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Ralph W. Rader
         The Literary Theoretical Contribution of Sheldon Sacks
         Behind all of Sheldon Sacks' writing and teaching lay an intense
            belief in the objectivity of literary experience and our capacity
            to achieve a shared conceptual understanding of the forms which
            underlie it. Literary criticism for him was not the critic's unique
            and unrepeatable performance but a serious inquiry a critical
            inquiry seeking explicit and precise explanatory concepts
            which others could grasp, test, and build upon. His effort was to
            show that we could in significant measure understand and explain
            literature and its value as standing independent of our
            understanding and explanation, and it was this double emphasis on
            the real being of literature and the possibility of valid
            conceptualization of it which gave his thought its appeal for those
            whom it influences. His creative constitution and the length
            and circumstances of his life were such as to allow only the
            one sustained effort of Fiction and the Shape of Belief and a
            series of articles in which he modified and expanded the
            application of the ideas developed therein. Yet in this relatively
            small body of work he revised and extended the ideas of the Chicago
            School within which he worked so as to achieve what seem to me
            genuine advances in the explicit conception of novelistic
            forms what might be called portable ideas, sharp and definite
            enough to be adopted and used and in their turn revised and
            redefined by others; this sets them apart from much critical work
            and marks their value and his intention.
             
            Ralph W. Rader, chairman of the department of English at the
            University of California at Berkeley, is the author of Tennyson's
            "Maud": The Biographical Genesis. His previous contributions to
             are "Fact, Theory, and Literary Explanation"
            (Winter 1974), "Explaining Our Literary Understanding: A Response
            to Jay Schleusener and Stanley Fish" (June 1975), and "The Dramatic
            Monologue and Related Lyric Forms" (Autumn 1976).
Lawrence Lipking
         Arguing with Shelly
         Now Shelly should be allowed a word. The way I have formulated the
            problem, he reminds me, suffers from glibness if not actual
            misrepresentation; above all in my tendency to equate artistic ends
            with artistic conventions. I accuse him of rigidity, yet define the
            western far more rigidly than he would do, even to the point of
            suggesting that a novel with real Indians in it would no longer be
            a western. Generic laws are not so arbitrary. The end of a work of
            art, as he understands it, cannot be located merely in some set of
            formal requirements (14 lines of rhyming iambic pentameter) or
            reproducible actions (the U.S. Cavalry rides to the rescue). We do
            not make works of art by satisfying a checklist of conventions.
            Rather, the ends obeyed by a work of art a concrete
            whole derive from the total effect that it tries to achieve.
            In a well-constructed piece of fiction, every element, including
            the ethical statements and implied moral judgments, contributes to
            and is subordinate to that total effect. Hence the seeming
            contradiction between artistic ends and moral means turns out, on
            analysis, to be illusory. An artistic end can accommodate any
            degree of moral complexity, even ethical ambiguities and
            contradictions, so long as they help shape the whole. Even Blifil
            could have been a richly complex character, if Fielding had wanted
            him to be, so long as his complexity had been made functional to
            the desired effect of Tom Jones. Only incompetent or convention-
            bound novelists find themselves compelled to make insincere
            judgments. A good novelist learns to advance his ends by every
            means, from his most outrageous leaps of the imagination to his
            most subtle ethical discriminations. If a good novel communicates
            some tension or internal contradictions, we have no right to
            conclude that such an effect was forced on the novelist against his
            will. Perhaps that tension manifests or articulates the author's
            most sincere and profound moral convictions.
             
