vol5num3cov290x435.jpg]
   1.    -3 Robert E. Streeter, Wayne C. Booth, W. J. T. Mitchell
         Sheldon Sacks 1930 1979
         It is strange to write for the pages of this journal a statement
            which will not come under the eye of its founding editor, Sheldon
            Sacks. For nearly five years everything that appeared in Critical
            Inquiry articles, critical responses, editorial
            comments was a matter of painstaking and passionate concern
            to Shelly Sacks. With a flow of questions and suggestions and a
            talent for unabashed cajolery, he generated articles and rejoinders
            to those articles. He worked tirelessly in editorial consultation
            and correspondence with contributors, especially young writers,
            helping them to discover the best way of giving form to their
            ideas. Among the essays submitted to this journal he searched
            eagerly, even anxiously, for those which seemed, in his words,
            "right for C.I."
             
            What was right for C. I.was never, for Shelly Sacks, a cut-and-
            dried choice. In his own intellectual life, in his teaching and
            writing, he delighted in arguing important general questions:
            theories of representation in the arts, points of possible
            intersection between linguistic science and literary criticism, the
            interplay of social forces and cultural expressions. Not
            surprisingly, in reconnoitering for , he found
            special satisfaction in identifying writers who shared his passion
            for reexamining fundamental topics in the intellectual disciplines.
            If such writers made their case forcefully, so much the better: in
            choosing an essay for publication he assessed its capacity to
            stimulate interesting counterargument.
             
            At no time, however, did Shelly Sacks confuse his own beliefs with
            the nature of intellectual discourse. As an editor he was
            hospitable to writers whose premises he questioned and whose
            conclusions he deplored. Nor did Shelly attempt to achieve a
            spurious catholicity by following a quiet quota system designed to
            give each major line of interpretation deconstructionist,
            Marxist, psychoanalytic, what have you an occasional airing
            in . For Shelly each article stood on its own
            ground: if its author dealt responsibly and freshly with an
            interesting problem, that was enough. And, along with his
            commitment to theoretical inquiry, he responded warmly to the
            personal, the offbeat, the idiosyncratic. He regarded the feature
            Artists on Art, for example, as a central element in our design.
             
            As an editor Sheldon Sacks was above all a shaper. He labored to
            find and suggest connections in the phenomena of intellectual life.
            Even the construction of a table of contents for a typical Critical
            Inquiryissue became for him an opportunity to influence the
            reader's experience of what we offered. The eminence of an author
            or the allure of a title were put to one side as Shelly sought to
            orchestrate, through placement, a kind of intellectual counterpoint
            from one essay to another. Unheard melodies, doubtless, for many of
            us, but for Shelly real and sustaining.
             
            In this valedictory note we have spoken of Sheldon Sacks' editorial
            accomplishment in our friendly view, a very distinguished
            one rather than of the personal qualities which made working
            alongside him an exhilarating experience. We should report,
            however, that for more than half the life of this journal Shelly
            was ill and knew that the time available to him was likely to be
            relatively brief. Faced with this diminishing perspective, he did
            not indeed it is more accurate to say he could
            not moderate his involvement with the life of this journal.
            At his death, as at the launching of this enterprise, he held to
            the high ambition that encourage comeliness, vigor,
            and continuity in the discourse of our time.
             
            The appropriate "critical response" to this great loss is that
            Sheldon Sacks' editorial colleagues, and our publisher, the
            University of Chicago Press, pledge whatever talents and energies
            we possess to the continuing life of the journal he imagined and
            brought into being.
Arnold Hauser
         The l'art pour l'art Problem
         EDITORIAL NOTE. Arnold Hauser died in February 1978 shortly
            after returning to his native Hungary; he had lived nearly half of
            his 85 years in a kind of self-imposed exile. He is considered, by
            those who know his work, to be perhaps the greatest sociologist of
            art, though his last years were spent in comparative neglect and
            obscurity. We present here as a testament to the importance of both
            the critic and the discipline he helped shape a section from the
            translation of hisSociology of Art(1974).
             
