Garry Wills
          (Kritik) in Clausewitz
         1.Wechselwirkung
            Suppose that A is standing at a bar with his friend B and tells B,
            "I'll give you a dollar to fight the man on the side of
            you"(C). B, naturally, answers: "Are you crazy? Even if
            I win, I'll probably tear my clothes, or mess them up. A
            dollar wouldn't even cover the dry-cleaning bill." B is
            very sensible.
            But then C starts to pick up B's change on the
            bar about a dollar's worth. "You can't do
            that," B assures him, emphatically. C says, "Who
            says?" "Oh yeah?"s get traded, then shoulders
            pushed in rotation and before you know it, B is fighting for
            a dollar after all.
            But now, B will assure us, the money does not matter, it's
            the principle of the thing. What principle? "That no one can
            steal from me, no matter what the amount." But the man
            picking up the change thought it was his; no principle about
            stealing existed in his mind. "Well, I don't want the
            idea to get around that anyone can take things from me." So C
            is suffering proleptically for all the people who might feel
            tempted to engage in C-like activities (the deterrence theory of
            punishment). But what if C's calamity does not get around to
            all the bars? What, that is, if future Cs do not know about the
            educational improvements B has effected on C's nose?
            "They might not know, but I would." B, it appears, can
            have no pride in himself unless he fights over one-dollar
            misunderstandings.
Joel Weinsheimer
         "London" and the Fundamental Problem of Hermeneutics
         In the preface to the Yale edition of Samuel Johnson's poems,
            the editors remark that "for a modern reader who can recreate
            the situation in which ["London"] was written, it may
            still be exciting enough. But to one with less imaginative capacity
            or historical knowledge, its appeal lies in Johnson's
            skillful handling of the couplet."2 To assist us in re-
            creating the milieu of 1738, the editors supply the usual notes
            identifying various historical personages and events which are no
            longer in the domain of common knowledge. In this respect they
            follow Johnson's lead. "London" is manifestly an
            occasional poem; and its occasion in part, Walpole's
            timidity abroad and corruption at home like all occasions,
            passed.3 Indeed it passed so quickly that Johnson himself felt
            called upon in the fifth edition (1750) to annotate, for instance,
            his mention of "the Gazetteer": "the paper which
            at that time contained apologies for the Court." By 1750
            Walpole was long out of court, the Gazetteer extinct, and
            "London" as outdated as yesterday's newspaper.
            For poems like "London" whose contents are neither au
            courant nor immortal but rather historical or simply dead, the Yale
            editors suggest two avenues of resuscitation: the reader may either
            restore the background by means of historical imagination or,
            failing that, admire Johnson's couplet art, which perhaps has
            a better chance at perennial appeal. Either content or form, either
            history or art both options require a sacrifice on our part,
            and that sacrifice is our occasion, our need. Even assuming that
            the poem's context could be exhumed and that we could
            participate once again in all the rage of the "patriot"
            opposition to Walpole, Why would we want to? The problem is that
            not only "London" but the Walpole regime itself is now
            defunct. Yet the same question must be asked of the poem's
            art, even and especially if it is eternal. Why are we interested in
            the aesthetic knowledge of couplets that have been drained of all
            substance? Is understanding "London" in either case an
            end in itself? The pure content of the poem is too concrete, its
            pure form too abstract, to answer our occasions. Thus to understand
            the poem as either history or art demands a leisure that has no
            exigencies and is therefore free for the bygone and ethereal.4
            2. E.L. McAdam, Jr. and George Milne, eds., Poems, vol. 6, The Yale
            Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven, Conn., 1964), p.
            xvii.
            3. For a detailed exposition of the social and political background
            of "London," see Donald Greene, The Politics of Samuel
            Johnson (New Haven, Conn., 1960), pp. 88-92, and James Clifford,
            "London," Young Sam Johnson (New York, 1955), pp. 175-
            94.
            4. John Locke explains the infinite leisure we can take in
            understanding the obscurities of ancient authors in An Essay
            Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser, 2
            vols. (New York, 1955), 2:110:
            There being no writings we have any great concernment to be very
            solicitous about the meaning of, but those that contain either
            truths we are required to believe, or laws we are to obey, and draw
            inconveniences on us when we mistake or transgress, we may be less
            anxious about the sense of other authors; who, writing but their
            own opinions, we are under no greater necessity to know them, than
            they to know ours. Our good or evil depending not on their decrees,
            we may safely be ignorant of their notions: and therefore in the
            reading of them, if they do not use their words with a due
            clearness and perspicuity, we may lay them aside.
