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Kenneth Burke
         Post-Poesque Derivation of a Terministic Cluster
         Underlying these pages is the assumption that, since we begin life
            as speechless bodies, the radicality of religious and poetic
            utterance somehow retains its relation to these origins, though in
            maturing we develop far from the order of reality we began with.
            Such expression must be rooted in man's primal essence as a
            speechless body, albeit there develops the technical "grace" of
            language (and of symbolicity in general, that "perfects" nature and
            is not reducible to terms of such sheerly physiological grounding).
             
            I take it that the body, as a physiological organism, is always
            behaving in the "specious present." Though we, as "persons," may
            anticipate or recall, the body as such is always behaving in a
            certain way now.
             
            If a believer is praying, his body cannot lie. If he is offering a
            prayer of thanks and really means it, his body behaves in one way.
            If he doesn't really mean it, his body behaves in a different way,
            though the vocables uttered in the prayer may be the same in both
            cases, and they may sound much less sincere to us if we hear them
            uttered by a genuine believer than as uttered by an accomplished
            tartuffe. In that sense it is by the speechless body that the
            person communicates with the nature of things.
             
            Kenneth Burke develops in this essay some behavioristic
            speculations that first exercised him in an early volume,
            Permanence and Change (1935). Those speculations are pursued
            further in an essay, "(Nonsymbolic) Motion / (Symbolic) Action,"
            which appears in the Summer 1978 issue of . His
            other contributions are "In Response to Booth: Dancing with Tears
            in my Eyes" (September 1974), "A Critical Load, Beyond that Door;
            or, Before the Ultimate Confrontation; or, When Thinking of
            Deconstructionist Structuralists; or, A Hermeneutic Fantasy"
            (Autumn 1978), and "Methodological Repression and/or Strategies of
            Containment" (Winter 1978).
Jean Ricardou
         Birth of a Fiction
         Nothing, one day, seemed more imperative to me than the project of
            composing a book whose fiction would be constructed not as the
            representation of some preexistent entity, real or imaginary, but
            rather on the basis of certain specific mechanisms of generation
            and selection. The principle of selection may be called
            overdetermination. It requires that every element in the text have
            at least two justifications. In this perspective, each element is
            invested with a coefficient of overdetermination. If there is a
            choice to be made between two overdetermined elements, the one with
            the highest coefficient of overdetermination will always be chosen.
            This principle, as we might expect, was not elected at random: it
            corresponds to any text construed as nonlinear. Take, for example,
            the simplest element, with a coefficient of two. A double relation
            connects it with the text: the one due to its place in the written
            line (commonly called a horizontal relation), and the one linking
            it with some other element in the text (a vertical relation). By
            operating at a maximum level of multiple determinations, the text
            is elaborated by means of a maximum number of transversal
            relations, in a field diametrically opposed to the realm of the
            linear.
             
            Jean Ricardou is equally well known for his fiction, including
            L'Observatoire de Cannes (Les Editions de Minuit, 1961), La Prise
            de Constantinople(Minuit, 1965),Les Lieux-dits (Gallimard, 1969),
            and Les Révolutions Minuscules (Gallimard, 1971), and his
            criticism, including Problèmes du Nouveau Roman (Le Seuil, 1967),
            Pour une Theorie du Nouveau Roman (Le Seuil, 1971), and Le Nouveau
            Roman (Le Seuil, 1973), LE PARADIGME d' Albert Ayme (Carmen
            Martinez, 1977), and a collection of essays, Nouveaux Problèmes du
            Roman. His "Composition Discomposed" appeared in the Autumn 1976
            issue of . Erica Freiberg regularly translates Jean
            Ricardou's works. She holds degrees in French and Italian,
            philosophy and modern literature from the University of Paris
            (Sorbonne) and the University of Geneva.
Joseph Frank
         Spatial Form: An Answer to Critics
         My own contribution relates to twentieth-century literature, where
            "spatialization" enters so fundamentally into the very structure of
            language and the organization of narrative units that, as [Frank]
            Kermode is forced to concede, "Frank says quite rightly that a good
            deal of modern literature is designed to be apprehended thus." His
            deals with the literature of the past, where "spatialization" (or,
            as he calls it, plot-concordance) was still the tendency which had
            by no means yet emerged in as radical a manner as in modernity.
            Both may be seen, and should be seen, as part of a unified theory
            which has the inestimable advantage of linking experimental
            modernism with the past in an unbroken continuity, and in viewing
            the present, not as a break, but rather as a limit-case, an
            intensification and accentuation of potentialities present in
            literature almost from the start. One of Kermode's essential aims,
            in The Sense of an Ending, was precisely to argue in favor of
            continuity and to reject the schismatic notion that a clean break
            with the past was either desirable or possible. It seems to me that
            he succeeded better than he knew, and that in polemicizing with
            spatial form" he merely perpetuates a schism which the deeper
            thrust of his own ideas has done much to reveal as nugatory and
            obsolete.
             
