vol4num1cov290x435.jpg]
Alain Robbe-Grillet
         Order and Disorder in Film and Fiction
         In any event, I realize fully that the parole, the speech, the
            "word" of a writer such as myself, has something strange and even
            contradictory about it, even within its own creator. At the moment
            when I write, let us say, La Jalousie or Glissements progressifs du
            plaisir, what I propose is improbable and consequently
            unacceptable; that is, my parole as a writer or as a cinéaste in my
            novels or in my films is abrupt, inexplicable, nonrecuperable for
            any correctly organized discourse. Nevertheless, you have noticed
            that I speak with the same clarity as any professor, and this
            constitutes an extremely interesting contradiction because it goes
            to the very heart of the debate; order and disorder never cease to
            interact, to contaminate each other, to practice a sort of mutual
            recuperation. If, having written a novel of disorder, I don't find
            someone for example, Bruce Morrissette, about La
            Jalousie to prove that it has order, I'll do it myself. The
            principle of order is so crucial that I wish to prove that the
            disorder which I've created I can myself transform into order. But,
            as soon as I have shown that it has its order, from that moment on
            I've destroyed the interest of my work. I have brought about within
            an organized discourse, organized according to the normal logic of
            Cartesianism, the recuperation of something which was in fact a
            machine of war against order. I often run into people who say to me
            after a film, "Ah, it's a pity that you didn't come to explain all
            of that before the film. We didn't understand a thing, and it is
            such a fine thing that you have explained it." And I reply, "Yes,
            but don't trust that too much," because what I've said is not at
            all the film. It is even almost the opposite; it is the way in
            which I show myself that there is in what I created a part which is
            in spite of everything, explainable by established order, and a
            part increasingly large, because order progresses.
             
            Alain Robbe-Grillet, novelist, film maker, and essayist, is the
            author of Les Gommes (1953), Le Voyeur(1955), La Jalousie (1957),
            Dans le labyrinthe (1959), La Maison de rendez-vous (1965), Projet
            pour une révolution à New York (1970), and Topologie d'une cité
            fantôme (1976). His films include: L'Année dernière à Marienbad
            (1961), L'Immortelle (1963), Trans-Europ-Express(1967), L'Homme qui
            ment (1968), L'Eden et après (1970), Glissements progressifs du
            plaisir (1974), and Le Jeu avec le feu (1975). He has presented his
            views on contemporary fiction in Pour un Nouveau Roman. Bruce
            Morrissette, author of books on Alain Robbe-Grillet and Sunny
            Distinguished Service Professor in the department of Romance
            languages and literature at the University of Chicago, has
            translated "Order and Disorder in Film and Fiction." He is the
            author of "Post-Modern Generative Fiction: Novel and Film"
            (, Winter 1975).
Siegmund Levarie
         Noise
         Noise has become an increasingly noticeable and significant symptom
            of our civilization. Fundamentally an acoustic phenomenon, noise
            has wider implications. It is the legitimate object of scientific
            investigations in the fields of psychology and physiology. It can
            be properly evaluated by its role in music and in general
            aesthetics. It leads to basic questions of sociology. We shall
            pursue the implications in these various fields one by one. In this
            process, as elsewhere, music provides the bridge from facts
            (acoustics, psychology, physiology) to commitments (aesthetics,
            sociology).
             
            Siegmund Levarie is professor of music at the City University of
            New York. The author of books on Mozart, Guillaume de Machaut,
            harmony, and Italian music, he has also collaborated with Ernst
            Levy on Tone: A Study in Musical Acoustics and the forthcomingA
            Dictionary of Musical Morphology.
Robert P. Morgan
         On the Analysis of Recent Music
         According to [Edward T.] Cone, then, there is a great deal of music
            written today that is simply no longer susceptible to analysis. If
            this is true, it can mean one of several things. First, it may
            indicate that, although there are new compositions that one finds
            interesting and representative of the period in which we live, the
            music simply does not lend itself to analysis. Thus, even if we
            enjoy and admire this music, there is not much that we can say
            about it beyond perhaps a mere description which I think most
            of us, along with Cone, would agree does not really constitute an
            analysis. I have the impression that many proponents of new music
            hold this view that is, they feel that new music is
            understandable only through a sort of mindless apprehension of its
            sensory surface. But if this is a fair account of the situation
            surrounding new music, it seems to me to represent a very
            serious and also depressing state of affairs. For what
            it means, I suspect, is that new music does not lend itself to
            being thought about in any serious way at all; and if so, then new
            music is missing a crucial dimension namely, an accompanying
            conceptual framework, erected through a body of critical and
            theoretical discourse, through which its meaning is defined and
            redefined as our thinking about music evolves. Indeed, this
            dimension forms and has always formed such an integral
            component of Western art music that its absence would seem to
            indicate that music, at least as we have known it, is in all
            likelihood dead.
             
