Sandra M. Gilbert
         Life's Empty Pack: Notes toward a Literary Daughteronomy
         A definition of [George] Eliot as renunciatory culture-mother may
            seem an odd preface to a discussion of Silas Marner since, of all
            her novels, this richly constructed work is the one in which the
            empty pack of daughterhood appears fullest, the honey of femininity
            most unpunished. I want to argue, however, that this
            "legendary tale," whose status as a schoolroom classic
            makes it almost as much a textbook as a novel, examines the
            relationship between woman's fate and the structure of
            society in order to explicate the meaning of the empty pack of
            daughterhood. More specifically, this story of an adoptive father,
            an orphan daughter, and a dead mother broods on events that are
            actually or symbolically situated on the margins or boundaries of
            society, where culture must enter into a dialectical struggle with
            nature, in order to show how the young female human animal is
            converted into the human daughter, wife, and mother. Finally, then,
            this fictionalized "daughteronomy" becomes a female
            myth of origin narrated by a severe literary mother uses the
            vehicle of a half-allegorical family romance to urge acquiescence
            in the law of the Father.
            If Silas Marner is not obviously a story about the empty pack of
            daughterhood, it is plainly, of course, a "legendary
            tale" about a wanderer with a heavy yet empty pack. In fact,
            it is through the image of the packman that the story, in
            Eliot's own words, "came across my other plans by a
            sudden inspiration" and, clearly, her vision of this
            burdened outsider is a re-vision of the Romantic wanderer who
            haunts the borders of society, seeking a local habitation and a
            name.11 I would argue further, though, that Eliot's depiction
            of Silas Marner's alienation begins to explain Ruby
            Redinger's sense that the author of this "fluid and
            metaphoric" story "is" both Eppie, the redemptive
            daughter, and Silas, the redeemed father. For in examining the
            outcast weaver's marginality, this novelist of the
            "hidden life" examines also her own female
            disinheritance and marginality.12
             
            11. Eliot to Blackwood, 12 Jan. 1861, quoted in Ruby V. Redinger,
            George Eliot: The Emergent Self (New York, 1975), p. 436. As Susan
            Garber has suggested to me, the resonant image of the
            "packman" may be associated with the figure of Bob
            Jakin in The Mill on the Floss (which Eliot had just completed),
            the itinerant pack-bearing peddler who brings Maggie Tulliver a
            number of books, the most crucial of which is Tomas à Kempis'
            treatise on Christian renunciation (so that its subject
            metaphorically associates it with Silas Marner's pack full of
            emptiness).
            12. Rediner, George Eliot, p. 439; Eliot, "Finale,"
            Middlemarch, p. 896.
             
