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Sheldon Sacks
         A Chimera for a Breakfast
         If the editor had done a proper job, his introductory rhetoric
            would have been superfluous. Indeed in the second fit of hubris
            immediately consequent upon the heady act of
            initiatingCRITICALINQUIRY, itscoeditors agreed that the success of
            our venture must be measured by the precise degree to which this
            issue was self-defining. Our goals would be fully explained by our
            accomplishment. Our commitment to reasoned inquiry into significant
            creations of the human spirit would be transformed from
            proclamation to actuality revealed as less, and therefore
            more, than pompous aspiration by a collection of essays,
            individually excellent, which, when viewed together, would
            represent the full range of interests and values implicit in our
            commitment.
Wayne C. Booth
         Kenneth Burke's Way of Knowing
         Kenneth Burke is, at long last, beginning to get the attention he
            de- serves. Among anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and
            rhetori- cians his "dramatism" is increasingly recognized as
            something that must at least appear in one's index, whether one has
            troubled to understand him or not. Even literary critics are
            beginning to see him as not just one more "new critic" but as
            someone who tried to lead a revolt against "narrow formalism" long
            before the currently fashionable explosion into the "extrinsic" had
            been dreamed of. I have recently heard him called a structuralist-
            before-his-time-and what could be higher praise than that! But in
            almost everything said about his literary criticism, there is an
            air of condescension that is puzzling. The tone seems usually to
            echo that of Rene Wellek (1971), who, as Burke himself laments
            (1972), "almost overwhelms me with praise," referring to "men of
            great gifts, nimble powers of combination and association, and
            fertile imagination," but then deplores Burke's irresponsibility,
            repudiates his critical judgments, condemns his general method
            without bothering to look closely at it, and in general makes him
            look like some sort of idiot savant-a buffoon with a high IQ.
            Wayne C. Booth received the Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award in
            1962 for his book The Rhetoric of Fiction. His most recent works, A
            Rhetoric of Irony and Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent,
            appeared this year. His contributions to  include
            "Irony and Pity Once Again: Thais Revisited" (Winter 1975), "M.H.
            Abrams: Historian as Critic, Critic as Pluralist" (Spring 1976),
            "THE LIMITS OF PLURALISM: 'Preserving the Exemplar': Or, How Not to
            Dig our Own Graves" (Spring 1977), "CRITICAL RESPONSE: Notes and
            Exchanges" (Autumn 1977), "Metaphor as Rhetoric: The Problem of
            Evaluation" (Autumn 1978) ,"Ten Literal 'Theses" (Autumn 1978),
            with Wright Morris: "The Writing of Organic Fiction: A
            Conversation" (Autumn 1976), and with Robert E. Streeter and W.J.T.
            Mitchell: "EDITORS' NOTE: Sheldon Sacks 1930-1979" (Spring 1979).
Kenneth Burke
         Dancing with Tears in My Eyes
         Booth says, "Burke seems to be claiming to know better than Keats
            himself some of what the poem 'means', and the meaning he finds is
            antithetical not just to the poet's intentions but to any
            intentions he might conceivably have entertained!" The notion
            underlying my analysis is this: Formal social norms of "propriety"
            are related to poetic "propriety" as Emily Post's Book of Etiquette
            is to the depths of what goes on in the poet's search "for what
            feels just right." Wellek stops with Emily Post. The official
            aesthetic isn't likely to cover the ground. If I may offer a
            perhaps "outrageously" honorific example, on pages 329-30 of my
            Language as Symbolic Action, when discussing a sonnet of mine,
            "Atlantis," I indicate how one can both know and not know when
            one's imagination is working at a level of "propriety" not
            reducible to the official code. My lines had a Swiftian,
            Aristophanic dimension; and though they were not "programmatically"
            so designed, my experience with them both ab intra and ab extra
            indicates how such things can operate.
            Kenneth Burke's numerous writings include The Complete White Oxen
            (stories), Towards a Better Life (novel), Collected Poems, and
            among his critical works, A Grammar of Motives, A Rhetoric of
            Motives, Language as Symbolic Action, and The Philosophy of
            Literary Form. His contributions to  are "ARTISTS
            ON ART: Post-Poesque Derivation of a Terministic Cluster" (Winter
            1977), "(Nonsymbolic) Motion/(Symbolic) Action" (Summer 1978),
            "CRITICAL RESPONSE: A Critical Load, Beyond that Door; or, Before
            the Ultimate Confrontation; or, When Thinking of Deconstructionist
            Structuralists; or, A Hermeneutic Fantasy"(Autumn 1978), and
            "CRITICAL RESPONSE: Methodological Repression and/or Strategies of
            Containment" (Winter 1978).