            Joseph Frank is professor of comparative literature and director of
            the Christian Gauss seminars in criticism at Princeton University.
            His many important contributions include The Widening Gyre: Crisis
            and Mastery in Modern Literature and Dostoevsky: The Seeds of
            Revolt, 1821-1849, for which he received the James Russell Lowell
            Prize of the MLA.
Eric S. Rabkin
         Spatial Form and Plot
         Novels in general use three different modes of reporting:
            narration, dialogue and description. Understanding that even with a
            given mode, such as the description of a stone, the relation
            between the diachronic flow of language and the synchronic focus of
            attention can be manipulated, we can still note that in general
            narration reports occurrences in a reading time considerably less
            than actual time. ("He ran all the way home"), dialogue reports
            occurrence in a reading time roughly congruent with actual time
            ("How are you?" "Fine"), and description reports occurrences in a
            reading time considerably greater than actual time ("The stone
            weighted heavily in his hand, clammy yet deeply textured, the
            solidity of its feel somehow incompatible with the delicacy of its
            silver veining"). Thus, in the interweaving of narration, dialogue
            and description a narrative not only defamiliarizes what it reports
            but guides the reader's consciousness through rhythms of
            correspondence between reading time and actual time. As long as we
            do not stay entirely in one mode and we never do these
            rhythms adjust the movement of our consciousness so that
            unconsciously at least we more or less approach synchronicity,
            depending on the particular techniques but we never achieve
            it. Spatial form may be thought of as a tendency, but in ordinary
            language it is never achieved.
             
            Eric S. Rabkin is professor of English at the University of
            Michigan at Ann Arbor. The author of Narrative Suspense, The
            Fantastic in Literature, and many articles on science fiction, he
            is also the coauthor of Form in Fiction and Science Fiction:
            History, Science, Vision. He contributed "Metalinguistics and
            Science Fiction" to the Autumn 1979 issue of .
William Holz
         Spatial Form in Modern Literature: A Reconsideration
         One measure of the validity of [Joseph] Frank's insight is the
            extent to which other versions of his ideas appear in other
            contexts: for if "spatial form" refers to something real, it cannot
            have escaped notice by other readers. One thinks, for example, of
            Northrop Frye's description of the critic viewing all the elements
            of the poem as a simultaneous array before him; or of Gaston
            Bachelard's evocative descriptions of The Poetics of Space. Or
            Pound's interest in ideographic script; or the frequent critical
            association of modern literature with impressionist painting. Or
            Eliot's poet synthesizing Spinoza, the sound of the typewriter, and
            the smell of cookery into a unified whole. Or at the root of
            it all, perhaps Poe's insistence on the unified effect of the
            story or poem.1 All of these instances reflect a more or less
            casual assumption of the basic premise of Frank's essay. More
            recently another critic, Frank Kermode, has offered an alternative
            description of this general problem. In The Romantic Image2 he
            assesses symbolist poetic theory; here the verbal image (or
            symbol), autonomous and autotelic, presumably unites meaning and
            feeling without intervening reflection or discourse: the "image" so
            hypostatized seems very close to a "spatial" form, and certainly
            the suppression of discourse, of reflection generally, follows from
            the disruption of syntax and narrative that results from the
            impulse toward "spatial" effects. Provisionally, we might say that
            Joseph Frank's essay is grounded in an essentially formalist
            conception of the literary work as artifact, and that the striking
            features of his argument result from an attempt to assimilate
            extended works (poetry as well as fiction) to a theory basically
            lyric in its orientation: as corollary, we must assume that the
            modern writers he cites had themselves operationally defined the
            concept in the course of their writing.
             