            Sandra M. Gilbert, now professor of English at the University of
            California, Davis, will join the Department of English at Princeton
            University in fall 1985. Her most recent works include a collection
            of poems, Emily's Bread (1984), and, coedited with Susan
            Gubar, The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Tradition
            in English (1985). In addition, she is at work on Mother Rites:
            Studies in Literature and Maternity, a project from which
            "Life's Empty Pack" is drawn, and, with Susan
            Gubar, on No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the
            Twentieth Century, a sequel to their collaborative Madwoman in the
            Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary
            Imagination (1979). "Costumes of the Mind: Transvestitism as
            Metaphor in Modern Literature" appeared in the Winter 1980
            issue of .
Zhang Longxi
         The Tao and the Logos: Notes on Derrida's_Critique_of_Logocentrism
         In a wholesale destructive or deconstructive critique of Western
            philosophical tradition, it is precisely this ethnocentric-
            phonocentric view of language that Jacques Derrida has chosen for
            his target. In Derrida's critique, Hegel appears as one of
            the powerful enactors of that tradition yet peculiarly on the verge
            of turning away from it as "the last philosopher of the book
            and the first thinker of writing."13 As Derrida sees it,
            phonocentrism in its philosophical dimension is also
            "logocentrism: the metaphysics of phonetic writing" (p.
            3). Derrida makes it quite clear that such logocentrism is related
            to Western thinking and to Western thinking alone. Gayatri
            Chakravorty Spivak points this out in the translator's
            preface to Of Grammatology: "Almost by a reverse
            ethnocentrism, Derrida insists that logocentrism is a property of
            the West…. Although something of the Chinese prejudice of the West
            is discussed in Part I, the East is never seriously studied or
            deconstructed in the Derridean text" (p. lxxxii). As a matter
            of fact, not only is the East never seriously deconstructed but
            Derrida even sees in the nonphonetic Chinese writing "the
            testimony of a powerful movement of civilization developing outside
            of all logocentrism" (p. 90). When he looks within the
            Western tradition for a breakthrough, he finds it in nothing other
            than the poetics of Ezra Pound and his mentor, Ernest Fenollosa,
            who built a graphic poetics on what is certainly a peculiar reading
            of Chinese ideograms:
            This is the meaning of the work of Fenellosa [sic] whose influence
            upon Ezra Pound and his poetics is well-known: this irreducibly
            graphic poetics was, with that of Mallarmé, the first break in the
            most entrenched Western tradition. The fascination that the Chinese
            ideogram exercised on Pound's writing may thus be given all
            its historical significance. [P. 92]
            Since Chinese is a living language with a system of nonphonetic
            script that functions very differently from that of any Western
            language, it naturally holds a fascination for those in the West
            who, weary of the Western tradition, try to find an alternative
            model on the other side of the world, in the Orient. This is how
            the so-called Chinese prejudice came into being at the end of the
            seventeenth and during the eighteenth centuries, when some
            philosophers in the West, notably Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, saw
            "in the recently discovered Chinese script a model of the
            philosophical language thus removed from history" and
            believed that "what liberates Chinese script from the voice
            is also that which, arbitrarily and by the artifice of invention,
            wrenches it from history and gives it to philosophy" (p. 76).
            In other words, what Leibniz and others saw in the Chinese language
            was what they desired and projected there, "a sort of
            European hallucination," as Derrida rightly terms it.
            "And the hallucination translated less an ignorance than a
            misunderstanding. It was not disturbed by the knowledge of Chinese
            script, limited but real, which was then available" (p. 80).
             
            Zhang Longxi is on the faculty of the Department of English
            Language and Literature at Peking University. He is the author of A
            Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century Theories of Literature
            (forthcoming) and is currently studying comparative literature at
            Harvard University.
Jerome J. McGann
         Some Forms of Critical Discourse
         The project begins by drawing two basic distinctions. The first
            distinction is between forms of ideological discourse in general,
            which may not be critical in their orientation, and those forms of
            criticaldiscourse which are historically self-conscious in their
            method. The formal antitype of all critical discourse is, in this
            view, the discourse of interpretation. The second distinction
            separates forms of critical thought (for example, forms of logic)
            from forms of critical discourse. Unlike the latter, forms of
            thought do not require for their existence the operation of an
            explicit set of signs or system of objective articulation.
            One further introductory point is in order. I believe that the
            elementary forms of critical discourse should be divided into two
            large categories: the narrative forms, on the one hand, and the
            nonnarrative forms, on the other. Furthermore, I suggest that the
            nonnarrative forms which are my chief concern in this
            paper comprise four elementary types: the hypothetical (which
            corresponds to the form of thought we call inductive logic); the
            practical or injunctive (which corresponds to the form of thought
            we call deductive logic); the array; and the dialectic. I shall
            concentrate on the nonnarrative forms, and in particular on the
            array and the dialectic, for two reasons: first, one of these, the
            array, is not normally recognized as a form of critical discourse;
            and, second, both the array and the dialectic offer especially
            clear contrasts with narrative forms of discourse, both critical
            and noncritical.1
             
            1. Some brief comments on the other two nonnarrative forms may be
            useful. Perhaps the best examples of a practical or injunctive form
            are furnished in a book like Euclid's Elements, or any
            cookbook. The hypothetical form may be illustrated out of any
            number of classic works such as Sir Humphry Davy's "On
            Some New Phenomena of Chemical Changes Produced by
            Electricity" (Philosophic Transactions of the Royal Society
            of London,19 Nov. 1807) and Michael Faraday's
            "Electricity from Magnetism" (Philosophic Transactions
            of the Royal Society of London,24 Nov. 1831).
             
