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Wayne C. Booth
         "Preserving the Exemplar": or, How Not to Dig_Our_Own_Graves
         At first thought, our question of the day seems to be "about the
            text itself." Is there, in all texts, or at least in some texts,
            what Abrams calls "a core of determinate meanings," "the central
            core of what they [the authors] undertook to communicate"? Miller
            has seemed to find in the texts of Nietzsche a claim that there is
            not, that "the same text authorizes innumerable interpretations:
            There is no 'correct' interpretation. . . . reading is never the
            objective identifying of a sense but the importation of meaning
            into a text which has no meaning 'in itself.'" Abrams claims that
            Miller cannot report on Nietzsche's deconstructionist claims
            without violating them: Miller seems to claim that he has found
            something that Nietzsche's text really says, not something that
            Miller himself merely brought to it. Is this objection a quibble or
            a clincher?1
             
            · 1. See my "M.H. Abrams: Historian as Critic, Critic as
            Pluralist,"  2 (Spring 1976): 411-45, and Abrams'
            reply, "Rationality and Imagination in Cultural History," pp. 447-
            64, esp. 456-58.
             
            Wayne C. Booth's other contributions to  include
            "Kenneth Burke's Way of Knowing" (September 1974), "Irony and Pity
            Once Again: Thais Revisited" (Winter 1975), "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, W.J.T. Mitchell: "Sheldon Sacks
            1930-1979" (Spring 1979).
M. H. Abrams
         The Deconstructive Angel
         That brings me to the crux of my disagreement with Hillis Miller.
            The central contention is not simply that I am sometimes, or
            always, wrong in my interpretation, but instead that I like
            other traditional historians can never be right in my
            interpretation. For Miller assents to Nietzsche's challenge of "the
            concept of 'rightness' in interpretation," and to Nietzsche's
            assertion that "the same text authorizes innumerable
            interpretations (Auslegungen): there is no 'correct'
            interpretation."1 Nietzsche's views of interpretation, as Miller
            says, are relevant to the recent deconstructive theorists,
            including Jacques Derrida and himself, who have "reinterpreted
            Nietzsche" or have written "directly or indirectly under his
            aegis." He goes on to quote a number of statements from Nietzsche's
            The Will to Power to the effect, as Miller puts it, "that reading
            is never the objective identifying of a sense but the importation
            of meaning into a text which had no meaning 'in itself.'" For
            example: "Ultimately, man finds in things nothing but what he
            himself has imported into them." "In fact interpretation is itself
            a means of becoming master of something."2 On the face of it, such
            sweeping deconstructive claims might suggest those of Lewis
            Carroll's linguistic philosopher, who asserted that meaning is
            imported into a text by the interpreter's will to power:
             
            "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so
            many different things."
            "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be
            master that's all."
             
            But of course I don't believe that such deconstructive claims are,
            in Humpty Dumpty fashion, simply dogmatic assertions. Instead, they
            are conclusions which are derived from particular linguistic
            premises. I want, in the time remaining, to present what I make out
            to be the elected linguistic premises, first of Jacques Derrida,
            then of Hillis Miller, in the confidence that if I misinterpret
            these theories, my errors will soon be challenged and corrected.
            Let me eliminate suspense by saying at the beginning that I don't
            think that their radically skeptical conclusions from these
            premises are wrong. On the contrary, I believe that their
            conclusions are right in fact, they are infallibly right, and
            that's where the trouble lies.
             
            ·  1. "Tradition and Difference," Diacritics 2 (Winter 1972): 8,
            12.
            ·  2. Ibid.
             