Arnold Krupat
         An Approach to Native American Texts
         Recent developments in post-structuralist hermeneutical theory,
            whatever their effect on the reading of Western literature, have
            had an enormously salutary effect on the reading of Native American
            literature. With the reexamination of such concepts of voice, text,
            and performance, and of the ontological and epistemological status
            of the sign, has come a variety of effective means for specifying
            and demonstrating the complexity and richness of Native American
            narrative. The movement away from structuralism's binary
            method necessarily rejected Claude Lévi-Strauss' opposition
            of the "myth" to the "poem," the one
            infinitely translatable, the other virtually untranslatable. In
            Lévi-Strauss' work, anything that might be considered the
            literature of the "primitive" people always appeared as
            myth, its "content" available for transformation into
            abstract pairs while its "form," its actual language,
            was simply ignored or dismissed.
Ruth Bernard Yeazell
         Podsnappery, Sexuality, and the English Novel
         Dickens' famous satire of complacency and chauvinism entails
            a peculiarly English fiction about the innocence of girls. The
            "Podsnappery" chapter of Our Mutual Friend is in fact
            devoted to a dinner party in honor of Georgiana Podsnap's
            eighteenth birthday, though "it was somehow understood…that
            nothing must be said about the day"1 the generation of
            Miss Podsnap being one of those disagreeable facts that Mr. Podsnap
            simply refuses to admit. But if Miss Podsnap's birth is
            unmentionable, her existence is crucial: Podsnappery very much
            depends upon the presence of a daughter. What Mr. Podsnap cannot
            dismiss as "Not English!" starving Englishmen,
            for instance can always be removed as subjects unsuited to
            the female young. The "cheek of the young person"
            becomes the test of knowledge over a wide field.
            1. Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, ed. Stephen Gill
            (Harmondsworth, 1971), bk. 1, chap. 11, pp. 181-82; all further
            references to this work will be included parenthetically in the
            text with only book and chapter numbers for the convenience of
            those using other editions.
Elizabeth Langland
         Society as Formal Protagonist: The Examples of Nostromo_and
            Barchester Towers
         Usually a novel's subject is the individual in action. That
            individual must confront a set of social expectations and norms
            which define and limit him. In such novels the revelation of social
            expectations constitutes a central element in the artist's
            depiction. The degree to which society limits the hero's
            action, of course, varies widely. We can imagine a continuum along
            which the influence of society is arranged. Sociological/
            naturalistic novels, in which a social order is depicted as
            destructive, define one extreme of that continuum. The protagonists
            in their suffering reveal this society's destructive force.
            At the opposite extreme, society's values and norms may be
            important in guiding and evaluating a protagonist's movement
            toward his fate without society itself becoming an obstacle to his
            progress. We think, for instance, of Jane Austen's novels. In
            the broad middle range of the continuum, protagonists struggle to
            realize their potential within social limitations, and their
            successes are usually partial. In assessing their triumphs, we must
            evaluate the obstacles they have encountered both in their own
            natures and in the natures of their social milieu.
            To make society the protagonist of a novel upsets the expectations
            of readers, first because the novel as a genre usually depicts the
            growth or change of protagonists moving from complications to
            stability, and second because the novel customarily concludes in
            some alteration of the protagonist's external state and in
            some expansion of his understanding. With society as his
            protagonist, a writer commits himself to engaging our primary
            interest in the life of an abstraction or set of principles. Here,
            too, action is crucial. This kind of novel differs from a utopian
            novel, however, which focuses on ideas about society and whose
            principal end is to criticize or espouse a particular social order,
            not to engage us in working out instabilities through action. In
            novels in which society is protagonist, we are involved with the
            fate of an entire social order, and it is one about which we are
            made to care. The principal purpose is to present a society moving
            from a state of instability toward a qualitatively defined fate
            analogous to the movement of an individual hero.
            To achieve this end, characters become agents through which a
            social order realizes its fate. This function of character entails
            no simple inversion of the usual relationships between individuals
            and society, because characters can never be reduced to a backdrop
            the way society can, and society cannot easily achieve the
            particularity of definition and identity the way a character can.
            In attempting to discover narrative terms for realizing the fate of
            a society, a novelist faces an enormous technical challenge. He
            must make us care as much about a social order as he would about a
            particular individual, and yet he cannot write directly about
            ideas he must record the actions of humans. Because his plot
            will focus on no single individual but on abstract processes and
            social hopes, he must constantly minimize individual fates and
            aspirations and make them clearly a function of society's
            larger turmoil. Our empathy must rest firmly with the social
            principles being threatened rather than with any single character.
            With this end in view, a clearly defined, circumscribed arena for
            action becomes necessary. Literal battles, or scenes in which
            battles operate as a principal metaphor, frequently appear in such
            novels. By bringing many of the major characters together, defining
            and creating allegiances, and pitting opposing social principles,
            such battles provide an important context for measuring the
            progress of those values with which we empathize.