            Jerome J. McGann is the Doris and Henry Dreyfuss Professor of
            Humanities at the California Institute of Technology. A new book,
            The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical
            Method and Theory (1985), continues the critical projects of his
            recent books The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (1983)
            and A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (1983). His most recent
            contribution to  is "The Religious Poetry of
            Christina Rossetti" (September 1983).
Peter J. Rabinowitz
         The Turn of the Glass Key: Popular Fiction_as_Reading_Strategy
         Even among critics not particularly concerned with detective
            fiction, Dashiell Hammett's fourth novel, The Glass Key
            (1931), is famous for carrying the so-called objective method to
            almost obsessive lengths: we are never told what the characters are
            thinking, only what they do and look like. Anyone's decisions
            about anyone else's intentions (which, in this underworld of
            ward politics, often have life-and-death consequences) are
            interpretivedecisions, dependent on correct
            presuppositions on having the right interpretive key. The
            novel's title, in part, refers to this kind of key. Ned
            Beaumont, the protagonist, has to decide how to govern his
            relationship with Janet Henry; one of his major clues to her mind
            is a dream that she tells him, a dream that climaxes in an attempt
            to lock a door against an onslaught of snakes. Dream interpretation
            is difficult enough to begin with, and Janet Henry compounds that
            difficulty by telling the dream twice. In the first version, the
            attempt to lock the door succeeds; in the second, the key turns out
            to be made of glass and it shatters. Ned Beaumont, in deciding
            which dream to us as his key, chooses the second (as do most
            readers) but it is a choice based on an intuitive mix of
            experience and faith, knowledge and hunch.
            A reader often faces the same difficulties that Ned Beaumont does.
            Reading a book, too, requires us to make a choice about what key to
            use to unlock it, and that choice must often be based on an
            intuitive mix of experience and faith, knowledge and hunch. For
            example, as I shall show, the experience of reading certain
            texts not all, but a significant number of them is
            problematic because it depends in part on whether the reader has
            chosen, before picking them up, to approach them as popular or
            serious. My argument hinges on two prior claims. First, I contend
            that one way (but not the only way) of defining genres is to
            consider them as bundles of operations which readers perform in
            order to recover the meanings of texts rather than as sets of
            features found in the texts themselves. To put this crudely but
            more modishly, genres can be viewed as strategies that readers use
            to process texts. Second, I argue that popular literature and
            serious literature can be viewed as broad genre categories.
             
            Peter J. Rabinowitz is associate professor of comparative
            literature at Hamilton College. He is currently working on a book
            about literary conventions and is also active as a music critic for
            such publications as Fanfare and Ovation. His previous
            contributions to  are "Truth in Fiction: A
            Reexamination of Audiences" (Autumn 1977) and "Who Was
            That Lady? Pluralism and Critical Method" (Spring 1979).
Stanley Fish
         Consequences
         Nothing I wrote in Is There a Text in This Class? has provoked more
            opposition or consternation than my (negative) claim that the
            argument of the book has no consequences for the practice of
            literary criticism.1 To many it seemed counterintuitive to maintain
            (as I did) that an argument in theory could leave untouched the
            practice it considers: After all, isn't the very point of
            theory to throw light on or reform or guide practice? In answer to
            this question, I want to say, first, that this claim is
            unsupportable. Here, I am in agreement with Steven Knapp and Walter
            Benn Michaels, who are almost alone in agreeing with me and who
            fault me not for making the "no consequences" argument
            but for occasionally falling away from it. Those dislike Is There a
            Text in This Class? tend to dislike "Against Theory"
            even more, and it is part of my purpose here to account for the
            hostility to both pieces. But since the issues at stake are
            fundamental, it is incumbent to begin at the beginning with a
            discussion of what theory is and is not.
             
            1. See my Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of
            Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), p. 370. For a
            response to the "no consequences" claim, see Mary
            Louise Pratt, "Interpretive Strategies/Strategic
            Interpretations: on Anglo-American Reader Response
            Criticism," Boundary 2 11 (Fall-Winter 1982-830): 222.
             
