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John Hollander
         Stanley Cavell and "The Claim of Reason"
         Even as the philosopher can show us how to treat an object
            conceptually as a work of art, by regarding it in some (unavowedly
            figurative) context, so Cavell constantly implies that there are
            parables to be drawn about the way we treat the objects of our
            consciousness and the subjects of parts of it. But this special
            sort of treatment like projective imagination itself is
            not fancy or wit but more like a kind of epistemological fabling
            that is close to what Shelley called, in A Defense of Poetry,
            "moral imagination." What is so powerful and yet elusive of
            the nets of ordinary intellectual expectation in The Claim of
            Reason is the way in which the activities of philosophizing become
            synecdochic, metonymic, and generally parabolic for the activities
            of the rest of life itself. It is the way in which the large (in
            English), unphilosophical, "poetic," or "religious" questions are
            elicited from their precise and technical microcosms that makes so
            much of this book poetical, but not "literary," philosophy. When he
            writes of how tragedy "is the story and study of a failure of
            acknowledgment, of what goes before it and after it i.e.,
            that the form of tragedy is the public form of skepticism with
            respect to other minds"; or when, after brilliantly adducing The
            Winter's Tale in his consideration of Othello, he confronts the
            magic of Hermione's statue coming to life, he observes that
            "Leontes recognizes the fate of stone to be the consequence of his
            particular skepticism," the reader can perceive the kind of vast
            fiction in which minds, bodies, the privacy of insides, dolls,
            statues, and other representations figure as agents and elements.
            It will take longer to understand, I think, the imaginative
            significance of the earlier portions of the book. The philosophers
            who find its terrain familiar tend to have little patience with
            poetry; the reader whose sensibility is "literary" may be unable to
            distinguish between the arguments and examples, and the meta-
            arguments and examples, of the discussions of Wittgensteinian and
            Austinian method. Both kinds of readers should keep at it.
             
            John Hollander, a distinguished poet and critic, is professor of
            English at Yale. The author of The Untuning of the Sky: Ideas of
            Music in English Poetry, 1500-1700, Vision and Resonance: Two
            Senses of Poetic Form, and The Figure of Echo,his books of poetry
            include Spectral Emanations and Blue Wine and Other Poems.
Stanley Cavell
         A Reply to John Hollander
         Having just read through John Hollander's brilliant and moving
            response to my book, my first response in turn is one of gratitude,
            for the generosity of his taking of my intentions, allowing them
            room to extend themselves; and of admiration, at the writing of a
            writer who has original and useful things to say about the
            relations of poetry and philosophy, of fable and argument, of trope
            and example, relations at the heart of what my book is about. . . .
            I am reminded of W. H. Auden's foreword to his A Certain World: A
            Commonplace Book in which he recognizes that his compilation
            amounts to a sort of autobiography. He calls it, responding to a
            passage from G. K. Chesterton, "a map of my planet." The passage
            Auden quotes from Chesterton contains these sentences: "The
            original quality in any man of imagination is imagery. It is a
            thing like the landscape of his dreams; the sort of world he would
            like to make or in which he would wish to wander; the strange flora
            and fauna of his own secret planet; the sort of thing he likes to
            think about." I would like to accept the idea that I have revealed
            a secret planet in revealing myself, a certain errant wholeness,
            with the proviso that no one's planet contains anything anyone
            else's may not contain, or does not contain, or does not have the
            equivalent of; and that their contents are commonplaces, including
            an aspiration toward the better possibility, which I might call the
            life of philosophy. Philosophy, at any rate, must ask no less.
             
            Stanley Cavell's other works include Must We Mean What We Say?, The
            World Viewed, and The Senses of Walden. His contributions to
             are "On Makavejev On Bergman" (Winter 1979) and
            "North by Northwest" (Summer 1981).
Vincent B. Leitch
         The Lateral Dance: The Deconstructive Criticism of J._Hillis_Miller
         Miller undermines traditional ideas and beliefs about language,
            literature, truth, meaning, consciousness, and interpretation. In
            effect, he assumes the role of unrelenting destroyer or
            nihilistic magician who dances demonically upon the broken
            and scattered fragments of the Western tradition. Everything
            touched soon appears torn. Nothing is ever finally darned over, or
            choreographed for coherence, or foregrounded as (only) magical
            illusion. Miller, the relentless rift-maker, refuses any apparent
            repair and rampages onward, dancing, spell-casting, destroying all.
            As though he were a wizard, he appears in the guise of a bull-
            deconstructer loose in the china shop of Western tradition.
             
