Tzvetan Todorov
         The Last Barthes
         It was his mother's death which allowed [Roland] Barthes to write:
            "I looked through…" "To write on something is to forfeit it,"
            Barthes used to say, reciprocally, it is licit to write on what is
            already dead, it was Barthes himself in one of his acceptations.
            His mother was for Barthes the internal order, who permitted both
            the external other and the I to exist. Once she was dead, his life
            was over and could therefore become the object of writing. Barthes
            no doubt had other books to write; but he no longer had any life to
            live.
             
            I find it emblematic that his last book should have been "on
            photography" (however deceptively). Eloquent or discreet, a
            photograph never says anything but: I was there; it leads to a
            gesture of monstration, to a silent deixis, and symbolizes a pre-
            or post-discursive world; it makes me an object, that is, a dead
            man. What Barthes himself calls "my last investigation" (accident?
            oversight? premonition?) also concerned death.
             
            Tzvetan Todorov, of the Centre National de la Recherche
            Scientifique in Paris, has numerous books on literary theory,
            including Théories du symbole and Symbolisme et interprétation,
            which has been published in English. His previous contribution to
            Crtitical Inquiry, "The Verbal Age," appeared in the Winter 1977
            issue. Richard Howard, a poet and critic, has translated many works
            by Roland Barthes, Tzvetan Todorov, Michel Foucault, and Gilles
            Deleuze.
Garrett Stewart
         Coppola's Conrad: The Repetitions of Complicity
         The ending of neither story [Heart of Darkness] nor film
            [Apocalypse Now] is confused, just bifocal. In Coppola we find writ
            large, for Willard as well as for us, what Conrad seems to keep
            from Marlowe by ironic distance: that the return to civilization
            from primitive haunts can never lay the ghostly image of that
            bestial horror lurking within us, the horror that finds such
            kinship, regressed beyond any ethical restraint, in the jungle's
            heart of darkness. It is a horror which the tropical rain droning
            on the sound track as the film's last trace can scarcely wash
            clean. For just before, staring straight at the camera and through
            it at us for one final time, confirming earlier suggestions of the
            universal complicity in evil, Willard's disembodied face - the
            reflective mind as if unmoored from its whole self, decapitated -
            slides out of view to the right behind the dead but deathless
            carved image. With the film's narrator absorbed into the immemorial
            icon of that anthropomorphic vanity and villainy which has
            comprised his tale, Kurtz's "horror" comes onto the sound track as
            a primal echo in the soul, an echo drenched from without by the
            sounds of a world that outlasts but cannot quench it.
             
            Garrett Stewart, professor of English at the University of
            California, Santa Barbara, is the author of Dickens and the Trials
            of Imagination. His previous contribution to ,
            "Modern Hard Times: Chaplin and the Cinema of Self-Reflection,"
            appeared in the Winter 1976 issue.
             
David M. Halperin
         Solzhenitsyn, Epicurus, and the Ethics of Stalinism
         Why did Solzhenitsyn choose to insert an indictment of Epicureanism
            into the text of his novel?
             
            The answer to this question is simple, but it requires elaborate
            argumentation. Epicureanism in The First Circle stands for the
            ethics of Stalinist society and furnished Solzhenitsyn with the
            vehicle for a destructive critique of Stalinist moral theory. But
            Stalinism has tended to be viewed in the West chiefly as a vicious
            form of political opportunism, its implicit ethical structure has
            escaped due recognition. But Stalinism was more than one man's
            strategy for the seizure and consolidation of power, more even than
            the collective aims, policies, and methods of the Soviet
            bureaucracy. The ideological component of Stalinism must not be
            neglected. Howsoever the integrity of its doctrines was
            subordinated to political exigencies of the moment, Stalinist
            ideology could lay claim to a coherent and distinguished
            intellectual ancestry: it was heir to the materialist philosophy of
            the so-called Left Hegelians (Feuerbach, Belinskii, Marx, and
            Engels), a philosophy militantly reinterpreted by the architects of
            the Russian Revolution. Stalinist ideology expected a profound
            influence on the popular notions of obligation and moral value
            during the period of its ascendancy, smoothing the way of
            acquiescence and cooperation for the reluctant, the dubious, and
            the conscience-stricken. One need not therefore subscribe to an
            idealist interpretation of history in order to agree with
            Solzhenitsyn that Stalin's creation of an univers
            concentrationnaire would have been impossible without an accessory
            code of official ethics.
             