            Stanley Fish is the William Kenan, Jr., Professor of English and
            the Humanities at the Johns Hopkins University. His most recent
            contributions to  are "Profession Despise
            Thyself: Fear and Self-Loathing in Literary Studies"
            (December 1983) and "Fear of Fish:"A Reply to Walter
            Davis" (June 1984). The present essay is the concluding
            chapter of Change (forthcoming, 1985).
Richard Rorty
         Philosophy without Principles
         My colleague E. D. Hirsch has skillfully developed the consequences
            for literary interpretation of a "realistic"
            epistemological position which he formulates as follows: "If
            we could not distinguish a content of consciousness from its
            contexts, we could not know any object at all in the world."
            Given that premise, it is easy for Hirsch to infer that
            "without the stable determinacy of meaning there can be no
            knowledge in interpretation."1 A lot of people disagree with
            Hirsch on the latter point, and they look to philosophy for replies
            to the premise from which it was inferred. But it is not clear
            where in philosophy they should look: To epistemology? Ethics?2
            Philosophy of language? What Jacques Derrida calls "a new
            logic, … a graphematics of iterability"?3 Where do we find
            first principles from which to deduce an anti-Hirsch argument?
            I want to argue that there is no clear or straight answer to this
            question and that there need be none. I shall begin by criticizing
            the strategy used against Hirsch and others by my fellow
            pragmatists Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels. They think that
            one can start with philosophy of language and straighten things out
            by adopting a correct account of meaning. I share their desire to
            refute Hirsch, their admiration for Stanley Fish, and their view
            that "theory" when defined as "an attempt
            to govern interpretations of particular texts by appealing to an
            account of interpretation in general" has got to go (p.
            723, and see p. 742). But they want to defend this position by
            exposing a mistake which they think common to all theory so
            defined: an error about the relation between meaning and intention.
            They assert that "what is intended and what is meant are
            identical" and that one will look for an "account of
            interpretation in general" only if one fails to recognize
            this identity (pp. 729, 723). Such failure leads to an attempt to
            connect meaning and intention (as in Hirsch) or to disconnect them
            (as in Paul de Man). But such attempts must fail, for they
            presuppose a break "between language and speech acts"
            which does not exist (p. 733).
             
            1. E. D. Hirsch, Jr., The Aims of Interpretation (Chicago, 1976),
            pp. 3, 1.
            2. See ibid., where Hirsch offers a "fundamental ethical
            maxim for interpretation" which, he says, "claims no
            privileged sanction from metaphysics or analysis" (p. 90).
            Here and elsewhere Hirsch suggests that it may be ethics rather
            than epistemology which provides the principles that govern
            interpretation. There remain other passages, however, in which he
            retains the view, conspicuous in his earlier writings, that an
            analysis of the idea of knowledge is the ultimate justification for
            his approach.
            3. Jacques Derrida, "Limited Inc abc … , " Glyph 2
            (1977) : 219.
             
            Richard Rorty is Kenan Professor of Humanities at the University of
            Virginia. He is the author of Consequences of Pragmatism (Essays:
            1972-1980),among other works, and is currently writing a book on
            Martin Heidegger. His previous contribution to ,
            "Deconstruction and Circumvention," appeared in the
            September 1984 issue.
Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels
         A Reply to Richard Rorty: What is Pragmatism?
         We are grateful to Stanley Fish for demonstrating what
            "Against Theory" had merely assumed, that the only kind
            of theory worth attacking is the kind which claims to be more than
            just another form of practice. Some readers have thought that our
            arguments were directed against all general reflection about
            literature or criticism. Others have thought that we were resisting
            the encroachment on literary study of themes derived from politics,
            or psychoanalysis, or philosophy. These are plausible misreading of
            our intention, since the term "theory" is indeed
            sometimes applied to any critical argument marked by historical or
            aesthetic generalization or by the reading of literature in terms
            of themes derived from other disciplines. But, as Fish shows,
            neither empirical generality nor thematic novelty is enough to make
            an argument theoretical in more than a trivial sense, that is, in a
            sense that marks it as importantly different in kind from other
            critical arguments. Theory in a nontrivial sense always consists in
            the attempt "to stand outside practice in order to govern
            practice from without," and this strong
            ("foundationalist") kind of theory is the kind whose
            coherence we deny (p. 742). It is also the kind of theory engaged
            in by the vast majority of those who consider themselves
            theorists including many who might prefer to think of
            themselves as practicing theory in some weaker sense.
            At the conclusion of "Philosophy without Principles,"
            Richard Rorty appears to join those who think we are attacking
            theory in its weaker senses as well as in the strong sense just
            described. He suggests that eliminating the writing and teaching of
            theory would deprive literary scholars of "an opportunity to
            discuss philosophy books as well as novels, poems, critical
            essays, and so forth with literature students" (Rorty,
            p. 464). If this were the only issue between Rorty's version
            of pragmatism and ours, our disagreement would come to an immediate
            end, since nothing could be further from the aims of "Against
            Theory" than rendering a judgment about what books should be
            discussed in literary classrooms. But our disagreement runs deeper
            than debates about the curriculum. It involves, first, a
            fundamental disagreement about language and, second, an equally
            fundamental disagreement about the nature and consequences of
            pragmatism.
             
