Stanley Cavell
         The Division of Talent
         My letter of invitation to this seminar expresses the thought that
            "it will be very useful to have someone from outside the
            field help us see ourselves." Given my interests in what you
            might call the fact of literary study, I was naturally attracted by
            the invitation to look at literary study as a discipline or
            profession but also suspicious of the invitation. I thought: Do
            professionals really want to be helped to see themselves by
            outsiders? This is an invitation to get a group of people sore at
            me, and it will only result in the group's having an occasion
            not to see itself, since any member of it can easily dismiss
            anything I say as uninformed. But the invitation goes on to give
            the title for this session as "The Nature and Function of
            Literary Study: As Others See Us." Reading that, I thought:
            That is different. That identifies me as an other to the
            "academic and professional concerns" of the
            field hence, not just outside but intimately outside, as if
            my position were an alternativeto yours. And how could I not be
            better informed about being other to you than you are?
            But of course I know that there is no single unified
            "you" to which I am other, that some of you, perhaps
            most, have other others than philosophy and see your practice not
            against philosophy but against history or criticism or literary
            theory. So I should perhaps say that I am not exactly single or
            unified myself, that I am also other to the Anglo-American
            profession of philosophy, to which at the same time I belong. A way
            of expressing my otherness to this profession of philosophy is
            simply to say that I take you as also among my others, that I
            recognize the study of literature to be an alternative to what I
            do a path I might have taken, might still irregularly be
            taking to occupy a relation to the way I think, that for most
            of the members of my profession would be occupied by a profession
            of logic or science. I will not try here to account theoretically
            for the intimate differences that may make philosophy and
            literature alternative studies, which means that I will not here
            systematically try taking the perspective of an other. But I will
            be bearing in mind its certain messages and rumors that have lately
            been coming my way from the field of literary studies. You have,
            for example, not kept it secret that you have been worrying, as a
            profession, and sometimes in the form of conducting arguments about
            the obligation to literary theory as part of literary study, nor
            secret that these arguments sometimes take on the color or texture
            of strong statements of, or against, something called
            deconstruction. I will try to say something about these poorly kept
            secrets.
             
            Stanley Cavell,professor of philosophy at Harvard University, is
            the author of many works, including Must We Mean What We Say?, The
            Senses of "Walden," The Claim of Reason,and, most
            recently, Themes Out of School. He has been chosen by the American
            Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters to receive the 1985
            Morton Dauwen Zabel Award for Criticism. His most recent
            contribution to , "Politics as Opposed to
            What?," appears in the September 1982 issue.
Joel Snyder
         Las Meninas and the Mirror of the Prince
         It is ironic that, with few exceptions, the now vast body of
            critical literature about Diego Velázquez's Las Meninas fails
            to link knowledge to understanding fails to relate the
            encyclopedic knowledge we have acquired of its numerous details to
            a convincing understanding of the painting as a whole. Las Meninas
            is imposing and monumental; yet a large portion of the literature
            devoted to it considers only its elements: aspects of its nominal
            subjects, their biographies, and their roles in the household of
            the queen or the king. Niceties of court etiquette; concerns about
            clothing, and shoes (thought not one shoe appears in the painting),
            and the small cup of water offered to the Infanta Margarita (such
            cups were made of scented red clay imported from the East Indies
            and, after their contents had been imbibed, were eaten in the
            belief that the clay would bleach the skin to lighter and in
            a kingdom ruled by Hapsburgs a more regal tone).
            This increasingly intimate discussion of the painting's
            details is not altogether beside the point; some of this
            information deserves to be integrated into descriptions of the
            painting as a whole. But a reader of these descriptive accounts
            soon begins to suspect they are offered in the hope that some new
            details might provoke an understanding of the entire painting,
            might prove to be the key to our comprehension of it. In fact, Las
            Meninas invites such analysis. Some nineteenth-century critics
            called it "photographic" in its naturalism ("as
            [if seen] in a camera obscura" or "an anticipation of
            Daguerre's invention"), in the profusion of its detail,
            and in the alleged "snapshot" quality of its
            composition.1 The underlying motive of this understanding ought not
            to be dismissed, even thought the photography analogy is clearly
            grotesque, in terms both of history and visual sensibility.
            Although we know a great deal about the contention, in seventeenth-
            century Spanish art theory, that a major function of art is the
            perfecting of nature according to ideal standards, Las Meninas
            nonetheless is most commonly taken to be a pure spectacle
            memorializing an incidental moment, seemingly explicable solely in
            terms of what is apparent in it.
             
