Richard Rorty
         Deconstruction and Circumvention
         I think … we ought to distinguish two sense of
            "deconstruction." In one sense the word refers to the
            philosophical projects of Jacques Derrida. Taken this way, breaking
            down the distinction between philosophy and literature is essential
            to deconstruction. Derrida's initiative in philosophy
            continues along a line laid down by Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin
            Heidegger. He rejects, however, Heidegger's distinctions
            between "thinkers" and "poets" and between
            the few thinkers and the many scribblers. So Derrida rejects the
            sort of philosophical professionalism which Nietzsche despised and
            which Heidegger recovered. This does indeed lead Derrida in the
            direction of "a general, undifferentiated textuality."
            In his work, the philosophy-literature distinction is, at most,
            part of a ladder which we can let go of once we have climbed up it.
            In a second sense of "deconstruction," however, the
            term refers to a method of reading texts. Neither this method, nor
            any other, should be attributed to Derrida who shares
            Heidegger's contempt for the very idea of method.2 But the
            method exists, and the passage I have quoted from Culler describes
            one of its essential features. Culler is quite right to say that
            deconstruction, in the second sense, needs a clear distinction
            between philosophy and literature. For the kind of reading which
            has come to be called "deconstructionist" requires two
            different straight persons: a macho professional philosopher who is
            insulted by the suggestion that he has submitted to a textual
            exigency, and a naive producer of literature whose jaw drops when
            she learns that her work has been supported by philosophical
            oppositions. The philosopher had thought of himself as speaking a
            sparse, pure, transparent language. The poetess shyly hoped that
            her unmediated woodnotes might please. Both reel back in horror
            when the deconstructionist reveals that each has been making use of
            complex idioms to which the other has contributed. Both go all to
            pieces at this news. A wild disorder overtakes their words. Their
            whimpers lend into interminable androgynous keening. Once again,
            deconstructionist intervention has produced a splendidly diffuse
            irresolution.
             
            Richard Rorty is Kenan Professor of Humanities at the University of
            Virginia. He is the author of Consequences of Pragmatism and is
            currently writing a book on Martin Heidegger.
Brook Thomas
         The Legal Fictions of Herman Melville and Lemuel_Shaw
         I have three aims in this essay. (1) I want to offer an example of
            an interdisciplinary historical inquiry combining literary
            criticism with the relatively new field of critical legal studies.
            (2) I intend to use this historical inquiry to argue that the
            ambiguity of literary texts might better be understood in terms of
            an era's social contradictions rather than in terms of the
            inherent qualities of literary language or rhetoric and,
            conversely, that a text's ambiguity can help us expose the
            contradictions masked by an era's dominant ideology. (3) I
            try to prove my assertion by applying my method to Herman
            Melville's three most famous short works "Benito
            Cereno," "Bartleby, the Scrivener," and Bill
            Budd, Sailor works dealing with the law and lawyers and
            widely acknowledged as ambiguous.1 I will base my critical inquiry
            into these stories on Melville's relationship with his
            father-in-law, Lemuel Shaw, who, while sitting as the chief justice
            of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts from 1830 to 1860,
            wrote some of the most important opinions in what Roscoe Pound has
            called "the formative era of American law."2
            Before I get started, I should clarify what this study does not
            entail. By using Shaw and his legal decisions in conjunction with
            Melville's fiction, I am not conducting a positivistic
            influence study. My method will not depend on the positivist
            assumption that Shaw's legal opinions can be used to
            illuminate Melville's texts only when his direct knowledge of
            Shaw's opinions can be proved. Nor will I limit myself to a
            traditional psychoanalytic reading: my emphasis is on political and
            social issues, and too often these issues are deflected by
            translating them into psychological ones. At the same time, I
            recognize that critics concerned with political and social issues
            too often neglect questions raised by a writer's individual
            situation. I compare Shaw to Melville not to reduce
            Melville's politics to psychology but to prevent a political
            study from neglecting the political implications of psychology, to
            remind us as the title of Fredric Jameson's book The
            Political Unconscious reminds us that psychological questions
            always have political implications.
             