            ·  1. Northrop Frye, "Literary Criticism," in The Aims and Methods
            of Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literature, ed. James Thorpe
            (New York, 1963), p.65. See also Fables of Identity: Studies in
            Poetic Mythology (New York, 1963), p. 21. Gaston Bachelard, The
            Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (New York, 1964). Ernest
            Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry,
            ed. Ezra Pound (San Francisco, 1969). T.S. Eliot, "The Metaphysical
            Poets," Selected Essays (New York, 1950), p. 247. Edgar Allan Poe,
            review of Twice-Told Tales, in Works, 17 vols., ed. James A.
            Harrison (New York, 1902) 11: 104-13.
            ·  2. Frank Kermode, The Romantic Image (London, 1957).
             
            William Holtz, professor of English at the University of Missouri-
            Columbia, is currently preparing an edition of an unpublished
            juvenile manuscript by Charlotte Brontë.
Marcel Franciscono
         History, Textbooks, and Art: Reflections on a Half_Century_of_Helen
            Gardner's Art through the Ages
         Because of their basic level, textbooks show the assumptions and
            biases of art historians more clearly than does advanced, and
            therefore more restricted, scholarship. Textbooks are the rock, as
            it were, within which lie the strata of historical method. They
            bury, and so preserve for the good and ill of students (at least
            for a while), not so much individual historical data, which can be
            picked up or rejected rather easily, as those things which give the
            appearance of intellectual grasp to historical writing: its
            generalizations, its interpretations, its sweeping perspectives.
             
            The successive editions of Helen Gardner's Art through the Ages can
            tell us much about the assumptions that have pervaded art
            historical education in America over the past century. The first
            edition, published fifty years ago last year, is worth looking at
            in some detail, because for all its seminal importance in the
            teaching of art history it is by now little more than a deposit in
            library stacks. A mere glance will show that it is not ours.
            Indeed, the distance we have gone since then is exactly measured by
            the gaucheries it displays. It is half the length of modern
            surveys, and it makes no pretense either to completeness or to
            objectivity. It is arranged by period and style until we reach the
            Renaissance (which extends from 1300 to 1600), at which point, in
            keeping with the interest of an earlier age in national
            characteristics, each country receives its due chapter. The Italian
            Renaissance, as befits the central position of the primitives in
            American taste then, has four chapters to itself. Thereafter,
            except for a final, brief section on contemporary art, each
            national school is taken to the period of its decline. This, of
            course, will vary. France is taken through Cézanne; England through
            the Pre-Raphaelites and William Morris; Spain, thanks to Goya, into
            the early nineteenth century; and Dutch and Flemish art only
            through the seventeenth century, but without Bosch or Bruegel. As
            for Germany, though the chapter heading promises us "From the
            Gothic Age to the Nineteenth Century," in fact it is on Durer and
            Holbein. What fulfills the promise of the title appears in its
            entirety thus: "After the death of these two masters, largely on
            account of exhaustion from wars there was very little production,
            until the second great manifestation of the German people came in
            the music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries."1 No pretense
            here at dutiful compilation; high points, after all, are high
            points.
             
            ·  1. Helen Gardner, Art through the Ages: An Introduction to Its
            History and Significance (New York, 1926), p. 345.
             
            Marcel Franciscono is the author of Walter Gropius and the Creation
            of the Bauhaus in Weimar. He is associate professor of art history
            at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Albert William Levi
         Culture: A Guess at the Riddle
         It is necessary to realize first of all that the concept of culture
            is founded upon two closely related dichotomies: that between the
            natural and artificial and that between the chaotic and the
            orderly. In its most primitive signification, culture means simply
            the imposition of an exquisite order upon the raw givenness of
            experience. In this sense, nature represents the immediacy of need,
            culture its formalization. Man may be "a rational animal," as
            Aristotle said, but in possessing the rational potential which he
            intermittently actualizes, he never ceases to remain an animal
            grounded immediately in hunger, lust, and the multiple instances of
            natural desire. Plato waged a never-ending struggle against the
            lawless outbreak of the natural appetites, and his efforts to curb,
            discipline, and form them is a primitive paradigm of the activity
            of culture. Man's capacity for thought and reason, for sociality
            and humane consideration has made him a sculpture-building animal
            and has made it possible for him, as Cassirer said, to live in a
            symbolic universe which he has himself created. But while his basic
            reality is not physical but cultural and spiritual, his anchorage
            forever remains that of nature and of animal need. The measure of
            culture is, therefore, a measure of artistic transformation.
             