            Lawrence Lipking, Chester Tripp Professor of the Humanities at
            Northwestern University, is the author of The Ordering of the Arts
            in Eighteenth-Century England and coeditor of Modern Literary
            Criticism 1900-1970. He is currently completing a work dealing with
            poetic careers, which is to be included in a larger project, The
            Poet-Critics, and is studying the literary tradition of "abandoned
            women." His previous contribution to , "The
            Marginal Gloss," appeared in the Summer 1977 issue.
James R. Kincaid
         Fiction and the Shape of Belief: Fifteen Years_Later
         What so many readers whether "sensitive and intelligent" and
            comprising "generations" I do not know have found in Fiction
            and the Shape of Belief is sheer delight in the rigor and
            shrewdness of the argument. The most formidable part of Sacks' book
            is precisely what one would at first necessarily consider the soft
            spot: the relations of "belief" to fictional form. If one allows
            the assumptions about a stable and controllable language implicit
            in the argument and then perhaps substitutes a Boothian term like
            "implied author" for "Fielding," the demonstrations are
            irresistible. Sacks sets himself the job of trying to "formulate a
            theory about a constant and necessary relationship between the
            ethical beliefs of novelists . . . and novels" (p. 27). He works
            his way through various possibilities largely by means of
            eliminating the crude and the obvious. The question "What must
            Fielding have believed to have created such a character or devised
            such a situation?" is at first answered by "Almost anything." We
            can infer little directly about belief from "situation characters";
            we must be very careful not to regard the speeches of paragon
            characters as "isolable topical essays" (p. 141). While the model
            of a novel presented to us is "constructed," architectural, and
            therefore undynamic, it is also highly complex. The process of
            making inferences from the relations between parts and between the
            parts and the whole, of comparing signals with other signals, is
            delicate indeed. Sacks' method is to lead us gradually toward more
            and more complex formulations of belief, blocking easy answers and
            forcing us to take more and more into account. He is gracious
            toward but has little interest in historical or biographical
            evidence that would bear on the question of belief; his subject is
            relentlessly formal. The central concern "How can any
            novelist embody his beliefs in novels?" is focused on "how,"
            on the manipulation of formal devices, not on the content of that
            belief. Once inside the system, one can do little but cheer.
             
            James R. Kincaid is professor of English at the University of
            Colorado at Boulder. The author of Dickens and the Rhetoric of
            Laughter, Tennyson's Major Poems: The Comic and Ironic Patterns,
            and The Novels of Anthony Trollope, he is currently writing a book
            on narrative structures and the question of coherence. His previous
            contributions to  are "Coherent Readers, Incoherent
            Text" (Summer 1977) and "Pluralistic Monism" (Summer 1978).
Mary Doyle Springer
         Upon ReadingFiction and the Shape of Belief
         If I choose two words in the book that I think have been most
            influential, I would choose "mutually exclusive." Sacks was
            scarcely the first critic to observe that the kinds of fiction are
            usually actions, apologues, or satires. But no other theoretician
            has insisted so cogently as he did that, as principles governing
            the interaction of parts in a coherent work, these principles are
            mutually exclusive, "mutually incompatible." The reason Sacks
            became a great journal editor was that the firmness of his own
            principles never blinded him to the value of other and very
            different theoretical questions which might be addressed to a work
            of fiction. And his tone of voice was never brazen but always that
            of the eighteenth-century gentleman: Come, let us reason together.
            Yet he never blinked his adherence to the truths he saw: he stated
            them directly, and he taught us to strive equally to face the
            consequences of holistic recognition of forms: "One cannot create
            an action which is also a satire any more than he can write an
            active sentence which is also a passive sentence in English. To
            carry the analogy a step farther, the observation that the types
            are mutually incompatible is no more an attempt to dictate to
            writers what they may or may not do than is the observation that
            active sentences are not passive sentences" (p. 46).
             