            Robert P. Morgan is professor of music theory and composition at
            Temple University. In addition to being a composer, he is active as
            a critic; his articles on contemporary music have appeared recently
            in several music journals and in An Ives Celebration. His
            contribution to , "Musical Time/Musical Space"
            appeared in the Spring 1980 issue.
Stefan Morawski
         Contemporary Approaches to Aesthetic Inquiry: Absolute Demands and
            Limited Possibilities
         The generalizing methods of philosophies achieve a popularity for a
            period of time, which may be extended or brief, during which their
            proponents and even their opponents may regard them as the
            cognitive presuppositions for the epoch. The same effect is
            achieved by the more exact scientific methodologies as they find
            fame outside the scientific circle and are treated by some as
            omnipotent discoveries with powers to heal all other disciplines
            which may be ailing. The limping disciplines, generally classified
            among the humanities and discerned to be in trouble since the
            nineteenth century, are understandably envious of the seemingly
            invincible, favored scientific children of our time. For our era
            tends to worship quantifiable data and the principles and
            instruments for measuring and conceptualizing it. Thus semiotics
            and information theory, in hopes of acquiring the status of the
            sciences, have led aesthetic inquiry (to mention only one field)
            toward the currently popular scientism; but the limited cognitive
            scope of this methodology has not been recognized. Sociology of
            knowledge, however, forewarns us of the winds of fashion on
            cognitive paradigms. Where the inherent explanatory scope of a
            doctrine, system, or method is less than is believed according to
            the prevailing sociological patterns, a correction will eventually
            set in. And an important factor in overcoming the para-religious
            claims will be, precisely, the fundamental antinomical tendency of
            the human mind.
             
            Stefan Morawski, Research Professor at the Institute of Arts of the
            Polish Academy of Sciences, has lectured throughout the United
            States and is currently teaching at the Ludwig Maximilian
            University in Munich. His works have appeared in a variety of
            languages: Marxism and Aesthetics: History of Ideas has been
            published in Spanish and Italian; Absolute and Form, in Polish,
            Italian, and French; and, in English, Inquiries into the
            Fundamentals of Aesthetics.
Frank Anderson Trapp
         The Emperor's Nightingale: Some Aspects of Mimesis
         One of Hans Christian Andersen's most beautiful tales is "The
            Emperor's Nightingale." Its message an exceptionally sobering
            one in the present context is that nature is altogether finer
            and more enduring than art. It tells how a Chinese emperor,
            beguiled by a precious imitation bird that had been given him,
            forsook a natural songster he had once favored. But when that
            glittering counterfeit broke down, its clockwork sound silenced,
            the now aged ruler found welcome solace in the real bird's return,
            in its more reliable and spiritually healing song. . . . Despite
            the artist's foregone defeat in any contest with nature (only in
            myth does a Pygmalion appear), over the ages artists have been
            irresistibly drawn to the challenge of imitating nature. The
            persistence of these claims upon their skills and the inventive
            flight that have been elicited in the process testify to the
            extraordinary hold that the desire to mirror nature, or better
            still, to capture something of its essence, can exert over artists
            and their public. Accounts of imitative prowess go back to the most
            ancient days, beyond the fabled skills of Zeuxis and Apelles. There
            is no need here to summarize the complicated but almost
            domestically familiar history of illusionism. Rather, it is my
            present intention to reflect upon some contradictions inherent in
            the conception of art as illusion and to review some of the more
            exaggerated forms in which efforts have been made to break down the
            boundaries between art and nature.
             