            M. H. Abrams's contributions to  include
            "Rationality and Imagination in Cultural History: A Reply to Wayne
            Booth" (Spring 1976) and "Behaviorism and Deconstruction: A Comment
            on Morse Peckham's 'The Infinitude of Pluralism'" (Autumn 1977).
J. Hillis Miller
         The Critic as Host
         At one point in "Rationality and Imagination in Cultural History"
            M.H. Abrams cites Wayne Booth's assertion that the
            "deconstructionist" reading of a given work "is plainly and simply
            parasitical" on "the obvious or univocal reading."1 The latter is
            Abrams' phrase, the former Booth's. My citation of a citation is an
            example of a kind of chain which it will be part of my intention
            here to interrogate. What happens when a critical essay extracts a
            "passage" and "cites" it? Is this different from a citation, echo,
            or allusion within a poem? Is a citation an alien parasite within
            the body of its host, the main text, or is it the other way around,
            the interpretative text the parasite which surrounds and strangles
            the citation which is its host? The host feeds the parasite and
            makes its life possible, but at the same time is killed by it, as
            "criticism" is often said to kill "literature." Or can host and
            parasite live happily together, in the domicile of the same text,
            feeding each other or sharing the food?
             
            · 1.  2, no. 3 (Spring 1976): 457-58. The first
            phrase is quoted from Wayne Booth, "M.H. Abrams: Historian as
            Critic, Critic as Pluralist," ibid., p. 441.
             
            J. Hillis Miller's contributions to  are "Ariadne's
            Thread: Repetition and the Narrative Line" (Autumn 1976) and
            "Theory and Practice: Response to Vincent Leitch" (Summer 1980).
E. H. Gombrich
         The Museum: Past, Present, and Future
         I hope you will agree, however, that the purpose of the museum
            should ultimately be to teach the difference between pencils and
            works of art. What I have called the shrine was set up and visited
            by people who thought that they knew this difference. You
            approached the exhibits with an almost religious awe, an awe which
            certainly was sometimes misplaced but which secured concentration.
            Our egalitarian age wants to take the awe out of the museum. It
            should be a friendly place, welcoming to everyone. Of course it
            should be. Nobody should feel afraid to enter it or for that matter
            be kept away by his inability to pay. But as far as I can see the
            real psychological problem here is how to lift the burden of fear,
            which is the fear of the outsider who feels he does not belong,
            without also killing what for want of a better word I must still
            call respect. Such respect seems to me inseparable from the thrill
            of genuine admiration which belongs to our enjoyment of art. This
            admiration is a precious heritage which is in danger of being
            killed with kindness.
             
            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 books include The Story of Art, Art
            and Illusion, Meditations on a Hobby Horse, Norm and Form, Symbolic
            Images, The Heritage of Apelles, and In Search of Cultural History.
            He became a Fellow of the British Academy in 1960, a Commander of
            the British Empire in 1966, and was knighted in 1972. He is also a
            trustee of the British Museum and a foreign member of the American
            Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Philosophical
            Society. His contributions to  include "Notes and
            Exchanges" (Summer 1979), "Standards of Truth: The Arrested Image
            and the Moving Eye" (Winter 1980), and, with Quentin Bell, "Canons
            and Values in the Visual Arts: A Correspondence" (Spring 1976).
Seamus Heaney
         Now and in England
         It is in the context of this auditory imagination that I wish to
            discuss the language of Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill, and Philip
            Larkin. All of them return to an origin and bring something back,
            all three live off the hump of the English poetic achievement, all
            three, here and now, in England, imply a continuity with another
            England, there and then. All three are hoarders and shorers of what
            they take to be the real England. All three treat England as a
            region or rather treat their region as England in
            different and complementary ways. I believe they are afflicted with
            a sense of history that was once the peculiar affliction of the
            poets of other nations who were not themselves natives of England
            but who spoke the English language. The poets of the mother
            culture, I feel, are now possessed of that defensive love of their
            territory which was once shared only by those poets whom we might
            call colonial Yeats, MacDiarmid, Carlos Williams. They are
            aware of their Englishness as deposits in the descending storeys of
            the literary and historical past. Their very terrain is becoming
            consciously precious. A desire to preserve indigenous traditions,
            to keep open the imagination's supply lines to the past, to receive
            from the stations of Anglo-Saxon confirmations of ancestry, to
            perceive in the rituals of show Saturdays and race-meetings and
            seaside outings, of church-going and marriages at Whitsun, and in
            the necessities that crave expression after the ritual of church-
            going has passed away, to perceive in these a continuity of
            communal ways, and a confirmation of an identity which is
            threatened all this is signified by their language.
             
