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Jacques Barzun
         Biography and Criticism a Misalliance Disputed
         Many years ago Degas said "Il faut décourager les arts." I am far
            from agreeing, but I am ready to say that critics of a certain kind
            are in need of active discouragement. Too much is written about
            matters that should be taken in by the beholder as he hears or
            scans the work. It is not desirable that his conscious mind should
            entertain - or be prepared to entertain - clear statements of what
            he experiences under the spell of a masterpiece. The very reason
            why art is finer when it shows rather than tells is that
            comprehension is then immediate, not discursive. Ideally, the
            spectator must absorb - in order to be absorbed; and this means
            that the critic should shut up until he is wanted. We have no need
            of a study of "Punctuality in Thomas Hardy." I am making up the
            subject, but everybody can think of dozens of comparable works of
            pseudo-scholarship and pseudo-criticism. Their only excuse is that
            the authors wrote them under Ph.Duress and cannot be blamed for
            being coerced.
             
            Jacques Barzun is University Professor at Columbia University.
            Among his numerous books are Classic, Romantic and Modern, Berlioz
            and the Romantic Century, The Use and Abuse of Art and, most
            recently, Clio and the Doctors: Psycho-History, Quanto-History, and
            History.
Quentin Bell
         The Art Critic and the Art Historian
         But while the literature of art is, in publishers' terms, booming,
            it has in one respect suffered a loss. During the past two hundred
            years there has usually been some important figure who acted as a
            censor and an apologist of the contemporary scene, a Diderot, a
            Baudelaire, a Ruskin or a Roger Frye. Who amongst our living
            authors plays this important role? What name springs to mind? I
            would suggest that no name actually springs; the last of our
            grandly influential critics was Sir Herbert Read and since his
            death, whatever else modern art may or may not possess, it has no
            prophet. This is not to say that aesthetic prophets are necessarily
            desirable nor that there are not some very conscientious and
            extremely perceptive critics at work today; in view of the fact
            that I am within a fortnight exhibiting my work in a London
            dealer's gallery (December 1973-January 1974), it would be folly to
            deny it. But it is I believe true that for better or for worse we
            have no grand pundit of living art and I believe that this lack may
            be concerned with what I see as a certain diminution in the role of
            the art critic, a certain decay in this department of literature.
            It is a tendency which I regret and the causes of which I want to
            try to discuss. It arises I believe from a misunderstanding
            concerning the proper functions of the critic and this confusion of
            purpose will be my theme. First, however, I think that I should
            glance at two important circumstances which make the work of an art
            critic particularly difficult today.
             
            Quentin Bell, professor of the history and theory of art at Sussex
            University, has written Virginia Woolf: A Biography, Of Human
            Finery, Ruskin, Victorian Artists, and, Bloomsbury. His article,
            "Art and the Elite," appeared in the first issue of Critical
            Inquiry. "The Art Critic and the Art Historian" was originally
            delivered as the Leslie Stephen lecture at the University of
            Cambridge on November 26, 1973. Other contributions are "CRITICAL
            RESPONSE: Notes and Exchanges" (Summer 1979), and "Bloomsbury and
            'the Vulgar Passions'" (Winter 1979).
John G. Cawelti
         Myths of Violence in American Popular Culture
         The chief difficulty with most social and psychological studies of
            violence lies in their assumption that violence is essentially a
            simple act of aggression that can be treated outside of a more
            complex moral and dramatic context. This may be the case with news
            reports of war, murder, assault, and other forms of violent crime,
            but it is certainly not a very adequate way to treat the fictional
            violence of a western, a detective story, or a gangster saga. It is
            true that one can count and catalog the number of violent acts that
            occur in a day or a week of television and produce distressing
            statistics about the number of murders and assaults per minute on
            the typical television show. One can, like the redoubtable Dr.
            Wertham, amass specific instances where a young person has imitated
            or thinks he has imitated an act of violence he saw on television,
            though we should not forget that it can also be said without much
            fear of contradiction that the literary work which has directly
            caused more violence in the history of Western civilization than
            any other is the Bible. One can also construct laboratory
            experiments in which various groups are shown short films of
            violent acts and demonstrate that in certain circumstances this
            experience will cause further aggressive behavior. With procedures
            such as this, the evidence of a correlation between media violence
            and aggressive behavior becomes more and more persuasive. But do
            such studies tell us anything more than that this is a violent age
            and that there is probably some connection between the violence of
            actuality and the representation of violence in the media?
             