Marshall Brown
         The Classic is the Baroque: On the Principle_of_Wölfflin's_Art
            History
         In the chapter on multiplicity and unity, the affective or
            anthropological motifs are both more complex and more interesting.
            Wölfflin's initial distinction is between "the
            articulated system of forms of classic art and the (endless) flow
            of the baroque" (PAH, p. 158). Imagery of fluidity pervades
            the chapter, for water, according to Wölfflin, "was the
            period's favourite element" (RB, p. 154). "Now,
            and now only," he says, "the greatness of the sea could
            find its representation"(PAH, p. 178), and as if to inculcate
            this affinity he places the reproduction of a baroque seascape by
            Jan van Goyen at the head of the introduction to the book and a
            riverscape by Peter Brueghel at the head of this chapter, even
            though neither painting is discussed where it is reproduced. In
            fact it is worth observing that Wölfflin does not discuss any water
            paintings in this chapter, though of course he does so elsewhere.
            Where fluidity becomes the meaning of his category, it is absent
            from the contents of the paintings. Wölfflin's procedure, as
            I have argued, is both objectively analytical and subjectively
            interpretive, and in this chapter he seems careful to preserve the
            distance between the forms he describes and the significances he
            reveals. Were he to treat water paintings here, he would obscure
            the fact that his analyses are always the prelude to translations.
            Though he conceals the fact, Wölfflin has here effected a
            translation of the baroque into itself, of water painting (and
            fountain architecture) into fluidity. Baroque art has declared its
            true meaning, which is to be an art of flux of time and,
            throughout this chapter, of momentariness. Suddenly here the
            baroque comes into its own, with a surprising reversal in
            Wölfflin's categories. Until now he has associated the
            baroque with lawlessness and confusion, and classicism with the
            unifying force of symmetrical organization around a center. Unity
            is repose the equation had been made explicitly in the
            discussion in Classic Art of Michelangelo's Medici Madonna
            (see p. 194) and clearly in Principles of Art History
            Wölfflin seems to say that the unification achieved in
            Leonardo's Last Supper was later lost Tiepolo's
            version.21 As Wölfflin says in the first sentence of chapter 4,
            "The principle of closed form of itself presumes the
            conception of the picture as a unity." But as the baroque now
            comes into its own, it appears that the unity of classicism is an
            illusory, "multiple unity," whereas the true or
            "unified unity" actually pertains to the baroque. It is
            the usurping baroque, rather than the deposed classic, that now has
            "a dominating central motive." And So Wölfflin returns
            in this chapter to the two Last Suppers in order to rescind his
            earlier position. He still claims that Leonardo's painting is
            unified, but he offers Tiepolo's version to illustrate the
            "possibility of surpassing this unity" (PAH, pp. 189,
            174). In becoming itself, baroque art has overthrown classicism.
            21. "Tiepolo composed a Last Supper which, while it cannot be
            compared with Leonardo as a work of art, stylistically presents the
            absolute opposite. The figures do not unite in the plane, and that
            decides" (PAH, p. 88).
Berel Lang
         Looking for the Styleme
         Nature did not equip any of its creatures with wheels, but that
            means of locomotion was discovered anyway; an even swifter vehicle
            for the mind has been found in the atom that irreducible unit
            which by virtue of its ubiquity provides reason with immediate
            access to alien objects, naturalizes nature, and urges an essential
            likeness beneath appearances so diverse that only an improbable
            imagination would even have placed them in a single world. The goal
            of atomism is to find one entity, a building block which then in
            multiples constitutes the structures of reality and appearance. All
            that is needed, given this once and future One, is a set of
            transformational rules and everything comes to life that has
            been dreamed of in the topologies of geometry, physics, history,
            even of metaphysics: a full representation of the world as it has
            been, is, will be.
             
            The ideology of atomism includes the assumption that, for
            structures distinguishable into parts and wholes, the parts precede
            the whole, temporally and logically. For the atomist, all
            structures can be analyzed in this way; that, in fact, turns out to
            be his definition of structure. This premise is already evident in
            the building-block universe first depicted by Democritus and
            Leucippus; it is no less present in the heady days of twentieth-
            century physics (although by now the proliferation of quarks and
            the thirty-odd other particles might cause the most ardent atomist
            to long for an unatomic whole that exerted some prior restraint).
            It is slightly more pliable in latter-day atomists like Claude
            Lévi-Strauss and Noam Chomsky and their descendent structuralists;
            but here, too, atomic units of linguistic or social discourse are
            claimed as blind first causes of the sighted and complex structures
            allegedly derived from them. And if the followers of even these
            contemporary advocates find themselves still waiting for the
            promises of atomism to be kept, the imaginative turns of those
            promises the binary code, the rules of an innate
            grammar keep old expectations alive.