            Seamus Heaney, recognized today as one of Ireland's leading poets,
            has received numerous honors, among them the E. C. Gregory Award,
            the Cholmondeley Award, the Irish Academy of Letters Award, the
            Denis Devlin Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
            E. M. Forster Award. His published poems have been collected in
            four volumes: Death of a Naturalist (1966), Door in the Dark(1969),
            Wintering Out(1972), and North (Oxford, 1976). In another form this
            essay was delivered as the Beckham Lecture at Berkeley in the
            spring of 1976. He has also contributed to the Summer 1981 issue on
            "Current Unstated Assumptions about Poetry" for
            .
Catharine R. Stimpson
         The Mind, The Body, and Gertrude Stein
         However, Stein's self-images are more than appropriations of a male
            identity and masculine interests. Several of them are irrelevant to
            categories of sex and gender. In part, Stein is an obsessive
            psychologist, a Euclid of behavior, searching for "bottom natures,"
            the substratum of individuality. She also tries to diagram psychic
            genotypes, patterns into which all individuals might fit. Although
            she plays with femaleness/maleness as categories, she also
            investigates an opposition of impetuousness and passivity, fire and
            phlegm; a variety of regional and national types; and the dualism
            of the "dependent independent," who tends to resist. In part, as
            she puzzles her way towards knowing and understanding, she presents
            herself as engaged in aural and oral acts, listening and hearing
            before speaking and telling. That sense of perception as physical
            also emerges in a passage in which she, as perceiver/describer,
            first incorporates and then linguistically discharges the world:
            "Mostly always when I am filled up with it I tell it, sometimes I
            have to tell it, sometimes I like to tell it, sometimes I keep on
            with telling it."1
             
            · 1. The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family's
            Progress (Paris: Contact Editions, 1926), p. 325.
             
            Catharine R. Stimpson, associate professor of English at Barnard
            College, is the editor of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and
            Society and the author of J.R.R. Tolkien as well as other essays
            and fiction.
             
            See also: "Visual Rhetoric in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas"
            by Paul K. Alkon in Vol. 1, No. 4; "Gertrude Stein, the Cone
            Sisters, and the Puzzle of Female Friendship" by Carolyn Burke in
            Vol. 8, No. 3
Susan Fox
         The Female as Metaphor in William Blake's Poetry
         In his prophetic poems Blake conceives a perfection of humanity
            defined in part by the complete mutuality of its interdependent
            genders. Yet throughout the same poems he represents one of those
            mutual, contrary, equal genders as inferior and dependent (or, in
            the case of Jerusalem, superior and dependent), or as unnaturally
            and disastrously dominant. Indeed, females are not only represented
            as weak or power-hungry, they come to represent weakness (that
            frailty best seen in the precariously limited "emanative" state
            Beulah) and power-hunger ("Female Will," the corrupting lust for
            dominance identified with women). Blake's philosophical principle
            of mutuality is thus undermined by stereotypical metaphors of
            femaleness which I believe he adopted automatically in his early
            poems and then tried to redress but found himself trapped by in his
            late works.
             