Quentin Bell
         Art and the Elite
         University teachers, as is well known, commit acts of despotism.
            About three years ago I committed such an act. I told my students
            that I would not accept papers which included the words
            protagonist, basic (as a noun), alienation, total (as an
            adjective), dichotomy, and a few others including elite and
            elitist. On consideration I decided to remove the ban on the last
            two for it seemed to me that there was no other term that could be
            used to discuss what is, after all, an interesting idea.
            It is of course true that my students and I use the word
            incorrectly. An elite must surely be a chosen body. Congress, the
            police, the final heat of the Miss World contest, and the Bolshevik
            Party are elites, whereas an aristocracy or a
            plutocracy unless one believes the rich and the nobility to
            be chosen by God are not. Nevertheless, when we use the word
            elite in connection with the visual arts it is certainly related
            to, though not synonymous with, class. An elite is usually a group
            within a relatively prosperous class. The patrons of the
            Renaissance were, presumably, at the apex of the social system: on
            the other hand, the patrons of the Impressionists belonged to a
            comparatively humble section of the middle classes. But it will be
            found that an aesthetic elite does always enjoy certain advantages
            of wealth and leisure and education.
            Quentin Bell is professor of the history and theory of art, Sussex
            University. He has written Virginia Woolf: A Biography, Of Human
            Finery, Ruskin, Victorian Artists and Bloomsbury. Other
            contributions to  are "The Art Critic and the Art
            Historian" (Spring 1975), "CRITICAL RESPONSE: Notes and Exchanges"
            (Summer 1979), and "Bloomsbury and 'the Vulgar Passions'" (Winter
            1979).
Henry Nash Smith
         The Scribbling Women and the Cosmic Success Story
         This essay deals with American fiction between the early 1850s,
            when Hawthorne and Melville produced their best work, and the first
            novels of Howells and James in the early 1870s. The familiar notion
            that this was the period of transition from pre-Civil War
            Romanticism to postwar Realism tells us nothing in particular about
            it. Yet we need some historical frame in which to place both of the
            later efforts of Hawthorne and Melville and the apprentice work of
            the next generation of novelists. To this end, I propose to examine
            a few examples of the popular fiction that held at least
            quantitative dominance of the field. Hawthorne and Melville
            believed that the unprecedented sales of a new kind of stories by
            women writers contributed significantly to the loss of audience
            they both suffered in the early 1850s; and not only Howells and
            James but also Mark Twain showed in their early careers an
            unacknowledged attraction toward the procedures of the popular
            novelists along with a conscious effort to escape from them...the
            type of best-seller that appeared in the 1850s was an accidental
            creation rather than the result of conscious contrivance on the
            part of either authors or publishers. In fact, it caught the
            publishers by surprise. According to the author's sister (Anna B.
            Warner 1909, p. 282), Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World ([1850]
            1851) was rejected by "almost all the leading book firms in New
            York," and the manuscript was returned with the comment "Fudge!"
            written on it by a reader for Harper's. Miss Warner, a thirty-one-
            year-old spinster, was the daughter of a once prosperous New York
            lawyer who had fallen into financial difficulties. The story
            resembles Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (published three years
            earlier) to the extent that its heroine is an orphan exposed to
            poverty and psychological hardships who finally attains economic
            security and high social status through marriage. But the American
            writer places much more emphasis on the heroine's piety, and the
            book sets an all-time record for frequency of references to tears
            and weeping.
            Henry Nash Smith, professor of English at the University of
            California at Berkeley, received the John H. Dunning prize and the
            Bancroft Award for hisVirgin Land: The American West as Symbol and
            Myth. He has also written Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer,
            and Popular Culture and Industrialism.