            Hauser's work draws on the influences of his teachers, Simmel,
            Bergson, Lukács, Mannheim, Sombart, and Troeltsch. He developed in
            his immenseSocial History of Art (1951)the groundwork for a
            sociological analysis of art ranging from prehistoric cave painting
            to film. In his later works The Philosophy of Art History
            (1958), Mannerism: The Crisis of the Renaissance and the Origins of
            Modern Art(1964), andThe Sociology of Art he continued to
            redefine his brilliant defense of art for society's sake.
             
            The theory of l'art pour l'art wants nothing to do with this
            contradiction and denies not only the moral and social usefulness
            of art but its every possible practical function as well. "Nobody
            would write poetry," says Eugenio Montale, "if the problem of
            literature consisted in making oneself understood." It has been
            doubted whether the capacity of making oneself understood, the
            unambiguous communication of feelings and experiences, even lies
            within the power of art. What Eduardo Hanslick asserts about music
            in Von musikalischen Schönen, namely, that its relation to
            everything which is nonmusical, everything which has emotional
            content, is vague and noncommittal, is to some extent true for all
            arts. Just as music expresses something which cannot be translated
            into any other form, so literature expresses something which is
            eminently literary, linguistic, something locked into words and
            syntactic structures. In the same way the untranslatable content of
            a painting, a pictorial idea, a vision, can only be seized and held
            onto in optical forms. The composer thinks in tones, the painter in
            lines and colors, the poet in words, tropes, and rhythms.
            Indubitable as this is, it is not the whole truth; side by side
            with the content which can only be expressed adequately in a
            particular form, there is an intrinsic value which can be
            translated into any form.
             
            Kenneth Northcott, translator of this essay, is professor of older
            German literature and of comparative literature at the University
            of Chicago. He is currently engaged in the translation of The
            Sociology of Art and in the study of late medieval satire in
            Germany and the works of Harold Pinter, in whose plays he also
            delights to act.
James S. Ackerman
         On Judging Art without Absolutes
         That art historians have felt it necessary to emulate this effort
            to express personal input can be explained by our need to gain
            credibility in that aspect of our work that is indistinguishable in
            method from other historical research: the reconstruction, through
            documents and artifacts, of past events, conditions, and attitudes.
            Most of us simply ignore the ambivalence of our position; I cannot
            recall having heard or read discussions of it, but it is bound to
            creep out from under the rug. If a student asks me why I think
            Rembrandt and Picasso are good artists which most students
            are too well trained to do and if I answer that judgments of
            value are not discussed by historians, I am within my rights, like
            a witness at a congressional hearing claiming the protection of the
            Fifth Amendment. But I ought to be found in contempt of the
            classroom. And if I try to answer seriously, I ought not begin by
            saying that I chose Rembrandt because he has been acknowledged by
            generations to have been a great artist but rather because I find
            more to think, feel, and speak about in his works than in those of,
            for example, Nicolaes Maes, and because I believe that the student
            stands to gain more by looking at them. I want the student to have
            the most rewarding experiences, and, as a result, perhaps to learn
            to make value discriminations of his own even ones different
            from mine and from the so-called consensus of history and
            ultimately to explain the grounds on which he makes them. This
            means having to know and to explain what I think is "rewarding."
             
