E.H. Gombrich
         Standards of Truth: The Arrested Image and the_Moving_Eye
         I have stressed here and elsewhere that perspective cannot and need
            not claim to represent the world "as we see it." The perceptual
            constancies which make us underrate the degree of objective
            diminutions with distance, it turns out, constitute only one of the
            factors refuting this claim. The selectivity of vision can now be
            seen to be another. There are many ways of "seeing the world," but
            obviously the claim would have to relate to the "snapshot vision"
            of the stationary single eye. To ask, as it has so often been
            asked, whether this eye sees the world in the form of a hollow
            sphere or of a projection plane makes little sense, for it sees
            neither. The one point in focus can hardly be said to be either
            curved or flat, and the remainder of the field of vision is too
            indistinct to permit a decision. True, we can shift the point of
            focus at will, but in doing so we lose the previous perception, and
            all that remains is its memory. Can we, and do we, compare the
            exact extension of these changing percepts in scanning a row of
            columns extended at right angles from the central line of
            vision to mention the most recalcitrant of the posers of
            perspectival theory?1 I very much doubt it. The question refers to
            the convenient choice of projection planes, not to the experience
            of vision.
            ·  1. I now prefer this formulation to my somewhat laboured
            discussion in Art and Illusion, chap. 8, sec. 4.
            E.H. Gombrich was director of the Warburg Institute and Professor
            of the History of the Classical Tradition at the University of
            London from 1959 to 1976. His many influential works include The
            Story of Art, Art and Illusion, Meditations on a Hobby Horse, The
            Sense of Order,and Ideals and Idols. An early version of "Standards
            of Truth" was presented at Swarthmore College in October 1976 at a
            symposium to mark the retirement of Professor Hans Wallach. His
            contributions to  include "The Museum: Past,
            Present, and Future" (Spring 1977), "Notes and Exchanges" (Summer
            1979), and, with Quentin Bell, "Canons and Values in the Visual
            Arts: A Correspondence" (Spring 1976).
Herbert F. Tucker, Jr.
         Browning's Lyric Intentions
         The lyric speaker begins by turning his or her will into words, but
            begins to be a Browningesque speaker when this conversion leads to
            a turning of the will against words. This inversion, or perversion,
            of the will against its own expression requires a reader to
            entertain a complex notion of the relationship between intention
            and language or, more accurately, to hold in suspension two
            competing versions of that relationship. A reader learns not only
            to conceive interpretation in the simple lyric sense, as a
            prevailing assertion of the will, but also to conceive any given
            assertion of the will, any intention given over to articulation in
            language, as an interpretation and therefore a potential
            falsification inviting further refinement. The playful competition
            Browning urges between these two conceptions of intentionality
            frees meaning to wander somewhere beyond the ken of each lyric
            speaker, somewhere in the future of lyric utterance. Meaning is to
            the dramatic lyric what action is to the drama proper; and much as
            the curious "action in character" of Browning's dramas defers
            dramatic action and makes room for play, so Browning defers meaning
            in the lyrics by enlisting the patterning forces of the self-
            interfering will.1
            · 1. Browning remarked in the preface to Strafford that his play
            turned on "Action in the Character rather than Character in Action"
            (Complete Works, 2:9).
            Herbert F. Tucker, Jr., an assistant professor of English at
            Northwestern University, has published articles on Hopkins and
            Browning. An expanded version of the present essay appears in his
            Browning's Beginnings: The Art of Disclosure.