            1. Gustav Waagen, paraphrased in Carl Justi, Diego Velazquez and
            His Times (London, 1889), p. 419; William Stirling-Maxwell, quoted
            in ibid.
             
            Joel Snyder is associate professor of humanities and of art and
            design and is chairman of the Committee on General Studies in the
            Humanities at the University of Chicago. He is currently working on
            a book about the foundations of perspective. His previous
            contributions to  are "Photography, Vision,
            and Representation," written with Neil Walsh Allen (Autumn
            1975), "Picturing Vision" (Spring 1980), and
            "Reflexions on Las Meninas:Paradox Lost," written with
            Ted Cohen (Winter 1980).
Daniel Cottom
         The Enchantment of Interpretation
         First, a joke that was circulating among academics a couple of
            years ago. In the version I heard, a Texan is walking across
            Harvard Yard. He stops a guy and asks him, in his nasal drawl,
            "Can you tell me where the library's at?" The guy
            looks him up and down, pauses, and says, "At Harvard we do
            not end our sentences with prepositions." The Texan
            apologizes, saying, "Excuse me. Can you tell me where the
            library's at, asshole?"
            This story may seem far removed from the subject of this essay,
            which is supposed to be a serious one. But what is the joke about,
            after all, if not the seriousness of language, its power, and the
            demystification of that power by our native brand of
            deconstructionist, the shrewd rube?
            […]
            If we find the joke funny, I imagine that the experience with which
            most of us identify is this: we want the gumption to reject an
            arrogant cultural authority. This experience may be especially
            appealing to students, but it also may appeal to intellectuals
            conscious of those problems of power and knowledge that have been
            so celebrated in recent years. In fact, if Friedrich Nietzsche was
            right in suggesting that grammar is a metaphysical discipline
            comparable to God, then the pleasure of this joke may lie in its
            humiliation of law, pure and simple. Sigmund Freud, among others,
            has suggested that figures of authority in jokes are only stand-ins
            of that general power of society over all individuals which is
            contested in the very form of the joke. Thus, following Freud, or,
            say, those who have made Mikhail Bakhtin's conception of
            carnival so popular a topic of academic discussion, we could see
            enjoyment of this joke as representing a momentary rebellion
            against every form of culture that, as the saying goes, it imposed
            upon us. From that perspective, even my use here of this joke is
            bound to seem ridiculous; indeed, academic psychologists who write
            on laughter and humor often preface their discussions with
            defensive remarks about people who find it funny to see
            intellectuals seriously and laboriously analyzing jokes.1
             
            1. See, e.g., Anthony J. Chapman and Hugh C. Foot, eds., It's
            a Funny Thing, Humour (Oxford, 1977), and Paul E. McGhee and
            Jeffrey H. Goldstein, eds., Handbook of Humor Research,2 vols. (New
            York, 1983).
             