            Vincent B. Leitch, associate professor of English at Mercer
            University, is the editor of Robert Southwell's Marie Magdalens
            Funeral Teares and The Poetry of Estonia: Essays in Comparative
            Analysis. Sections of the present essay will appear in his The
            Poetics of Deconstruction, which offers a critical history and
            anatomy of deconstructive criticism.
J. Hillis Miller
         Theory and Practice: Response to Vincent Leitch
         Leitch speaks of his procedure with my work as employing an "abrupt
            asyndetic format" and as being "a metonymic montage in which themes
            and citations are playfully and copiously combined." One form of
            this playfulness is the panoply of figures he uses to describe me
            and my criticism. The need to use figures for this is interesting,
            as is their incoherence, though the figures can be shown to fall
            into a rough antithetical pattern. At one moment the deconstructive
            critic is a fairy godmother able to turn the pumpkin of the Western
            tradition into a phantasmal coach. He is a magician or wizard who
            shows that things are not what they have seemed with the great
            texts of our tradition or who turns them into something other than
            what they have seemed solidly to be, pragmatic pumpkins,
            unequivocally there. At the next moment the deconstructer is a
            disco dancer, moving sideways in the "lateral dance of
            interpretation" (my own image, but it was not really mine; it was
            taken from Tess of the d'Urbervilles, the novel I was discussing in
            the sentences Leitch quotes). The more or less benign fairy
            godmother and dancer then turns into a "nihilistic magician - who
            dances demonically upon the broken and scattered fragments of the
            Western tradition." He becomes a ferocious shaman, "Ravening,
            raging, and uprooting that he may come/Into the desolation of
            reality" (Yeats). He is "a bull-deconstructer loose in the china
            shop of Western tradition" (Leitch). In the next moment the bull
            metamorphoses into a lamb, as Leitch realizes the conservative
            aspects of deconstruction, the way it claims to be rescuing and
            preserving aspects of our culture which have always been there,
            both in literary and philosophical works and in the techniques of
            interpreting them. The same point is made more sharply and
            critically by William E. Cain in another recent essay on my work
            (College English 41, no.4. [December 1979]: 367-81). In the final
            paragraph of his essay, Leitch has fun inventing permutations of an
            image of sand in the salad from one of my essays. Will
            deconstruction sandblast the whole shebang, or will the alien grain
            of sand turn into a pearl of price?
             
            J. Hillis Miller is Frederick W. Hilles Professor of English at
            Yale. His previous contributions to  are "Ariadne's
            Thread: Repetition and the Narrative Line" (Autumn 1976) and "The
            Critic as Host" (Spring 1977).
Dore Ashton
         On Harold Rosenberg
         Rosenberg was a chronicler and a good one, yet much of his inner
            dialogue was not with the present so much as the omnipresent
            artistic past. The central question, posed early in his life,
            concerned a man's individuality. Dostoyevsky had called it his
            "dearest" possession. At no time, even in his Marxist youth, did
            Rosenberg relinquish his vision of the individual as the central,
            most important player in any drama. Rosenberg was positively
            possessed with Dostoyevsky's doubts. One can hear the rant of the
            man from the underground repeatedly in Rosenberg's written
            works the stubborn hero who maintains the right even to be
            absurd and to "desire for himself what is positively harmful and
            stupid" if he claims it as a right. The right of the individual to
            live up to man's nature which, as Dostoyevsky said, "acts as one
            whole, with everything in it, conscious or unconscious" was
            Rosenberg's most consistent ideal.
             
            The individual he most admired, both in himself and in others, was
            the artist. But only in spite of everything. No one was more alert
            to the tartufferie that bedevils the world of the artist. Rosenberg
            craved sincerity with the same kind of passion for it he had found
            in Dostoyevsky. Art and artifact would not be a substitute for
            ethics and hard thought. Rosenberg's deepest conviction is revealed
            in his 1960 essay, "Literary Form and Social Hallucination," which
            begins with Dostoyevsky complaining about literature that does not
            lead to truth.
             