            Frank Anderson Trapp, William Rutherford Mead Professor of Fine
            Arts, chairman of the department of art, and director of the Mead
            Art Museum at Amherst College, is the author of The Attainment of
            Delacroix and a number of essays on the history of art.
Robert Scholes
         Towards a Semiotics of Literature
         The most powerful assumption in French semiotic thought since
            Saussure has been the notion that a sign consists not of a name and
            the object it refers to, but of a sound-image and a concept, a
            signifier and a signified. Saussure, as amplified by Roland Barthes
            and others, has taught us to recognize an unbridgeable gap between
            words and things, signs and referents. The whole notion of "sign
            and referent" has been rejected by the French structuralists and
            their followers as too materialistic and simple minded. Signs do
            not refer to things, they signify concepts, and concepts are
            aspects of thought, not aspects of reality. This elegant and
            persuasive formulation has certainly provided a useful critique of
            naive realism, vulgar materialism, and various other-isms which can
            be qualified with crippling adjectives. But it hasn't exactly
            caused the world to turn into a concept. Even semioticians eat and
            perform their other bodily functions just as if the world existed
            solidly around them. The fact that the word "Boulangerie" has no
            referent does not prevent them from receiving their daily bread
            under that sign. As Borges put it: "The world, alas, is real; I,
            alas, am Borges." Obviously, the whole question of the relationship
            between words and things cannot be debated without any assistance
            from nonverbal experience seems to me highly unlikely. In my view,
            if language really were a closed system, it would be subject, like
            any other closed system, to increase in entropy. In fact, it is new
            input into language from nonverbal experience that keeps language
            from decaying.
             
            Robert Scholes, professor of English and director of the program in
            semiotic studies at Brown University, is co-author (with Robert
            Kellogg) of The Nature of Narrative and author of Structuralism in
            Literature.A Guggenheim fellow for 1977-78, he is currently working
            on "A Semiotics of Fiction." He has also contributed "Language,
            Narrative, and Anti-Narrative" (Autumn 1980) to .
Peter J. Rabinowitz
         Truth in Fiction: A Reexamination of Audiences
         Questions about the status of literary truth are as old as literary
            criticism, but they have become both more intricate and more
            compelling as literature has grown progressively more self-
            conscious and labyrinthian in its dealings with "reality." One
            might perhaps read The Iliad or even David Copperfield without
            raising such issues. But authors like Gide (especially in The
            Counterfeiters), Nabokov, Borges, and Robbe-Grillet seem
            continually to remind their readers of the complex nature of
            literary truth. How, for instance, are we to deal with a passage
            like the following from William Demby's novel The Catacombs:
            "When I began this novel, I secretly decided that, though I would
            exercise a strict selection of the facts to write down, be they
            'fictional' facts or 'true' facts taken from newspapers or directly
            observed events in my own life, once I had written something down I
            would neither edit not censor it (myself)."1
            What does this sentence mean? When an apparently fictional narrator
            (who, to make matters more confusing, has the same name as his
            author and is also writing a novel entitled The Catacombs)
            distinguishes between "fictional" and "true" facts, what is the
            status of the word "true"? It clearly does not mean the same as
            "fictional," for he opposes it to that term. Yet it cannot mean
            "true" in the sense that historians would use, for he calls what he
            is writing a novel, and even if he quotes accurately from
            newspapers, the events of a narrator's life are not "historically"
            true.
             
            · 1. William Demby, The Catacombs (New York, 1970), p.93.
             
            Peter J. Rabinowitz, assistant professor at Kirkland College, is
            currently working on articles on Raymond Chandler, Faulkner, and
            Dostoyevsky and is, as well, a music critic for the Syracuse Guide.
            He wrote his doctoral dissertation in comparative literature on the
            philosophical implications of Nabokov's use of humor and terror.
            "Truth in Fiction" is the first article he has had published in a
            scholarly journal.
Dennis Porter
         The Perilous Quest: Baseball as Folk Drama
         If the morphology of baseball is similar to that of the fairy tale,
            it is obviously not because baseball is a form of narrative art. As
            my title suggests, insofar as baseball resembles literature at all
            in the way it manifests itself, it is clearly much closer to drama.
            Baseball takes place within a fixed, carefully delimited space that
            may be improvised but is reserved specifically for the purpose
            wherever the game is institutionalized. It is an ensemble
            performance carried out by specially trained "players" in front of
            an audience for whom the occasion is a festive event that occurs as
            a suspension of ordinary life. It possesses a plot that develops in
            a limited period of time from initial situation through
            complication to denouement and has a relatively large number of
            dramatis personae who are sent into the playing area at a given
            moment in order to perform specific roles.
             
