Frederic Jameson
         On Magic Realism in Film
         The concept of "magic realism" raises many problems,
            both theoretical and historical. I first encountered it in the
            context of American painting in the mid-1950s; at about the same
            time, Angle Flores published an influential article (in English) in
            which the term was applied to the work of Borges;1 but Alejo
            Carpentier's conception of the real maravilloso at once
            seemed to offer a related or alternative conception, while his own
            work and that of Miguel Angel Asturias seemed to demand an
            enlargement of its application.2 Finally, with the novels of
            Gabriel García Márquez in the 1960s, a whole new realm of magic
            realism opened up whose exact relations to preceding theory and
            novelistic practice remained undetermined. These conceptual
            problems emerge most clearly when one juxtaposes the notion of
            magic realism with competing or overlapping terms. In the
            beginning, for instance, it was not clear how it was to be
            distinguished from that vaster category generally simply called
            fantastic literature; at this point, what is presumably at issue is
            a certain type of narrative or representation to be distinguished
            from realism. Carpentier, however, explicitly staged his version as
            a more authentic Latin American realization of what in the more
            reified European context took the form of surrealism: his emphasis
            would seem to have been on a certain poetic transfiguration of the
            object world itself not so much a fantastic narrative, then,
            as a metamorphosis in perception and in things perceived (my own
            discussion, below, will retain some affiliations with this
            acceptation). In García Márquez, finally, these two tendencies
            seemed to achieve a new kind of synthesis a transfigured
            object world in which fantastic events are also narrated. But at
            this point, the focus of the conception of magic realism would
            appear to have shifted to what must be called an anthropological
            perspective: magic realism now comes to be understood as a kind of
            narrative raw material derived essentially from peasant society,
            drawing in sophisticated ways on the world of village or even
            tribal myth. (At this point, the stronger affiliations of the mode
            would be with texts like those of Tutuola in Nigeria or the
            Magunaíma [1928] of the Brazilian writer Mário de Andrade.) Recent
            debates, meanwhile, have complicated all this with yet a different
            kind of issue: namely, the problem of the political or
            mystificatory value, respectively, of such texts, many of which we
            owe to overtly left-wing revolutionary writers (Asturias,
            Carpentier, Márques).3 In spite of these terminological
            complexities which might be grounds for abandoning the
            concept altogether it retains a strange seductiveness which I
            will try to explore further, adding to the confusion with reference
            points drawn from the work of Jacques Lacan and from Freud's
            notion of the "uncanny," and compounding it by an
            argument that magic realism (now transferred to the realm of film)
            is to be grasped as a possible alternative to the narrative logic
            of contemporary postmodernism.4
             
            1. See Angel Flores, "Magical Realism in Spanish American
            Fiction," Hispania38 (May 1955): 187-92.
            2. See Alejo Carpentier, "Prólogo" to his novel El
            Reino de este mundo (Santiago, 1971); the most useful survey of the
            debate remains Roberto Gonzalez Echeverria, "Carpentier y el
            realism magico," in Otros Mundos, otros fuegos,ed. Donald
            Yates, Congreso International de Literature Iberoamericana 16 (East
            Lansing, Mich., 1975), pp. 221-31.
            3. See Angel Rama, La Novel en America Latina (Botoa, 1982), and
            especially Carlos Blanco Aguinaga, De Mitólogos y novelistas
            (Madrid, 1975), in particular the discussions of Gabriel García
            Márques and Alejo Carpentier.
            4. My own general frame of reference for
            "postmodernism" is outlined in my "Postmodernism;
            or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," New Left
            Review146 (July-Aug. 1984): 53-92.
             
