Anne, Margaret, and Patrice Higgonet
         Façades: Walter Benjamin's Paris
         "Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century" juxtaposes
            elliptical descriptions that reveal the interiorization of
            commodities in the economy of high capitalism. "Allegory in
            the nineteenth century vacated the outer world, to colonize the
            inner world."32 Each of the exposé's six sections
            consists of two parts: "Fourier, or the Arcades,"
            "Daguerre, or the Panoramas," "Grandville, or the
            World Exhibitions," "Louis-Philippe, or the
            Interior," "Baudelaire, or the Streets of Paris,"
            "Haussmann, or the Baricades."33
            The commercial arcade and not the factory is the logical starting
            point for Benjamin. Paris, like London, the other capital of
            nineteenth-century capitalism, is an administrative and financial
            but not an industrial center. Paris is the locus classicus of
            bourgeois culture, which finds its most conspicuous expression in
            the arcade. The arcade cuts through and commercializes the
            residential block. It harnesses the technology of cast-iron
            "Pompeian" pillars, to offer in its enticing bay
            windows the latest, most sophisticated form of bourgeois
            merchandising. Fourier houses his "land of Cockaigne"
            in a "reactionary modification" of the arcade.34
            Parallel to the technical innovation of the arcades is that of the
            lifelike painted panoramas, which serve Jacques-Louis David's
            pupils when they "draw from nature." Politically
            superior, the city still dreams of the country. "The
            panoramas, which declare a revolution in the relation of art to
            technology, are at the same time an expression of a new feeling
            about life."35 They drive a wedge between "plastic
            foreground" and "informational base." The worker
            in the literary panorama is "a trimming for an idyll."
            Technical innovations in photography (a simultaneously urban and
            commercial phenomenon) reduce the representational significance of
            painting. Now photography "is given the task of making
            discoveries": it explores the sewers and catacombs. It
            markets events. With impressionism and cubism, painting in turn
            transcends bourgeois conceptions of realism.
             
            32. "Die Allegorie hat im neunzehnten Jahrhundert die Umwelt
            geråumt, um sich in der Innenwelt anzusiedeln" (1:681).
            33. Adorno objects to the use of people's names in these
            titles and suggests that objects like dust or plush would bemore
            illuminating. Benjamin retains the names to evoke bourgeois
            interiorization. Louis-Philippe, however, is anomalous, since he is
            emblem rather than allegorist; the true allegorist of the
            "Louis-Philippe, or the Interior" section is the
            collector. Otherwise, the organization is strictly symmetrical:
            Benjamin discusses Charles Fourier, Louis Daguerre, and Grandville
            at the end of the sections in which they appear, the others at the
            beginning.
            34. Trans. Jephcott, p. 148. "Das Schlaraffenland,"
            "ihre reaktionåre Umbildung" (5:47).
             
            Anne Higonnet, formerly a student at the Ecole du Louvre, is a
            graduate student of art history at Yale University. Margaret
            Higonnet, professor of English and comparative literature at the
            University of Connecticut, has written on Romantic and modern
            literary theory. Patrice Higonnet is Goelet Professor of French
            History at Harvard University. He has written on the French
            Revolution and, with Margaret Higonnet, is coauthor of a
            forthcoming book on suicide in eighteenth-century France.
Garry Wills
         Washington's Citizen Virtue: Greenough and Houdon
         Washington eludes us, even in the city named for him. Other leaders
            are accessible there Lincoln brooding in square-toed
            rectitude at his monument, a Mathew Brady image frozen in white,
            throned yet approachable; Jefferson democratically exposed in John
            Pope's aristocratic birdcage. Majestic, each, but graspable.
            Washington's faceless monument tapers off from us however we
            come at it visible everywhere, and perfect; but impersonal,
            uncompelling. Yet we should remember that this monument, unlike the
            other two, was launched by private efforts. When government
            energies were stalled, in the 1830s, subscriptions kept the project
            alive. Even when Congress took over the project, stones were added
            by the citizenry, those memorial blocks one can study while
            descending the long inner stairway. The classical control of the
            exterior hides a varied and spontaneous interior an image of
            the puzzle that faces us, the early popularity of someone lifted so
            high above the populace. The man we can hardly find was the icon
            our ancestors turned to most easily and often. We are distanced
            from him by their generosity, their willingness to see in him
            something more than human.
            The larger they made Washington, the less they left us to
            admire until, in Horatio Greenough's George Washington,
            he becomes invisible by sheer vastness. Greenough took for his
            model what the neoclassical period believed was the greatest statue
            ever created, by the greatest sculptor who ever lived the
            Elean Zeus of Phidias. Since that chryselephantine wonder was no
            longer extant, artists had to rely on the description given by
            Pausanias in the Description of Greece, and on coins of Elis that
            celebrated the work. Here is what Pausanias had to say.
            The seated god is himself fashioned from gold and ivory; the
            garland on his head appears to be real olive shoots. In his right
            hand he holds a Victory, also of gold and ivory, offering a ribbon,
            a garland on her head. In the god's left hand there is a
            scepter, encrusted with every kind of metal, and the bird on the
            tip is an eagle.1
             