            Daniel Cottom is associate professor of English at Wayne State
            University. He is the author of The Civilized Imagination(1985) and
            is currently working on a study of the politics of interpretation.
Betsy Erkkila
         Greta Garbo: Sailing Beyond the Frame
         Greta Garbo named herself. It was she who invented the name
            "Garbo" and officially registered the change from Greta
            Gustafsson to Greta Garbo at the Ministry of Justice in Sweden on 4
            December 1923. The name had the metonymic virtue of suggesting the
            nature of her screen presence. The Swedish meaning of garbo,
            "wood nymph," suggests the association with
            otherworldly forces that became part of her image; while the
            Spanish meaning of the word, "animal grace sublimated,"
            combines the animal passion and spiritual grace that were part of
            her power.1 And yet in most accounts of Garbo's life and work
            the legend still persists that it was Swedish director Mauritz
            Stiller who named her after a seventeenth-century Hungarian king.
            The extent to which the legend has obscured Garbo's initial
            act of self-naming is symptomatic of the larger tendency in film
            theory and criticism to mask the creative power of the actress by
            treating her as the blank sheet upon which the director inscribes
            his own signature.
            What is particularly misleading about the Svengali metaphor as it
            has figured in studies of Garbo is that it so deliberately masks
            the evidence. In her article "Gish and Garbo: The Executive
            War on the Stars," Louise Brooks suggests that the popular
            image of Garbo the "dumb Swede" transformed by
            Stiller's art was perpetuated by Hollywood executives
            eager to play down the very real power that Garbo already exhibited
            in the rushes for her first American film, The Torrent (1926).
            "The whole MGM studio, including Monta Bell, the director,
            watched the daily rushes with amazement as Garbo created out of the
            stales, thinnest material the complex, enchanting shadow of a soul
            upon the screen." Although recent accounts of Garbo's
            life and work have advanced beyond the "dumb Swede"
            publicity of Photoplay magazine, critics still reveal a similar,
            almost vampish determination to deprive Garbo of her creative
            power. "Her contribution," states Kenneth Tynan,
            "is calm and receptiveness, an absorbent repose which
            normally, in women, coexists only with the utmost vanity. Tranced
            by the ecstasy of existing, she gives to each onlooker what he
            needs" ("G," p. 347). Comparing Garbo to a
            "watermark in a blank sheet of paper," David Thomson
            says in an essay in honor of her seventy-fifth birthday: "She
            must be no one in herself if she is to signify so much to so many
            others…. All the moods and moments of love are encompassed because
            the appearance is hollow. We are to inhabit it, to flesh it
            out." In these accounts, Garbo is presented not as an active
            shaping power but as a passive female vessel, ready to receive the
            impress of male voyeuristic fantasy.
             
            Betsy Erkkila,assistant professor of English at the University of
            Pennsylvania, is author of Walt Whitman among the French: Poet and
            Myth and editor of Ezra Pound: The Critical Reception. She is
            currently working on a book, Whitman the Political Poet,and a
            collection of essays, American Women Poets Musing.
Steven Mailloux
         Rhetorical Hermeneutics
         The Space Act of 1958 begins, "The Congress hereby declares
            that it is the policy of the United States that activities in space
            should be devoted to peaceful purposes for the benefit of all
            mankind." In March 1982, a Defense Department official
            commented on the statute: "We interpret the right to use
            space for peaceful purposes to include military uses of space to
            promote peace in the world."1 The absurdity of this willful
            misinterpretation amazed me on first reading, and months later it
            readily came to mind when I was looking for an effective way to
            illustrate the politics of interpretation. With just the right
            touch of moral indignation, I offered my literary criticism class
            this example of militaristic ideology blatantly misreading an
            antimilitaristic text.
            "But … the Defense Department is right!" objected the
            first student to speak. Somewhat amused, I spent the next ten
            minutes trying, with decreasing amusement, to show this student
            that the Reagan administration's reading was clearly,
            obviously, painfully wrong. I pointed to the text. I cited the
            traditional interpretation. I noted the class consensus, which
            supported me. All to no avail. It was at this point that I felt
            that "theoretical urge": the overwhelming desire for a
            hermeneutic account to which I could appeal to prove my student
            wrong. What I wanted was a general theory of interpretation that
            could supply rules outlawing my student's misreading.
            This little hermeneutic fable introduces the three topics of my
            essay. One topic is the theoretical moment that concludes the
            narrative; another is the simple plot, a brief rhetorical exchange;
            and finally there's the institutional setting(a university
            classroom) in which the exchange takes place. These three topics
            preoccupy the sections that follow. Section 1 analyzes the problems
            resulting from the theoretical urge, the impasse of contemporary
            critical theory. Section 2 proposes my solution to this impasse, a
            solution I call rhetorical hermeneutics, which leads in section 3
            to a rhetorical version of institutional history.
             