            James S. Ackerman, professor of fine arts at Harvard University, is
            the author of, among other works, The Architecture of Michelangelo,
            Art and Archaeology, The Cortile del Belvedere, and Palladio. He is
            currently writing on Renaissance art, science, and naturalism and
            making a film on Andrea Palladio and his influence in America.
            "Transactions in Architectural Design," his previous contribution
            to , appeared in the Winter 1974 issue.
W. V. Quine
         On the Nature of Moral Values
         The distinction between moral values and others is not an easy one.
            There are easy extremes: the value that one places on his
            neighbor's welfare is moral, and the value of peanut brittle is
            not. The value of decency in speech and dress is moral or ethical
            in the etymological sense, resting as it does on social custom; and
            similarly for observance of the Jewish dietary laws. On the other
            hand the eschewing of unrefrigerated oysters in the summer, though
            it is likewise a renunciation of immediate fleshly pleasure, is a
            case rather of prudence than morality. But presumably the Jewish
            taboos themselves began prudentially. Again a Christian
            fundamentalist who observes the proprieties and helps his neighbor
            only from fear of hellfire is manifesting prudence rather than
            moral values.1 Similarly for the man with felony in his heart who
            behaves himself for fear of the law. Similarly for the child who
            behaves himself in the course of moral training; his behavior
            counts as moral only after these means get transmuted into ends. On
            the other hand the value that the child attaches to the parent's
            approval is a moral value. It had been a mere harbinger of a
            sensually gratifying caress, if my recent suggestion is right, but
            has been transmuted into an end in itself.
             
            ·  1. Bernard Williams, Morality (New York, 1972), pp. 75-78,
            questions the disjointedness of these alternatives. I am construing
            them disjointedly.
             
            W.V. Quine, Edgar Pierce professor emeritus of philosophy at
            Harvard University, is the author of many influential works,
            including The Roots of Reference. "A Postscript on Metaphor," his
            previous contribution to , appeared in the Autumn
            1978 issue. The present essay is being published in a festschrift,
            Values and Morals: Essays in Honor of William Frankenna, Charles
            Stevenson, and Richard Brandt.
P. D. Juhl
         Do Computer Poems Show That an Author's Intention_Is_Irrelevant_to
            the Meaning of a Literary Work?
         Suppose a computer prints out the following little "poem":
             
            The shooting of the hunters she heard
            But to pity it moved her not.
             
            What can we say about the meaning of this "poem"? We can say that
            it is ambiguous. It could mean:
            (1) She heard the hunters shooting at animals, people, etc., but
            she had no pity for the victims. . . .
            (2) She heard the hunters being shot but did not pity them. . . .
            (3) She heard the hunters shooting at someone or something and she
            heard the hunters being shot (at) but did not pity either.
             
            An author could use the above word sequence (the text of the
            "poem") to convey either (1), (2), or (3). But since (by
            hypothesis) we cannot treat the text produced by the computer as
            anyone's use of the words in question, it would not make sense to
            decide among its linguistically possible readings, just as it would
            not make sense to choose among the linguistically possible readings
            of an ambiguous sentence if it is considered in abstraction from
            its use by a speaker on a particular occasion. For example, it
            would not make sense to say of the sentence "He saw the man
            carrying the suitcase" that it just means "He saw the man who is
            carrying the suitcase" if we know that and in which what ways the
            sentence is ambiguous. If someone did say this, we would be
            inclined to think either that he does not know that the sentence is
            ambiguous or that he is talking not about the sentence but about an
            utterance (i.e., a use) of that sentence by a speaker on some
            occasion.
             
            Hence all we can do in interpreting the computer "poem" is to
            specify the set of its linguistically possible readings, namely, {
            (1), (2), (3)}. But it would not make sense to select (1), for
            example, and say, "That is what the computer poem means, not (2),
            nor (3)."
             
            P. D. Juhl is an assistant professor of German at Princeton
            University. The present essay, in a different form, will appear in
            his forthcoming book, The Nature of Literary Interpretation.
             
