number.   Michael Ragussis,professor of English at Georgetown University, is the author of The Subterfuge of Art: Language and the Romantic Tradition (1978) and Acts of Naming: The Family Plot in Fiction (1986). He is currently working on a book-length study entitled "Figures of Conversion: Jewish Identity and British Fiction." Margaret Olin Validation by Touch in Kandinsky's Early Abstract Art Some recent artists and critics have taken it upon themselves to demystify the notion of stylistic unity. Their task has included the historical reconception of a few "modernist" artists along "postmodern" lines, usually as precursors of current semiotic strategies.11 These artists may have used a set of incompatible styles to expose the artificiality of competing stylistic conventions, or even to challenge the myth that celebrates the authenticity of artistic expressiveness. Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp, otherwise very different artists, have both been seen as having "deconstructed" the concept of authenticity by problematizing basic means of artistic reference.12 But the desire to challenge conventions must not be misconstrued as an enduring element of an iconoclastic artist's personality. Otherwise, the characterization is merely an updated version of the traditional argument for authorial unity.   11. The terms "modern" and "postmodern" are used in a variety of ways in contemporary criticism. Here, "modern" refers to nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists who embrace the notion of originality, and "postmodern" to those who would attack the notion by exposing the conventionality at its center. Although some critics who profess "modernism" do not mention "originality" by name, most subscribe to it in some form, often with the originality and self-sufficiency of the artist transposed to that of the work. This is especially true of the criticism of Clement Greenburg and Michael Fried. 12. Rosalind Krauss rightly uses the semiotic complications of Picasso's art to object to autobiographical interpretations of his work. In the course of the argument, she refers to Picasso's semiotics as part of the "proto- history" of postmodernist art. See Krauss, "In the Name of Picasso," The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), pp. 38-39. Arguments for Duchamp's protopostmodernism are much more common. For one example, see Krauss, "Notes on the Index: Part 1," The Originality of the Avant-Garde,pp. 196-209.   Margaret Olin is an assistant professor in the department of art history and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is presently writing a book on the theories of Alois Riegl. Daniel Cottom Purity Once an artist imagined how he would look if he plucked out an offending eye. He painted a self-portrait in which the orbit on the right side of his face was gaping, dolorous. Seven years passed, and then there came a day when the artist tried to break up a fight among his friends. In the ensuing melee he lost his left eye the one he must have painted out all those years before, when working on the self-portrait, if he based his image on the sight of himself in a mirror. Mirrors, of course, reverse the images before them. If we could forget niggling qualifications, epistemological hedges, all the huffing and puffing of the sense of responsibility that distinguishes intellectuals from assassins, then this story might be frightening, uncanny. As it is, I suspect most of my readers would find it terrible only in the derogatory sense. Although it has a certain primitive simplicity, it seems facile, as if it might have served for one of the weaker episodes in Walter Scott's Waverley novels or Rod Serling's "Twilight Zone." Even if it were presented by a master of simple plots, I can imagine it succeeding only as an occasion for metaphysical conjectures, glistening thorns and blossoms of irony, and the like. (Play around with the comparison to Picture of Dorian Gray,sure, and throw in a reference to E. T. A. Hoffmann, do a turn on Lewis Carroll, or tell us one more time about the sly ruses of representation, if you must none of this will make the story moving.) And even if I were to say that this is a true story, that Victor Brauner painted this Autoportraitin 1931 and suffered this injury in 1938, it seems unlikely that it would be more affecting. How could such a corny plot raise a shiver from anyone past the age of reason? If this story is true, so much the worse for truth. It ought to know better than to seek us out with such shopworn devices.   Daniel Cottom is a professor in the English department at the University of Florida. His most recent book is Text and Culture: The Politics of Interpretation (1989). He is currently completing a book on spiritualism and surrealism.