Elder Olsen
         On Value Judgements in the Arts
         When we discuss the value of a work of art we are confronted
            immediately with two difficulties: the terms we use, and the
            peculiar character of art. No one, to my knowledge, has ever
            doubted that an artist produces a form of some kind, and that in
            any discussion of art as art that form must somehow be considered;
            but the terms we use generally have no reference to form. We miss
            the form in various ways (1) We use terms that are
            nonartistic that is, terms that refer to something external
            to the work, as when we speak of the subject of a painting, of what
            was depicted rather than the depiction of it, though we know full
            well that what we respond to is not what was depicted but the
            depiction of it. "This is a play about Oedipus  what does
            that tell us of the diverse forms produced by Sophocles, Seneca,
            Dryden, Voltaire, Gide, Cocteau? (2) Or again, we use terms which
            are analogical, for example, the "rhythm" of a painting; the
            difficulty with these is that they are ambiguous and also that,
            while they may relate to the work, they can designate it only
            insofar as there is similarity between it and the analogue. (3)
            Again, we use terms which seem to designate a single form when in
            fact they refer to forms of the utmost heterogeneity, as when we
            speak of "the novel"; this usually arises out of the indiscriminate
            application of the term over some considerable span of history, so
            that the "historical slippage" of meaning is gradual and goes
            unnoticed. As the term broadens in meaning to include more and more
            heterogeneous forms, the essence of each is lost, and the term
            comes to apply only to accidental analogies between the forms. In
            the end very little can then be said, involving only the most
            abstract and general accidents of likeness. Henry James' The Art of
            Fiction, Percy Lubbock's The Craft of Fiction, and E.M. Forster's
            Aspects of the Novel illustrate this condition perfectly. The
            complaint that it is impossible to discuss tragedy because the term
            has been diversely employed and its proffered justification
            (usually nowadays with the citations from Wittgenstein) stem from
            this condition. The complaint and the justifications are both
            trivial, and the solution of the difficulty is simple. All that is
            necessary is to distinguish the different senses of the term by
            distinguishing the different things to which it is applied.
            Language is ambiguous, and we use it ambiguously; this in no way
            implies that the ambiguities cannot be cleared up. (4) Finally, we
            may use terms which indeed have reference to the form of the work
            but place the part for the whole; that is, terms which are elements
            in its definition but do not constitute the complete definition.
            Thus we designate something, not through the form proper but
            through the device or method used, as in "drama," "sculpture,"
            "etching," "collage," or through the means or medium, as in
            "charcoal sketch," "watercolor," "oil painting." The point is not
            that the object is not, say, a drama or a watercolor; of course it
            is. The point is rather that these terms do not as such refer to
            the form and refer to it completely. If in fact they stipulated
            form, all charcoal sketches would be alike in form, and all oil
            paintings, and all dramas. One consequence of speaking in such a
            fashion is that we are likely to confuse the method with the form
            and talk of, say, "the nature of drama" as though all drama were of
            the same "nature," whereas the dramatic method is used in a wide
            variety of forms; or to confuse the medium or means with the form
            and to assure that the work can have no properties beyond those of
            its medium, as though artists did not exist and all art were simply
            nature.
            Elder Olson, poet and critic, has received numerous awards for his
            verse (Collected Poems, 1963). Among his many works are Tragedy and
            the Theory of Drama, and The Theory of Comedy. His contributions to
             are "The Poetic Process"" (Autumn 1975), Part 1 of
            a "Conspectus of Poetry"(Autumn 1977), and Part 2 of a "Conspectus
            of Poetry" (Winter 1977).
Joshua C. Taylor
         Two Visual Excursions
         As some artists discovered early in the century, there is a
            particular pleasure and stimulation to be derived from works of art
            created by cultures untouched by our own traditions of form. In
            part this is probably a delight in exoticism, in being away from
            home, and in part it possibly is our sentiment for cultures we look
            on as traditional, in a Jungian sense, or primitive in their
            unquestioning allegiance to simple cultural necessity. But more
            significantly, without indulging in philosophical or
            anthropological speculation, we are forced, in looking at such
            objects as these elegantly designed boxes and bowls, to revise our
            visual thinking, our assumptions about unity and grace.
            Joshua C. Taylor, director of the National Collection of Fine Arts
            of the Smithsonian Institution, has written Learning to Look,
            William Page: The American Titian, and catalogues of exhibits of
            futurism and the works of Umberto Boccioni. Part 1 of this paper
            has been published in somewhat different form in Boxes and Bowls
            (Smithsonian Institute Press, Washington D.C., 1974).