            1. See Herman Melville, "Benito Cereno,"
            "Bartleby," and Billy Budd, Sailor, "Billy Budd,
            Sailor" and Other Stories, ed. Harold Beaver (Harmondsworth,
            1967); all further references to these works will be included in
            the text.
            2. See Roscoe Pound, The Formative Era of American Law (Boston,
            1938). For discussions of Melville and Lemuel Shaw, see Charles
            Roberts Anderson, Melville in the South Seas, Columbia University
            Studies in English and Comparative Literature, no. 138 (New York,
            1966), pp. 432-33; Charles H. Foster, "Something in Emblems:
            A Reinterpretation of Moby-Dick," New England Quarterly 34
            (Mar. 1961): 3-35; Robert L. Gale,
            "Bartleby Melville's Father-in-Law," Annali
            sezione Germanica, Istituto Universitario Orientale di Napoli 5
            (Dec. 1962): 57-72; Keith Huntress, " &lsquo;Guinea" of
            White-Jacket and Chief Justice Shaw," American Literature 43
            (Jan. 1972): 639-41; Carolyn L. Karcher, Shadow over the Promised
            Land: Slavery, Race and Violence in Melville's America (Baton
            Rouge, La., 1980), pp. 9-11 and 40; John Stark, "Melville,
            Lemuel Shaw, and &lsquo;Bartleby,' " in Bartleby, the
            Inscrutable: A Collection of Comentary on Herman Melville's
            Tale "Bartleby the Scrivener,"ed. M. Thomas Inge
            (Hamden, Conn., 1975), all further references to this work,
            abbreviated JA, will be included in the text.
             
            Brook Thomas teaches English and American literature at the
            University of Hawaii, Manoa. He is the author of James
            Joyce's "Ulysses": A Book of Many Happy Returns
            and is at work on a study of the relations between law and
            literature in antebellum America.
David Simpson
         Criticism, Politics, and Style in Wordsworth's Poetry
         Questions could and should be raised about the political profile of
            English Romanticism both in particular and in general.
            Wordsworth's poetry is especially useful to me here because
            of the way in which, through formal discontinuities, it dramatizes
            political conflicts. Reacting against these discontinuities,
            aesthetically minded critics have simply tended to leave out of the
            canon those poems which have the greatest capacity to help us
            become aware of a political poetics. In this respect it may well be
            that Wordsworth is the most stylistically perverse of the Romantic
            poets. Not the most difficult to read, necessarily Percy
            Bysshe Shelley's breath-suspending songs and William
            Blake's determination to produce "variety in every
            line" with the aim of unfettering poetry surely make more
            aggressive and obvious demands on the reader.1 But in these cases
            we can be reasonably sure that the difficulties are part of a
            conscious and coherent intention to set imagination to work in
            kindling sparks from ashes. Wordsworth also set out to do this, and
            we can agree that he did so with some success in some poems. But
            critics from Samuel Taylor Coleridge onward have rightly questioned
            the unity of Wordsworth's canon in this respect. In
            Biographia Literaria, Coleridge notices the "inconstancy of
            the style," an unevenness and a general inability to satisfy
            the demands of "good poetry" conceived as something
            possessing an organic form.2 This concern with a wholeness and
            consistency of artifice is more Coleridge's than
            Wordsworth's, and it seems to me that it is precisely the
            disjunctions in the poems that embody some of their most original
            and historically urgent meanings. The blemishes recorded by
            Coleridge alternating and dissimilar states of feeling,
            overminuteness in description, and obsession with "accidental
            circumstances" (BL, 2:126), overuse of the dramatic mode,
            disproportion of thought to event, and so forth can in fact
            serve as eloquent signals for discerning the complexities of the
            poems as they address a historical crisis in consensus (both social
            and literary) embodied exactly in the unstable vehicle of the
            Wordsworthian speaker.3
             
            3. I have explored the "formal" implications of this
            crisis in Irony and Authority in Romantic Poetry (London and
            Totowa, N.J., 1979), and the terms of its historical discourse in
            Wordsworth and the Figurings of the Real (London and Atlantic
            Highlands, N.J., 1982).
             