            1. "National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958," United
            States Statutes at Large (Washington, D.C., 1959), vol. 72, pt. 1,
            sec. 102(a), p. 426; Robert Cooper, director of the Defense
            Advanced Research Projects Agency, quoted in Frank Greve,
            "Pentagon Research Retains Vision of &lsquo;Winning' N-
            war," Miami Herald, 27 Mar. 1983, sec. D, p. 4.
             
            Steven Mailloux,associate professor of English at the University of
            Miami, is the author of Interpretive Conventions: the Reader in the
            Study of American Fiction. He is currently at work on a book
            tentatively entitled Rhetorical Power: Politics in American
            Literature, Criticism, and Theory. His previous contributions to
             are "Stanley Fish's
            &lsquo;Interpreting the Variorum': Advance or Retreat?"
            (Autumn 1976) and "Truth or Consequences: On Being Against
            Theory" (June 1983).
Nelson Goodman
         How Buildings Mean
         Arthur Schopenhauer ranked the several arts in a hierarchy, with
            literary and dramatic arts at the top, music soaring in a separate
            even higher heaven, and architecture sinking to the ground under
            the weight of beams and bricks and mortar.1 The governing principle
            seems to be some measure of spirituality, with architecture ranking
            lowest by vice of being grossly material.
            Nowadays such rankings are taken less seriously. Traditional
            ideologies and mythologies of the arts are undergoing
            deconstruction and disvaluation, making way for a neutral
            comparative study that can reveal a good deal not only about
            relations among the several arts2 but also about the kinships and
            contrasts between the arts, the sciences, and other ways that
            symbols of various kinds participate in the advancement of the
            understanding.
            In comparing architecture with the other arts, what may first
            strike us, despite Schopenhauer, is a close affinity with music:
            architectural and musical works, unlike paintings or plays or
            novels, are seldom descriptive or representational. With some
            interesting exceptions, architectural works do not
            denote that is, do not describe, recount, depict, or portray.
            They mean, if at all, in other ways.
            On the other hand, and architectural work contrasts with other
            works of art in scale. A building or park or city3 is not only
            bigger spatially and temporally than a musical performance or
            painting it is bigger even than we are. We cannot take it all
            in from a single point of view; we must move around and within it
            to grasp the whole. Moreover, the architectural work is normally
            fixed in place. Unlike a painting that may be reframed and rehung
            or a concerto that may be heard in different halls, the
            architectural work is firmly set in physical and cultural
            environment that alters slowly.
             