            Albert William Levi is the author of The Idea of Culture, of which
            this essay is a part. The David May Distinguished University
            Professor of the Humanities at Washington University, St. Louis, he
            is the author of Philosophy and the Modern World; Literature,
            Philosophy and the Imagination; Humanism and Politics; and
            Philosophy as Social Expression. His "De interpretatione: Cognition
            and Context in the History of Ideas" appeared in ,
            Autumn 1976.
Walter Blair
         Americanized Comic Braggarts
         During nearly two centuries, American storytellers have celebrated
            comic figures, ebullient showoffs who turned up on one frontier
            after another in the old South, in Kentucky and Tennessee,
            along the great inland rivers, in the mountains and the mines and
            on the prairies. Often, the stories went, when these characters
            engaged in a favorite pastime playfully bragging about their
            strength, their skill and their exploits they used animal
            metaphors such as Opossum, Screamer, Half-Horse Half-Alligator, the
            Big Bear of Arkansas or Gamecock of the Wilderness to furnish
            nicknames. Often they were also identified as fictional or real
            frontiersmen Mike Fink, Nimrod Wildfire, Jim Doggett, Pecos
            Bill and tall tales clustered around them. Explaining a
            metaphor and a nickname, an Ohio newspaper in 1830 cited the most
            famous braggart of this sort: "Ring-tailed roarer A most
            vicious fellow a Crockett." . . . The stories did not have to
            have roots in reality and often were not new. The real Crockett was
            well built, handsome, ruddy-cheeked. But traditional jokes made
            ugliness a funny quality. Falstaff claimed Bardolph's crimson
            proboscis glowed with a flame that made torches inoperative. The
            Spectator in 1711 told about "Spectator's" election to England's
            Ugly Club. Joke 177 in Joe Miller's Jests (1739) was about the
            British kingdom's champion ugly man. When Gus Longstreet entered
            law school in Litchfield, Connecticut, in 1813, a student welcomed
            him: "Here, sir, is a knife always given to the ugliest student. .
            . . Until now it has been mine, but beyond doubt, sir, since you
            are here, I have now no right to it any longer." Andy
            Jackson "Old Hickory" won a like award. (So in time
            would Lincoln.) Lore had it that Davy was so repulsive looking that
            if he grinned at a raccoon, it tumbled from its tree. Once, worried
            because he grinned and grinned without bringing down his victim, he
            was relieved when a close look showed he had mistaken a knot for a
            beast. All the same, he had grinned all the bark off the branch.
             
            Walter Blair is professor emeritus in the department of English at
            the University of Chicago. His many influential works include
            Native American Humor and Horse Sense in American Humor.
            "Americanized Comic Braggarts" appears in a slightly different
            version in the book (coauthored with Hamlin Hill) America's Humor
            from Poor Richard to Doonesbury.
Tzvetan Todorov
         The Verbal Age
         What is The Awkward Age about? It is not easy to answer that
            apparently simple question. But the reader can take consolation
            from the fact that the characters themselves seem to have just as
            much trouble understanding as he does.
             
            Actually, a large proportion of the words exchanged in this
            novel a novel made up, moreover, almost exclusively of
            conversations consists of requests for explanation. These
            questions may touch upon different aspects of discourse and reveal
            various reasons for obscurity. The first, the simplest and the
            rarest, is an uncertainty about the very meaning of words; it is
            like the uncertainty a foreigner would naturally feel whose
            knowledge of the language was imperfect: the questions here are
            matters of vocabulary. In The Awkward Age there are no foreigners
            who speak bad English, but one of the characters, Mr. Longdon, has
            for a long time lived far from London; now that he has come back,
            he has the feeling that he no longer understands the meaning of
            words, and, in the course of his first conversations at least, he
            often asks questions like: "What do you mean by early?" "What do
            you mean by the strain?"1 These questions, innocent as they appear,
            nevertheless require those to whom they are addressed both to
            explain and to take full responsibility for the meaning of the
            words that is why the questions sometimes provoke lively
            refusals. "What do you mean by fast?" Mr. Longdon asks again, but
            the response of the Duchess is cutting: "What should I mean but
            what I say?" (p. 194). We shall see, however, that the Duchess' own
            niece is a victim of the same disorder not understanding the
            meaning of words.
             
            ·  1. P. 43. References are to the Penguin Modern Classics edition
            (London, 1975). All further references will appear in the text.
             