Gerald L. Bruns
         Intention, Authority, and Meaning
         [Herbert F.] Tucker has shown us in a very practical way that the
            concept of meaning is the problem of problems, not only in
            hermeneutics but in literary theory and, indeed, literary study
            generally. It may well be that in literary study there can be no
            talk of meaning that is not ambiguous, that does not require us to
            speak in figures or by means of metaphorical improvisations. It
            would not necessarily follow that our talk of meaning is merely
            provisional or without philosophical authority since we know now
            that considerable authority attaches to ordinary language, whence
            we obtain our use of the word "meaning" as well as the figurations
            that we use to talk our way around it. To be sure, the discipline
            of literary study is now rapidly filling with grave masters who
            take our figures to mean that meaning is literally
            unspeakable only so many transferences and substitutions
            within a system of differences alarmingly vast (a system whose
            center is everywhere and whose circumference is an illusion). This
            is itself a terrific idea, or a terrific figure, although it is
            used mainly to expose the thoughtless way we talk about meaning as
            well as our offhand assumptions about the conditions that make
            understanding possible. Our problem in literary study is not that
            meaning is unspeakable even if it were it would not be a
            problem but that we rarely reflect on the subject of meaning
            in a disciplined way. In our time, meaning as a topic of study is
            the preserve of logicians. It is almost exclusively a theme of
            analytical philosophy, and even those not bound by this philosophy
            address themselves to the analytical tradition when they speak of
            meaning.1 It is time that we entered into this discourse on
            meaning; a paper as fine as Tucker's should serve as a summons.
            · 1. Among numerous cases, see John R. Searle, "Metaphor" and
            "Literal Meaning," Expression and Meaning (Cambridge, 1979), pp.
            76-136, and "Intentionality and the Use of Language," in Meaning
            and Use, ed. Avishai Margalit (Dordrecht and Boston, 1979), pp.
            181-97.
            Gerald l. Bruns, professor of English at the University of Iowa, is
            the author of Modern Poetry and the Idea of Language and
            Inventions: Writing, Textuality, and Interpretation in Literary
            History.
Joseph Kerman
         How We Got into Analysis, and How to_Get_Out
         It may be objected that musical analysts claim to be working with
            objective methodologies which leave no place for aesthetic
            criteria, for the consideration of value. If that were the case,
            the reluctance of so many writers to subsume analysis under
            criticism might be understandable. But are these claims true? Are
            they, indeed, even seriously entered?
            Certainly the original masters of analysis left no doubt that for
            them analysis was an essential adjunct to a fully articulated
            aesthetic value system. Heinrich Schenker always insisted on the
            superiority of the towering products of the German musical genius.
            Sir Donald Tovey pontificated about "the main stream of music" and
            on occasion developed this metaphor in considerable detail. It is
            only in more recent times that analysts have avoided value
            judgments and adapted their work to a format of strictly corrigible
            propositions, mathematical equations, set-theory formulations, and
            the like all this, apparently, in an effort to achieve the
            objective status and hence the authority of scientific inquiry.
            Articles on music composed after 1950, in particular, appear
            sometimes to mimic scientific papers in the way that South American
            bugs and flies will mimic the dreaded carpenter wasp. In a somewhat
            different adaptation, the distinguished analyst Allen Forte wrote
            an entire small book, The Compositional Matrix, from which all
            affective or valuational terms (such as "nice" or "good") are
            meticulously excluded. The same tendency is evident in much recent
            periodical literature.
            Joseph Kerman, professor of music at the University of California
            at Berkeley, has been the editor of Nineteenth-Century Music. His
            books include Opera as Drama, The Elizabethan Madrigal, The
            Beethoven Quartets, Listen(with Vivian Kerman), and The Masses and
            Motets of William Byrd.
Bert O. States
         The Persistence of the Archetype
         If we are looking for an Ur-explanation for the persistence of the
            Ur-myth, or any other myth, in our literature, could we not more
            directly find it in the structure of a mind which does not have to
            remember in order to imitate? The occasion of both myth and
            literature is the social life of the species which, in
            Starobinski's sense, is a history of continual eviction; but as
            regards the apparatus of thought by which this social life is
            reflected in art it is more a history of assimilation and
            repetition. "The work of the brain," to cite a recent article in
            Scientific American, "is to create a model of a possible world
            rather than to record and transmit to the mind a world that is
            metaphysically true…Different worlds are presumably constructed by
            similar species."1 And, presumably, similar worlds are constructed
            by similar species. Weisinger hints briefly at something like this
            in his essay "The Mythic Origins of the Creative Process," but one
            has the clear impression, as his title suggests, that he would like
            to have the [myth/ritual] cart before the creative horse.2 However
            much this may satisfy our longing to crown our literature, if not
            creativity itself, with a mythic genealogy, it seems a wistful
            hypothesis. One might just as well look upon the remains of early
            man's shelters, marvel that they too had roofs, just like ours, and
            conclude that therefore our roofs have their origin in theirs.