             
Frank Kermode
         Novels: Recognition and Deception
         This is a shot at expressing a few of the problems that arise when
            you try to understand how novels are read. I shall be trying to
            formulate them in very ordinary language: the subject is becoming
            fashionable, and most recent attempts seem to me quite unduly
            fogged by neologism and too ready to match the natural complexity
            of the subject with barren imitative complications. Of course you
            may ask why there should be theories of this kind at all, and I can
            only say that they are needed because of what we have missed by
            always meditating on what we have read and can survey, as it were,
            from a distance which allows us to think it's keeping still, rather
            than upon the ways in which, as we read, we deal with the actual
            turbulence of a text. Much of what I say will seem obvious enough,
            but it may throw some light on a fact that we all know so
            intimately that we don't bother to ask questions about it: the fact
            of plurality, of which the plurality of our own interpretation is
            evidence. There are interesting side issues: why do some novels
            seem to be more plural than others, and why, on the whole, do the
            ones that seem most plural so often turn out to be fairly recent,
            not to say modern? Also, perhaps, how do interpretations alter in
            time? And what's wrong with the sorts of theories we already have?
            . . . For the natural or naive way of reading - a matter of
            recognition, the medium being a virtual transparency - is neither
            natural nor naive. It is conditioned and arbitrary, a false return
            to "story" - to the "wisdom", as Benjamin calls it, of folklore, a
            pretence that everybody can agree on a particular construction of
            reality. It is, however, no more apposite to condemn this on moral
            grounds than to condemn texts that reject narratives, that reject
            story, theme, closure, authority, that trap us into contemplation
            of their own opacity, on the ground that this is deceptive. It
            seems right to allow into the plurality of readings the naive among
            the rest, though such a text as Ford's is so evidently not naive
            that naive readers of it would probably soon grow impatient. It
            calls for virtuosity elaborately built on the basis of naive
            competence, a development on productive capacity. Even to think of
            what that virtuosity entails is to encounter novel problems. It is
            harder to describe it than to do it, like riding a bicycle. But it
            is worth trying, because of the errors that accumulate in the
            absence of serious discussion - false notions of plurality, a too
            simple view of the history of interpretation, even culpable
            negligence in the reception of new and difficult work. These are
            problems that arise from problems native to novels - they are the
            problems of modern criticism, its scope and responsibilities. We
            know them about as well, as Dowell knew the Ashburnhams. But that
            is another sad story.
             
            Frank Kermode is King Edward VII Professor of English at Cambridge
            University. He is the author ofThe Sense of an Ending: Studies in
            the Theory of Fiction, Continuities, Modern Essays, andShakespeare,
            Spenser, Donne: Renaissance Essays. His contributions to Critical
            Inquiry are "A Reply to Denis Donoghue" (Spring 1975), "A Reply to
            Joseph Frank" (Spring 1978), and "Secrets and Narrative Sequence"
            (Autumn 1980).
Morris Philipson
         Mrs. Dalloway, "What's the Sense of Your Parties?"
         I submit that the intimations of "inner meanings" as presented in
            this novel should be reread as a transpositions from the language
            of sexual intercourse to the language of idealized consciousness,
            that is, from physical sensation to felt thought. Consider the
            imagery employed when Mrs. Dalloway reminds herself of her
            experiences of love:
             
            It was a sudden revelation, a tinge like a blush which one tried to
            check and then, as it spread, one yielded to its expansion, and
            rushed to the farthest verge and there quivered and felt the world
            come closer, swollen with some astonishing significance, some
            pressure of rapture, which split its thin skin and gushed and
            poured with an extraordinary alleviation over the cracks and sores!
            Then, for that moment, she had seen an illumination; a match
            burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed. But the
            close withdrew; the hard softened. It was over - the moment. [p.
            47]
            What is implied by the phrase "inner meaning" - secret, hidden,
            private - discoverable only by letting go of the protecting,
            preserving defenses of the self merged in the most fulfilling
            involvement with another, through rhythmic participation and
            withdrawal, is expressed in the superb image of "a match burning in
            a crocus." The ecstatic, climatic moment bursts into the vision of
            a flower, even a common flower, a crocus, seen, first as an object
            of beauty only: for flowers are felt to be useless, as having no
            use for us other than as objects for aesthetic contemplation, and
            then, as a match - straight, hard in the center - burning. Thus,
            the vividness of the visual perception is combined with the thrill
            of a danger involved, the inherent destructive potential of fire.
            Thereby, the flower image is experienced as an event, a
            performance, not a useful means to an end other than itself but of
            use only as expressive of consummatory pleasure, an end in itself.
            Expressions of such moments of insight characterize culminating
            experiences in answer to the question: "What will ever be enough?"
            to make life worth living.
            Morris Philipson is the author of Outline of a Jungian Aesthetics,
            a satirical novel, Bourgeois Anonymous, and a biography of Tolstoy,
            The Count Who Wished He Were a Peasant, winner of the Clara Ingram
            Judson award. He has also edited a number of books including
            Aesthetics Today and Aldous Huxley on Art and Artists.