            1. Pausanias Description of Greece 5. 11.
             
            Garry Wills, a prize-winning author and journalist, is Henry R.
            Luce Professor of American Culture and Public Policy at
            Northwestern University. Among his many books are Nixon Agonistes
            (1970), Inventing America (1978), and The Kennedy Imprisonment
            (1982). His forthcoming book, Cincinnatus: George Washington in the
            Englightenment, will appear in June 1984. His previous contribution
            to  was " (Kritik) in
            Clausewitz" (December 1982).
Robert P. Morgan
         Secret Languages: The Roots of Musical Modernism
         It is frequently noted that a "crisis in language"
            accompanied the profound changes in human consciousness everywhere
            evident near the turn of the century. As the nature of reality
            itself became problematic or at least suspect, distrusted for
            its imposition of limits upon individual imagination so,
            necessarily, did the relationship of language to reality. Thus in
            the later nineteenth century, the adequacy of an essentially
            standardized form of "classical" writing was
            increasingly questioned as an effective vehicle for artistic
            expression: even though often in "elevated" form, such
            writing bore too close a connection to ordinary discourse. Indeed,
            it was precisely the mutually shared, conventional aspects of
            language that came to be most deeply distrusted for their failure
            to mirror the more subjective, obscure, and improbable
            manifestations of a transcendent reality or, rather,
            realities the plural reflecting an insistence upon the
            optional and provisional nature of human experience. Language in
            its normal manifestations with its conventionalized
            vocabulary and standardized rules for syntactical
            combination proved inadequate for an artistic sensibility
            demanding, in Friedrich Nietzsche's words, "a world of
            abnormally drawn perspectives."
            This dissatisfaction with "normal" language received
            its classic statement through Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Lord
            Chandos. Writing in 1902, Hofmannsthal conveys through the figure
            of the aristocratic Chandos the loss of an encompassing framework
            within which the various objects of external reality are connected
            with one another and integrated with the internal reality of human
            feelings. Chandos' world has become one of disparate,
            disconnected fragments, resistant to the abstractions of ordinary
            language. It is a world characterized by "a sort of feverish
            thought, but thought in a material that is more immediate, more
            fluid, and more intense than that of language." Chandos longs
            for a new language in which not a single word is known to me, a
            language in which mute objects speak to me and in which perhaps one
            day, in the grave, I will give account of myself before an unknown
            judge."2 The content and forms of art thus shifted away from
            exterior reality, which no longer provided a stable,
            "given" material, toward language itself to
            "pure" language in a sense closely related to the
            symbolists' "pure" poetry. "No artist
            tolerates reality," Nietzsche proclaimed.3 And Gustave
            Flaubert's farsighted advice to himself was that he should
            write "a book about nothing, a book dependent on nothing
            external, which would be held together by the internal strength of
            its style."4
             