            Dore Ashton, professor of art history at The Cooper Union, is the
            author of numerous works, including Abstract Art Before Columbus,
            Poets and the Past, A Reading Of Modern Art, and, most recently, A
            Fable of Modern Art. Her previous contribution to ,
            "No More than an Accident?" appeared in the Winter 1976 issue.
Michael Riffaterre
         Syllepsis
         Ambiguity is not the polysemy most words display as dictionary
            entries but results from the context's blocking of the reader's
            choice among competing meanings, as when, to use an example from
            Derrida, a French context hinders the reader from deciding
            whetherplus de means "lack" (no more) or "excess" (more than).1 In
            this case, the undecidability is due entirely to the fact that the
            reader is playing a score, the syntax, that will not let him
            choose. This must be because the score is badly written; yet it is
            precisely this sort of willful neglect that critics have labeled
            poetic license, thereby underlining its literary nature.
            Undecidability has become a central feature in Derrida's analyses
            of literariness, and it is also the main underpinning of his
            creative writing.2 Better still, his own critical discourse has put
            undecidability to use, not a rare case of metalanguage imitating
            the very devices of the language it purports to analyze. My example
            are therefore drawn from Derrida on the assumption that his
            conscious practice of écriture, backed up by a sophisticated
            theory, will be particularly illuminating. For my own analysis of
            these phenomena, I shall be using a special word that Derrida has
            adopted and adapted from the terminology of ancient rhetoric. He
            proposes it in his commentary on this sentence of Mallarmé's: "La
            scène n'illustre que l'idée, pas une action effective, dans une
            hymen . . . entre le désir et l'accomplissement, la perpétration et
            son souvenir."3 Our critic points out that the grammar prevents the
            reader from choosing between hymen as "marriage," a symbolic union
            or fusion, and as "vaginal membrane," the barrier is broken through
            if desire is to reach what it desires. Undecidability is the
            effective mechanism of pantomime as an art form since from mimicry
            alone, without words, the spectator cannot tell whether a dreamed,
            or a remembered, or a present act is being set forth. This, in
            turn, Derrida shows to be fundamental to Mallarmé's concept of
            poetry. It is simply a pun or, as Derrida prefers to call it, a
            "syllepsis,"4 the trope that consists in understanding the same
            word in two different ways at the same time, one meaning being
            literal or primary, the other figurative.5 The second meaning is
            not just different from and incompatible with the first: it is tied
            to the first as its polar opposite or the way the reverse of a coin
            is bound to its obverse the hymen as unbroken membrane is
            also metaphorical in both its meanings is irrelevant to its
            undecidability. What makes it undecidable is not that it is an
            image but that it embodies a structure, that is, the syllepsis.
             
            ·  1. See Jacques Derrida's La Dissémination (Paris, 1972), p. 307.
            ·  2. Because Derrida is a philosopher by trade, one would expect
            his undecidability to reflect the very precise logical and
            mathematical concepts of that discipline - which is to say, the
            limitations inherent in the axiomatic method. Kristeva, for
            example, tries to do this in her Le Texts du roman: Approche
            sèmiologique d'une structure discursive transformationnelle (The
            Hague, 1970), pp. 76-78. So far as I can make out, however (as a
            layman I have hardly been able to go beyond the relatively
            simplified but highly instructive exposition of the problem in
            Ernst Nagel and James R. Newman's Gödel's Proof [New York, 1958]),
            Derrida's critical theory and reading practice do not pack more
            into the word "undecidable" than does the definition I offer in
            this paper.
            ·  3. Stephane Mallarmé, Mimique, Oeuvres complètes (Paris, 1951),
            p. 310: "the scene [a drama, or rather a pantomime] bodies forth
            only an idea, not an action: it is like a hymen between desire and
            its realization, or between an act committed and the memory of it";
            here and elsewhere, my translation unless otherwise cited.
            Derrida's commentary, "La Double Séance," has been rpt. in La
            Dissémination, pp. 199-317; see esp. pp. 240 ff.
            ·  4. See La Dissémination, p. 249.
            ·  5. This definition has prevailed ever since Dumarsais' treatise,
            Des Tropes (Paris, 1730). That syllepsis must be distinguished from
            the so-called grammatical syllepsis or the zeugma is apparent in
            Heinrich Lausberg's Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik (Munich,
            1960), pars. 702-7; on the acceptation chosen by Derrida, see pars.
            7-8.
             