            1. See Bryan Magee, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (Oxford, 1983),
            pp. 176-78.
             
            Nelson Goodman,emeritus professor of philosophy at Harvard
            University, is the author of, among other works, The Structure of
            Appearance, Languages of Art, Ways of Worldmaking,andOf Mind and
            Other Matters. His previous contributions to  are
            "The Status of Style" (June 1975), "Metaphor as
            Moonlighting" (Autumn 1979), "Twisted Tales; or, Story,
            Study, and Symphony" (Autumn 1980), "The Telling and
            the Told" (Summer 1981), and "Routes of Reference)
            Autumn 1981).
Ken Hirschkop
         A Response to the Forum on Mikhail Bakhtin
         's Forum on Mikhail Bakhtin [Critical
            Inquiry10 (December 1983): 225-319] is the latest contribution to
            the spectacular effort of interpretation and assimilation that is
            being applied to the work of this recently recovered critic. In
            such a situation, analysis proceeds with one eye on the work in
            question and the other on current debates in the field; in the case
            of Bakhtin, interpretation is at the same time an attempt to come
            to grips with challenges posed by recent literary theory to certain
            axiomatic critical assumptions about intentionality, textuality,
            and the human subject. But the matter is also complicated by the
            fact that we are dealing here with a critic who was active in the
            USSR. This brings into play additional ideological pressures,
            generated by the cold war, which bear on the scholarly assimilation
            of his work.
            The debate on Bakhtin is made yet more difficult by the nature of
            his writing: immensely varied stylistically and topically but
            also and more importantly, I believe writing which
            strives for solutions it cannot quite articulate. It moves between
            alternative and contradictory formulations in a single essay and
            thus produces a set of concepts whose explanatory importance is
            matched by an unnerving tendency to slide from one formulation to
            the next with disturbing ease. Such ambiguities are not the sign of
            an open and skeptical mind, but neither are they mere
            inconsistencies which can be safely ignored. These internal
            contradictions dictate that argument over concepts like
            "dialogism" and "heteroglossia" cannot be
            settled by a definitive decision as to what they
            &lsquo;really' mean; instead, we must discuss how to manage
            these complexities and contradictions, and to what ends. Certain
            definite strategies of management are emerging, and the articles
            presented in the forum, while by no means reducible to a single
            position, share key lines of interpretive strategy that I think
            ought to be brought out into the open and contested. With the
            notable exception of Susan Stewart's article ["Shouts
            on the Street: Bakhtin's Anti-Linguistics," pp. 265-
            81], the contributions share an ideological drift, the ultimate
            effect of which is to evade the most radical aspects of
            Bakhtin's work in favor of an interpretation that renders him
            useful in the argument against the recent advances of post-
            structuralism and recent literary theory in general.
             
            Ken Hirschkop is a postgraduate student at Saint Antony's
            College, Oxford University, working on a book about Mikhail
            Bakhtin.
Gary Saul Morson
         Dialogue, Monologue, and the Social: A Reply to_Ken_Hirschkop
         One particularly interesting aspect of Hirschkop's essay is
            the repertoire of "double-voiced words" (to use
            Bakhtin's terms for certain rhetorical strategies) it
            displays. I will enumerate just three of them:
            1. The Misaddressed Word.Apparently, Hirschkop has been arguing
            these points with someone else, whose voice has drowned out what
            was actually said by myself and the other contributors to the Forum
            on Bakhtin. In a number of cases, Hirschkop objects that we failed
            to say things that were, in fact, explicitly stated and attributes
            to us a different, phantom position, which he then cites as
            evidence of "liberal," individualistic, and "cold
            war" biases (p. 676; and see p. 673). Likewise, I ostensibly
            "implied" a number of things, thought Hirschkop offers
            no direct quotations as evidence (p. 677).
            2. The Word That Lies in Ambush(a special version of what Bakhtin
            called "the word with a loophole"). In a way that has
            become increasingly common in theoretical essays, Hirschkop
            contents himself with stating only what is not the case and
            neglects telling us his conception of the alternative, correct
            position. For example, Hirschkop says: "Such ambiguities [in
            Bakhtin] are not the sign of an open and skeptical mind, but
            neither are they mere inconsistencies which can be safely
            ignored" (p. 672). In consequence, respondents who presume to
            guess at his position, whether they guess rightly or wrongly, are
            subject to an accusation of total or partial misrepresentation of
            his position or, perhaps worse, of drawing typically liberal
            inferences.
            3. The Preemptive Word(another version of "the word with a
            loophole"). Using a strategy familiar to most polemicists,
            Hirschkop attempts to discredit his adversaries by anticipating
            their objections within his own argument. Unfortunately, he
            projects responses that no one has made as if those
            responses were inevitable and seeks to dismiss them simply by
            naming them rather than answering them. Thus, he accuses my fellow
            contributors and me of a "kind of relativism, whose
            ideological affinities with the commonplaces of Western cold war
            discourse (the contrast of a liberal openness with a Left
            &lsquo;dogmatism') cannot be missed" and which
            "crops up again and again when Bakhtin is interpreted"
            (p. 676). The phrase in parentheses and the word in quotation marks
            are an example of preemptive discourse.
             