            David Simpson is professor of English at Northwestern University.
            He is the author of Irony and Authority in Romantic Poetry (1979),
            Wordsworth and the Figurings of the Real (1982), and Fetishism and
            Imagination: Dickens, Melville, Conrad (1982) and editor of German
            Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: Kant, Fichte, Schelling,
            Schopenhauer, Hegel (1984).
Gerald Mast
         On Framing
         One of the common and commonsensical ways to distinguish cinema
            from every other art and semiotic system, and to define the
            property of its uniqueness, is to claim that cinema is the only
            art/"language" that links images. This
            "linking" can imply three different yet complementary
            operations. First, cinema links individual still photographs into
            an apparently continuous sequence of movement by pushing the
            individual frames or photographs through a camera or projector at
            sixteen or twenty-four or however many frames per second. Second,
            cinema links images by editing (or cutting, or montage, or
            decoupage), by splicing together individual shots, which are
            continuous chains of linked frames. Finally, cinema links images
            with sounds, synchronously or otherwise. The only problem with such
            an apparently unrestrictive and unprescriptive definition of cinema
            and the "cinematic" is that it obscures an essentially
            cinematic operation that precedes the linking of cinema images: the
            image must first be framed before it can be linked with another.
            But is framing unique to cinema? Don't paintings have frames?
            Aren't photographs frames?  Isn't the theater's
            proscenium arch a frame? A consequence of such perfectly sensible
            questions is a consistent undervaluing of the cinema frame as an
            essentially and uniquely cinematic tool, unlike that of any other
            art, producing serious errors in the writing of film theory and
            serious misunderstandings of the processes of film history. The
            goal of this article is to diagnose some of these errors (arising
            from mistaken assumptions and complementary prejudices) so they
            might someday be cured.
             
            Gerald Mast is professor of English and general in the humanities
            at the University of Chicago. Among his many books are A Short
            History of the Movies, The Comic Mind: Comedy and the Movies, Film/
            Cinema/Movie, The Movies in Our Midst,and Howard Hawks,
            Storyteller.His previous contributions to  are
            "What Isn't Cinema?"(December 1974) and
            "Kracauer's Two Tendencies and the Early History of
            Film Narrative" (Spring 1980).
Anthony J. Niesz and Norman N. Holland
         Interactive Fiction
         The structure of traditional fiction is essentially linear or
            serial. No matter how complex a given work may be, it presents
            information to its reader successively, one element at a time, in a
            sequence determined by its author. By contrast, interactive fiction
            is parallel in structure or, more accurately, dendritic or tree-
            shaped. Not one, but several possible courses of action are open to
            the reader. Further, which one actually happens depends largely,
            though not exclusively, upon the reader's own choices. To be
            sure, the author is still in overall control, since it is she who
            has set up the particular nexus of events, but the route up the
            narrative tree, the actual sequence of events, is generally
            affected, if not completely determined, by the reader's
            responses to that particular reader's specific situation. In
            an adventure, the sequence of action frequently depends upon the
            reader's decision to go in one geographical direction rather
            than another. In the eliza sample, the content of the
            "story" depends on such particulars as whether this
            reader has a brother or not, whether she fears her father, and why
            she has consulted the terminal. In general, the text presented to
            the eliza-reader depends on what that reader has already said and
            how the computer has interpreted and stored it, and this is
            generally true of interactive fiction.
            Further, interactive fiction is, in principle (if not in practice),
            open-ended infinite. A conversation with eliza could go on
            for as long as one with Woody Allen's psychoanalyst in
            principle, forever. It has no necessary terminus. The program will
            go one writing texts and answers on the screen as long as the
            reader or player chooses to supply responses. Further, the computer
            can act as a metafictional narrator like John Barth or Thomas
            Pynchon who can create a story within a story or a story that
            generates another story within itself which generates another story
            within itself and so on, fictions dizzying and dazzling. One senses
            one's essential humanity wobbling in the midst of the
            infinite paradoxes of existence and meaning.
             
            Anthony J. Niesz, assistant professor of German at Yale University,
            is the author of Dramaturgy in German Drama: From Gryphius to
            Goethe (1980). He is interested in the phenomenon of the meta-
            theater, especially in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century German
            drama, as well as in the literature and cultural policies of the
            German Democratic Republic. Norman N. Holland is Milbauer Eminent
            Scholar at the University of Florida. He is the author of Laughing
            (1982) and The I (forthcoming in 1985).
Strother B. Purdy
         Technopoetics: Seeing What Literature Has to Do with_the_Machine
         What I refer to is how our thought in inventing, designing,
            modifying, and using machines carries over into acts we do not
            consciously associate with them like writing or reading
            poetry. An airplane in flight may be "pure poetry," or
            a Ferrari "a poem in steel"; it intrigues me to
            consider that beneath such object comparisons an object-of-thought
            connection may be made. Or in other words, there may be really
            something to a hackneyed compliment like "poem in
            steel." ("Ah, commendatore, tu sei veramente in gamba!
            Questa volta c'è la poesia di acciaio!")
            My preference for thought form over object form makes me less
            interested in machines that we can see than in those that we
            can't, and it makes me direct my inquiry along two lines,
            concerning two questions about invisibility. The first involves the
            history of technology: How is it that machines
            "disappear" become less visible, impinge less and
            less upon popular consciousness? The effect cannot be imputed
            entirely to familiarity. The second involves the history of
            literature: If machines have disappeared, are there
            "disappeared" or
            "invisible" machines in literature? It is
            reasonably clear that we go to considerable lengths to hide the
            machines that surround us and that we choose, or our artists
            choose, insofar as such choice can be located, to restrict the
            appearance of machines in art.3 Commonly their restricted
            appearance in art is understood as a kind of resistance to some
            form of machine takeover, while their concealment has only
            uncommonly received analysis and is not generally discussed in
            context with the matter of artistic representation. But we do
            accept, at least in theory, the idea that style of living and style
            in literature are connected. If the machine penetrates our style of
            living, then and this is the end of my inquiry these
            invisibilities are of interest to literary criticism, for they have
            something to do with the way literature is written, with whether or
            not, that is, writers choose to describe machines, use them as
            characters, or give them any role at all to play in surface
            structure. Since the artist often works to reveal what his society
            works to conceal and since the postmodern period has so far been
            one of crisis in the relations between society and technology, we
            may expect to find in postmodern fiction, or in writing to come,
            some greater revelation or simple exposure of the workings, than we
            could have seen before.
             