            Michael Riffaterre, Blanche W. Knopf Professor of French Literature
            and chairman of the department of French and Romance literatures at
            Columbia University, is the editor of Romantic Review. He is the
            author of Semiotics of Poetry, La Production du Texte, Typology of
            Intertextuality and A Grammar of Descriptive Poetry. "Syllepsis"
            developed out of seminars he led at the Irvine School of Criticism
            and Theory and at Johns Hopkins University.
Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan
         Doubles and Counterparts: Patterns of Interchangeability in Borges'
            "The Garden of Forking Paths"
         Analogy among characters is not the only structural device which
            blurs the boundaries of the self. The very repetition of the act of
            narration, involving a chain of quotations, makes the story a
            perfect example of what Jakobson calls "speech within speech"1 and
            divorces the various characters from their own discourse. In
            addition to the real author's speech to the real reader,
            crystallized in that of the implied author to the implied reader,
            the whole story is the speech of an extradiegetic-heterodiegetic
            narrator who, in the footnote, calls himself "editor" and who sums
            up Liddell Hart's account and juxtaposes it with Yu Tsun's dictated
            statement. Just as the editor quotes Tsun, so Tsun, an
            extradiegetic-homodiegetic narrator, quotes Albert who in turn
            quotes Ts'ui Pên, sometimes verbatim, as in the case of the crucial
            letter, sometimes by conjecture, as in the instance of Pên's
            supposed declarations about the book and the maze. Quotation, then,
            is a dominant narrative mode in this story, and quotation is the
            appropriation by one person of the speech of another. Since a
            person is to a large extent constituted by one person of his
            discourse, such an appropriation implies, at least partly, an
            interpenetration of personalities. Thus both repetition through
            analogy and repetition through quotation threaten the absolute
            autonomy of the self.
             
            ·  1. Roman Jakobson, "Linguistics and Poetics," in Essays on the
            Language of Literature, ed. Seymour Chatman and Samuel R. Levin
            (Boston, 1967), pp. 296-322.
             
            Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan is a senior lecturer in the department of
            English at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The author of The
            Concept of Ambiguity: The Example of James, she is currently
            writing on the poetics of repetition and, in collaboration with
            Moshe Ron, on contemporary narrative theory.
Loy D. Martin
         Literary Invention: The Invention of the Individual Talent
         In a paper presented at a symposium on structuralism at the Johns
            Hopkins University in 1968, the historian Charles Morazé analyzed
            the issue of invention largely with reference to mathematics and
            the theory of Henri Poincare.1 Poincare, along with the
            physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz, was the first to put forward a
            theory of scientific discovery as occurring in discrete phases. In
            1926, Joseph Wallas generalized this theory to apply to all
            creativity, positing phrases which closely resemble those of
            Morazé. While both Poincare and Wallas use a four-phrase model of
            invention, Morazé reduces his to three phrases: information,
            cogitation, and intellection. In information, the inventor becomes
            familiar with the sign systems and knowledge, the "collective
            contributions of society," relevant to his field of problems.
            Cogitation assembles these materials and concentrates them until "a
            certain moment" when "a light breaks through." This "sudden
            illumination...forces us to insist upon the neurological character"
            of the inventive moment. Finally, in intellection, the inventor
            rationally evaluates the utility of his invention and thus, in a
            sense, steps outside of himself and rejoins society. The
            distinction which organizes Morazé 's entire account, as well as
            most of the discussion that followed his presentation, is between
            the "collective" support and control of the inventor and his own
            individual, or "neurological," act of synthesis or creation.
             
            ·  1. See Charles Morazé 's "Literary Invention," in The
            Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the
            Sciences of Man, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore,
            1972), pp. 22-55.
             
            Loy D. Martin is an assistant professor of English at the
            University of Chicago. He has written The Language of Invention, a
            study of Robert Browning and the genesis of the dramatic monologue.
            "A Reply to Carl Pletsch and Richard Schiff" appeared in the Spring
            1981 issue of .
Jay Schleusener
         Convention and the Context of Reading
         Speech-act theory is often called upon to support one of the
            central claims of contextualism: that works of literature differ
            from ordinary speech because they are not tied to an immediate
            social context. The distinction is simple enough. Speakers and
            hearers meet face-to-face in a world of concrete circumstances that
            has a good deal to do with what they say. Their use of language is
            supported by facts that help to clarify their meaning, and they
            understand one another partly because they share an understanding
            of their situation. Authors and readers, on the other hand, can
            hardly be said to meet anywhere at all. Their only common ground is
            the text, and they share nothing but the words that pass between
            them. Meanings that might be clear enough in the social context of
            ordinary speech tend toward ambiguity in this circumstantial void
            where author and reader must do without a common world of reference
            and make the best of a language that cannot rely on the casual
            support of facts.
             