            Dennis Porter, associate professor of French and comparative
            literature at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, has
            published widely on nineteenth- and twentieth-century French and
            English novels. He is currently an NEH fellow and is working on two
            books: one on plot and ideology in the novel, the other, The Alibi
            of Crime, on detective fiction.
Elder Olson
         A Conspiracy of Poetry, Part I
         Is there an alternative course to one which sets up hypotheses as
            to the nature of poetry and then proceeds to illustrate them?
            Happily, there is. Rather than beginning with the hypothesis we may
            begin with the fact, and let what may emerge. That is, rather than
            beginning with some notion of the nature of poetry, we may begin
            with individual poems and discover what we may of their nature or
            form. This procedure evidently involves four phases: (1)
            examination of the characteristics of individual poems, (2)
            discovery, by comparison with other poems, of likenesses and
            differences, (3) decision as to which of these likenesses and
            differences are relevant to poetic form, and (4) the statement of
            form itself. Once we have discovered a given form, we shall be in a
            position to discuss the principles underlying the construction of
            such form, the various possibilities of such construction, and what
            constitutes excellence in a given form.
             
            Elder Olson, poet, critic, and Distinguished Service Professor in
            the department of English at the University of Chicago, is the
            author of six volumes of verse, including Collected Poems and
            Olson's Penny Arcade, and of numerous works of literary criticism.
            His previous contributions to  are "The Poetic
            Process" (Autumn 1975) and "On Value Judgments in the Arts"
            (September 1974), the title essay on his most recent collection of
            criticism. Among the many awards which he has received are the
            Academy of American Poets award, the Longview Foundation award, the
            Emily Clark Balsh award and, for Olson's Penny Arcade, the Society
            of Midland Authors award. Both his poetry and his criticism are the
            subject of a book by Thomas E. Lucas. Part II of "A Conspectus of
            Poetry" will appear in the Winter 1977 issue of .
M. H. Abrams
         Behaviorism and Deconstruction: A Comment on Morse Peckham's_"The
            Infinitude of Pluralism"
         Peckham claims that my "behavior" in dealing with the quotations in
            Natural Supernaturalism is the same, in methodology and validity,
            as the interpretative behavior of Booth's waiter. But the great
            bulk of the utterances in my quotations and no less, of the
            utterances constituting Peckham's own essay do not consist of
            orders, requests, or commands. Instead, they consist of assertions,
            descriptions, judgments, exclamations, approbations, condemnations,
            and many other kinds of speech-acts, the meanings of which are not
            related to my interpretative behavior, even in the indirect way in
            which the meaning of Booth's order is related to the future
            behavior of his waiter.
             