            Steven Knapp is an assistant professor of English at the University
            of California, Berkeley; his book Personification and the Sublime:
            Milton to Coleridgeis forthcoming. Walter Benn Michaels,an
            associate professor of English at the University of California,
            Berkeley, is working on the relation between literary and economic
            forms of representation in nineteenth-century America. A previous
            contribution to , "Sister Carrie's
            Popular Economy," appeared in the Winter 1980 issue. The
            authors' joint contribution to ,
            "Against Theory," and "A Reply to Our
            Critics," appeared respectively in the Summer 1982 and June
            1983 issues.
James McMichael
         Real, Schlemiel
         At some moment in his life, James Joyce stopped writing Ulysses. If
            there had been at least one more thing he meant to fuss with or to
            fix, one more thing he meant to do to the book, he never did it.
            Ulysses was at that moment complete.
            The book reads to me as if it's "harking back in a
            retrospective sort of arrangement" from that very moment, as
            if Joyce anticipated coming to it all along.1 Because he knew it
            would be a moment in which the book he was writing would become the
            book he had written, that moment backed up into the writing itself,
            it dictated to him that the narrator's sentences must be in
            the past tense. For Joyce, each phrase of Ulysses was over and done
            with as soon as he found that he could let it stand as it was. I
            think it's for this reason that his characters' actions
            and words are narrated as if they too were in the past.
            "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead,
            bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.
            A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him
            by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned
            …" (pp. 2-3). The writing which empowers Buck Mulligan to
            speak and act had at some moment stopped being a present participle
            for Joyce and begun to be a noun, a piece of writing, that now-
            realized thing which had been written. It's therefore in the
            past tense that the narrative proceeds.
            Not that along the way there isn't interior monologue that
            offers what a given character thinks, each thought sounding very
            much as if it's in the present. "Mr Bloom stood far
            back, his hat in his hand, counting the bared heads. Twelve.
            I'm thirteen" (p. 110). The illusion is that right
            here, right now, autonomously, Bloom is thinking about how many
            mourners there are at Dignam's funeral and is trying to
            establish their number for himself. And yet while the sentence
            fragments "Twelve" and "I'm thirteen"
            interrupt the already completed past-tense narrative, the past-
            tense sentence which introduces the fragments implies an
            intelligence that has managed to narrate Bloom's thoughts
            before Bloom himself has thought them. To narrate that Bloom is
            "counting the bared heads" in advance of that counting
            is paradoxically to review what hasn't yet happened. It
            implies a knowledge that looks back on each present moment from a
            point outside of time. And it's from precisely this point
            that the narrating intelligence closes off Bloom's present-
            tense thoughts with past-tense news: "The coffin dived out of
            sight, eased down by the men straddled on the gravetrestles"
            (p. 110).
             