            Jay Schleusener, an associate professor of English at the
            University of Chicago, is currently completing a book on Piers
            Plowman. His previous contribution to , "Literary
            Criticism and the Philosophy of Science: Rader's 'Fact, Theory, and
            Literary Explanation,'" appeared in the Summer 1975 issue.
John C. Sherwood
         Prolegomena to Any Future Criticism Which Shall Claim_to_Make_Sense
         The principle of selection necessarily follows if we accept that a
            poem is a verbal structure of a very complex kind involving the
            interaction of all kinds of elements ideas, images, rhythms,
            rhetorical features, narrative, logical patterns, whatever. The
            possible relationships among all these elements seem infinite or at
            least, in Frye's phrase, unlimited. (Although the terms used here
            may sound like those of a formalist, one easily could make the same
            point in structuralist terms, for not only must the elements within
            a given structure be related to other structures inside and outside
            the poem.) Hence, a definitive critique of any work seems, even in
            theory, impossible. It is hard to see how the human mind could
            consciously contemplate, much less articulate, all aspects at once,
            even in short pieces; as the various aspects are enumerated, we
            begin to lose sight of the wood for the trees, to lose our grip on
            the integrated whole which we at least partially intuit at a given
            moment in time. And so many are the attitudes and interests which
            may be brought to bear upon a poem that the critique which once
            seemed definitive soon seems incomplete to the critic after a
            further reading, for every time we read a work of any complexity,
            we find something new; and even the less sensitive know that each
            new school of criticism, not to mention each latest shift in
            politics, society, or psychology, will throw at least some of our
            masterpieces into a new light. As for translation, the only way to
            avoid it would be wholesale quotation, and even that would be a
            partial translation in that it would alter the poet's total meaning
            by substituting a part for the whole.
             
            John C. Sherwood, professor of English at the University of Oregon,
            is the author of articles on Dryden, modern literature, and English
            composition. He is currently at work on an annotated bibliography
            of R. S. Crane.
Howard Felperin
         Romance and Romanticism
         The work of Northrop Frye, evenly divided as it is between those
            earlier and later literatures and equally influential in both
            fields, will serve to illustrate the literary-historical myth I
            have begun to describe. "Romanticism," he writes, "is a
            'sentimental' form of romance, and the fairy tale, for the most
            part, a 'sentimental' form of folk tale."1 Frye's terms are
            directly adopted from Schiller's famous essay, "Über naive und
            sentimentalische Dichtung," though "naive" for Frye means simply
            "primitive" or "popular" and is not historically identified, as it
            is in Schiller, with "classical," while "sentimental," as in
            Schiller, means "later" or "sophisticated." In adopting Schiller's
            terms, however, Frye has also adopted, though less obviously,
            Schiller's historical scheme. In the theory of modes that opens the
            Anatomy, Frye's division of Western literature into a descending
            scale from "myth" through "romance," "high mimetic," and "low
            mimetic" to "irony" is correlated to the historical periods in
            which each mode successively dominates: classical, medieval,
            Renaissance, eighteenth century, nineteenth century, and modern.
            Like Schiller's starker contrast of the "naive" or classical poet
            in touch with the natural world and the "sentimental" or Romantic
            poet alienated from it by modern civilization, Frye's logical and
            chronological scheme conceives literary history as a process of
            disintegration or displacement away from the natural integrity and
            univocality of myth and toward the self-conscious distancing and
            discontinuities of irony. The history of literature moves,
            following hard upon an Enlightenment conception of cultural history
            that derives as much from Rousseau as from Schiller and Friedrich
            von Schlegel, from the anonymous universality of myth to the
            individuality or eccentricity of modern fiction. Frye
            systematically avoids valorizing this "progress of poetry" in any
            of the ways it has been successively valorized by various schools
            of ancients and moderns, classics and Romantics, over the past
            three centuries. Yet he nonetheless repeats the historical scheme
            that underlies and generates these schools and their quarrels in
            the first place. It may turn out that the weakness of Frye's
            rehabilitation of romance is not his avoidance of history, as is
            commonly charged, but his inability to do without a version of it.
             