            M. H. Abrams, author of Natural Supernaturalism and The Mirror and
            the Lampand Class of 1916 Professor of English at Cornell
            University, responds in this essay to Morse Peckham's "The
            Infinitude of Pluralism" (Summer 1977). Morse Peckham, in his
            Critical Response, was commenting on issues raised by the forum on
            "The Limits of Pluralism" (Spring 1977), to which M. H. Abrams
            contributed. Previous contributions to  are
            "Rationality and Imagination in Cultural History: A Reply to Wayne
            Booth" (Spring 1976) and "The Deconstructive Angel" (Spring 1977).
Robert Denham
         The No-Man's Land of Competing Patterns
         The reductive nature of Kincaid's undertaking comes into sharper
            focus when we compare his kind of critical inquiry with that, say,
            of [Sheldon] Sacks or [Ralph] Rader. Kincaid concludes where they
            begin. For Sacks, the identification of some type, such as satire,
            is what initiates the critical process. What then remains is to
            move beyond type, which exists at the highest level of generality,
            to form and finally to those detailed analyses which will account
            for the peculiar powers of unique works. His types, as he says, are
            "only elementary distinctions," and he adds that "at some point in
            an adequate criticism of a single literary work, we will inevitably
            be discussing those variations which distinguish a particular
            literary work from all other literary works of its class, even if
            that class has been defined according to the most subtle and
            intricate combination of variables possible."1 Similarly for Rader,
            our intuitions about formal principles and intentions are but first
            steps in critical inquiry. "My theory, " he says, "attempts not to
            establish 'general laws' . . . but to render explicit the
            structural features of our tacit experiences of literature in a way
            that will allow us to bring all its implications to bear
            simultaneously upon our explanation of any particular literary
            work."2Such procedures as these, which are designed to give us
            particular knowledge, are ruled out by Kincaid's program, the most
            specific formal principle of which is something quite general: the
            competition among narrative patterns. There is finally, then, very
            little knowledge to be shared, for our inquiries will always arrive
            at the same conclusion. Although readers, in his view, can intend
            one thing rather than another, writers cannot, and this assumption
            that agents (who are, by the way, conspicuously absent from his
            title) are somehow set apart from the other members of the species
            means, I suspect, that Kincaid is right about one thing: his effort
            to mediate does indeed place him in a "no-man's land."
             
            ·   1. Sheldon Sacks, Fiction and the Shape of Belief (Berkeley,
            1967), pp. 25-26 n.
            ·   2. Rader, "Explaining Our Literary Understanding," Critical
            Inquiry 1 (June 1975): 905.
             
            Robert Denham, editor of Northrop Frye: An Enumerative Bibliography
            and the forthcoming Northrop Frye on Culture and Literature(a
            collection of Professor Frye's essay-reviews), is associate
            professor and chairman of the department of English at Emory and
            Henry College. In this essay Robert Denham replies to James R.
            Kincaid's "Coherent Readers, Incoherent Texts" Critical inquiry,
            Summer 1977.
René Wellek, Wayne C. Booth, Joseph F. Ryan, Jean H.
            Hagstrum
         Notes and Exchanges
         In late April we received the following letter from René Wellek:
            May I comment on the remarks Wayne C. Booth made about some
            passages in Theory of Literature in his article "Preserving the
            Exemplar" (in CI, vol. 3, pp. 408-10)?
             
            Mr. Booth is completely mistaken in referring to Wellek and Warren
            as "those Un-new Critics." The chapter in Theory of Literature is a
            revision of my paper "The Mode of Existence of a Literary Work of
            Art," published in the Southern Review (vol. 7, pp. 735-54) in
            1942. This in turn rehearses some of the arguments of my older
            paper "The Theory of Literary History" in the Travaux du Cercle
            Linguistique de Prague (vol. 6 [1936], pp. 173-91), written some
            four years before my emigration to the United States. The
            incriminated passages are, I believe, the very first attempt to
            define the ontological status of a literary work in English. The
            method is phenomenological and not neo-critical at all. The terms
            such as "structure of norms," "structure of determinism" (used also
            by Meyer Abrams) come from Husserl's Méditations cartésiennes
            (Paris, 1931) and from Roman Ingarden's Das literarische Kunstwerk
            (Halle, 1931), as I acknowledged in many contexts. I trust,
            however, that I supported and developed this position with new
            arguments, for instance, in rejecting the theories of I. A.
            Richards. This rejection follows logically from my acceptance of
            Husserl's arguments against psychologism. In many contexts, I have
            carefully discussed the theories of I. A. Richards, first in 1937,
            in a Czech article, on the Cambridge theorists of literature
            (Richards, Leavis, Empson), most elaborately in "On Rereading
            Richards" in The Southern Review (vol. 3 [N.S., Summer 1967], pp.
            533-53), an account which will be included in the forthcoming fifth
            volume of my History of Modern Criticism.
             
             
            Wayne Booth responded to Professor Wellek:
            I am greatly embarrassed by my mistake in writing "Robert Penn
            Warren" when I "know" very well that your collaborator was Austin
            Warren. Though it was a slip of the pen, and mind, it is the kind
            of mistake for which there is no real excuse. I knew, of course,
            about the distribution of different chapters to each of you, but
            assumed that because you published the book jointly it would be
            only fair to include both authors' names in my attribution.
             