            See also: "Against Theory" by Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels
            in Vol. 8, No. 4
Charles Altieri
         Presence and Reference in a Literary Text: The_Example_of_Williams'
            "This Is Just to Say"
         If Milton is the grand expositor of human culture as a middle
            realm, Williams can be seen as in many respects his secular heir,
            an heir careful to work out how the poetic imagination serves to
            make man's expulsion from Edenic origins bearable and even
            invigorating. Williams' poetics begins, as Riddel makes clear, in
            the awareness that there is no inherent or even recoverable
            correspondence between words and facts in the world, but Williams
            then devotes most of his energies to denying the metaphysical
            alternative to that position the claim that all language can
            do is reflect on and play with the emptiness or fictiveness of its
            signifiers. If words do not copy but produce meanings, then they
            can be used significantly to focus our attention on the activities
            of the artist and his constructed characters as they engage in that
            process of production. The act of producing meanings can be the
            process by which to achieve another kind of reference, for the act
            of expression can itself become the focus generating a poem's
            significance by calling attention to the various ways authors and
            characters station themselves in relation to specific situations.
            Fiction then is not so much a term describing the ontological
            status of certain kinds of language (since many utterances in
            ordinary behavior also do not have referents) but a term
            characterizing a particular way of using language to reflect upon
            forms of behavior in which we are not fully conscious of the
            quality of our activities. Williams' position on the artist's
            language is clearest in his frequent metaphor of the artist as
            farmer. The initial activity of both men is a kind of violence, an
            assertion of the difference between human desires and indifferent
            "blank fields." But what begins as antagonism does not result in
            the creation of self-referential fictive structures or the gay
            wisdom of maintaining and disseminating differences. Rather
            antagonism is the precondition for what Williams richly labels
            "composition": the farmer-poet organizes the blank field into a
            fertile, life-sustaining set of relationships which are not simply
            linguistic.1
             
            ·  1. Williams, Imaginations, ed. Webster Schott (New York, 1970),
            pp. 98-99. Williams' image of arts as antagonistic composing has
            important parallels with the Russian Formalist concept of
            "defamiliarization," but for Williams it is not simply a scene but
            a total human act that is revealed by this process.
             
            Charles Altieri teaches modern literature and literary theory in
            the English department at the University of Washington. The author
            of Enlarging the Temple: New Directions in American Poetry of the
            1960s, he has just completed a study of literary meaning. "Culture
            and Skepticism: A Response to Michael Fischer" was contributed
            to in the Winter 1979 issue.
Richard McKeon
         Pride and Prejudice: Thought, Character, Argument, and Plot
         Justification for reading Pride and Prejudiceas a philosophical
            novel may be found in its much cited and variously interpreted
            opening sentence: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a
            single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a
            wife." This universal law is the first principle of a philosophical
            novel, although I shall also interpret it as the statement of a
            scientific law of human nature, a characterization of the civility
            of English society, and as a pronouncement on the manners of an
            economic class. Pride and Prejudice is a philosophical novel both
            in the sense of presenting a philosophy in exposition and of
            embodying a philosophy in action, and literary criticism exercises
            its proper function by expounding that philosophy and by
            explicating and clarifying the thought and action of the novel by
            means of it. The thought of Pride and Prejudice may be uncovered by
            interpreting it in accordance with any of a variety of
            philosophies, but it is peculiarly appropriate, and enlightening,
            to recognize its Platonizing echoes since the dialogues of Plato
            have gone through a history of interpretation that has evolved
            distinctions which are useful in interpreting Pride and Prejudice.
            Many interpreters of Plato's dialogues, in antiquity and later,
            argue that they are not statements of thoughts or opinions but are
            simply exhibitions of how philosophers talk; others, beginning with
            the Old Academy, interpret them as the expression of the truth not
            of the doctrines of one philosopher, but of all philosophers; some,
            beginning with the skepticism of the Middle or New Academy, hold
            that the method of Socrates was to demonstrate that all doctrines
            are false and therefore, by the same token, true; and some,
            following the Neoplatonists, sought in them the adumbration of a
            truth transcending human thought and expression. Neoplatonic truths
            are suited to tragedy and epic; skeptical Academic opinions provide
            a place and expectation proper to comedy. All Platonisms share
            hierarchical structures of being, thought, and aspiration. Plato
            himself describes three ladders of being, knowledge, and love in
            the Republic and the Symposium. The New Academic skepticism chooses
            a low place on those ladders, which is excellently named in the
            opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice: knowledge is based on
            self-evident truths, opinion can rise no higher than "a truth
            universally accepted," "possession of a good fortune" is a dubious
            degradation of vision of the ideal God to possession of material
            goods, and "want of a wife" is a transformation of charity or agape
            or love of the good in itself to concupiscence or eros or
            matrimony.
             