            3. I use "restrict" in a statistical sense, for since
            the beginning of the Industrial Revolution there have been artists
            to celebrate the machine; today's hyperrealist movement
            offers contemporary examples. These artists Tom Blackwell,
            Ron Kleemann, Ralph Goings, and others work a transformation
            like that of Andy Warhol with the pop object. They present not so
            much a celebration as an effort to turn looking into seeing, here
            directed at automobiles in particular, so much a part of everyday
            life as to have become (despite all efforts of the advertising
            industry) indistinguishable from one another and as a species from
            the other parts of the semiurban landscape the mailbox, the
            front lawn, the visiting relatives staring into the camera.
             
            Strother B. Purdy is the author of The Hole in the Fabric: Science,
            Contemporary Literature, and Henry James. His previous
            contributions to  are "Stalingrad and My Lai:
            A Literary-Political Speculation" (Summer 1979) and
            "Reply to Lawrence W. Hyman (Summer 1980).
Michael Riffaterre
         Intertextual Representation: On Mimesis as Interpretive Discourse
         If we try to arrive at the simplest and most universally valid
            definition of the representation of reality in literature, we may
            dispense with grammatical features such as verisimilitude or with
            genres such as realism, since these are not universal categories.
            Their applicability depends on historical circumstances or
            authorial intent. The most economic and general definition,
            however, must at least include the following two features. First,
            any representation presupposes the existence of its object outside
            of the text and preexistent to it. Readers feel, and critics
            pronounce, that the text's significance depends on this
            objective exteriority, even though this significance may entail
            destroying the commonplace acceptance of the object; indeed,
            negating something still presupposes that something. Second, the
            reader's response to the mimesis consists in a
            rationalization tending to verify and complete the mimesis and to
            expand on it sensory terms (through visualizations, for instance).
            The metalanguage of criticism accordingly prolongs and continues
            the text's mimetic discourse, and critics evaluate
            representation in terms of its precision and suggestive power. Both
            processes presupposition and rationalization
            alike assume that referentiality is the basic semantic
            mechanism of the literary mimesis.
            There are, however, literary representations almost devoid of
            descriptive content, or so vague and so skimpy that their object
            cannot be analyzed or rationalized in sensory terms. Criticism is
            hard put to explain why readers feel compelled to evaluate them.
            And yet these texts not only lend themselves to interpretation but
            they are especially apt to trigger and control the reader's
            hermeneutic behavior. In short, the represented object eschews
            referentiality yet refuses to vanish altogether, becoming instead
            the verbal vehicle of an interpretive activity that ends up by
            making the object subservient to the subject.1
             
            1. See Roland Barthes et al., Littérature et réalité (Paris, 1982),
            esp. my paper, pp. 81-118, on the referential fallacy.
             