            Frederic Jameson,William A. Lane Professor of Comparative
            Literature at Duke University, is the author of The Prison-House of
            Language and The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially
            Symbolic Act.He is also a member of the editorial collective of
            Social Text. His previous contributions to  are
            "The Symbolic Inference; or, Kenneth Burke and Ideological
            Analysis" (Spring 1978) and "Ideology and Symbolic
            Action" (Winter 1978).
Stephen Greenblatt
         Loudun and London
         Several years ago, in a brilliant contribution to the Collection
            Archives Series, Michel de Certeau wove together a large number of
            seventeenth-century documents pertaining to the famous episode of
            demonic possession among the Ursuline nuns of Loudun.1 One of the
            principal ways in which de Certeau organized his disparate complex
            materials into a compelling narrative was by viewing the
            extraordinary events as a kind of theater. There are good grounds
            for doing so. After all, as clerical authorities came to
            acknowledge the incidents of possession and treat them accordingly,
            they ceased to be isolated, private events occurring inside the
            convent walls and were transformed instead into public spectacles
            performed for a populace deeply divided between Catholics and
            Huguenots. Once or twice a day the nuns were taken from their
            needlework or tranquil meditations and led in small groups through
            the streets of the town to a church or chapel, where spectators had
            already gathered. At first these spectators were local townspeople,
            many of whom must have been acquainted with or even related to the
            nuns, but, as word of the possession spread, crowds of the curious
            arrived not only from the region but from all over France and from
            as far away as England and Scotland. The inns of the town were
            filled with these visitors who traveled to Loudun expecting to
            witness events there that were at once beyond nature and yet
            performed on schedule: repeatable, predictable, and in their
            bizarre way decorous.
            At the appointed times, beneath the expectant gaze of the crowd,
            the possessed women would ascend a scaffold, be loosely tied to low
            chairs, and begin to manifest their symptoms. From within each of
            the tormented bodies, a particular devil would arise and be
            constrained by the exorcist to identify himself. If a nun were
            possessed by more than one demon, the exorcist could dismiss one
            supernatural voice and demand that another come forth and occupy
            the tongue of the writhing woman. If the demon refused to cooperate
            in the interrogation, the presiding priest would solemnly remove
            the Holy Sacrament from the pyx and hold it up to the mouth of the
            possessed while the priests and spectators would assist by chanting
            the Salve Regina. This would provoke screams and violent
            contortions. Submitting to irresistible spiritual pressure, the
            devil would then be compelled to speak, confirming the Christian
            mysteries and the power of the Catholic church. "On
            stage," writes de Certeau, "there are no longer human
            beings; in this sense, there is no longer anyone only
            roles" (PL, p. 133). And these "roles" in turn
            are revealed to be the hidden truths that underlie the masks of
            ordinary life; more accurately, the ceremony has the power to
            convert ordinary life into mere masks, precisely so that these
            masks may be stripped away to reveal the inward drama of spiritual
            warfare. The demons appear at first to dominate that drama, forcing
            their wretched and unwilling hosts to manifest the power of
            darkness, but a spectacular ecclesiastical counterforce transforms
            the tragedy into a comedy in which the devil confesses that he has
            been vanquished by Jesus Christ.
             
            1. See Michel de Certeau, La Possession de Loudun,Collection
            Archives Series, no. 37 (Paris, 1980); all further references to
            this work, abbreviated PL, will be included in the text
            (translations are my own). On the relationship between exorcism and
            theater in this period, see also Henri Weber,
            "L'Exorcisme à la fin du seizième siècle, instrument de
            la Contre Réforme et spectacle baroque, &raquo; Nouvelle revue du
            seizième siècle 1 (1983) : 79-101.
             