            Mary Doyle Springer, associate professor of English at Saint Mary's
            College of California, is the author of Forms of the Modern Novella
            and A Rhetoric of Literary Character: Some Women of Henry James.
            She is presently at work on a companion theoretical study dealing
            with the rhetoric of dramatic character in performance.
Sheldon Sacks
         The Pursuit of Lew Archer
         For example, in the traditional "who done it" (much of Ellery
            Queen, some of the early Gardner, and a number of Agatha Christie's
            best tales), the basic pleasure is in the creation and solution of
            the riddle itself - somewhat akin to the pleasure of solving a
            difficult crossword puzzle. In such works the riddle itself must be
            sufficiently ingenious to surprise us but never so labyrinthine as
            to destroy the illusion that we may beat the professional to the
            solution. In no case may necessary clues be withheld for, failing
            to solve the riddle ourselves, we must at the very least see how we
            should have been able to solve it with the same information as the
            professional; given an unreliable narrator, we will feel deceived
            rather than pleasantly surprised. It is clear that in such
            instances the value judgments, as opposed to the riddle, should be
            as unoriginal and conventional as possible. The agents or agent
            whose initial act caused the riddle might best perform an act of
            murder for obvious gain or because he wants to replace a current
            wife with a beautiful mistress. Complexity of thought and judgment
            must never reach the point where it distracts our attention from
            the pleasure of the riddle itself; ethical values must merely be
            minimally consonant with our desire to see the riddle solved in
            terms that prevent moral indignation. The detective in turn may be
            given minimal idiosyncrasies that define him as a character, but
            again since, in this kind of work, the alteration of circumstances
            of who commits the crime is merely pro forma usually he is
            merely caught and his future in prison or the electric chair is
            unstressed the traits possessed by the detective are almost
            solely restricted to those that allow him to solve the riddle that
            we should have been able to solve ourselves. It is this kind of
            work that is frequently advertised by plaintive requests "please
            don't reveal the ending." We rarely read such works a second time.
            We are completely remote from the pursuit of Lew Archer.
Quentin Bell
         Bloomsbury and "the Vulgar Passions"
         As I see it, the historic role of literary Bloomsbury was to act as
            a sort of check or antibody continually attacking the proponents of
            the vulgar passions in the body politic whenever these menaced the
            traditional values of liberal England. In a democracy and perhaps
            in any modern state there is always a danger that men seeking power
            will rely upon the feelings rather than the intelligence of the
            masses. Such appeals to the vulgar passions represent a continual
            danger; fight on till the Huns are smashed, squeeze Germany until
            the pips squeak, woman's place is in the home, stamp out dirty
            unnatural vice, keep the black man in his place exhortations
            of this kind can be terribly effective. Against them, or most of
            them, one may oppose the arguments of the Sermon on the Mount: love
            your enemies, all men are brothers. This Bloomsbury did not do; it
            had no use either for the hero or for the saint. In its polemics it
            appeals to good sense and good feeling and relies upon the belief
            that ultimately the reasoned argument will prevail.
             
            Quentin Bell is the author of, among other works, Virginia Woolf: A
            Biography, Bloomsbury, Ruskin,and On Human Finery.His previous
            contributions to are "Art and the Elite" (Autumn
            1974) and exchanges with E. H. Gombrich (Spring 1976) and James
            Ackerman (Summer 1979).
Wendy Steiner
         The Case for Unclear Thinking: The New Critics_versus_Charles
            Morris
         In 1946, after an eight-year debate with the New Critics, Charles
            Morris doggedly maintained that "an education which gave due place
            to semiotic would destroy at its foundations the cleavage and
            opposition of science and the humanities."1 This insistence on the
            unity of disciplines the hallmark of the logical empiricist
            movement and its brainchild, The International Encyclopedia of
            Unified Science (of which Morris was associate
            editor) effectively silenced semiotics as a force in American
            literary studies. For the New Critics' point of departure and
            one of the few tenets that they held in common was the belief
            that art creates a mode of knowledge different in kind from that of
            practical or scientific discourse and that a criticism modeled on
            the latter would miss the essence of its subject matter. The
            quarrel, which continued unresolved during the polemics of the war
            years, now fuels the controversy between structuralism and post-
            structuralism. It lies at the very heart of the question of the
            relevance of semiotics to the humanities.
             
            ·  1. Charles Morris, Signs, Language, and Behavior, in Writings on
            the General Theory of Signs (The Hague, 1971), p. 327.
             
