Gary Saul Morson
         Tolstoy's Absolute Language
          Among Tolstoy's absolute statements are those that exhibit
            characteristics of both biblical commands and proverbs and of
            other types of absolute statements as well. He also draws, for
            example, on logical propositions, mathematical deductions, laws of
            nature and human nature, dictionary definitions, and metaphysical
            assertions. The language of all these forms is timeless, anonymous,
            and above all categorical. Their stylistic features imply that they
            are not falsifiable and that they are not open to qualification:
            they characteristically include words like "all," "each," "every,"
            "only," and "certainly" and phrases like "there neither is nor can
            be," "the human mind cannot grasp," and "it is impossible that."
            Even in sentences that omit such phrases, the very refusal to use a
            qualifier of any kind can assert unqualifiability. When Tolstoy's
            absolute statements take the form of syllogisms, the use of the
            word "therefore" or some explicit or implicit equivalent carries
            the force of logical inevitability. It carries the same force with
            Tolstoy's enthymemes, which omit the major premise for the reader
            to reconstruct. [An example] from The Death of Ivan Ilysch,1 cited
            above, for instance, contains a minor premise and a conclusion of a
            syllogism; the reader himself must supply the major premise, which
            would be: "The simpler and more ordinary a life is, the more
            terrible it is."
            ·  1. "Ivan Ilysch's life was the most simple and the most
            ordinary, and therefore the most terrible."
            Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilysch, ed. John Bayley, trans.
            Louise and Aylmer Maude (New York, 1967), p.225.
            Gary Saul Morson is an associate professor of Russian literature at
            the University of Pennsylvania, and the author of The Boundaries of
            Genre: Dostoevsky's Diary of a Writer and the Traditions of
            Literary Utopia,and The Broken Frame: The Anti-tradition of Russian
            Literature.The present article is from a theoretical study of
            literary creativity and the biography of authors.
             
Marshall Brown
         Mozart and After: The Revolution in Musical Consciousness
         There can be no question, of course, of any "influence" of Kant's
            or Rousseau's ideas on Mozart's musical structures. While I have
            used various loosely synonymous nonmusical terms reverie,
            dream, unconscious, ethereal, and so on the analysis could
            proceed on a nonmetaphorical, strictly technical basis. Indeed,
            much of it has. I should therefore clarify why I have superimposed
            this philosophical and literary layer on the musical analysis, even
            at the risk of giving the false impression that I wished to make
            the history of music dependent upon the history of ideas.
            My answer lies, first of all, in the contention in which I
            follow chiefly Michel Foucault, though with
            qualifications that at every period in history a subterranean
            network of constraints governs the organization of human thought.
            Different fields develop and change in parallel not because they
            affect one another but because the infrastructures of mental
            activity affect them all. In this respect, the relationship of
            music and philosophy is no different from the relationship of
            literature and philosophy. The infrastructure is the precondition
            of thought and is by definition unconscious and unarticulated.
            Because it lies outside the limits of the individual disciplines,
            it cannot really be formulated within any of them. Hence arises the
            necessity of comparative study. The infrastructure comes to light
            at the juncture of independent fields. In the present case, it is
            accurate to say that music and philosophy mutually illuminate one
            another precisely because they are such different media; where they
            coincide lie the true invariants of eighteenth-century thought.
            Marshall Brown, an associate professor of English at the University
            of Colorado, Boulder, is the author of The Shape of German
            Romanticism, and Pre-Romanticism: Studies in Stylistic
            Transformation.
James B. White
         Homer's Argument with Culture
         From beginning to end, the poem is literally made up of relations…
            [that] constitute a method of contemplation and criticism, a way of
            inviting the reader to think in terms of one thing in terms of
            another. Consider, for example, Odysseus' trip to Chryse in book 1,
            a passage I never read without surprise: in this tense and heavily
            charged world, in which everything seems to have been put into
            potentially violent contention, why are we given this slow and
            deliberate journey, so heavily formulaic in texture? The answer is
            that this is a ritual of reconciliation, a kind of healing, which
            will receive its most ample performance at the great movement in
            book 24 when Achilles and Priam share their sorrows. A movement
            begins here that will run throughout the poem.
            It is by such an art of arrangement, by placing one thing against
            another, that Homer criticizes the world of book 1 with which he
            began; not, as we expect of a writer today, by elaborating
            competitive languages of motives and value but by ordering his
            materials into patterns of experience that teach the reader
            something different from anything the material itself seems to
            say.1 In a way the poem, as a whole thus has the form of argument;
            not, of course, argument in the ratiocinative sense of a thesis
            supported by propositions, from which it can be said to proceed by
            the rules of logic or the laws of probability, but argument as an
            activity of critical engagement, a definition of resources and a
            testing of limits, that results in the creation of a new position
            taken by the writer and offered to the reader. An argument goes on
            in the text, but its method is closer to that of music than debate.
            ·  1. Cf. Cedric H. Whitman, Homer and the Heroic Tradition
            (Cambridge, Mass., 1958) chap. 6, for another view of the ways that
            formula and image combine.
            James B. White is a professor in the law school, the college, and
            the committee on the ancient Mediterranean world at the University
            of Chicago. He is the author of The Legal Imagination,
            Constitutional Criminal Procedure, and a book on rhetoric and
            culture, from which the present article is drawn.