            ·  1. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, N.J., 1957),
            p. 35.
             
            Howard Felperin is the author of Shakespearean Romance and
            Shakespearean Representation. He has taught at Harvard, the
            University of California, and Yale and is currently Robert Wallace
            Professor of English at the University of Melbourne, Australia.
Cary Nelson
         Soliciting Self-Knowledge: The Rhetoric of Susan Sontag's Criticism
         Sontag is certainly attracted to the aesthetic she describes but
            not so wholeheartedly as many readers have assumed.1 One of the
            ironies of her career has been her reputation as an enthusiast for
            works toward which she actually expresses considerable ambivalence.
            Many of her essays include overt advocacy, but it is rarely
            uncomplicated or uncompromised.2 Despite her reputation for
            partisanship, she more typically begins her essays by recounting an
            experience of alienation, annoyance, uncertainty, or shock. For
            example, she describes the "happening" as an event "designed to
            tease and abuse the audience"3 and speaks of the "profoundly
            discouraging," even "hopeless," emotions of her first days in North
            Vietnam. She is, therefore, often motivated by her sense of
            difference from the event or object she describes. But it is not
            her wish merely to find ways of assimilating and dominating
            unpleasant or alien experience; while that is certainly one of the
            main impulses in her work - to control apparently impossible
            subjects, to exhilarate in the Nietzschean will to power over the
            text - her will to power is always countered by a need to credit
            and honor the text's otherness. Sontag never finally assumes an
            easy familiarity with her subject but rather draws its difficult
            and negating otherness ever closer to herself. Her work may be
            understood, in a way, as a search for a text that is utterly
            unknowable, a text that will always elude and contradict what we
            may say about it, a text, in short, that cannot be contaminated by
            critical rhetoric. That is a quality she has recently attributed to
            Artaud's work: "Like Sade and Reich, Artaud is relevant and
            understandable, a cultural monument, as long as one mainly refers
            to his ideas without reading much of his work. For anyone who reads
            Artaud through, he remains fiercely out of reach, an unassimilable
            voice and presence."4
             
            ·  1. There is, to be sure, an atmosphere of iconoclasm and
            intellectual challenge about Sontag's criticism, but it is not
            especially self-congratulatory. She is only interested in difficult
            topics or in topics whose difficulties have been repressed, partly
            because that context energizes her mind and partly, as she has
            written of Diane Arbus, because she wants "to violate her own
            innocence, to undermine her sense of being privileged" (On
            Photography [New York, 1977], p. 43)
            ·  2. The exception is some of the early reviews included in
            Against Interpretation, where the polemical requirements of the
            occasion distinguish those brief judgments from her more careful
            and extended pieces.
            ·  3. Sontag, Against Interpretation (New York, 1966), p. 267.
            ·  4. Sontag, "Artaud," Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings (New
            York, 1976), p. lix.
             
            Cary Nelson teaches critical theory at the University of Illinois.
            He is the author of The Incarnate Word: Literature as Verbal Space
            and Our Last First Poets: Vision and History in Contemporary
            American Poetry and Reading Criticism: The Literary Status of
            Critical Discourse.
Susan Fromberg Schaeffer
         The Unreality of Realism
         What should be immediately apparent to any writer of realistic
            fiction is its unreal or synthetic nature. Regardless of how
            persuasive the forgery appears, it is still a forgery. The colors
            of the painting are not identical to those of the real world. The
            illusion of similarity is achieved by trickery. The houses of
            realistic novels are like those found on a stage set; they are
            there to lend reality and weight to what is important, which may be
            a conversation between two realistically dressed people, walking in
            front of the novels' realistic buildings, conversing about
            something which would, in actuality, be impossible to talk about
            openly, something which would, ordinarily, seem impossible to take
            seriously as a motive for violent emotion which leads to violent
            action. No matter how expertly and exactly a novelist's world
            duplicates common reality, the duplication must be a means to an
            end. Duplication itself is not the novel's goal. If it were, the
            novelist would be properly defined as a camera which takes pictures
            with words or as a maker of verbal documentaries who strives to
            capture the passing scene. This is an axiom which must appear self-
            evident to both the writer and the audience. However, when I wrote
            Anya (New York, 1975), I found that this self-evident truth
            provided random and unreliable light; if this truth had been a
            source of electricity, it would be safe to say that its failure to
            illuminate caused a blackout of comprehension for many critics and
            readers.
             
            Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, professor of English at Brooklyn College
            of the City University of New York, is the author of Falling,
            Anya,and Time in Its Flight, several collections of poetry,
            including Rhymes and Runes of the Toad and Alphabet for the Lost
            Years, and, most recently, The Queen of Egypt and Other Stories.
Lawrence W. Hyman
         Harpsicord Exercises and the My Lai Massacre
         That there is something not altogether honest about a didactic
            novel can be seen once we imagine a novel which violates our
            political sympathies or our moral principles, such as a novel that
            shows the Nazis or the American soldiers at My Lai as heroes. We
            certainly would not like this novel. But could we refute it because
            of our certain knowledge that these men, in real life, were
            murderers? I don't think so, since a skillful writer could easily
            make his characters act heroically in the situation and even
            make us dislike their victims. Could we say that the situation is
            false? Perhaps, but since the actions and the characters are
            fictional, what does it mean to refute them? We can say that a
            novel is bad or unconvincing if the characters do not resemble
            people in real life or if the actions do not satisfy our sense of
            logic or probability. But these are literary objections, not
            political ones. And because the writer cannot be refuted by
            evidence from the real world, he cannot make pronouncements about
            this world. For example, even if there were evidence that no slave
            resembled Tom and no overseer resembled Legree, such evidence could
            not refute the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. And as Moody Prior points
            out in his essay ("Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom,"  5
            [Summer 1979]: 635-50), our disagreement with the philosophy of
            spiritual, rather than physical resistance to slavery cannot take
            away the heroism of Tom's action. His final act of forgiveness is
            indeed Christ-like, and no philosophy of political activism which
            is validated by, let us say, our admiration for Tom within the
            novel cannot validate Tom's kind of inward action in the real
            world. If it did, then our admiration for Tom, a fictional
            character, would prelude our support for a more active resistance
            to oppression. But, of course, it does not, or at least it should
            not, if we are to see fiction as performing a different role than
            politics and philosophy.
             
            Lawrence W. Hyman, professor of English at Brooklyn College of the
            City University of New York, is the author of The Quarrel Within:
            Art and Morality in Milton's Poetry. His previous contribution to
            , "The 'New Contextualism' Has Arrived: A Reply to
            Edward Wasiolek," appeared in the Winter 1975 issue.
Strother Purdy
         Reply to Lawrence W. Hyman
         We differ mainly, I think, in that Hyman is willing to indulge his
            taste for subtlety more extensively than I am. He seems comfortable
            with post-modern paradoxes like "the tendency of a literary work to
            refuse to give us a moral direction is itself a value" and believes
            that this refusal is properly based on the writer's incapacity to
            "make pronouncements about [the] world." It could be I mistake him
            here, and he means only to reject those solutions toutes faites
            that are part of the didactic mode, in which case I agree once
            more. But I feel the thrust of his argument is to deny the
            existence of the first of the two abysses, frivolity and
            propaganda, into which, according to Camus, it is the task of the
            writer to keep from falling. To seek a strengthening of moral
            commitment in a literature that operates at "a level of awareness
            deeper than our moral and political judgments" is certainly to
            avoid exposure to propaganda; but it is also something of a
            logical and psychological contradiction in terms and
            therefore doomed to irrelevance or, in Camus' terms, frivolity. One
            cannot answer for individual variations on common aesthetic
            experiences, of course; there exist men and women and literary
            characters who find strength to take a moral stand in the
            contemplation of a Chinese jar or in what I called harpsichord
            exercises the term includes, after all, Das wohltemperiertes
            Klavier but such experiences, for all their abstract beauty,
            lack a social basis and a social relevance. The mimetic imperative
            is not so easily bypassed.
             
            Strother Purdy, professor of English at Marquette University, is
            the author of The Hole in the Fabric: Science, Contemporary
            Literature, and Henry James. He has also contributed "Stalingrad
            and My Lai: A Literary-Political Speculation" to .
John Reichert
         Making Sense of Interpretation
         If we are capable of changing our minds of rejecting, that
            is, one hypothesis for another the issue becomes one of the
            criteria which govern our choices. Are they, as [Stanley] Fish
            would argue, dependent on "beliefs" and "assumptions"? Perhaps, at
            some very fundamental level, they are. But I do not think Fish has
            succeeded in showing them to be so. Certainly the criteria are
            independent of anything so specific as beliefs about the nature of
            literature or the human mind. Who among us, for example, whatever
            the object of interpretation, would choose one on the grounds of
            its greater inconsistency, or on the grounds of its accounting for
            fewer of the facts that we want to explain, or on the grounds of
            its being unnecessarily complicated? On the contrary, do we not
            tend to argue, as Fish does so effectively, as if counterexamples
            and inconsistencies tell against an hypothesis? It may be the case
            that our cherished beliefs (in the unconscious, say, or in ordinary
            language, or in progress) often make it difficult in practice even
            to formulate our questions in ways that allow such criteria as I
            have hinted at to come into play. But why should hard work
            discourage us?
             