            Wendy Steiner, assistant professor of English at the University of
            Pennsylvania, is the author of Exact Resemblance to Exact
            Resemblance: The Literary Portraiture of Gertrude Stein. She has
            written a book on the relations between modern painting and
            literature and edited the proceedings of the 1978 Ann Arbor
            Conference on the Semiotics of Art.
Ross Miller
         Chicago Architecture after Mies
         Mies' disciplined retreat from romantic or individual influence
            created the illusion of an objective architectural order. Miesian
            architecture seemed fated, and the public was asked to accept it as
            a fait accompli. In contrast, Tigerman's "Little House" and the
            designs of Laurence Booth, Thomas Hall Beeby, Stuart Cohen, James
            Freed, James Nagle, and Ben Weese are not dependent on their ever
            being produced. They need not exist in actuality but only in
            process because their self-conscious styles serve a heuristic
            purpose. The Chicago Seven exhibitors present an architecture that
            cannot be understood apart from the ideas which underlie it. The
            audience is directly involved in architectural creation and leaves
            such an exhibit better prepared to evaluate the man-made
            environment. The work is revealed to the audience at its earliest
            moment of creation and serves as a modest but important first step
            at demystifying architecture and the entire design process.
             
            Conceptual architecture distinguished from work rendered for
            particular clients reveals the fundamentally dialectical
            nature of contemporary architecture. The linking of method, the way
            an architectural idea evolves (sketches and notes), to product
            (model and working prints) accentuates the art's dynamic quality.
            Design in this way is seen not merely as a supraorganizational
            framework capable of defining large areas of urban or exurban space
            but as a problem-solving tool that can be sensitively applied to
            meet the specific needs of an individual or community.
             
            Ross Miller teaches English and American studies at the University
            of Connecticut. He has written a book on the roots of contemporary
            architecture in Chicago.
Hiram W. Woodward, Jr.
         Acquisition
         Material acquisition buying, inheriting, being
            given and nonmaterial learning a word, assimilating a
            form have been likened, and in both, meaningful acquisition
            cannot take place without a taxonomy, a scheme of categories into
            which the acquired element can be fitted. Then with these
            elements both material and nonmaterial we create a
            world or build and project a self, the painter and the interior
            decorator equally manipulating the elements in a vocabulary. The
            coarseness of such an outlook seems to bludgeon away long-
            established fine distinctions. We need not deny, however, that
            there may be a kind of "indifference" in regard to "the real
            existence of the thing" which allows us "to play the part of judge
            in matters of taste," as Kant would have it,1we need not deny the
            existence of an "aesthetic attitude: it is just that such
            indifference and such an attitude probably don't have much to do
            with our day-to-day experience of artifacts and perhaps needn't.
            The "aesthetic attitude" was not long ago defined by Jerome
            Stolnitz as "disinterested and sympathetic attention to and
            contemplation of any object of awareness whatever, for its own sake
            alone."2 Stolnitz is at pains to distinguish the aesthetic attitude
            from "interests" with which it may be preferable to confuse it.
            "One of them," he writes, "is the interest in owning a work of art
            for the sake of pride or prestige" (p. 20). And again, "Another
            nonaesthetic interest is the 'cognitive,' i.e., the interest in
            gaining knowledge about an object" (p. 20). Both these interests
            sound rather acquisitive, and let us consider the "aesthetic
            attitude" as somehow tied in everyday practice to the bundle of
            "acquiring" activities.
             
            ·  1. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed
            Meredith (Oxford, 1952), p. 43.
            ·  2. Jerome Stolnitz, Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art
            Criticism (Boston, 1960), excerpted in Introductory Readings in
            Aesthetics, ed. John Hospers (New York, 1969), p. 19; all further
            citations in text.
             
            Hiram W. Woodward, Jr. is a lecturer in the department of the
            history of art at the University of Michigan. He is editor of
            Eighty Works in the University of Michigan Museum of Art: A
            Handbookand coeditor (with Luis O. Gomez) of Barabudur: History and
            Significance of a Buddhist Monument.
Stanley Cavell
         On Makavejev on Bergman
         Makavejev's recurrence to the ideas of death and birth, in his
            critical remark about the opening of Persona and in his quoting of
            Bergman's statement "Each film is my last" (commenting about this
            that "it is not only a statement about imminent death, but a
            testimony of an obsessive need to be reborn over and over again"),
            recalls the recurrence of the ideas of death and birth in Sweet
            Movie. The sound track opens with a song asking "Is there life
            after birth?" and the images end with a corpse coming to life; in
            between, the film is obsessed with images of attempts to be born.
            The question about life after birth posing the question
            whether we may hope for mortality as prior to the question whether
            we may hope for immortality has the satisfying sound of one
            of Feuerbach's or the early Marx's twists that turn Christianity
            upside down into socialism. . . . It is the great concluding
            moments of Sweet Music, however, which bear direct comparison with
            the great opening moments of Persona. But even to describe those
            concluding sonorities relevantly requires a general idea of the
            film as a whole.
             