            2. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, "Ein Brief," Gesammelte
            Werke, ed. Bernd Schoeller with Rudolf Hirsch, 10 vols. (Frankfurt
            am Main, 1980), 7:471-72; my translation. All further translations
            are my own unless otherwise indicated.
            3. Friedrich Nitzsche, Complete Works, ed. Oscar Levy, 18 vols.
            (London, 1909-15), vol. 15, The Will to Power, trans. Anthony M.
            Ludovici, p. 74.
            4. Gustave Flaubert, Flaubert to Louise Colet, 16 Jan. 1852, The
            Letters of Gustave Flaubert 1830-1857, ed. and trans. Francis
            Steegmuller (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), p. 154. Other passages in
            this letter are equally remarkable for their
            "modernist" tone. Flaubert argues that from the
            standpoint of l'Art pur, "one might almost establish
            the axiom that there is no such thing as subject style in
            itself being an absolute manner of seeing things" (p. 154).
            Further:
            The finest works are those that contain the least matter; the
            closer expression comes to thought, the closer language comes to
            coinciding and merging with it, the finer the result. I believe the
            future of Art lies in this direction. I see it, as it has developed
            from its beginnings, growing progressively more ethereal …. Form,
            in becoming more skillful, becomes attenuated, it leaves behind all
            liturgy, rule, measure; the epic is discarded in favor of the
            novel, verse in favor of prose; there is no longer any orthodoxy,
            and form is as free as the will of its creator. This progressive
            shedding of the burden of tradition can be observed everywhere:
            governments have gone through similar evolution, from oriental
            despotisms to the socialisms of the future. [P. 154]
             
            Robert P. Morgan, professor of music at the University of Chicago,
            is currently writing a history of twentieth-century music and
            working on a study of form in nineteenth-century music. His
            previous contributions to  are "On the
            Analysis of Recent Music" (Autumn 1977) and "Musical
            Time/Musical Space" (Spring 1980).
Gerald L. Bruns
         Canon and Power in the Hebrew Scriptures
         Thus it would not be the content or meaning of a written Torah that
            Jeremiah would attack; rather it would be the Deuteronomic
            "claim to final and exclusive authority by means of
            writing" (pp. 38-390). Jeremiah's problem is political
            rather than theological. He knows that writing is more powerful
            than prophecy and that he will not be able to withstand
            it and he knows that the Deuteronomists know no less. As
            Blenkinsopp says, "Deuteronomy produced a situation in which
            prophecy could not continue to exist without undergoing profound
            transformations" (p. 39) that is, without ceasing to be
            "free prophecy," or prophecy unbound by any text,
            including its own. "It might be considered misleading or
            flippant to say that for [Deuteronomy], as for rabbinic orthodoxy,
            the only good prophet is a dead prophet. But in point of fact the
            Deuteronomic scribes, despite their evident debt to and respect for
            the prophets, contributed decisively to the eclipse of the kind of
            historically oriented prophecy (Geshcichtsprophetie) represented by
            Jeremiah and the emergence in due course of quite different forms
            of scribal prophecy" (pp. 38-39; see also pp. 119-20).
            It is at this point that we reach a sort of outer limit of biblical
            criticism a threshold that scholars, with their foundations
            in literary criticism, their analytical attitude toward texts, and
            their theological concerns, are not inclined to cross. In any case,
            it is no accident that the political meaning of the conflict of
            prophecy and canon has received its most serious attention not from
            a biblical scholar but from a radical historian, Ellis Rivkin. In
            The Shaping of Jewish History, a brilliant and tendentious book,
            Rivkin proposes to treat the question of canon-formation and the
            promulgation of canonical texts of the Scriptures, not according to
            literary criteria but according to power criteria. For Rivkin, the
            production of the Hebrew Scriptures "was not primarily the
            work of scribes, scholars, or editors who sought out neglected
            traditions about wilderness experience, but of a class struggling
            to gain power."23
             
            23. Ellis Rivkin, The Shaping of Jewish History: A Radical New
            Interpretation (New York, 1971), p. 30; further references to this
            work will be included in the text.
             