            Stephen Greenblatt,the Class of 1932 Professor of English at the
            University of California, Berkeley, is a founder and editor of
            Representations. His most recent book, Renaissance Self-Fashioning:
            From More to Shakespeare, received the British Council Prize in the
            Humanities. He is presently completing a study of Shakespeare and
            the poetics of culture. "Marlow, Marx, and Anti-
            Semitism," his previous contribution to ,
            appeared in the Winter 1978 issue.
Michael André Bernstein
         Image, Word, and Sign: The Visual Arts as_Evidence_in_Ezra_Pound's
            Cantos
         1. To list Pound's triumphs of recognition in the realm of
            art, music, or literature is by itself no more enlightening than to
            catalog his oversights. Thus, for example, his instant and almost
            uncanny responsiveness to the work of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska is not
            more informative than his bizarre ranking of Francis
            Picabia's paintings above those of Picasso or Matisse.
            Clearly it is essential to know, with as much specificity as
            possible, exactly what Pound said about a particular work of art or
            literature and, equally important, given the frequent shifts of
            emphasis and interest throughout his long career, just when these
            opinions were first formulated. Like every reader of the The
            Cantos, I am conscious of the enormous service rendered by Pound
            scholars whose research is giving us a more complete inventory of
            the poet's various statements and positions, and it would be
            foolish to take my point here as a derogation of such efforts. But
            a list, no matter how complete, is not an argument, and an
            inventory, no matter how scrupulously assembled, is not an
            explanation; a recurrent problem in Pound studies is that too often
            the compoilation of discrete items of information is seen as a
            sufficient answer to problems of interpretation and understanding.
            In other words, I think it essential that discussions of pound and
            the Visual Arts (or, for that matter, of Pound and History, Pound
            and Economics, and so forth) move beyond the quagmire resulting
            from still another frain-storm of "factual atoms"
            chronicling his various passions and dislikes.
            2. Far from implying, however, that we must therefore simply accept
            Pound's brilliant discoveries and pass over his
            "howling blunders," my position would emphasize the
            need to take his ideas seriously enough to confront them, to test
            them against the material to which they are a response and for
            which they often seek to provide an explanatory account. There are
            times, as I have argued in an analogous context, when it is less
            demeaning to give a man credit for his worst errors than to remove
            from him the capacity to err.
            3. What we require, I believe, is less a catalog of all of
            Pound's specific statements about various artists, with each
            utterance assigned a positive or negative prefix depending upon our
            own personal and currently sanctioned hierarchy of values, than a
            careful study of the place of those statements in the logic and
            texture of Pound's own work. The attempt to focus attention
            on The Cantos'network of artistic references its
            invocation of masterpieces and privileged moments of cultural
            achievement will yield only trivial results unless the inner
            dynamic linking Pound's various exampla and the actual role
            these play in the poem's argument become clearer in the
            process.
             
            Michael André Bernstein,associate professor of English and
            comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley,
            is the author of The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern
            Verse Epic (1980) and Prima della Rivoluzione (1984), a volume of
            verse. He is currently completing a study of the Abject Hero and
            literary genealogy. His previous contribution to
William Veeder
         The Negative Oedipus: Father, Frankenstein,and the Shelleys
         My study of Mary Shelley and father includes her husband because
            Percy Shelley's obsessions with patriarchy, with "
            &lsquo;GOD, AND KIND, AND LAW,' " influenced profoundly
            Mary's* art and life. Percy's idealizations of father
            in The Revolt of Islam and Prince Athanase indicated ways or
            resolving familial antagonisms which Mary adopted and developed her
            later fiction. Percy's relationship with Frankenstein is
            still more intricate. Recognizing that her husband's
            obsessions with father and self-creation were contributing to the
            deterioration of their marriage, Mary represents these obsessions
            (among many others, including her own) in Victor
            Frankenstein partly to vent in art the anger which would have
            further damaged the marriage, and party to show Percy before it was
            too late the errors of his ways. It was too late. Percy responded
            to Frankenstein in Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci with a
            reaffirmation of sonship which has been largely unrecognized by
            scholars.
            Father looms so large for both Mary and Percy Shelley that no one
            critical approach can account for him fully. At their most
            idealistic and thus most traditional the Shelleys
            encourage a critical methodology which integrates the traditional
            disciplines of biographical and close textual analyses. By taking
            this approach to Mary's later fiction and to Percy's
            The Revolt of Islam, I can not only confirm the prominence of
            father for the Shelleys but also establish the ideal against which
            their most subversive and important art was created. Reading this
            indirect, overdetermined art in light of the negative Oedipus will
            help answer important questions about Frankenstein, Prometheus
            Unbound,and The Cenci and will, I hop, add to our understanding of
            the vexed role of father in the Romantic period and in subsequent
            generations whose children we are.
             