            Sweet Movie is, at a minimum, the most original exploration known
            to me of the endless relations between documentary and fictional
            film, incorporating both; hence in that way an original exploration
            of the endless relations between reality and fantasy. Its use of
            documentary footage declares that every movie has a documentary
            basis at least in the camera's ineluctable interrogation of
            the natural endowment of the actors, the beings who submit their
            being to the work of film. My private title for Makavejev's
            construction of Sweet Movie (his fifth film) and of (his third and
            fourth films) Innocence Unprotected and WR: Mysteries of the
            Organism is "the film of excavation." I mean by this of course my
            sense of his work's digging to unearth buried layers of the psyche
            but also my sense that these constructions have the feeling of
            reconstruction as of something lost or broken. The search at
            once traces their integrity (you might say the autonomy) of the
            individual strata of a history and plots the positions of adjacent
            strata. I accept as well the implied sense something the
            experience of Makavejev's last three films conveys to me that
            these constructions are inherently the working out of a group's
            genius, its interactions, not of one individual's plans; though it
            is true and definitive of Makavejev's work that a group's
            interactions, or those of shifting groups, work themselves out into
            comprehensible forms because a given individual is committed to
            seeing to it that they may.
             
            Stanley Cavell, professor of philosophy at Harvard University, is
            the author of Must We Mean What We Say?, The World Viewed, The
            Senses of Walden, and The Claim of Reason. Other contributions
            include ""A Reply to John Hollander"" (Summer 1980) and "North by
            Northwest" (Summer 1981).
Howard Nemerov
         On the Measure of Poetry
         To sum up on forms and rightness. No one wants poetry to be like
            filling out a form, though plenty of poems look dismally like it.
            The forms were there to be wrestled with mightily, because they
            silently and emptily, till one filled them up with the thing said,
            stood for the recalcitrant outside and other that knows nothing of
            the human will. The mindless rigidity in principle of the verse
            patterns suggestively compounded with the sinewy nature of the
            speaking voice that flowed in continuous energy through the marked-
            off graph of foot and line and strophe. Together they might be
            taken to stand for two powers of the mind that ought to work with
            and against one another to the same effect: the streamy nature of
            association, said Coleridge, that thinking curbs and rudders. Ezra
            Pound's commandment to the poet, to compose in the sequence of the
            musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome, is a good
            warning against monotonous cadences; but taken literally it invites
            the reply that Beethoven did both. For art is a place where you
            make choices, sometimes difficult ones that require you decide not
            between good and bad but between this good and that: very often it
            is between the beauty of a line and the sense of the whole thing. A
            proverb says you can't do two things at once; but it is conspicuous
            that in art you must always be doing two things at once, knowing
            that that is only the minimum requirement:
             
            And twofold Always. May God us keep
            From Single vision &amp; Newton's sleep!
             
            Howard Nemerov, professor of English at Washington University, is
            the author of, among other works, Figures of Thought: Speculations
            on the Meaning of Poetry and Other Essays and The Collected Poems,
            for which he received the National Book Award and the Pulitzer
            Prize for poetry in 1978.
             