            Susan Fox is currently working on a book of poems and has written
            articles on Spenser and Blake as well as Poetic Forms in Blake's
            Milton. She is an associate professor of English at Queens College
            of the City University of New York.
Jean H. Hagstrum
         Eros and Psyche: Some Versions of Romantic Love_and_Delicacy
         The millennial interest in the fable told by Apuleius in The Golden
            Ass has produced periods of intense preoccupation. Of these uses of
            the legend none is more interesting, varied, and
            profound none possesses greater implications for contemporary
            life and manners than the obsessive concern of pre-Romantic
            and Romantic writers and artists. Hellenistic, Roman, and early
            Christian culture had produced at least twenty surviving statues of
            Psyche alone, some seven Christian sarcophagi that used the legend,
            and a set of mosaics on a Christian ceiling in Rome from the early
            fourth century;1 and of course to late antiquity belongs the
            distinction of having produced the seminal telling of the tale by
            Apuleius in about A. D. 125. But what we possess from that remote
            time is thin and lacks the power to engage the modern spirit. The
            allegorizing and erotic responses made in the Renaissance,
            Mannerist, and Baroque culture produced monuments of painting that
            the later period cannot rival; but the impregnation of literature
            by the legend was slight, and the intellectual or moral content was
            often only a perfunctory and dutiful addendum. The revival of the
            story in the aesthetic movement of the late Victorians and early
            moderns has its examples of beauty, particularly in Rodin and in
            the lush harmonies and occasionally piercing melodies of César
            Franck's Psyché, a tone poem for chorus and orchestra; but the long
            retellings by Morris, Bridges, and John Jay Chapman oppress with
            luxuriant sweetness and remain of interest only as period pieces.
             
            ·  1. See Elizabeth Hazelton Haight, Apuleius and His Influence
            (New York, 1963), p. 164, and Maxime Collignon, "Essai sur les
            monuments grecs et romains . . . ," in Bibliothèque des écoles
            françaises d'Athène et de Rome (Paris, 1877), fasc. 2, pp. 285-446,
            esp. pp. 364, 436-38.
             
            Jean H. Hagstrum, John C. Shaffer Professor of English and
            Humanities at Northwestern University, is currently preparing a
            book on the theme of love in European literature and art from the
            mid-seventeenth century through the Romantic period. He is the
            author of books and articles on Blake and Samuel Johnson, and of
            The Sister Arts, a study of the relations of poetry and painting
            from antiquity through the eighteenth century.
Leon Rosenstein
         On Aristotle and Thought in the Drama
         The first view I shall investigate holds that the art form of
            tragedy expresses or contains certain eternal, acultural, and
            ahistorical facts which are "tragic" and present as such in the
            real or extra-artistic worlds; these facts are merely composed in
            tragedy as its content such that tragedy may be said to embody some
            perennial statement or thought about the (nonaesthetic) things that
            are. The assumption here is that "tragedy" is a noun which can
            literally be applied to describe certain facts or events we
            encounter in the everyday world. This term has been more
            specifically understood to refer to the fact of death (or certain
            aspects of it, such as suicide, sacrifice, transcendence,
            destruction), to a way of existence or human existence generally,
            or to a relationship existing between man and the world, or man and
            other men, or man and himself (or certain aspects of these
            relationships, such as defeat, lack of communication or communion,
            contradiction, conflict, etc.). Though tragedy certainly has its
            preferred topics, and these have sources in a world outside any
            given world which the particular tragedy constructs, there is
            surely a distinction between the world in general, with its facts,
            relationships, significances, and interpretations, and the
            particular world created by a given tragedy. This purely
            aesthetical creation of its own facts, relationships,
            significances, and interpretations is what I shall henceforth call
            the worked world (the art form's world or the aesthetical world) of
            tragedy.
             