            James McMichael,professor of English at the University of
            California, Irvine, is completing a manuscript called Reading
            "Ulysses."His most recent book of poems is Four Good
            Things.
Jane Marcus
         Quentin's Bogey
         In a famous essay, later a chapter in the classic work of feminist
            criticism The Madwoman in the Attic, called "Milton's
            Bogey: Patriarchal Poetry and Women Readers," Sandra Gilbert
            argues that "Milton's bogey" is made deliberately
            ambiguous by Woolf and may refer to Milton himself, Adam, or Satan.
            She argues that "the allusion has had no significant
            development."3&shy;&shy;But, of course, the previous
            reference to "the large and imposing figure of a gentleman,
            which Milton recommended for my perpetual adoration" makes it
            clear that Woolf's bogey is Milton's patriarchal god.
            That she later calls him a "human being" may be wicked
            and perverse, but is a brilliant undercutting of patriarchal
            divinity. The allusion is also developed in several ways throughout
            A Room of One's Own,and the reader who puts the pieces
            together has perhaps caught the "little fish" she
            promises her readers in the beginning. If Milton's bogey
            blocks the view of the open sky, her aunt's legacy
            "unveiled the sky" to her; money freed her to look at
            "reality" (Room, p. 39; and see p. 5). The second
            development of the figure is in the phantom form of
            "J H ." Jane Harrison's ghostly
            presence does not block the view of the open sky: "As if the
            scarf which the dusk had flung over the garden were torn asunder by
            star or sword the flash of some terrible reality
            leaping" (Room, p. 17). Harrison herself, and her great
            scholarly feminist work on preclassical Greece, is suggested here
            as having the opposite effect of Milton's bogey. She unveils
            reality and is held up as a model for women. The third development
            of the theme is the "loneliness and riot" of
            Woolf's vision of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of
            Newcastle the writer as madwoman, "plunging ever deeper
            into obscurity and folly": "Evidently the crazy Duchess
            became a bogey to frighten clever girls with" (Room, p. 65;
            emphasis mine). Virginia Woolf had been a clever girl, and she
            feared mental instability. The woman writer as madwoman certainly
            frightened her. She saw Margaret Cavendish's mind "as
            if some giant cucumber had spread itself all over the roses and
            carnations in the garden and choked them to death" (Room, p.
            65). There is a distinct relationship between Milton's
            patriarchal bogey and the giant cucumber. Patriarchy covers sky and
            earth with phallic images preventing women's vision and
            growth. The woman writer's power is inhibited by the
            forbidding Christian God who suggests that writing is a male
            prerogative; and if that doesn't inhibit her enough, a female
            bogey is invented to show her the woman writer's madness and
            folly.
             
            3. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic:
            The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination
            (New Haven, Conn., 19790, p. 188; and see pp. 187-212.
             
            Jane Marcus is associate professor of English and director of
            women's studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She has
            edited three collections of essays on Virginia Woolf, a collection
            of Rebecca West's socialist-feminist essays, and is presently
            finishing Liberty, Sorority, Misogyny: Virginia Woolf and the
            Languages of the Patriarchy.
Quentin Bell
         Reply to Jane Marcus
         It must be admitted that there are some of us who
            "teach" Virginia Woolf and yet seem unable to learn
            from her. The secret of Virginia's eminently readable prose
            style remains hidden from us. It is for this reason that I find it
            impossibly hard to read everything that Professor Marcus and some
            of her colleagues produce in such astounding abundance, and that,
            she may retort, is why she has found it impossible to read my
            biography of Virginia Woolf. In a sense, she does not need to; she
            can imagine it and, thus, credit me with the statement that I
            considered my aunt "a minor British novelist, ranked
            somewhere below E. M. Forster as a writer of fiction" (p.
            489). Seeing that I made it clear from the outset of that biography
            that I would not attempt to assess the work of Virginia Woolf,
            seeing that I have been blamed for this abstention (by Professor
            Marcus herself, if memory serves), and seeing that I have said
            absolutely nothing at any time that could possibly be construed in
            this sense, I think that we may well call this a master-stroke of
            the imagination.
            Also it is irrelevant. I accuse her of inaccuracy; she
            "replies" by asserting that I have bad taste. It seems
            a rather unconvincing form of defence. In fact, in her
            "reply," which must be about as long as the article by
            which it was engendered, Professor Marcus can find so little in the
            way of evidence or argument with which to support those contentions
            which I have criticized that the reader must wade through page
            after page of completely otiose matter before coming to anything
            which seems to bear on the matter at hand. At last Professor Marcus
            tells us that she has written "two long essays in which I did
            at length and in detail exactly what he does here"; here,
            then, we come to her answer (p. 493). The reader, who may be
            somewhat bewildered by so long a preface, may wish to be reminded
            what there is that needs to be answered. I maintain that Professor
            Marcus has neglected to notice that Margaret Llewelyn Davis was
            primarily Leonard Woolf's friend rather than
            Virginia's, that her relationship with Virginia was at times
            very uneasy, that Virginia was out of sympathy with politically
            minded women, and that Professor Marcus neglects to notice any of
            this because she fails to use the evidence of the diaries and the
            letters. When she does quote from a letter, she completely
            misunderstands it, just as she fails to understand Virginia's
            use of the term "the woman's republic" (see p.
            563).
             