            See also: "Strict Form in Poetry: Would Jacob Wrestle with a Flabby
            Angel" by Peter Viereck in Vol. 5, No. 2
Michael Fischer
         Rehabilitating Reference: Charles Altieri's "Presence and Reference
            in a Literary Text"
         Like many readers, I sympathize with Charles Altieri's attempt in
            "Presence and Reference in a Literary Text"1 to correct Derrida's
            assimilation of poetry to linguistic "freeplay without origin." But
            Altieri's "middle ground" solution is at best a stopgap measure,
            delaying the deconstructionist project but not finally answering
            it. Altieri agrees with Derrida that "language is not primarily a
            set of pictures ideally mirroring a world" (p. 492). But he resists
            the conclusion that for Derrida follows from this premise, namely,
            that poems are consequently self-referential and antimimetic.
            Instead Altieri adopts a position between these two extremes,
            seeing in art the representation not of reality but of the
            "stances" we take toward our world. Poems reveal "the qualities of
            human actions" (p. 498). In "This is Just to Say," for example,
            Williams constructs a "simple drama" which brings to light a
            speaker's "honesty, self-knowledge, and faith in his wife's
            understanding" (p. 503).
             
            ·  1. Charles Altieri, "Presence and Reference in a Literary Text:
            The Example of Williams' 'This is Just to Say,'"  5
            (Spring 1979): 489-510; all further references to this article will
            be included in this text.
             
            Michael Fischer is an assistant professor of English at the
            University of New Mexico. He has written on nineteenth- and
            twentieth-century modern critical theory and on the defense of
            poetry in modern criticism.
Charles Altieri
         Culture and Skepticism: A Response to Michael Fischer
         I have so far argued in terms of general principles. But they are
            not worth very much unless they help explain how a cultural account
            of values can preserve a public sphere of judgments that is not
            subject to Fischer's charges of arbitrariness, relativism, or
            confusing value and fact. I assume that I will have gone a long way
            toward answering Fischer if I can provide an adequate response to
            his question, "where [does] Williams' poem get its presumably
            public ideas of honesty, self-knowledge, and faith," without
            relying on an external order of values human reason can know. For,
            Fischer suggests, without reference to that order of values there
            is no defensible way to justify combining objective description of
            details and evaluative predicates like "honest" and "self-aware."
             
            Charles Altieri, professor of English at the University of
            Washington, is the author of Enlarging the Temple: New Directions
            in American Poetry of the 1960s. "Presence and Reference in a
            Literary Text: The Example of [William Carlos] Williams' 'This is
            Just to Say'" was contributed to in the Spring 1979
            issue.
Mark Roskill
         A Reply to John Reichert and Stanley Fish
         John Reichert and Stanley Fish, in their discussion of the finding
            of different "meanings" in Samson Agonistes,1 do not seem to
            recognize what is really in dispute between them. Certainly they
            step in to further confusions along the way.
             
            It is true that, as Fish reiterates, the "meaning" which is to be
            cumulatively grasped from a total work of art, such as a long
            dramatic poem or novel, is open in principle to unlimited
            divergencies of interpretation on the basis of either external
            facts that can be brought to bear on the work (and which are
            themselves open to differences of understanding) or hypotheses that
            can be counted or presented as potentially relevant. This is so not
            only because people differ in their understandings in a great
            variety of ways (which Fish's term "assumptions" by no means
            adequately covers) but also because the fundamental indeterminacy
            of language as distinct from the ambiguity of particular
            statements2 is capable of being understood as such.
             
            ·  1. John Reichert, "But That Was in Another Ball Park: A Reply to
            Stanley Fish,"  6 (Autumn 1979): 164-72; Stanley E.
            Fish, "A Reply to John Reichert; or, How to Stop Worrying and Learn
            to Love Interpretation,"  6 (Autumn 1979): 173-78.
            Fish's original essay, "Normal Circumstances . . . and Other
            Special Cases," appeared in the Summer 1978 issue.
            ·  2. See for this distinction my remarks in "On the Recognition
            and Identification of Objects in Paintings,"  3
            (Summer 1977): 702.
             
            Mark Roskill, professor of art history at the University of
            Massachusetts at Amherst, is the author of Van Gogh, Gauguin, and
            the Impressionist Circle, and What is Art History? He has
            contributed "On the Recognition and Identification of Objects in
            Paintings" to the Summer 1977 issue of .