            John G. Cawelti, author of Apostles of the Self-made Man, Six-Gun
            Mystique, and Focus on Bonnie and Clyde, is professor in the
            Department of English and chairman of the Committee on General
            Studies in the Humanities at the University of Chicago.
Frederick Crews
         Reductionism and Its Discontents
         The present disarray of psychoanalytic criticism is no doubt a
            cause for satisfaction among people who never cared for "deep"
            interpretation and who now feel confirmed in their resolution to
            allow literature to speak for itself. The only way to do that,
            however, is to remain silent a sacrifice beyond the
            saintliest critic's power. To be a critic is precisely to take a
            stance different from the author's and to pursue a thesis of one's
            own. Among the arguments it is possible to make, reductive ones are
            without a doubt the trickiest, promising Faustian knowledge but
            often misrepresenting the object of inquiry and deluding the critic
            into thinking he has cracked the author's code. To forswear all
            reductions, however, is not the answer: that is the path of phobia.
            A critic can avoid reductionism, yet still give his intellect free
            rein, only by keeping his skepticism in working order. If
            psychoanalysis, originally the most distrustful of psychologies,
            has by its worldly success and conceptual elaboration become a
            positive impediment to skepticism, we need be no more surprised
            than Freud himself would have been at such all-too-human
            backsliding. A critic's sense of limits, like Freud's own, must
            come not from the fixed verities of a doctrine but from his awe at
            how little he can explain. And that awe in turn must derive from
            his openness to literature from his sense that the reader in
            him, happily, will never be fully satisfied by what the critic in
            him has to say.
             
            Frederick Crews has written books on James, Forster, Hawthorne, and
            Christopher Robin. He is professor of English at the University of
            California at Berkeley. The present essay is a chapter from a new
            book, Out of My System: Psychoanalysis, Ideology, and Critical
            Method (Oxford University Press, Fall 1975).
E. D. Hirsch, Jr.
         Stylistics Synonymity
         Among philosophers as well as linguists the battle is still joined
            between those who view the correlation between meaning and
            linguistic form as strictly determined by convention and those who
            argue (as I shall) for the essential indeterminacy of the
            relationship between meaning and form.1 Plato's Cratylus aside, the
            philosphical dialogue that forms the locus classicus of this debate
            is the following:
             
            "You're holding it upside down!" Alice interrupted. "To be sure I
            was!" Humpty Dumpty said gaily, as she turned it round for him. "I
            thought it looked a little queer. As I was saying. that seems to be
            done right - though I haven't time to look it over thoroughly just
            now - and that shows that there are three hundred and sixty-four
            days when you might get un-birthday presents -" "Certainly," said
            Alice. "And only one for birthday presents, you know. There's glory
            for you!" "I don't know what you mean by 'glory,'" Alice said.
            Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. "Of course you don't - till I
            tell you. I meant 'there's a nice knock-down argument for you!'"
            "But 'glory' doesn't mean 'a nice knock-down argument,'" Alice
            objected. "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a
            scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither
            more nor less."2
             
            ·  1. This should not be taken as an argument for the indeterminacy
            of linguistic meaning itself. Quite the contrary; it is because
            meaning can be stable and determinate despite variations in mental
            acts and linguistic forms that the relation between form and
            meaning must be indeterminate on the basis merely of rules and
            conventions.
            ·  2. Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, chap. 6.
             
            E. D. Hirsch, Jr. is Kenan Professor of English at the University
            of Virginia. He is the author of Validity in Interpretation and
            Wordsworth and Schelling: A Typological Study of Romanticism. A
            second edition of his book on Blake, Innocence and Experience, will
            appear next year, as will a new book on critical theory.
John Holloway
         Narative Structure and Text Structure:Isherwood's A Meeting by_the
            River, and Muriel Spark'sThe Prime of Miss Jean_Brodie
         Some recent discussions of narrative structure consider the
            narrative as a sequence of events, and assume that the structure is
            what is manifested by the relation between any given event and the
            event (n - 1)1, or perhaps the whole sequence from the first event
            up to the (n - 1)th event in the book. In the present discussion
            this approach will be modified in two ways. It will be modified,
            later on, by considering what would be happening if the writer were
            revising his work into the final version, out of a penultimate
            version which was, as it were, a next-most complex version: one to
            which some final "complexifying" process had not yet been applied.
            The other way in which the present discussion will modify that
            approach is that it will consider narrative not as one sequence of
            events but as an interrelated set of sequences.
             
            ·  1. E.g., R. Barthes, "Introduction à l'analyse structurale du
            récit," Communications, no. 8 (1966), pp.1-27.
             