            ·  1. Harry J. Jerison, "Paleoneurology and the Evolution of Mind,"
            Scientific American, January 1976, p. 99.
            ·  2. Herbert Weisinger, The Agony and the Triumph: Papers on the
            Use and Abuse of Myth (East Lansing, Mich., 1964), p. 250.
            Bert O. States, professor of dramatic arts at the University of
            California at Santa Barbara, is the author of Irony and Drama: A
            Poeticsand The Shape of Paradox: An Essay on "Waiting for Godot."
Norman N. Holland
         Why Ellen Laughed
         I propose this: Ellen [a graduate student] laughs because she is
            re-creating her identity. This theory differs from the others
            because "identity" is not simply a category that is filled or not,
            like "incongruity" or "superiority" which become variables in an
            "if this, then that" explanation. "If there is a sudden
            incongruity, people will laugh." Rather, identity is a further
            question, a way of asking, Can I understand Ellen's actions as a
            theme and variations? Moreover, any such interpretation is itself a
            part of the interpreter's actions, hence a function of his - in
            this case, my - identity. The principle is general, but putting it
            into practice in each instance is unique. Unlike an "if this, then
            that" which leads to closure, an explanation through identity leads
            to a continuing dialogue. One asks questions of an individual
            situation, like Ellen's laughing at [B.] Kliban's cartoons. One
            gets answers that lead to a fuller understanding of that situation.
            The answers can be generalized into questions, leading to more and
            closer questioning and more answers that lead to more questions,
            all within the general principle of identity re-creation as
            embodied in the unique situation.
            Norman N. Holland is the James H. McNulty Professor of English at
            the State University of New York at Buffalo. He has written a book
            on the theory of laughter presented in the present essay. His
            previous contributions to  are "Literary
            Interpretation and Three Phases of Psychoanalysis" (Winter 1976)
            and "Human Identity" (Spring 1978).
Walter Benn Michaels
         Sister Carrie's Popular Economy
         Instead of seeing satisfaction as the necessary and appropriate
            goal of desire, Dreiser seems to see it only as an inevitable but
            potentially fatal by-product. Desire, for him, is most powerful
            when it outstrips its object; indeed, it is the very fact of this
            excessiveness that fuels Sister Carrie's economy which is one
            reason why Carrie is right to think of money ("something everybody
            else has and I must get") as "power itself." The economy runs on
            desire, which is to say, money, or the impossibility of ever having
            enough money. Nothing is more characteristic of Carrie than her
            ability to "indulge" in what Dreiser calls "the most high-flown
            speculations,"1 rocking in her chair and spending in "her fancy"
            money she hasn't yet earned. Fancy or imagination is the very agent
            of excessive desire for Carrie, enabling her to get "beyond, in her
            desires, twice the purchasing power of her bills" (p. 48). When
            Drouet suggests to her that she has dramatic ability,
            "imagination," as usual, "exaggerated the possibilities for her. It
            was as if he had put fifty cents in her hand and she had exercised
            the thoughts of a thousand dollars" (p. 118).
            · 1. Thomas Dreiser, Sister Carrie, ed. Donald Pizer (New York,
            1970), p. 22. All subsequent references to this work will be cited
            parenthetically in the text.
            Walter Benn Michaels is an assistant professor of English at the
            University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of articles on
            American literature and literary theory and a book entitledAmerican
            Epistemologies: Literary Theory and Pragmatism.
Sandra M. Gilbert
         Costumes of the Mind: Transvestism as Metaphor in_Modern_Literature
         There is a striking difference, however, between the ways female
            and male modernists define and describe literal or figurative
            costumes. Balancing self against mask, true garment against false
            costume, Yeats articulates a perception of himself and his place in
            society that most other male modernists share, even those who
            experiment more radically with costume as metaphor. But female
            modernists like Woolf, together with their post-modernist heirs,
            imagine costumes of the mind with much greater irony and ambiguity,
            in part because women's clothing is more closely connected with the
            pressures and oppressions of gender and in part because women have
            far more to gain from the identification of costume with self or
            gender. Because clothing powerfully defines sex roles, both overt
            and covert fantasies of transvestism are often associated with the
            intensified clothes consciousness expressed by these writers. But
            although such imagery is crucially important in works by Joyce,
            Lawrence, and Eliot on the one hand, and in works by Barnes, Woolf,
            and H. D. on the other, it functions very differently for male
            modernists from the way it operates for female modernists.