            Gary Saul Morson is the author of The Boundaries of Genre:
            Dostoevsky's "Diary of a Writer" and the
            Traditions of Literary Utopia (1981) and the editor of Literature
            and History: Theoretical Problems and Russian Case Studies
            (forthcoming). He is currently completing a book on Tolstoy, one
            chapter of which ("Tolstoy's Absolute Language")
            appeared in the Summer 1981 issue of . He was the
            guest editor of 's Forum on Mikhail Bakhtin,
            for which he wrote the introduction, "Who Speaks for
            Bakhtin?" (December 1983).
Richard M. Berrong
         Finding Antifeminism in Rabelais; or, A Response to_Wayne_Booth's
            Call for an Ethical Criticism
         In his article "Freedom of Interpretation: Bakhtin and the
            Challenge of Feminist Criticism" (9
            [September 1982]: 45-76), Wayne Booth develops an argument for
            "ethical" literary criticism, criticism that is
            concerned with the ideologies inherent in works of literature and
            the effects these ideologies may have on the reader. Or, as he
            phrases it himself: "What we are talking about [is] human
            ideals, how they are created in art and thus implanted in readers
            and left uncriticized" (p. 65). Booth's starting point,
            his "inspiration" for this argument, is Mikhail
            Bakhtin's notion of "dialogism" and, in
            particular, Bakhtin's use of this notion in his
            interpretation of François Rabelais' Gargantuaand Pantagruel
            narratives.1 For those not familiar with Booth's essay (and/
            or Bakhtin's interpretation), I will briefly summarize his
            argument in support of ethical criticism.
            Booth begins with much praise for Bakhtin (and Rabelais, as Bakhtin
            saw him) because Bakhtin seems (to Booth) to have discovered in
            Rabelais a linguistic technic that frees the reader from the
            ideologies inherent in language (much less in works of literature
            constructed with language). As Booth paraphrases Bakhtin, any
            writer who employs the languages of different ideologies within one
            text (hence making the text "dialogic") freed the
            reader from the "prison-house of language" to the
            extent that he allows the reader to view each ideology from the
            outside, from these other languages, so that this reader can judge
            each ideology in terms other than those which the ideology builds
            into its own language.
             
            1. See Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene
            Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass., 1968).
             
            Richard M. Berrong is visiting assistant professor of French at the
            University of Nebraska. He is the author of Every Man for Himself:
            Social Order and Its Dissolution in Rabelais(forthcoming, 1985) and
            Rabelair and Bakhtin Revisited: The Presence and Exclusion of
            Popular Culture in "Gargantua and Pantagruel"
            (forthcoming, 1986).
Wayne C. Booth
         Reply to Richard Berrong
         At first I thought Richard Berrong's claim was only that I
            had misread Rabelais. My main point was not about Rabelais but
            about how, in general, we might deal with sexist classics. But it
            remains true that if Berrong has caught me misreading and
            then condemning "bits" torn from their context, I
            have violated my own professed standards. He and I both see
            Rabelais as a very great author, and we both hope to avoid the
            pointlessness of judging works, great or small, for faults that
            they do not exhibit. But I am not certain whether we agree that
            when, after careful reading, we find that a beloved author is in
            some way insensitive or unjust, we will want somehow to include
            that judgment in what we say about the author's genius. When
            I consider his conclusion closely, I begin to suspect that we are
            engaged in a dispute not about Rabelais but about whether we are
            free to appraise a literary work in terms other than "its
            own."
            I shall not attempt a detailed answer to the claim that I have
            misread Rabelais. Even if I chanced to persuade Berrong an
            unlikely outcome now, since my long article failed to win
            him we can be sure that many other modern readers would rise
            up to call Rabelais inoffensive. Disputes about his treatment of
            women have continued for more than four centuries, and they are not
            likely ever to be finally settled. So I shall just touch on four of
            our contrasting readings and then turn to the more important matter
            of how we view ethical criticism.
             
            Wayne Booth's most recent book is Critical Understanding: The
            Powers and Limits of Pluralism. A version of his critique of
            Rabelais will appear this year in The Company We Keep: Ethical
            Criticism and the Ethics of Reading.