            The other matters are of course much less simple to deal with. My
            little joke about "Un-new Critics" was intended more as a dig at
            the new new critics than as a lumping of you together with all the
            others who have been called "New Critics." You must have been
            annoyed many times over the years at the careless way in which a
            School was inferred when no single grouping ever existed. If I were
            ever discussing the New Critics I would want to discriminate what
            you have stood for from a large variety of other theories that came
            into prominence at about the same time.
             
             
            In a second letter, addressed directly to Wayne Booth, Professor
            Wellek further clarified his view of the issues in dispute as well
            as those points where he believes he and Professor Booth are in
            substantial agreement:
            You wrote me such a friendly and generous letter that I felt like
            withdrawing my letter to . But on second thought I
            let it stand as I wrote it. Your paper has been heard and read by
            many.
             
            I agree with you completely about the abuse of the term "The New
            Criticism." In the fifth volume of my History of Modern Criticism
            which, I hope, will at last appear next year, I have made a
            determined effort to expound the American critics so labeled as
            distinct individuals often radically different in outlook,
            theories, tastes and conclusions.
             
             
            In April we also received the following letter from Joseph F. Ryan
            about Jean H. Hagstrum's "Eros and Psyche: Some Versions of
            Romantic Love and Delicacy" (Spring 1977):
            Thank you for the Hagstrum essay on Eros and Psyche. It is the type
            of article  exists to provide and perhaps too
            infrequently finds.
             
            I do have one quarrel with Hagstrum over his interpretation of
            Flaubert's reaction to the kiss exchanged by Cupid and Psyche in
            Canova's representation.
             
            Jean Hagstrum responded:
            Thank you for your kind remarks on my recent essay in Critical
            Inquiry.
             
            We are in considerably less disagreement than your letter suggests,
            Flaubert's response must surely be "sensual," as he says it is,
            though I must say that there is something a little less than
            ultimately satisfying about kissing a statue that is not likely to
            become flesh.
             
            Subsequently we received two more letters from Joseph Ryan. The
            first was directed to us and was an elaboration of comments made in
            his initial letter; the second was directed to Professor Hagstrum
            and forwarded to us.
            I should not like Professor Hagstrum to think my letter lacking in
            the critical seriousness that his excellent essay requires as an
            adequate response. I would like to state the grounds of my consent
            to his argument more fully, so that any reservations that I may
            maintain may not seem whimsical or coy.
            I think Professor Hagstrum's essay is seminal in every possible
            sense of the term. He calls our attention to the centrality of a
            myth that has been so often observed, noticed, even peeked at,
            that, like many lovely and regenerating things, it has been as much
            overlooked as looked at.
             
            [The second letter reads:]
            Thank you for your kind reply to my first letter. Your reply has
            set me thinking about several questions concerning the relation of
            spiritual love to the flesh. You agree that there is nothing
            necessarily narcissistic and regressive about Flaubert's response,
            but you feel that his action must have been less than "ultimately
            satisfying." While it is quite true that many mystics are thwarted
            or crossed lovers and that this truth lends cogency to the
            hypothesis that mystical love is merely a displacement of an
            inhibited sexual aim, we cannot explain all forms of "Platonic"
            love in this fashion without recourse to a materialism more
            vindictive than disinterested.
             
            Jean Hagstrum then answered:
            In your letter of 9 June you broaden the meaning of Flaubert's kiss
            to symbolize the fusion of body and spirit in all aesthetic
            response. It is an excellent statement, and I shall not try to
            improve on it.
             
            In the longer response to my essay of 9 May, directed to Critical
            Inquiry, I do not find the suggested fusions nearly so persuasive.
             
            Then, in July, we received the following from Joseph Ryan:
            I wish to state my hypothesis about two distinct kinds of Platonic
            tradition as clearly as possible. (This hypothesis owes more than I
            can say to de Rougemont, a little to Leslie Fiedler, but, as far as
            I can tell, nothing at all to Marcuse.) These two traditions
            interpenetrate and even wage a struggle in many authors but ideally
            and essentially they are distinguishable.