            Sandra M. Gilbert, professor of English at the University of
            California at Davis, is the author of Acts of Attention: The Poems
            of D.H. Lawrenceand In the Fourth World; the coauthor, with Susan
            Gubar, of The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the
            Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, and its sequel, No Man's
            Land: The Woman Writer and the Twentieth-Century Literary
            Imagination.
Joyce Carol Oates
         The Picture of Dorian Gray: Wilde's Parable of_the_Fall
         Beyond the defiance of the young iconoclast Wilde himself, of
            course and the rather perfunctory curve of Dorian Gray to
            that gothic final sight (beautiful Dorian dead with a knife in his
            heart, "withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage"), there is
            another, possibly less strident, but more central theme. That one
            is damned for selling one's soul to the devil (for whatever
            prize "eternal youth" is a trivial enough one) is a
            commonplace in legends; what arrests our attention more, perhaps,
            is Wilde's claim or boast or worry or warning that one might indeed
            be poisoned by a book . . . and that the artist, even the
            presumably "good" Basil Hallward, is the diabolical agent. Wilde's
            novel must be seen as a highly serious meditation upon the moral
            role of the artist an interior challenge, in fact, to the
            insouciance of the famous pronouncements that would assure us that
            there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book ("Books are
            well written, or badly written," Wilde claims in his preface. "That
            is all.") or that all art is "quite useless." Wilde's genius was
            disfigured by his talent: he always sounds much more flippant, far
            more superficial, than he really is. So one always say about Dorian
            Gray, with an air of surprise, that the novel is exceptionally good
            after all and anyone who has read it recently replies, with
            the same air of faint incredulity, yes, it isexceptionally
            good in fact, one of the strongest and most haunting of
            English novels. Yet its reputation remains questionable. Gerald
            Weales virtually dismisses it as "terribly fin de siècle" in a
            rather flippant introduction to the novel, and it would be
            difficult to find a critic who would choose to discuss it in terms
            other than the familiar ones of decadence, art for art's sake, art
            as "the telling of beautiful untrue things."
             
            Joyce Carol Oates has written, among others, Bellefleur, Childhood,
            a collection of short stories, Nightside, and Son of the
            Morning.Her contributions to ,include "Jocoserious
            Joyce" (Summer 1976) and "Lawrence's Gotterdammerung" (Spring
            1978).
Joel Snyder and Ted Cohen
         Reflexions on Las Meninas: Paradox Lost
         Surely [John R.] Searle must rely on a stable, formal conception of
            the point of view. He sets Las Meninas on a par with the antimony
            of the liar and the paradoxes of set theory. (It is apparently
            because of what he takes to be its rather strict analogy with these
            conundrums that Searle goes on to say that Las Meninas is involved
            with self-reference.) But nothing is an antimony or a paradox just
            because it seems so or just because it is confusing or difficult,
            even if it seems so to everyone. To deserve such a description, a
            thing must be, so to speak, intrinsically intractable, not merely
            resistant when looked at in a particular way. If a man says "I do
            not believe I am alive," that would be odd, and it would be hard to
            understand just what he means, and it may even be hard or
            impossible to believe that he is telling the truth; but there is no
            antimony. If a man says "I am lying," then we have a primitive
            version of the antimony of the liar. Given the meaning of this
            utterance and nothing else there is no way to get a
            grip on it. If what the man says is true, then it's false; if what
            he says is false, then it's true.
             
            Joel Snyder, a practicing photographer, is associate professor of
            humanities and of art and design at the University of Chicago. His
            contributions to include "Photography, Vision, and
            Representation," written with Neil Walsh Allen (Autumn 1975), and
            "Picturing Vision" (Spring 1980). Ted Cohen, associate professor of
            philosophy at the University of Chicago, has written on language,
            aesthetics, and taste. His previous contribution to Critical
            Inquiry, "Metaphor and the Cultivation of Intimacy," appeared in
            the Autumn 1978 issue.