            Quentin Bell is the author of, among other works,Ruskin (1963),
            Bloomsbury (1969), Virginia Woolf: A Biography(1972), and On Human
            Finery (1978). His previous contributions to 
            include "Art and the Elite" (Autumn 1974),
            "Bloomsbury and &lsquo;the Vulgar Passions'"
            (Winter 1979), and "A &lsquo;Radiant' Friendship"
            (June 1984).
Murray Krieger
         Optics and Aesthetic Perception: A Rebuttal
         I am troubled by the temper of E. H. Gombrich's response,
            "Representation and Misrepresentation" (Critical
            Inquiry 11 [December 1984]: 195-201), to my "Ambiguities of
            Representation and Illusion: An E. H. Gombrich Retrospective"
            (11 [December 1984]: 181-94) and by his preferring
            not to sense the profound admiration indeed, the
            homage intended by my essay, both for his contributions to
            recent theory and for their influence upon its recent developments.
            But I am more troubled by the confusions his remarks may cause in
            the interpretation of his own work as well as in the judgment of
            mine. There are important issues at stake, I feel, especially as
            regards the relation between scientific and aesthetic inquiry.
            The very irritated tone of his reaction helps make what I see as my
            major point: his work has contained a conflict between two
            Gombrichs one, the skeptical humanist and, the other, the
            positive scientist and with the passing years the second has
            increasingly sought to obliterate signs of the first, becoming
            increasingly impatient with any attempt to revive those signs or
            remind us of their existence. On the other side, since the line of
            literary criticism with which I associate myself has drawn strength
            from the first Gombrich, this development in his work and in his
            attitudes has caused some disappointment.
             
            Murray Krieger is University Professor of English at the University
            of California. He is the author of many works, including The Tragic
            Vision, The Classic Vision, Theory of Criticism: A Tradition and
            its System, Poetic Presence and Illusion: Essays in Critical
            History and Theory,and Arts on the Level. His previous
            contributions to  are "Fiction, History, and
            Empirical Reality" (December 1974), "Poetic Presence
            and Illusion: Renaissance Theory and the Duplicity of
            Metaphor" (Summer 1979), and "The Ambiguities of
            Representation and Illusion: An E. H. Gombrich Retrospective"
            (December 1984).
George Rochberg
         Kramer vs. Kramer
         Confusion abounds in Jonathan Kramer's attempt, in "Can
            Modernism Survive George Rochberg?" (
            [December 1984]: 341-54), to reply to the issues I raised in my
            essay "Can the Arts Survive Modernism? (A Discussion of the
            Characteristics, History, and Legacy of Modernism)" (Critical
            Inquiry [December 1984]: 317-40). Besides the endemic disarray of
            his thought process, he confutes and contradicts himself at every
            turn either out of his own mouth or out of the mouths of
            those he quotes to support his position. He is incapable of
            following his own line of argument either because he doesn't
            remember in one part of his paper what he's said in another
            or because he doesn't grasp the logical implications of his
            own statements sufficiently follow through. Thus he constantly cuts
            the ground out from under his own feet.
            Some specific illustrations are in order. First, let me deal with
            how he "thinks." To write prose we perforce must use
            words; and when we use words, it behooves us to know what they
            mean. All too often Kramer appears not to know what key words he
            uses domean but he marches blindly on through his own jungle
            of tangled thoughts. For instance, when he says, "A far
            better example of reductionism in musical scholarship than
            Schenker's multilayered theory is Rochberg's own
            article," he reveals a total lack of understanding his key
            word, "reductionism" (p. 345).
            "Reductionism" is the distilled or diminished content
            left after removing, stripping away, all alternative ways of
            understanding a situation or problem. That, of course, is what
            Schenker did in promulgating his theory of tonal practice, and it
            is clear Kramer understands that much. "Reductionism,"
            however, hardly describes the presentation of an overview of the
            impact of modernism on the life of the twentieth century (not only
            its art and culture but its intellectual, societal, and political
            aspects as well) which is what my article does.
             
            George Rochberg is the composer of a large body of musical works
            and the author of a recently published collection of essays, The
            Aesthetics of Survival, a Composer's View of Twentieth-
            Century Music. He recently completed his fifth symphony, on
            commission from the Chicago Symphony. In 1983 he retired from the
            University of Pennsylvania as Emeritus Annenberg Professor of the
            Humanities. His previous contribution to Critical
            Inquiry,"Can the Arts Survive Modernism? (A Discussion of the
            Characteristics, History, and Legacy of Modernism)," appeared
            in the December 1984 issue.