            Richard McKeon is the editor of The Basic Works of Aristotle and
            coeditor of Peter Abailard, Sic et Non: A Critical Edition. He
            delivered an earlier version of this paper at the 1977 Modern
            Language Association's session of the Division on Philosophical
            Approaches to Literature. His previous contributions to Critical
            Inquiry are "Arts of Invention and Arts of Memory: Creation and
            Criticism" (Summer 1975) and "Canonic Books and Prohibited Books:
            Orthodoxy and Heresy in Religion and Culture" (Summer 1976).
Victor E. Vogt
         Narrative and Drama in the Lyric: Robert Frost's_Strategic
            Withdrawal
         Part of Frost's continuing appeal to the "popular imagination"
            stems from his pronunciamentos on diverse topics: the metaphoric
            "pleasure of ulteriority," "the sound of sense," poems beginning in
            wisdom and ending in delight "a momentary stay against
            confusion." These phrases along with favorite one-liners ("earth's
            the right place for love" and "good fences make good neighbors")
            have made their way into our lexicon as memorable formulations both
            of Frost's ars poetica and of quotidian reality. Even schoolboys
            allegedly know the poet in these or similar terms. And why not? Yet
            the supposed "commonness" of Frost is precisely what must be
            brought under radical scrutiny including his formulaic
            statements of intent. Though these statements have been used
            effectively for critical purposes, the fact remains that they
            themselves are often problematic and tend toward the
            disconcertingly devious.1 That Frost's recourse to the rhetoric of
            irony and indirection is by no means confined to his poetry should
            not deter us from using his statements of intent to understand his
            poetry more fully. A cautionary "go slow," however, is in order.
             
            ·  1. This is one reason I have difficulty accepting Elaine Barry's
            claims for Frost as a theorist. Having distinguished between Frost
            as "critical theorist" and as "practical critic," Barry concludes:
            "Robert Frost has left us a body of critical theory that is
            probably larger than that of any American poet. It has scope and
            depth, wit and subtlety and a great sanity. In its
            significance, it bears favorable comparison with the formalized
            criticism of Eliot or Pound . . ." (Robert Frost: On Writing [New
            Brunswick, N.J., 1973], p.33). Frost makes some most suggestive
            statements often requiring de-metaphorization about
            poetry, especially his own. But taken as a whole, those statements
            constitute, at best, only an approximation of "theory." That this
            is not merely semantic haggling over the definition of theory
            should be evident from Barry's favorable comparison of Frost to
            Pound and especially Eliot.
             