            William Veeder,professor of English at the University of Chicago,
            has published books on Yeats, Henry James, and Victorian feminism.
            His Mary Shelley and "Frankenstein": The Fate of
            Androgyny will appear in December 1985. The Art of Criticism: Henry
            James on the Theory and the Practice of Fiction, coedited with
            Susan M. Griffin, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: The Centenary, a
            collection of new essays on Stevenson's novel, are also
            forthcoming (1986). He is currently at work on The Serpent's
            Tale: Anglo-American Gothic Fiction, 1885-1914.
Maria Torok
         Unpublished by Freud to Fliess: Restoring and Oscillation
         The aim of the following lines is to reinstate some unpublished
            fragments into two letters written by Freud to Fliess on 12 and 22
            December 1897, respectively. These dates refer to a period in
            Freud's elaborations traditionally considered subsequent to
            his renunciation of the seduction theory. As is well known, the
            interpretation of an earlier letter to Fliess, written by Freud on
            21 September 1897, makes his revocation into the first stage of
            what has since become Freudian psychoanalysis. This "turning
            point" has allowed many an interpreter to grasp Freudian
            psychoanalysis as a theory of instinctive fantasies. Yet, the
            conventional dots, frequently used in The Origins of Psycho-
            analysis to indicate editorial omissions, raise the issue: Do
            hitherto unknown quantities prevent us from understanding what the
            precise nature of this "turning point" might be?
            In the English and subsequent German editions of the Freud-Fliess
            correspondence there are indeed some clues of uncertainty as
            regards Freud's definitive repeal of his seduction theory.
            Consider, for example, the statement from a letter dated 31 August
            1898: "The secret of this restlessness is hysteria."2
            Freud cannot rest on his new hypothesis about the nature of
            neurosis since the etiology of hysteria continues to be a secret. A
            particularly dense passage of the same letter seems to elaborate on
            the causes of Freud's agitation.
            True, I have a good record of successes, but perhaps they have been
            only indirect, as if I had applied the lever in the right direction
            for the line of cleavage of the substance; but the line of cleavage
            itself remains unknown to me. [O,p. 262]
             
            Maria Torokis the author (with Nicolas Abraham) of The Wolf-
            Man's Magic Word (Le Verbier de L'Homme aux
            loups),forthcoming in translation, 1986. "Unpublished by
            Freud to Fliess" is part of a book-length study she is
            completing on the genesis of Freudian concepts. Nicholas
            Rand,assistant professor of French at the University of
            Wisconsin Madison, is the translator of The Wolf-Man's
            Magic Word.
Leo Bersani
         "The Culture of Redemption": Marcel Proust and Melanie_Klein
         What is the redemptive power of art? More fundamentally, what are
            the assumptions which make it seem natural to think of art as
            having such powers? In attempting to answer these questions, I will
            first be turning to Proust, who embodies perhaps more
            clearly in a sense, even more crudely than any other
            major artist a certain tendency to think of cultural symbolizations
            in general as essentially reparative. This tendency, which had
            already been sanctified as a more or less explicit dogma of modern
            high culture by Proust's time, persists, I believe, in our
            own time as the enabling morality of a humanistic criticism. I will
            argue that the notion of art as salvaging somehow damaged
            experience has, furthermore, been served by
            psychoanalysis more specifically, by a certain view of
            sublimation first proposed rather disconnectedly by Sigmund Freud
            and later developed more coherently and forcefully by Melanie
            Klein. The psychoanalytic theory I refer to makes
            normative both for an individual and for a culture the
            mortuary aesthetic of A la recherché du temps perdu.
            As everyone knows, involuntary memories play a crucial role in the
            Proustian narrator's discovery of his vocation as a writer.
            Let's begin with a somewhat untypical example of the genre,
            the passage in Sodome et Gomorrhe describing the
            "resurrection" of Marcel's grandmother on the
            first evening of his second visit to Balbec. This passage
            reformulates the importance of memory for art in terms of another
            relation about which the theoretical passages that conclude Le
            Temps retrouvé will be at once prolific and evasive: the dependence
            of art on death.
             