             
            In contrast to this general ideological assertion, the search for
            artistic atoms by poetics and aesthetic theory has lagged
            noticeably. We can see this disparity in the characteristic
            resistance to fragmentation by works of art; for many writers, the
            will of artistic appearance to exhibit itself as a whole, to insist
            on an undivided surface rather than on the elements within or
            beneath it, is precisely what distinguishes the structures of art
            from others. Even where a craftsmanlike impulse breaks into the
            surface of artistic unity (for example, when Aristotle itemizes the
            "parts" of tragedy), the pieces are usually counted
            teleologically: they matter as contributions to an effect,
            retrospectively. The artist himself, it is implied, deployed them
            in the first place to anticipate the unified surface; we (audience,
            critics, theorists), in turn, then understand them only in terms of
            that whole, not with the atomist by conjuring a unity
            from the earlier accidental joining of what then become accidental
            parts.
Marjorie Perloff
         Between Verse and Prose: Beckett and the New_Poetry
         Whatever we choose to call Beckett's series of disjunctive
            and repetitive paragraphs (sixty-one in all), Ill Seen Ill Said
            surely has little in common with the short story or the novella.
            Yet this is how the editors of the New Yorker, where
            Beckett's piece first appeared in English in 1981, evidently
            thought of it, for like all New Yorker short stories, it is
            punctuated by cartoons and, what is even more ironic, by a
            "real" poem, Harold Brodkey's "Sea
            Noise" (see fig. 1). Notice that the reader immediately
            knows or is supposed to know that Brodkey is a poet and
            Beckett a fiction writer, not only because "Sea Noise"
            is designated a poem in the issue's table of contents, but
            also because its placement on the page, framed by white space,
            distinguishes it from Ill Seen Ill Said, which is printed in
            standard New Yorker columns. Yet if we examine the sound structure
            of Brodkey's poem, we find that the rhythm of recurrence is,
            if anything, less prominent here than in the Beckett
            "prose." The four stanzas are of irregular line length
            (9, 6, 9, 7); the stress count ranges from one ("and
            cúrsive") to five ("ínterlócutóries [baritone]"); rhyme
            occurs only once, at the end of the poem ("lie"/
            "reply"); and alliteration and assonance are not
            marked. Unless we assume that poetry is defined by the sheer
            decision of its maker to lineate the text, or unless we want to
            call "Sea Noise" a poem because it is built around a
            single extended metaphor (the witty analogy of sea:shore =
            professor:class), there is no rationale for the classification the
            New Yorker has implicitly adopted.4
            The meaning of this classification is worth pondering, for it
            represents, in microcosm, the orthodoxy of every major literature
            textbook and literary history as well as of most classrooms in the
            United States and Britain, which that Beckett is a writer who, like
            the young Joyce or the young Faulkner, wrote in his dim youth some
            negligible, clotted lyric poems but whose real work belongs to
            drama and fiction. As such, we don't teach Beckett in our
            poetry courses or include him in discussions of contemporary poetry
            and poetics. The index of any major book on the subject say,
            Robert Pinsky's The Situation of Poetry will bear this
            out. And yet the irony is that contemporary poets are increasingly
            using forms that cannot be properly understood without the example
            of Beckett's astonishing "lyrics of
            fiction" to use Ryby Cohn's apt term5 or,
            as I shall call them, his "associative monologues."
            Perhaps, then, it is time to rethink our current procedures of
            canon making. In what follows, I shall use Ill Seen Ill Said as an
            example.
            4. Contemporary prosodists, perhaps because they must account for
            the difficult case of free verse, generally do equate
            verse and hence implicitly the poem with lineation. For
            example, Charles O. Hartman, in his recent Free Verse: An Essay in
            Prosody (Princeton, N.J., 1980), observes that, difficult as it is
            to define the word "poetry" "rigorously and
            permanently," verse can be distinguished from prose quite
            readily:
            Verse is language in lines. This distinguishes it from prose…. This
            is not really a satisfying distinction, as it stands, but it is the
            only one that works absolutely. The fact that we can tell verse
            from prose on sight, with very few errors…indicates that the basic
            perceptual difference must be very simple. Only lineation fits the
            requirements. [P.11]
            But, as I have just shown in the case of Beckett and Brodkey, what
            looks like verse may sound like prose and vice versa. The
            "basic perceptual difference" between the two is surely
            not as simple as Hartman suggests. I discuss this question from a
            somewhat different angle in "The Linear Fallacy,"
            Georgia Review 35 (Winter 1981): 855-69.
            5. See Ruby Cohn, Back to Beckett (Princeton, N.J., 1973), chap. 5,
            "Lyrics of Fiction."