            Victor E. Vogt has recently completed a study on love, death, and
            the quotidian in modern American drama and is currently working on
            the moral and sociological aspects of dramatism.
Earl Miner
         On the Genesis and Development of Literary Systems,_Part_II
         The account in Part I of this essay posited two related but
            distinct sequences of development: of literary systems proper and
            of critical systems. Or, more simply, we must recognize that
            literary practices and systematic ideas about them develop in
            different ways. Today we can see in retrospect that lyric,
            narrative, and lyric-narrative or narrative-lyric begin literary
            cultures. Systematic ideas about literature develop, however, more
            by accident, what seems to be the result of conditions producing
            important critical minds at times propitious for reflection. Any
            full account would have to consider such things as bipropertied
            conceptions. This has been mentioned before, but a specific example
            can be given here. Chinese wen designated not merely poetry but
            also prose historical writing: the fu (usually called "prose-poem")
            established a kind of middle ground between them. In any event,
            such combinations, such bipropertied conceptions, do exist in very
            sophisticated times. Another matter of crucial importance involves
            the difference between the actual or descriptive existence of a
            literary variety and normative or valued critical consideration of
            a given kind. Various evidence shows that ancient Greece had lyrics
            as well as narrative, and preliterary Japan, narrative as well as
            lyrics. In the case of Greece, we tend today to think of narrative
            normatively as the early literature, although Plato and Aristotle
            lumped it with lyric and concerned themselves almost entirely with
            their crucial genre, drama. As for early Japan, the narrative was
            largely a possession of reciters, and so few heroic cycles are left
            from the nondominant peoples that narrative poetry is more a
            supposition that a presence. But there is in what remains from
            early times a mixture of lyric poetry with narrative prose. That
            combination did not prove crucial for a systematic poetics,
            although it is of utmost significance for later developments. It
            can hardly be said emphatically enough that the literary system
            comes first and the critical system after some interval. But the
            various complexities in different cultures are such that to get our
            bearings we may well consider the course of literary development in
            a single culture.
             
            Earl Miner is Townsend Martin, Class of 1917, Professor of English
            and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. "That
            Literature is a Kind of Knowledge," his previous contribution to
            , appeared in the Spring 1976 issue. His works
            include Literary Uses of Typology from the Middle Ages to the
            Present (of which he is editor and a contributor) and Japanese
            Linked Poetry. Part I of the present essay appeared in the Winter
            1978 issue of .
Gerald Graff
         New Criticism Once More
         Wellek is surely right in arguing that the New Critics did not
            intend to behave as formalists, but I think he needs to explain why
            they came so close to doing so in spite of themselves. One
            explanation may lie in a sphere Wellek mentions but might have
            probed even more fully, the long-standing Romantic and modernist
            revolt against the culture of science, positivism, and
            utilitarianism. In Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (London, 1958),
            Raymond Williams argues that the Romantic reaction against
            industrial-utilitarian society led to a specialization of
            literature that attenuated literature's claims in a self-defeating
            way. Instead of contesting the realm of objective knowledge, the
            defenders of literature conceded this territory to science and
            commerce, either celebrating literature for its very freedom from
            such knowledge or claiming for it some alternate form of knowledge
            (not "about" anything) that could not be made rationally
            respectable. One could argue that the same pattern of misplaced
            reaction is seen in the New Criticism, that its revolt against the
            utilitarian, "Platonic" drives of science and positivism took the
            form of an attempt to divest literature of objective "truth of
            correspondence." Having equated this kind of truth with the most
            reductive forms of scientism, moralism, and propagandizing, the New
            Critics made it difficult to justify their own ambitious claims for
            the humanistic knowledge embodied in literature. Their way of
            reacting against the depravities of technological culture continues
            to be a common one today and can even be found in such adversaries
            of the New Critics as the cultural revolutionaries, the
            phenomenologists, and the deconstructionists all of whom
            express the paradigms of our modern "adversary culture." It is an
            understandable and even perhaps an admirable reaction, but it has
            led to distortions in our conception of the humanities one of
            which is the aggravation of that very dissociation of sensibility
            into scientific and poetic components that we all say we want to
            have done with.
             