            Leo Bersani is professor of French at the University of California,
            Berkeley. The Forms of Violence/Narrative in Ancient Assyria and
            Modern Culture,written in collaboration with Ulysse Dutoit, is his
            most recent publication. Professor's The Freudian Body/
            Psychoanalysis and Art will be published this winter.
John Limon
         The Integration of Faulkner's Go Don, Moses
         The smallest ambition of this essay is to demonstrate that Rider,
            the central character in William Faulkner's short story
            "Pantaloon in Black," cannot be understood. This may be
            of some interest to Faulkner specialists. But the fact that he
            cannot be understood has ramifications, because "Pantaloon in
            Black," seems to be the anomaly of the book Go Down,
            Moses,which is either a collection of stories or a novel, depending
            on the success one has in integrating "Pantaloon in
            Black" into it. If Rider cannot be understood, then Go Down,
            Moses has an enigma at the center of its mysteries, around which it
            cannot be made to cohere.
            More important to nonspecialists is the question of why Rider
            cannot be understood, and, consequently, why Go Down, Moses
            disintegrates. To answer this I want to perform the logical
            operation modus tollens on Stanley Fish's idea that
            interpretations are produced (not by individuals directed by texts,
            but) by interpretive communities: if interpretations fail, then it
            must be because interpretive communities fail. Of course, Fish
            everywhere argues that interpretations must always, on the
            contrary, succeed; the lesson of Is There a Text in This Class?is
            that interpretive communities produce texts inexorably and
            inevitably in their own image. But Fish's idea of an
            interpretive community is something like the Modern Language
            Association, or the set of all English professors, or the Yale
            school bigger or smaller machines perfectly programmed (so he
            believes) for producing texts out of theoretical presuppositions.
            What is, however, even English professors are members of
            communities that fit the definition of an interpretive community,
            by virtue of the fact that they speak through our readings, but
            which are not chiefly engaged in the manufacture of masterful
            criticism? Worse: what if these communities speak a different
            language from those to which we professionally belong? Worse yet:
            what is they are disintegrating even as the MLA, or the Yale
            school, endures, or prevails?
            The point is not that Fish is wrong; it is that he has
            oversimplified his sense of a text by reducing it to the instrument
            of communication used by professor speaking to other professors.
            But in "Pantaloon in Black," Faulkner has formed a text
            in the image of a Southern Negro and invited us to join an
            interpretive community on the model of Yoknapatawpha County.
            Insofar as we take up that invitation, we fail to understand his
            story; insofar as we reject it, we also fail to understand his
            story. The paradox is the result of our being forced to join a
            community which does not cohere; to the degree that that community
            fails to cohere, so does our reading. What Faulkner says to Fish is
            that the American belief in the power of interpretive communities
            is akin to an idealist's dream of an integrated South.
             
            John Limonis assistant professor of English at Williams College. He
            is currently working on a book, Half-Sight of Science,on the
            history of the American novel in relation to the history of science
            and science philosophy.
Richard Shiff
         Remembering Impressions
         In his essay "Painting Memories" ( 10
            [March 1984]: 510-42), Michael Fried identifies memory as the
            privileged thematic that structures Charles Baudelaire's
            Salon of 1846. But he then limits his investigation of this topic
            by focusing on the representation of "past" art,to the
            exclusion of the recollection of "past" experience.
            Fried thus isolates the theme of memory from the dialectic of life
            and art that characterizes its performance for Baudelaire. Such
            selective analysis not only reverses Baudelaire's priorities
            but deflects his pointed comments on modernity and naiveté, which
            in turn inform the example of Edouard Manet, Fried's
            exemplary modernist painter. One wonders whether too much of
            Baudelaire and Manet is lost to this view. Perhaps the
            predilections of contemporary criticism have sanctioned
            Fried's approach. For today we hesitate to ground art in
            experience, preferring to conceive of representations as signs
            fully engendered by and engendering other signs. Baudelaire was of
            a different mind; he lived through the dawning of our own age, but
            also in the fading light of another. He was heir to a tradition
            that regarded the forms of art as powerfully motivated by the
            experience of internalized ideas and sensations; for him, a master
            artist's "signs" would appear more symbolic than
            allegorical, more immediate than mediated or distanced. (This
            distinction often, and rightfully, slips away; it will become
            evident that Baudelaire's writing encompasses both positions,
            ours and his.)
            As we deny artistic signs motivation in extralinguistic
            "experience," we aggravate that perennial problem of
            origins which Fried himself invokes. It might be reformulated in
            this manner: all painting depends on a lineage of antecedent
            painting; yet, to succeed, a new work must transcend its filial
            bondage, as it compounds the effect of the "original
            (s)" in its own originality. Vexation follows from this issue
            of the artistic source. Since memories of past art
            (representations, conventions, signs) make possible the very
            creation of art, the creative event cannot assume priority over
            memory. And the matter of primordialmemory, like the matter of an
            absolutely original art, is aporia. Fried does not pursue this
            matter (Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, and others have); but the
            question necessarily implies that both representations and
            memories, in constituting the "past," must always be
            distanced. Distanced not from the present, which they enter and
            likewise constitute, but from those "original"
            experiential moments they purport to (re)present.
             