Rudolf Arnheim
         On the Nature of Photography
         When a theorist of my persuasion looks at photography he is more
            concerned with the character traits of the medium as such than with
            the particular work of particular artists. He wishes to know what
            human needs are fulfilled by this kind of imagery, and what
            properties enable the medium to fulfill them. For his purpose, the
            theorist takes the medium at its best behavior. The promise of its
            potentialities captures him more thoroughly than the record of its
            actual achievements, and this makes him optimistic and tolerant, as
            one is with a child, who has a right to demand credit for his
            future. Analyzing media in this way requires a very different
            temperament than analyzing the use people make of them. Studies of
            this latter kind, given the deplorable state of our civilization,
            often make a depressing reading.
             
            Among  Rudolf Arnheim'slatest publications are Toward a Psychology
            of Art, Visual Thinking, and Entropy and Art. A new version of Art
            and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye, will
            appear this fall. He is professor of the psychology of art,
            emeritus, at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard
            University. Other contributions to  are "A
            Stricture on Space and Time" (Summer 1978) and "THE LANGUAGE OF
            IMAGES: A Plea for Visual Thinking" (Spring 1980).
Leonard B. Meyer
         Concering the Sciences, the Arts AND the Humanities
         Like a number of other writers, [Gunther S.] Stent contends that in
            essential ways science and art are comparable. As he puts it: "Both
            the arts and the sciences are activities that endeavor to discover
            and communicate truths about the world" (Stent 1972, p. 89).
            Although one cannot but sympathize with the desire to bring the so-
            called Two Cultures together, a viable and enduring union will not
            be achieved by ignoring or glossing over important differences.
            Using the behavior of scientists, artists, and laymen as empirical
            evidence, the first part of this essay will argue that Stent's
            union is a shotgun marriage, not one made in heaven, and that his
            attempt to wed different disciplinary species results not in fecund
            insight but barren misconception. In the second part, I will
            suggest that this misunderstanding arises because, like many
            scientists (as well as a goodly number of artists and laymen) Stent
            fails even to recognize the existence of the humanist - that is,
            the theorist and critic of the arts. Yet the humanities must be
            included, and areas of inquiry within them differentiated, if
            diverse disciplines are to be related to one another in a coherent
            and consistent way.
             
            Leonard B. Meyer's most recent book is Explaining Music: Essays and
            Explanations. He is also the author of Emotion and Meaning in
            Music, The Rhythmic Structure of Music (with Grosvenor W. Cooper),
            and Music, The Arts, and Ideas, awarded the Laing Prize in 1969.
             
            See also: "Against Literary Darwinism" by Jonathan Kramnick in Vol.
            38, No. 2
Eudora Welty
         "Is Phoenix Jackson's Grandson Really Dead?"
         I had not meant to mystify readers by withholding any facts; it is
            not a writer's business to tease. The story is told through
            Phoenix's mind as she undertakes her errand. As the author at one
            with the character as I tell it, I must assume that the boy is
            alive. As the reader, you are free to think as you like, of course:
            the story invites you to believe that no matter what happens,
            Phoenix, for as long as she is able to walk and can hold to her
            purpose, will make her journey. The possibility that she would keep
            on even if he were dead is there in her devotion and its single-
            minded, single-track errand. Certainly the artistic truth, which
            should be good enough for the fact, lies in Phoenix's own answer to
            that question. When the nurse asks, "He isn't dead, is he?" she
            speaks for herself: "He still the same. He going to last."
             
            Eudora Weltyreceived the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for her novel, The
            Optimist's Daughter. Among her other works are The Shoe Bird,
            Losing Battles, and One Time, One Place.
Eudora Welty
         A Worn Path
         It was December - a bright frozen day in the early morning. Far out
            in the country there was an old Negro woman with her head tied in a
            red rag, coming along a path through the pinewoods. Her name was
            Phoenix Jackson. She was very old and small and she walked slowly
            in the dark pine shadows, moving a little from side to side in her
            steps, with the balanced heaviness and lightness of a pendulum in a
            grandfather clock. She carried a thin, small cane made from an
            umbrella, and with this she kept tapping the frozen earth in front
            of her. This made a grave and persistent noise in the still air,
            that seemed meditative like the chirping of a solitary little bird.
             
            Eudora Weltyreceived the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for her novel, The
            Optimist's Daughter. Among her other works are The Shoe Bird,Losing
            Battles, and One Time, One Place.