            Leon Rosenstein is currently working on "Hegelian Sources of
            Freud's Social and Political Philosophy," a four-article series to
            appear during 1977. He is an associate professor of philosophy at
            San Diego State University.
Richard Ellmann
         Joyce and Homer
         The broad outlines of Joyce's narrative are of course strongly
            Homeric: the three parts, with Telemachus' adventures at first
            separate from those of Ulysses, their eventual meeting, their
            homeward journey and return. Equally Homeric is the account of a
            heroic traveler picking his way among archetypal perils. That the
            Odyssey was an allegory of the wanderings of the soul had occurred
            to Joyce as to many before him, and he had long since designated
            the second part of a book of his poems as "the journey of the soul"
            (2:20). He had also construed Stephen's progress in A Portrait as a
            voyage from Scyllan promiscuity in chapter 4. Although in Ulysses
            he diverged sharply from Homer in the order of events, Joyce
            clearly adapted the Homeric settings and what he chose to consider
            the prevailing themes. He found the Odyssey beautifully all-
            embracing in its vision of human concerns. His own task must be to
            work out the implications of each incident like a Homer who had
            long ago outlived his time and had learned from all subsequent
            ages. Joyce once asked his friend Jacques Mercanton if God had not
            created the world in much the same ways as writers compose their
            works; but he then bethought himself and murmured, "Perhaps, in
            fact, he does give less thought to it than we do." Neither God nor
            Homer could compete with Joyce in self-consciousness.
             
            Richard Ellmann, Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature at
            Oxford University, received the 1960 National Book Award for his
            definitive James Joyce: A Biography. He has written extensively on
            Joyce and other modern writers, edited work by and about them, and
            examined the theoretical implications of biography in Golden
            Codgers. "Joyce and Homer" is a selection from his book, The
            Consciousness of Joyce, published by the Oxford University Press.
John Henry Raleigh
         Bloom as a Modern Epic Hero
         But Joyce did not want his hero to be either Greek or English: he
            wanted him to be Jewish. To that end, a third archetype, and an
            actual historical person, comes in: Baruch (or Benedictus) Spinoza.
            That Joyce himself was acquainted with Spinoza from fairly early in
            his career seems indubitable. In 1903 he mentioned him twice in a
            review of J. Lewis McIntyre's Giordano Bruno.1 Also in 1903 Joyce
            met Synge in Paris, and the two argued about art. Synge finally
            told Joyce, who was at this time forging his ironclad esthetic in
            Aristotelian or Thomistic terms, that he had a mind like Spinoza, a
            remark that Joyce passed on, presumably with some pride, to his
            mother and his brother. These are the only times in Joyce's life of
            which there is any published evidence of a connection between
            Spinoza and Joyce, and yet, as all readers of Ulysses know, Spinoza
            is Bloom's philosopher, and in Ulysses as a whole Spinoza plays a
            greater role than any other philosopher, including Aristotle and
            St. Thomas who appear, surprisingly, rarely and always, with one
            exception, in the Stephen Dedalus context. Spinoza ("spinooze") is
            also a presence in Finnegans Wake. The appeal of Spinoza to Joyce
            both as a man and as a mind must have been considerable.
             
            ·  1. How well Joyce knew Spinoza at this time is problematical.
            His review of McIntyre's book, entitled "The Bruno Philosophy,"
            published in the Dublin Daily Express, 30 Oct. 1903 (and
            republished in James Joyce: The Critical Writings, ed. Ellsworth
            Mason and Richard Ellmann [New York, 1959], pp. 132-34), is done in
            English style, that is, the reviewer makes assertions as if they
            were his own when in fact they come from the author of the book
            under review. Thus when Joyce says, "in his attempt to reconcile
            the matter and form of the Scholastics . . . Bruno had hardily out
            forward an hypothesis, which is a curious anticipation of Spinoza"
            (p. 133), he is only saying what McIntyre himself had said, as the
            editors of The Critical Writings point out.
            In point of fact there is nothing "curious" about Bruno being a
            precursor of Spinoza. One of Spinoza's early mentors, Francis Van
            den Ende, introduced him early on to the philosophy of Bruno, who
            thus became one of the formative influences on Spinoza's thought.
             