            Gerald R. Bruns is professor of English at the University of Iowa.
            He is the author of Modern Poetry and the Idea of Language (1974)
            and Inventions: Writing, Textuality, and Understanding in Literary
            History (1982). The present essay is from a work in progress,
            Hermeneutics, Ancient and Modern.
James Chandler
         The Pope Controversy: Romantic Poetics and the English_Canon
         To see what might be at stake in the question of Pope's place
            in the poetic canon in the question as such, before anything
            is said of critical theory we must understand that late
            eighteenth-century England was developing a different sort of canon
            from the one which Pope and the Augustans had in view. As everyone
            knows, Pope's classics were, well, classical. His pantheon
            was populated with poets of another place and time whose stature
            was globally recognized. One recalls the tribute to these
            "Bards triumphant" in An Essay on Criticism (1711):
                                    Still green with Bays each ancient Altar
            stands,
                        Above the reach of SacrilegiousHands,
                        Secure from Flames, from Envy'sfiercer Rage,
                        Destructive War, and all-involving Age.
                        See, from each Climes the Learn'd their Incense
            bring;
                        Hear, in all Tongues consenting Paeans ring!
                        In Praise so just, let ev'ry Voice be
            join'd,
                        And fill the Gen'ral Chorus of Mankind!14
            Pope's song of praise here forms just a part of
            mankind's "Gen'ral Chorus." These are poets
            for all climates and languages, and for all nations, even
            "Nations unborn" and "Worlds…that must not yet be
            found" (ll. 193-94). Although I want to place adequate stress
            on Pope's deep commitment to this universalized canon, it
            would be misleading to suggest that he was completely uninterested
            in the poetry of his own nation. He studied it an imitated it. He
            even sketched a plan for a possible history of poetry in England.
            It is to the point here, however, that this project remained only a
            sketch and that England would have no major overview of its
            national accomplishment until the 1770s and 1780s, when Thomas
            Warton issued the first three volumes of his pioneering History of
            English Poetry, and Johnson, his Lives of the English Poets.
            Building on the scholarship of René Wellek, Lawrence Lipking has
            offered a compelling account of the emergence of these great works
            at that time, buy reference to the "interested and demanding
            public" that called for them.15 What the public wanted and
            got, Lipking explains, "was a history of English poetry, or a
            survey of English poets, that would provide a basis for criticism
            by reviewing the entire range of the art. Warton and Johnson
            responded to a national desire for an evaluation of what English
            poets had achieved" (p. 238). Such terms are most useful,
            although "evaluation" connotes a greater degree of
            neutrality than even Lipking's own subsequent analysis
            permits. For example, among the public needs served by such work as
            Johnson's and Warton's, Lipking lists the
            "patriotic" and the "political" as primary.
            These needs are obviously related. The patriotic need expresses
            itself as a hunger for "a glorious national poetic
            pantheon" (p. 328); that is, for a specifically national
            rather than a global canon of classics. Such a canon would in turn
            serve political purposes that Lipking sees motivating "the
            poets" of mid-century, Thomson and Akenside and Collins and
            Gray and Mason and Smart," who all "wrote variations on
            the mythopolitical them of Milton: sweet Liberty, the nymph who had
            freed English pens to outstrip the cloistered conservative rule-
            bound verses of less favored nations." Politically, in other
            words, and this is the crucial point, "English literary
            history was shaped by the need for a definition of the superiority
            of the national character" (p. 329).
             