            David M. Halperin, an assistant professor of literature at the
            Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is the author of articles on
            Solzhenitsyn, Conrad, Augustine, Virgil, and ancient bucolic
            poetry.
Elizabeth Ermarth
         Realism, Perspective, and the Novel
         I argue that in realism the identity of things, increasingly
            independent from typological paradigms, becomes series-dependent;
            that is, it becomes a form emergent from a series of instances
            rather than a form intelligible through one instance alone.
            Realistic identity, in other words, becomes abstract, removed from
            direct apprehension to a hidden dimension of depth. In speaking of
            realistic identity, I use the term "identity" to mean the oneness
            or the invariant structure by which we recognize a thing, by which
            we judge it under varying conditions to be the same. This
            conception of identity and all it implies about the regularity of
            nature and about the possibilities of knowledge belongs to an
            empirical epistemology which, though foreign to the Middle Ages and
            radically modifies today, was current throughout the otherwise
            diverse period from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century.
            It is a conception of identity so obvious to us that we have ceased
            to see it as the convention it is, but it was not obvious in the
            Renaissance, and it took a long time to become common sense.
             
            Elizabeth Ermarth teaches English at the University of Maryland,
            Baltimore County, and is the author of several articles on George
            Eliot.
Phillip Harth
         The New Criticism and Eighteenth-Century Poetry
         It is easy to overlook the fact that the kind of personalist
            criticism Brower, Wimsatt, and other New Critics were reacting
            against was a method of interpretation bequeathed by the nineteenth
            century which most of us would now regard as naïve, simplistic, and
            sometimes absurd. With the exception of a few poems such as
            Browning's dramatic monologues, which provided the speaker with an
            explicit identity as unmistakable as that of a character in a
            play "I am poor brother Lippo, by your leave! / You need not
            clap your torches to my face" lyric and didactic poems of the
            first person were invariably treated as personal statements. The
            voice, emotions, attitudes, and state of mind of the speaker were
            those of the poet, and even the most symbolic details were often
            read as literal aspects of the poet's self or environment. Many
            critical studies and anthologies remain today on library shelves
            testifying to the persistence of these critical habits of the late
            1940s and 1950s. On the assumption that Rochester's love poems
            describe his actual sexual experiences, Vivian de Sola Pinto was
            able to write a much longer biography of the poet than would have
            been possible if personalist criticism had not been in vogue.1
            David Nichol Smith could assert that Dryden's Religio Laici "was
            wholly spontaneous" the familiar Romantic criterion - and
            show the poet arguing out "his problems for the peace of his own
            mind."2 If it became unfashionable to speak in that manner of these
            and numerous other poems, it was because the New Critics, along
            with the Chicago critics, had shown convincingly that a lyric poem
            can be dramatic, the imitation of a fictitious speaker responding
            to an imagined situation, and that a didactic poem can deal with
            public issues instead of private agonies.
             
            ·  1. See Vivian de Sola Pinto, Rochester: Portrait of a
            Restoration Poet (London, 1935).
            ·  2. David Nichol Smith, John Dryden (Cambridge, 1950), p. 61.
             
            Phillip Harth is Merritt Y. Hughes Professor of English at the
            University of Wisconsin, Madison, and is the author of Swift and
            Anglican Rationalism and Contexts of Dryden's Thought.
             
Jonathan D. Kramer
         New Temporalities in Music
         As this century has found new temporalities to replace linearity,
            discontinuities have become commonplace. Discontinuity, if carried
            to a pervasive extreme, destroys linearity…There were two enormous
            factors, beyond the general cultural climate, that promoted
            composers' active pursuit of discontinuities. These influences did
            not cause so much as feed the dissatisfaction with linearity that
            many artists felt. But the impact has been profound.
             