            Tzvetan Todorov has written numerous books on literary theory, the
            last of which is Théories du symbole (1977), and has translated the
            works of the Russian Formalists into French. Two of his books have
            been translated into English, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach
            to a Literary Genre and Poetics of Prose. He is editor (with Gérard
            Genette) of the journal Poétique and works as Maître de recherche
            at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. "The
            Last Barthes" appeared in the Spring 1981 issue of Critical
            Inquiry.
Elder Olson
         A Conspectus of Poetry, Part II
         When the activity depicted in a poem involves a succession of
            moments, it may take one of two possible forms: simple or complex.
            A simple activity is like a straight line; that is, it involves
            progression in a single direction, then in another. This changing
            of course, so to speak, is called a turning point or reversal.
            Every complex activity contains at least one such turning point;
            and it is possible to have a good many turning points if the action
            is long enough, as in an epic like the Odyssey, which in fact is
            full of reversals, for Odysseus or his men or those whom they
            encounter are always getting into danger and then out of it, or
            else doing something and having to produce an opposite effect to
            the one intended; and of course all such things are reversals. . .
            . Generally speaking, we feel emotions more powerfully when they
            come upon us unexpectedly. Unexpected good fortune seems even
            better than it is, unexpected misfortune even worse, by comparison
            with what we had expected: consequently we respond with greater
            emotion. Since reversals always involve something of the
            unexpected, the complex form of activity offers more possibility of
            emotional power than the simple. The reversal must be unexpected if
            it is to be effective, and also...it must be probable; the complex
            activity must therefore always contain an apparent or on-the-
            surface probability, which founds our expectation, and the real
            probability, which defeats it. The real probability must be more
            probable than the apparent, for otherwise we should not accept it;
            and it must be hidden (that is, concealed by the poet), for
            otherwise we should expect it as the more probable.
             
            Part I of a "Conspectus of Poetry" appeared in the Autumn 1977
            issue of . Elder Olson's contributions to Critical
            Inquiry are "The Poetic Process" (Autumn 1975) and "On Value
            Judgments in the Arts" (September 1974).
Wallace Martin
         Literary Critics and Their Discontents: A Response to_Geoffrey
            Hartman
         In view of Hartman's article, the canny critic might with some
            justice claim that the dispute is actually one between Anglo-
            American and Continental traditions and arm himself with all the
            historical and philosophical resources that the former can provide.
            Occam's razor and the armed vision might in the end prove equal to
            Nietzsche's hammer and the broken hammer that haunts the pages of
            Heidegger. However, the canny critic will realize that no matter
            how armed, he would still lose the argument because of his refusal
            to relinquish one resource that in the end constitutes his
            irreducible commitment to his tradition: his assumption that the
            debate should be conducted in accordance with rules he knows and
            understands. Through a Hegelian Aufhebung in critical controversy,
            it is now precisely those rules that are in question. What is at
            stake is not something that can be decided by rational arguments,
            but our shopworn conception of rationality itself; not logic, but
            the question of whether or not our logic is an a posteriori
            construction of a more primal rhetoric; not truth, but the devious
            ways in which this concept is used to mask the will to power. And
            finally, given that these are serious questions, they will be
            misunderstood if there is no room for play in discussing them.
             
            Wallace Martin, professor of English at the University of Toledo in
            Ohio, is the author of The New Age under Orage and is preparing a
            book on the theory of criticism. He responds in this essay to
            Geoffrey Hartman's "Literary Criticism and Its Discontents" (Winter
            1976).
Geoffrey Hartman
         The Recognition Scene of Criticism
         Wallace Martin's response to "Literary Criticism and Its
            Discontents" is anything but naive. Its most sophisticated device
            is to posit my invention of a "naive reader" and to suggest that I
            would place the New Critics and their heirs in that category. But
            when I see the movement of criticism after Arnold as exhibiting an
            anti-self-consciousness principle or being so worried about a
            hypertrophy of the critical spirit that the spirit is acknowledged
            only by refusing its seminal or creative force, I am not alleging
            naiveté but "organized innocence," or the privileged assignment of
            some given, intuitive (in that sense naïve) power of creation to
            the area of art which excludes the area of philosophy or
            philosophically-minded commentary. This defensive partition of the
            critical and the creative spirit, which recognizes the intelligence
            of the creative writer but refuses the obverse proposition that
            there may be creative force in the critical writer, I have
            elsewhere named the Arnoldian concordat.
             
            Geoffrey Hartman, professor of English and comparative literature
            at Yale University, is the author of Criticism in the Wilderness.