            Michael Riffaterre, University Professor at Columbia University, is
            the editor of Romantic Review. He is presently working on a book
            about Anthony Trollope (forthcoming in 1985). His previous
            contribution to , "Syllepsis," appeared
            in the Summer 1980 issue.
Edward Pechter
         When Pechter Reads Froula Pretending She's Eve Reading_Milton;_or,
            New Feminist Is But Old Priest Writ Large
         According to Froula, Paradise Lost is aimed at affirming or
            reaffirming the power of orthodox authority, by locating its source
            in an invisible being beyond understanding or question. In this
            respect, Milton's own authority is analogous to that of the
            metaphorical priest in the Virginia Woolf passage quoted at the
            beginning of Froula's essay, who can claim a direct
            connection, presumably derived from the laying on of hands, with
            this original authority to which the rest of us have no access. It
            is an odd analogy: Milton and a priest. It sorts very badly with
            everything we know about Milton, who was dedicated to the
            eradication of formal instutitional authority in favor of freedom
            of conscience. What is more important, such a view sorts oddly with
            the working of Paradise Lost itself.
            If we try to read Paradise Lost as an attempt to affirm orthodox
            authority by mystifying it, we run immediately into some major
            problems well before "Hee for God only, shee for God in
            him." The first of these problems is Satan, who is, as we all
            know, in many ways an impressively heroic figure. Satan directly
            affirms the autonomy that Eve is said to be made to repress in the
            story she tells of her creation in book 4. This Satanic
            affirmation, moreover, is also made to depend upon a creation
            story. In book 5, responding to Abdiel's argument that he
            owes gratitude to God for his creation, Satan says that he
            doesn't remember any time when he was not as he is. The
            notion that God created him is, Satan declares, a "strange
            point and new" (5.855). If Milton's purpose in the poem
            is the affirmation of authority, why has he made the proponent of
            autonomy and rebellion into such an impressive figure?
             
            Edward Pechter, associate professor of English at Concordia
            University in Montreal, is the author of Dryden's Classical
            Theory of Literature and is currently completing a book on
            Shakespeare and contemporary theory.
Christine Froula
         Pechter's Specter: Milton's Bogey Writ Small; or, Why_Is_He_Afraid
            of Virginia Woolf?
         The specter of Mr. Pechter's complaints haunted me as I wrote
            "When Eve Reads Milton," as those friends who helped me
            to write by continually banishing it can attest. This ghost seemed
            somehow familiar, a shadow of Milton's bogey or an echo of
            that angel in the house who still stalks the precincts of academia.
            Indeed, if Mr. Pechter did not exist, I confess that I could have
            invented him, although the specter of my imagining was rather more
            daunting, with his perfect command of my arguments, urbane bearing,
            and formidable learning. Never mind. The materialization of this
            specter in any form elicits some important issues that my article
            itself could not address; so I must thank Mr. Pechter for the
            trouble of his reply.
            The difficulty that I find in answering him, however, is that he
            responds to my arguments by ignoring them, substituting for them
            certain inventions of his own. While I could cheerfully join Mr.
            Pechter in dismissing much of what he says I say, I'm afraid
            the credit for it goes to him. The best refutation I can offer is
            the original essay, but it would be a waste of time to reiterate
            that here. Nor does it make sense, given the extent to which his
            representation of my essay differs from the essay itself, to refute
            him point by point. Instead, I will attempt to describe what I
            think is the crux of our dispute and to propose a way of
            reconciling our positions.
            Our disagreement arises, it seems to me, from the fact that,
            although he and I look at Paradise Lost from two quite different
            perspectives, Mr. Pechter is able to recognize only one. Since he
            does not grant that women's position and history in
            patriarchal culture place us at a vantage point which differs in
            some fundamental ways from that of readers like himself, who
            identify strongly with that culture, he cannot grasp indeed,
            cannot even read my arguments. It is not surprising, then,
            that such scattered impressions as he does pick up should seem to
            him not merely different from himself but, as he repeatedly says,
            "very strange." Mr. Pechter has an interesting way of
            coping with difference, however; even as he professes to find the
            essay very strange, he goes to great lengths to claim that in fact
            I am saying nothing new. My argument, he says, has been anticipated
            by Milton criticism and indeed by Milton's own Protestant
            resistance to orthodox authority. This position, so he thinks,
            already incorporates all imaginable differences, all possible inner
            voices, in itself. By these lights, there is no need and no use for
            a feminist critique of Miltonic authority, for it can only
            perform unoriginally, unnecessarily, indeed,
            redundantly another repetition of the poem and its critical
            history.
             
            Christine Froula is associate professor of English at Yale
            University. Her most recent book is "To Write
            Paradise": Style and Error in Pound's Cantos; she is
            currently working on a book about literary authority in James Joyce
            and Virginia Woolf. "When Eve Reads Milton: Undoing the
            Canonical Economy," her previous contribution to Critical
            Inquiry,appeared in the December 1983 issue.