            John Reichert is the chairman of the English department at Williams
            College and the author of Making Sense of Literature. He has
            contributed "But That Was in Another Ball Park: A Reply to Stanley
            Fish" to .
Stanley E. Fish
         One More Time
         What I would add, and what Reichert seems unable to see, is that
            the facts of the text do not identify themselves. He faults Roskill
            for failing to see that coherence is not a function of the text but
            of "principles we bring to the text"; yet he himself does not see
            that the text, insofar as one can point to it, is produced by those
            same principles. Indeed, Reichert is continually doing the very
            thing for which he criticizes Roskill, attributing to the text
            qualities and features that are the product of interpretive
            strategies. Thus, for example, he cites the instance of "the
            interpreter . . . noticing something in the text that makes his
            former reading seem implausible" as evidence that the text is at
            some level independent of interpretation; but noticeability is a
            function of what it is possibleto notice given a particular set of
            assumptions: a reader innocent of the principles of typology would
            be incapable of "noticing" a typological pattern, whereas for a
            reader like Madsen, the pattern will seem to announce itself; and a
            reader who "notices" something he didn't "notice" before is a
            reader who (for a variety of reasons that one could discuss) is
            proceeding within a different set of interpretive assumptions. That
            which is noticeable, in short, can never be the means of confirming
            or constraining interpretations because it is always a product of
            one. The same argument dissolves the distinction, invoked by
            Reichert, between extratextual and textual evidence; it is not that
            such a distinction is never in force (it almost always is) but that
            what counts as internal and external evidence will vary according
            to the interpretive principles one espouses. Just what is and what
            is not extratextual is a matter of continual debate, and when the
            debate has been (temporarily) concluded, it is not because the
            matter has been settled by the facts but because one set of
            interpretive principles has won the right to say what the facts
            are.
             
            Stanley E. Fishis the author of, among other works, Is There a Text
            in This Class: The Sources of Interpretative Authority. His
            contributions to  include "Facts and Fictions: A
            Reply to Ralph Rader" (June 1975), "Interpreting the Variorum"
            (Spring 1976), "Interpreting 'Interpreting the Variorum'" (Autumn
            1976), "Normal Circumstances, Literal Language, Direct Speech Acts,
            the Ordinary, the Everyday, the Obvious, What Goes without Saying,
            and Other Special Cases" (Summer 1978), and "A Reply to John
            Reichert; or, How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love
            Interpretation" (Autumn 1979).
Leonard Dean
         Theory and the Muddle
         Editor's Note: We are happy to print the following comment by
            Leonard Dean as a reminder that the arbitrary, improvisatory nature
            of practical criticism (dignified by certain theorists under the
            rubric ofbricolage) has its origins in a much more homely and
            familiar phenomenon.
             
            A muddler naturally feels flattered by any kind of praise from the
            world of theory, as, for example, by Robert Scholes' generous
            remark that "muddling along, in literary theory as in life, is
            often more humane and even more efficient than the alternatives
            offered by political, ethical, or aesthetic systems. We may in fact
            'know' more than we can systematize about certain kinds of human
            behavior, so that our intuitions may indeed be superior to our more
            reasoned positions" ("Toward a Semiotics of Literature," Critical
            Inquiry 4 [Autumn 1977]: 105). For a moment praise like that makes
            a muddler feel the way the ghost of Shakespeare must have felt when
            he was called a natural genius in the days of the Rules, but then
            you remember how it really was and is. Like Shakespeare and the New
            Dealers we patched things together under pressure, and like them we
            borrowed from anybody. New critical methods were a godsend for
            anyone who was trying to revive an old survey course into a
            discussion of literature, and equally useful were old critical
            methods like those used by Dr. Johnson for the job of general
            public education.