Frederic K. Hargreaves, Jr.
         The Concept of Private Meaning in Modern Criticism
         In sum, major critics of the twentieth century continually insist
            that poetry's unique value lies in its ability to convey meanings
            for which there are no public criteria whatsoever. But there are no
            such meanings, and to praise a poem for conveying them is empty.
            Again, these critics assume that what we understand by emotion is
            to be identified simply with an inner experience or state of mind
            and that this state of mind is what is conveyed by, or gives
            meaning and definition to, words which are used to refer to our
            emotional life. The emotions or qualities of emotions supposedly
            communicated by poetry alone, moreover, are said to elude public
            language altogether; they can be neither defined nor discussed but
            only embodied in images. But whatever the status these private
            experiences have for us, they as yet play no part in our language,
            even our poetic language, and reference to them certainly
            contributes nothing to our criticism of poetry. Criticism can play
            a central role in interpreting and shaping our lives, but it will
            only be worth writing if its vocabulary has content. If criticism
            is to become intelligible, it must begin by abandoning the appeal
            to private knowledge.
            Frederic K. Hargreaves, Jr. received his doctorate in English from
            Boston University.
Joel Rudinow
         Duchamp's Mischief
         We began by…implying a comparison between Duchamp and the
            swindlers; we lately find ourselves . . . implying a comparison
            between Duchamp and the child. I believe that in the end both
            comparisons are essential to a thorough understanding of Duchamp's
            significance; it is also, however, essential that each comparison
            temper and qualify the other. The swindlers begin and end as aliens
            to the community on which they practice their art. Duchamp is as
            much inside the artworld as is the child inside his community. On
            the other hand, Duchamp is not disenfranchised, as is the child,
            though, like the child, he is innocent of certain illusions typical
            of full enfranchisement. Like the swindlers, and unlike the child,
            Duchamp is full of guile. He pointedly produces something
            ambiguous, something which supports diametrically opposed readings,
            depending on where one's bets are placed. One of the readings
            amounts to a critique of the other reading as a hoax. But unlike
            the swindle, whose effectiveness depends on the degree to which the
            critique remains hidden and the hoax enjoys full rein, Duchamp's
            gesture is effective, as is the child's unambiguous announcement,
            to the degree that the critique embarrasses the hoax. It seems,
            then, that Duchamp embodies some rare and interesting combination
            of guile and innocence which the fable keeps apart by dividing them
            between agents whose activities are at cross-purposes. The
            limitation of the fable as an analogy is that it provides no model
            for the combination. The fable contains the figures of the
            swindler, of the gullible mark, and of the observer so innocent as
            to be incapable of duplicity. What we are confronted with in
            Duchamp is the figure of the wise guy.
            Joel Rudinow, a conceptual artist, created a multimedia satire
            entitled Higher Learnin'; or, The Song and Dance of Socrates: In
            Which the Love of Wisdom Leads to the Discovery that the Unlived
            Life is Not Worth Examining.
Stanley Cavell
         North By Northwest
         [Alfred Hitchcock's] film is called North by Northwest. I assume
            that nobody will swear from that fact alone that we have here an
            allusion to Hamlet's line that he is but mad north-northwest; even
            considering that Hamlet's line occurs as the players are about to
            enter and that North by Northwest is notable, even within the
            oeuvre of a director pervaded by images and thoughts of the theater
            and of theatricality, for its obsession with the idea of acting;
            and considering that both the play and the film contain plays-
            within-the-play in both of which someone is killed, both being
            constructed to catch the conscience of the one for whose benefit
            they are put on. But there are plenty of further facts. The film
            opens with an ageless male identifying himself first of all as a
            son. He speaks of his efforts to keep the smell of liquor on his
            breath (that is, evidence of his grown-up pleasures) from the
            watchful nose of his mother, and he comes to the attention of his
            enemies because of an unresolved anxiety about getting a message to
            his mother, whereupon he is taken to a mansion in which his
            abductor has usurped another man's house and name and has, it turns
            out, cast his own sister as his wife. (The name, posted at the
            front of the house, is Townsend, and a town is a thing smaller than
            a city but larger than a village, or a hamlet.) The abductor orders
            the son killed by forcing liquid into him. It is perhaps part of
            the picture that the usurper is eager to get to his dinner guests
            and that there is too much competitive or forced drinking of
            liquor. Nor, again, will anyone swear that it is significant that
            the abductor-usurper's henchmen are a pair of men with funny, if
            any, names and a single man who stands in a special relationship
            with the usurper and has a kind of sibling rivalry with the young
            woman that this son, our hero, will become attracted to and
            repelled by. These are shadowy matters, and it is too soon to speak
            of "allusions" or of any other very definite relation to a so-
            called source. But it seems clear to me that if one were convinced
            of Hamlet in the background of North by Northwest, say to the
            extent that one is convinced that Saxo Grammaticus' Danish History
            is in the background of Hamlet, then one would without a qualm take
            the name Leonard as a successor to the name Laertes.
            Stanley Cavell, professor of philosophy at Harvard University, is
            the author of Must We Mean What We Say?, The Senses of Walden, The
            World Viewed, The Claim of Reason, and Pursuits of Happiness. His
            previous contributions to  are "On Makajev On
            Bergman" (Winter 1979) and "A Reply to John Hollander" (Summer
            1980).