            John Holloway, professor of Modern English at the University of
            Cambridge, has written The Victorian Sage, The Charted Mirror, The
            Story of the Night, Blake: The Lyric Poetry, and five volumes of
            verse, such as New Poems. He is presently completing a book on
            poetic modes from Milton to Hardy and coediting a four-volume
            series on English and Irish street ballads. His other contribution
            to ," Supposition and Supersession: A Model of
            Analysis for Narrative Structure" appeared in the Autumn 1976
            issue.
Martin Price
         People of the Book: Character in Forster's A_Passage_to_India
         The subtlety of the novel lies in its unrelieved tension of flesh
            and spirit, exclusion and invitation, the social self and the
            deeper impersonal self. At one extreme are the caricatures caught
            in the social grid - the Turtons and Burtons. At the other are the
            characters who slip out of the meshes of social responsibility
            through despair or obliviousness. We move from the elaborate
            rituals of Anglo-Indian to Mau, where the only aspects of life we
            are shown are ecstasy and neglect. Where does the mind rest? The
            difficulty with looking at reality directly is that reality will
            tend to dissolve: "not now, not here, not to be apprehended except
            when it is unattainable." Transcendence dehumanizes, the deeper
            self is a source rather than a habitation, we cannot see the
            unseen. We only glimpse it through paradox, violence, or farce; and
            each of these contributes something to Forster's conception of
            character.
             
            Martin Price, Thomas E. Donnelly Professor of English at Yale
            University, is author of To the Palace of Wisdom and the recently
            reprinted Swift's Rhetorical Art, editor and coeditor of the Oxford
            Anthology of English Literature, and coeditor of Poetry Past and
            Present. He is currently working on a book on character in the
            novel.
Edward Wasiolek
         Wanted: A New Contextualism
         With the publication of Anatomy of Criticism in 1957, Northrop Frye
            had already recognized that some egress had to be found from the
            theoretical impasse of insisting on an autonomy that cut literature
            off from more and more. Whereas American New Criticism saw the
            structure of the individual work as unique and self-sufficient,
            Frye insisted that there were structures that overrode the specific
            contexts of individual works. The structures of individual works
            were not worlds unto themselves, but were conditioned by contexts
            and structures broader than they. Works were not made ex nihilo;
            they were made out of literature, and Frye seemed to imply what
            T.S. Eliot had stated some thirty years before him: that there was
            an order of works that affected and was affected by the individual
            work.1 Unlike the American New Critics who insisted - at least in
            their extreme period - that the individual poem had an induplicable
            context, Frye insisted on the duplicable context, and on the fact
            that certain images and basic structures are repeated throughout
            Western literature.
             
            ·  1. Frye actually pays high tribute to Eliot's The Function
            of Criticism and his concept of literature as an ideal order of
            works and not simply the collection of writings of individuals. He
            says, "This is criticism and very fundamental criticism. Much of
            this book attempts to annotate it" (Anatomy of Criticism
            [Princeton, N.J., 1957], p.18).
             
            Edward Wasiolek, is author of Dostoevsky: The Major Fiction and
            editor of the five-volume edition of Dostoevsky's notebooks for
            which he received the Gordon J. Laing Prize. He is Avalon
            Foundation Professor and chairman of the Department of Slavic
            Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago.
Eugène Ionesco
         Ionesco and the Critics: Eugène Ionesco Interviewed by_Gabriel
            Jacobs
         GJ: We've talked a lot about critics who are hostile toward you. Do
            you ever feel the need to make a stand against those who are
            favourably inclined toward your plays but whose comments seem to
            you to be stupid?
             
            EI: Well, for better or worse, that's what I've always done: I
            wrote Notes and Counter-Notes, had discussions with Claude
            Bonnefoy, I've written articles; and in each case what I've said,
            in short, is that critics who gave me their approval, did so
            because they misunderstood me and were mistaken about my
            intentions.
             
            GJ: Finally, are you at all bitter about the critics?
             
            EI: No. Many have become good friends of mine. But it is a bit
            disheartening; when I began, a critic who, shall we say, is on the
            Right, a conservative critic who is very well-known and has since
            become a friend of mine, called me an impostor, a fraud, and a
            dummy; and now, twenty-five years later, the Leftists still call me
            an impostor, a fraud, and a dummy.
             
            GJ: But less often?
             
            EI: Well, I suppose so.
             