            One factor contributing to the increase of discontinuity was the
            gradual absorption of music from totally different cultures, which
            had evolved over the centuries with virtually no contact with
            Western ideas…Cross-cultural exchange in music will, of course,
            never destroy aesthetic boundaries, but music of non-Western
            cultures continues to show Western composers new ways to use and
            experience time.
             
            The second tremendous influence on twentieth-century musical
            discontinuity was technological rather than sociological: the
            invention of recording techniques. Recording has not only brought
            distant and ancient musics into the here and now, it has also made
            the home and the car environment just as viable for music listening
            as the concert hall. The removal of music from the ritualized
            behavior that surrounds concertgoing struck a blow to the internal
            ordering of the listening experience. Furthermore, radios, records,
            and, more recently, tapes allow the listener to enter and exit a
            composition at will. An overriding progression from beginning to
            end may or may not be in the music, but the listener is not captive
            to that completeness. We all spin the dial, and we are more immune
            to having missed part of the music than composers might like to
            think.
             
            Jonathan D. Kramer is an associate professor of music theory and
            composition and director of electronic music at the College-
            Conservatory of Music of the University of Cincinnati. The present
            essay is part of his book, Time and Meaning in Music.
Mari Riess Jones
         Only Time Can Tell: On the Topology of_Mental_Space_and_Time
         An obvious result of including time rules into specifications of
            world patterns is the rather persuasive representation of rhythm.
            Rhythm as a property of world patterns has received relatively
            little attention recently, although it has had a long and
            distinguished history in psychology. Nonetheless, its recent
            neglect means that all too often we have failed to consider the
            implications of time patterning of stimuli that we as psychologists
            routinely present to individuals in our attempts to study human
            performance in many tasks, tasks which often do involve explicitly
            musical stimuli. Often in our psychological studies we present as
            stimuli words, lights, colored forms, or other items in a fashion
            that is regularly spaced in time. It's just common sense, and
            besides it's easier. And other current paradigms have not
            encouraged experimental questions about the temporal patterning of
            stimuli. But consider what this pacing means. We are rhythmically
            programming events. Is it possible that this temporal regularity
            forms attentional waves that buoy up our studies and so make it
            likely that we canstudy what we are most interested in? And, with
            our own attention as psychologists fixed steadily upon the topic of
            our immediate concern (Polanyi's focal target?), is it possible
            that we overlook the fact that underlying our effects is a rhythmic
            regularity that is crucial to having the subject's attention on the
            task at hand?
             
            Mari Riess Jones is professor of psychology at Ohio State
            University and has written numerous articles on the human response
            to patterns in time.
Roger Scruton
         Photography and Representation
         It seems odd to say that photography is not a mode of
            representation. For a photograph has in common with a painting the
            property by which the painting represents the world, the property
            of sharing, in some sense, the appearance of its subject. Indeed,
            it is sometimes thought that since a photograph more effectively
            shares the appearance of its subject than a typical painting,
            photography is a better mode of representation. Photography might
            even be thought of as having replaced painting as a mode of visual
            representation. Painters have felt that if the aim of painting is
            really to reproduce the appearances of things, then painting must
            give way to whatever means are available to reproduce an appearance
            more accurately. It has therefore been said that painting aims to
            record the appearances of things only so as to capture the
            experience of observing them (the impression) and that the accurate
            copying of appearances will normally be at variance with this aim.
            Here we have the seeds of expressionism and the origin of the view
            (a view which not only is mistaken but which has also proved
            disastrous for the history of modern art) that painting is somehow
            purer when it is abstract and closer to its essence as an art.
             
            Roger Scruton is the author of Art and Imagination, The Aesthetics
            of Architecture, The Meaning of Conservatism, From Descartes to
            Wittgenstein, and The Politics of Culture and Other Essays.