            Richard Schiff is associate professor of art at the University of
            North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of Cézanne and the
            End of Impressionism: A Study of the Theory, Technique, and
            Critical Evaluation of Modern Art (1984) and is currently working
            on a study of modernism in relation to classicism and a related
            study of photographic realism. His previous contributions to
             are "Seeing Cézanne" (Summer 1978),
            "Art and Life: A Metaphoric Relationship" (Autumn
            1978), and, with Carl Pletsch, "History and Innovation"
            (Spring 1981).
Michael Fried
         Forget It: A Response to Richard Shiff
         The basic disagreement between Richard Shiff and me is one of
            approach and ultimately of intellectual taste. What I tried to do
            in "Painting memories" was read Charles
            Baudelaire's Salon of 1846 with a view to construing its
            central argument as rigorously as possible, which for me meant
            without appealing, except in one crucial, authorized instance, to
            other writings by Baudelaire or indeed anyone else. (I refer here
            to the reading conducted in the first half of my essay and in the
            body of the text; a few footnotes cite passages in other writings
            on art by Baudelaire, and toward the end of the essay I allude
            briefly to The Painter of Modern Life.) This seemed to me
            desirable, first, because on the strength of a long familiarity
            with the Salon of 1846 I had become convinced that it was not the
            fragmented, somewhat incoherent, less than fully mature performance
            that many previous commentators had taken it to be (and that Shiff
            himself appears to think it is) but rather that it possessed a
            problematic consistency, even systematicness, which I wanted to
            explore; and second, because I had come to feel that one of the
            principal sources of the dreariness and predictability of much
            exegesis not only of that Salonbut of Baudelaire's art
            criticism generally was the tendency of many commentators to treat
            his art writing as a single, barely differentiated mass, to be
            supplemented when desired by selected passages from the lyric
            poems. Let me be as clear as I can. I am not claiming that the only
            fruitful approach to Baudelaire's art criticism is to
            consider each of his writings in isolation from the rest. I am
            saying that the widespread tendency to read a particular Salon or
            article on the visual arts in the light of others has meant that
            insufficient attention has been paid to the workings of individual
            texts, with dismaying consequences both for our understanding of
            those texts and for our sense of the shape of Baudelaire's
            intellectual career.
             
            Michael Fried,professor of humanities and the history of art and
            director of the Humanities Center at the Johns Hopkins University,
            is the author of Morris Louisand Absorption and Theatricality:
            Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot. He is currently at
            work on books on Gustave Courbet and on Thomas Eakins and Stephen
            Crane. His most recent contributions to  are
            "The Structure of Beholding in Courbet's Burial at
            Ornans" (June 1983) and "Paitnig Memories: On the
            Containment of the Past in Baudelaire and Manet" (March
            1984).
Henry Staten
         Rorty's Circumvention of Derrida
         Richard Rorty's "Deconstruction and
            Circumvention" ( 11 [September 1984]: 1-21)
            is a sobering reminder of how far we have to go before anything
            like a real dialogue between deconstruction and philosophy can take
            place in this country. Our literary critics ignore too much of what
            is specifically philosophical in philosophical texts; and our
            philosophers equally blind when they read literary language.
            Perhaps it is laughably undeconstructed to make the distinctions I
            had just made. But perpahs, too, it is not so easy to get beyond
            certain oppositions as is beginning to be widely taken for granted.
            It is surprising to see Rorty encouraging such complacency, for
            Rorty himself generally thinks hard and to good purpose. He is a
            figure of unique distinction on our intellectual landscape, a
            bridge, perhaps, our only one, between deconstruction and the
            American philosophical establishment. But for that very reason it
            is sobering to see how this philosopher reads Jacques Derrida: very
            much as a philosopher reads. The overall result is ambiguous (and
            we will trace the structure of this ambiguity), but is it not
            finally to "encapsulate and circumvent" Derrida,
            leaving the native speech community immune to his critique? Let us
            see.
             