            Gerald Graff, chairman of the English department at Northwestern
            University, is the author of Poetic Statement and Critical Dogma
            and, most recently, Literature against Itself: Literary Ideas in
            Modern Society. He responds in this article to René Wellek's "The
            New Criticism: Pro and Contra," published in Summer 1978 in
            .
René Wellek
         A Rejoinder to Gerald Graff
         Graff's second point about formalism does not refute my argument
            that the New Critics upheld the coherence or organicity of a work
            of art and yet did not ignore its relation to reality. I argued
            this to be a defensible view also from a parallel with painting.
            The individual New Critics emphasized one or the other side, in
            different contexts, and I am not prepared to defend the clarity and
            consistency of every one of their pronouncements. But even the
            loosely phrased quotation from Allen Tate's essay "Narcissus as
            Narcissus" (1938) can be defended. In saying that "it [Tate is
            discussing his own "Ode to the Confederate Dead"] is not knowledge
            'about' something else," he means that the poem does not make
            statements about the solipsism and narcissism that he discusses
            later. "The poem is rather the fullness of that knowledge"; that
            is, it is a creation, a new thing which has its meaning as a
            totality, and that meaning surely refers to the outside world: the
            cemetery, the dead, the Civil War, and so on. . . . To judge from
            Graff's book, Poetic Statement and Critical Dogma, we are not so
            far apart in our estimate of the New Criticism. I also have my
            troubles (as my writings on I. A. Richards, Ransom, Blackmur, and
            Burke show), mainly with their psychologism and the dichotomy
            between emotional and propositional language, but on the points
            that I discussed in the article the supposed lack of
            historical outlook, aestheticism, formalism, and
            scientism the New Criticism, has often been misunderstood and
            misrepresented. It needs and deserves the rehabilitation I have
            attempted.
             
            Rene Wellek, Sterling Professor Emeritus of comparative literature
            at Yale University, is the author of Theory of Literature (with
            Austin Warren) and of A History of Modern Criticism, 1750-1950. He
            has contributed "Notes and Exchanges Between Rene Wellek and Wayne
            C. Booth" (Autumn 1977) and "The New Criticism: Pro and Contra"
            (Summer 1978) to .
William C. Dowling
         Invisible Audience: Peter J. Rabinowitz's "Truth in Fiction"
         The problem of internal audience is thus that no such audience
            exists, that the X or abstract boundary of intentionality to which
            we want to give the name audience cannot be described in the terms
            of a world in which audiences listen to utterance. For that is the
            world that is annihilated in our objective comprehension of the
            work, and the X becomes the sole reality. Yet the only terms
            available to us to describe the reality that is the work must be
            taken from the only world we know, and the only escape from
            theoretical confusion is to see that such terms have, in their new
            use, a purely analogous function, that they draw on the world only
            as an unreal analogy of the X (and its world) that is real.
             
            I'm not certain that Rabinowitz's discussion of Pale Fire is in any
            way central to his "four audience" theory, but I'd like to end by
            saying that it misses an essential point.
             
            William C. Dowling is an associate professor of English at the
            University of New Mexico and the author of The Boswellian Hero.
Peter J. Rabinowitza
         Who Was That Lady? Pluralism and Critical Method
         To be sure, I agree that Nabokov creates a "sense of dizzying
            complexity," but I don't see how Dowling accounts for it at all.
            First of all, the passage he cites from Pnin is not an instance of
            the Liar's Paradox. The Liar's Paradox occurs when a single person
            claims that he or she always lies for in that case, there is
            no logically consistentway to call the claim either true or false.
            In Pnin,however, we have something quite different: a person, whom
            we suspect of often filtering the truth to serve his own ends,
            claims that someone else has called him a liar. That's confusing,
            perhaps, but not logically inconsistent; for instance, it would be
            logically inconsistent to say that Pnin is wrong, or is at least
            exaggerating, when he says that you shouldn't believe anything that
            the narrator says. Indeed, Pnin is wrong, and the careful reader
            can sort out the narrator's claims with a fair degree of accuracy,
            at least on the second reading. The odd sensation that Pnin
            inspires comes not because there's no logically consistent way to
            determine the truth or falsity if the narrative but rather because
            we can figure out when and how the narrator has slanted his
            statements only once we have finished the book, for only the last
            chapter gives us the evidence we need to interpret the earlier
            chapters properly.
             
            Peter J. Rabinowitz, assistant professor of comparative literature
            at Hamilton College, is the author of articles on Raymond Chandler,
            Faulkner and Dostoyevsky, and literary borrowing and is, as well, a
            music critic for Fanfare.