            John Henry Raleigh, professor of English at the University of
            California at Berkeley, is the author of Matthew Arnold and
            American Culture; Time, Place, and Idea: Essays on the Novel; and a
            forthcoming book on Joyce, The Chronicle of the Blooms: "Ulysses"
            as Narrative. He is currently writing a book on Sir Walter Scott,
            "Ivanhoe" and Its Times.
James E. Miller, Jr.
         Catcher in and out of History
         [The Catcher in the Rye's] catalogue of characters, incidents,
            expressions could be extended indefinitely, all of them suggesting
            that Holden's sickness of soul is something deeper than economic or
            political, that his revulsion at life is not limited to social and
            monetary inequities, but at something in the nature of life itself
            - the decrepitude of the aged, the physical repulsiveness of the
            pimpled, the disappearance and dissolution of the dead, the terrors
            (and enticements) of sex, the hauntedness of human aloneness, the
            panic of individual isolation. Headlines about Korea, Dean Acheson,
            and the cold war seem, if not irrelevant, essentially wide of the
            mark - if we define the mark as the heart and soul of Catcher.
             
            James E. Miller, Jr., author of "Henry James in Reality" (Critical
            Inquiry, Spring 1976) and numerous books and articles on American
            literature, responds in this essay to Carol and Richard Ohmann's
            "Reviewers, Critics, and The Catcher in the Rye (Autumn 1976). The
            Ohmann's answer will appear in our summer issue.
Josephine Donovan
         Feminism and Aesthetics
         In response to the discussion between William W. Morgan and Annette
            Kolodny in the Summer 1976 issue of  I would like
            to address the issue of separating judgments based on feminism as
            an ideology from purely aesthetic judgments. Peripherally this
            included the issue of "prescriptive criticism," so labeled by Cheri
            Register in Feminist Literary Criticism: Explorations in Theory.1
            In the same book, as Kolodny points out,2  I called for criticism
            that exists in the "prophetic mode." Kolodny indicates reservations
            about both concepts (prescriptive and prophetic criticism) without
            fully exploring the issue. I would like to explain my statement
            here and to explore further the issue of feminism and aesthetics.
             
            When I called for criticism in the prophetic mode, I did not intend
            to promote an idea of the critic as ideological prophet. Rather, as
            I explain in the context from which the term is taken,3 I am
            speaking of the engaged scholar who is concerned to influence the
            future by her/his work today. S/he chooses her/his work with an eye
            to encourage political and social changes. Obviously, for a
            feminist this translates into a concern for a future in which women
            (and ultimately all human beings) will be free from many of the
            restrictions that have held them down in the past. Much feminist
            criticism is thus corrective criticism designed to redress the
            imbalance in current literary curricula, and more generally to
            reintroduce "the feminine" into the public culture.
             
            ·  1. Cheri Register, "American Feminist Literary Criticism: A
            Bibliographical Introduction ," Feminist Literary Criticism:
            Explorations in Theory, ed. Josephine Donovan (Lexington, Ky.,
            1975) pp. 11-24.
            ·  2. Annette Kolodny, "The Feminist as Literary Critic," Critical
            Inquiry 2 (Summer 1976): 828.
            ·  3. Josephine Donovan, "Critical Re-Vision," Feminist Literary
            Criticism, p. 81, n. 2.
             
            Josephine Donovan, currently working on a literary biography of
            Sarah Orne Jewett, has written "Feminist Style Criticism," "Sexual
            Politics in the Short Stories of Sylvia Plath," and has edited
            Feminist Literary Criticism: Explorations in Theory. Although the
            occasion for this response was the exchange between Annette Kolodny
            and William W. Morgan (Summer 1976), the questions raised by Ms.
            Donovan have some bearing on other topics discussed in
            CriticalInquiry e.g., the nature of accepted canons in the
            arts (E. H. Gombrich and Quentin Bell [Spring 1976]). In addition
            the question of how we may interpret literary works from the past
            that contain currently unacceptable representations of women has
            implications as well for how we respond to "objectionable"
            representations of ethnic and religious groups and even of social
            classes. The editors expect to see these issues explored further in
            the future.