            Henry Staten is associate professor of English and adjunct
            professor of philosophy at the University of Utah. He is the author
            of Wittgenstein and Derrida (1984) and is currently working on a
            study of mourning and idealization in Western literature from Homer
            to D. H. Lawrence.
Richard Rorty
         The Higher Nominalism in a Nutshell: A Reply_to_Henry_Staten
         Staten gets my intentions right when he suggests that I may simply
            have been saying that "the dream of philosophy is a rare but
            serious malady, now less common than it used to be, but currently
            threatening a new outbreak in the disguised form of
            deconstruction" (p. 455). I had thought I was urging that the
            appropriation of Derrida in the Anglo-Saxon "Now let's
            deconstruct literature" mode was a mistake and that there
            were some things in Derrida (not the most important things) which
            had encouraged this mistake notably the Heideggerian
            suggestion that the "text of philosophy" was at the
            heart of our culture. State, however, finds me more cunning and
            ungenerous, harsher toward Derrida, than I had imagined myself to
            be. He may have a point, but is hard for me to tell. No author is
            much good at following "the rhetorical contours" of his
            own writing, since his (quite possibly self-deceptive) beliefs
            about what he wanted to say keep leveling off the contours of what
            he actually wrote (p. 455).
            The best I can do by way of reply to the charge that I was (even if
            perhaps unconsciously) attempting to " &lsquo;encapsulate and
            circumvent' " Derrida is to take up a central ambiguity
            which Staten detects (p. 453). He says that I flit back and forth
            between "two characterizations of the history of
            philosophy": (1) "a constantly changing, self-
            deconstructing enterprise which is therefore not characterizable in
            terms of any single system of metaphors," and (2) "a
            &lsquo;metaphysical tradition' which has dreamed the dream of
            a closed, total, and transparent vocabulary which would tell the
            whole truth and thing but the truth" (p. 456).
             
            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 contributions to 
            are "Deconstruction and Circumvention" (September 1984)
            and "Philosophy without Principles" (March 1985).
Nelson Goodman and Catherine Z. Elgin
         Interpretation and Identity: Can the Work Survive the_World?
         Predictions concerning the end of the world have proven less
            reliable than your broker's recommendations or your fondest
            hopes. Whether you await the end fearfully or eagerly, you may rest
            assured that it will never come not because the world is
            everlasting but because it has already ended, if indeed it ever
            began. But we need not mourn, for the world is indeed well lost,
            and with it the stultifying stereotypes of absolutism: the absurd
            notions of science as the effort to discover a unique, prepackaged,
            but unfortunately undiscoverable reality, and of truth as agreement
            with that inaccessible reality. All notions of pure givenness and
            unconditional necessity and of a single correct perspective and
            system of categories are lost as well.
            If there is no such thing as the world, what are we living in? The
            answer might be "A world" or, better, "Several
            worlds." For to deny that there is any such thing as theworld
            is no more to deny that there are worlds than to deny that there is
            any such thing as thenumber between two and sevenis to deny that
            there are numbers between two and seven. The task of describing the
            world is as futile as the task of describing the number between
            twoand seven.
            The world is lost once we appreciate a curious feature of certain
            pairs of seemingly contradictory statements: if either is true,
            both are. Although "The earth is in motion" and
            "The earth is at rest" apparently contradict each
            other, both are true. But from a contradiction, every statement
            follows. So unless we are prepared to acknowledge the truth of
            every statement, the appearance of contradiction in cases like
            these must somehow be dispelled.
             
            Nelson Goodman is professor emeritus of philosophy at Harvard
            University. He has written Of Mind and Other Matters, Ways of
            Worldmaking, Problems and Projects, Languages of Art, The Structure
            of Appearance,and Fact, Fiction, and Forecast. His most recent
            contribution to  is "How Buildings
            Mean" (June 1985). Catherine Z. Elgin is associate professor
            of philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She
            is the author of With Reference to Referenceand is currently
            writing a book entitled Philosophy without Foundations.