            Eugene Ionesco, renowned by playwright , recently was awarded the
            International Writer's Prize by the Welsh Arts Council. While in
            Wales, he was interviewed by Gabriel Jacobs, lecturer in French at
            University College of Swansea; the interview represents Ionesco's
            most concerted attempt yet to deal with his critics. He is
            completing a book on the subject which Gabriel Jacobs will
            translate into English.
A. Walton Litz
         Recollecting Jane Austen
         The nineteenth century compared her to Shakespeare; in our own
            time, she has been likened most often to Henry James. Both
            comparisons reflect a basic difficulty in reconciling subject
            matter with treatment, in squaring Jane Austen's restricted world -
            "3 or 4 Families in a Country Village" - with her profound impact
            upon our imaginations. Over the years her admirers have tried to
            resolve this paradox in various ways, none quite successful, but
            throughout all the changes in critical method one thing has
            remained constant: the high level of admiration. As Edmund Wilson
            once remarked, in various revolutions of taste which have occurred
            during the last century and a half, "perhaps only two reputations
            have never been affected by the shifts of fashion: Shakespeare's
            and Jane Austen's. We still agree with Scott about Jane Austen,
            just as we agree with Ben Jonson about Shakespeare." Even in the
            half-century after Jane Austen's death, when her reputation was
            limited in comparison with those of the great Victorians, the
            praise of discriminating critics was remarkably consistent; and it
            seems safe to predict, as we begin to celebrate the two-hundredth
            anniversary of her birth, that this high estimate will remain
            unchallenged. The bicentennial year will produce the usual
            tributes, conferences, and collections of essays, but the call for
            "revaluation" which is usually a ritual part of such occasions will
            scarcely be heard. The question will not be one of placing Jane
            Austen in some hierarchy of value, but of trying once again to
            explain her accepted excellences.
             
            A. Walton Litz has written The Art of James Joyce, Jane Austen: A
            Study of Her Artistic Development, Introspective Voyager: The
            Poetic Development of Wallace Stevens, and numerous articles. He is
            professor of English at Princeton University.
Gunther S. Stent
         On Art and Science: A Reply to Leonard_B._Meyer
         I was surprised to note the critical tone of the discussion which
            my friend Leonard B. Meyer recently devoted in these pages to an
            article on the relation of art and science that I wrote for a
            popular scientific magazine. For I had believed all the while that
            in my article I was merely presenting to a general scientific
            audience a watered-down version of what I thought were Meyer's own
            views. Evidently I was mistaken in that belief, though I have been
            unable to fathom just where I went wrong in interpreting Meyer's
            earlier writings, which, more than any other source, are the
            provenance of my ideas about the nature of art.
             
            Gunther S. Stent, professor of molecular biology at the University
            of California, Berkeley, is the author of Molecular Biology of
            Bacterial Viruses, Phage and the Origin of Molecular Biology,
            Molecular Genetics: An Introductory Narrative, The Coming of the
            Golden Age: A View of the End of Progress, and many important
            scientific papers. In Concerning the Sciences, the Arts AND
            the Humanities" (September 1974), Leonard B. Meyer took issue with
            views expressed by Professor Stent in "Prematurity and Uniqueness
            in Scientific Discovery," published in Scientific American
            (December 1972).
Leonard B. Meyer
         Leonard B. Meyer's Rejoinder
         I am very sorry that you were distressed by the "critical
            tone" of my essay; and I apologize if it was in any way
            offensive. Though I am afraid that our disagreements remain, it
            would take another article to reply to the paper you enclosed. Of
            course, I have no objections to your sending your MS to the editor
            of , if you have not already done so.) But let me
            at least try to pinpoint our differences as I see them.
             
            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.
Frank Kermode
         A Reply to Denis Donoghue
         Like all sensible men I feel that to be read carefully by Denis
            Donoghue is a privilege rather than an ordeal; but although I am
            clearly to blame insofar as I allowed him to misunderstand me, I
            can't at all admit that he has damaged the argument I was trying to
            develop.
             
             I cheerfully concede most of his points, but they don't work
            against me in the way he thinks. Of course there is a sense in
            which it can be said that "there is only one story," the facts of
            which can be had "for the trouble of finding them." That is not in
            dispute; the question concerns that "trouble" and its products. For
            we surely mean by right reading something more than the
            reconstruction of events in causal and chronological order - that
            is what we do when we read complicated detective stories, though
            even then, as I have argued elsewhere, our "trouble" involves
            considerations of a nonnarrative order; and this is true whether or
            not it is the intention of the author that it should.
            (Incidentally, I remember lecturing on that topic a couple years
            ago in Dublin, again, it appears, without convincing my host and
            friend Denis Donoghue that even in these relatively simple cases no
            single right reading is possible.)
             
            In the December issue of  Denis Donoghue raised
            objections to Frank Kermode's "Novels: Recognition and Deception"
            (, September 1974). In his brief comments,
            Professor Kermode clarifies the issues in dispute. Kermode's other
            contributions to  are "A Reply to Joseph Frank"
            (Spring 1978), and "Secrets and Narrative Sequence" (Autumn 1980).