            James Chandler, assistant professor of English at the University of
            Chicago, is the author of Wordsworth's Second Nature: A Study
            of the Poetry and Politics (forthcoming this autumn). His previous
            contribution to  was "Romantic
            Allusiveness" (Spring 1982).
Michael Fried
         Painting Memories: On the Containment of the Past_in_Baudelaire_and
            Manet
         Near the beginning of Charles Baudelaire's Salon of
            1846 one of the most brilliant and intellectually ambitious
            essays in art criticism ever written the twenty-five-year-old
            author states that "the critic should arm himself from the
            start with a sure criterion, a criterion drawn from nature, and
            should then carry out his duty with a passion; for a critic does
            not cease to be a man, and passion draws similar temperaments
            together and exalts the reason to fresh heights."1 It may be
            the emphasis on passion, indeed on strong personal feeling of every
            kind, not only here but everywhere in the Salon, that has prevented
            commentators from taking wholly seriously the possibility that a
            single criterion is in fact at work throughout it. But what if that
            criterion operates in the realm of feeling, if it is itself a
            feeling or complex of feelings, and if, moreover, as Baudelaire as
            much as says, no conflict between the claims of reason and of
            passion exists within his conception of the critical enterprise?
            Not that scholars have failed to recognize either the brilliance or
            (within limits) the ambitiousness of the Salon of 1846; on the
            contrary, it is widely regarded as the major extrapoetic text of
            Baudelaire's early career and especially in recent years has
            received extensive commentary. But by and large, those who have
            written about it have focused primarily on topics, such as
            Baudelaire's conception of nature, his vision of the creative
            process, and the relation of his ideas to those of other critics,
            that seem to me, if not quite pseudoproblems, at any rate concerns
            that lead us to ignore what the text may be saying about its own
            manner of proceeding.2 I acknowledge, too, that certain features of
            that manner the mixture of irony and seriousness in the
            opening dedication to the bourgeois, the many abrupt fluctuations
            of tone in the body of the essay, the seeming breaks in the
            argument from section to section, the texture and movement of the
            prose could hardly be less systematic in effect. And yet it
            would not be hard to show that the Salon as a whole is the product
            of a remarkable effort, not merely to ground the judgment of
            individual works of art in a single experiential principle but also
            to bind together a number of diverse concerns pictorial,
            literary, political, philosophical in an intellectually
            coherent structure every part of which is meant to be consonant
            with every other. No wonder the last sentence of the
            Salonapostrophizes Balzac: the sheer inclusiveness of
            Baudelaire's undertaking recalls nothing so much as the scope
            of the Comédie humaine.
             
            1. Charles Baudelaire, Salon of 1846, Art in Paris 1845-1862:
            Salons and Other Exhibitions, ed. and trans. Jonathan Mayne
            (Ithaca, N.Y., 19810, p. 45; for the original French, see
            Baudelaire, Salon de 1846, "Curiosités esthétiques,"
            "L'Art romantique," et autres oeuvres
            critiques,ed. Henri Lemaître (Paris, 1971), pp. 101-2. All further
            references to the Salon of 1846 (the translation and the original,
            in that order) will be included parenthetically in the text
            (occasionally I have modified Mayne's renderings in the
            interest of greater exactness). I have also consulted the recent
            edition, Baudelaire: "Salon de 1846," ed. David Kelley
            (Oxford, 1975), which includes a useful introduction and
            bibliography.
            2. See, for example, Margaret Gilman, Baudelaire, the Critic (New
            York, 19430, pp. 3-54; Lucie Horner, Baudelaire, critique de
            Delacrois (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1955; Geneva, 1956),
            pp. 12-53 and 77-111; F. W. Leakey, "Les Esthétiques de
            Baudelaire: Le &lsquo;Système' des annés 1844-1847,"
            Revue des sciences humaines, n.s., fasc. 127 (July-Sept. 1967) :
            481-96, and Baudelaire and Nature (Manchester, 1969), pp. 73-88;
            and Kelley, "Deux Aspects du Salon de 1846 de Baudelaire : La
            Dédicace aux bourgeois et la couleur," Forum for Modern
            Language Studies 5 (Oct. 1969) : 331-46, and introduction to
            Baudelaire:"Salon de 1846," pp. 1-114.
             
            Michael Fried, professor of humanities and the history of art and
            director of the Humanities Center at the Johns Hopkins University,
            is the author of Morris Louis and Absorption and Theatricality:
            Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot. He is currently at
            work on a book on Gustave Courbet. His most recent contribution to
            , "The Structure of Beholding in
            Courbet's Burial at Ornans," appeared in the June 1983
            issue.
