Richard Stern
         Penned In
         "Writers don't have tasks," said Saul Bellow in a
            Q-and-A. "They have inspiration."
            Yes, at the typewriter, by the grace of discipline and the Muse,
            but here, on Central Park South, in the Essex House's bright
            Casino on the Park, inspiration was not running high.
            Not that attendance at the forty-eight PEN conference was a task.
            It was rather what Robertson Davies called
            "collegiality." "A week of it once every five
            years," he said, "should be enough." He, Davies,
            had checked in early, Saturday afternoon, and attended every
            session. In black overcoat and black fur cap, he had a theatrical,
            Man-Who-Came-to-Dinner look. (He'd been an actor and worked
            in Minneapolis with the Guthrie Theater.) In the lobby he made a
            great impression.
            Why not? After all, weren't writers here to be seen as well
            as to see each other, to make as well as take impressions? A month
            before, I'd spent a couple of hours at the Modern Language
            Association convention. There were thousands and thousands of
            scholars and critics there. Some of the most noted make a career of
            squeezing authors out of their texts. An author, wrote one tutelary
            divinity, "constitutes the privileged moment of
            individualization in the history of ideas, knowledge, [and]
            literature…."1 Not content with auctoricide,
            deconstructionist critics went after texts. "Il n'y a
            pas de hors-texte."2 Since there's nothing that
            doesn't belong to the text, texts are interchangeable. And
            it's not that superfluous, mythical being, the author, who
            decides they are, but his readers, at least those readers capable
            of erecting on his miserable pedestal the poem, the story,
            the novel a memorable explication.
            Ah well, was my thought, for some people a corpse will serve as
            well as a person. Indeed, for intellectual undertakers, hit-men,
            and cannibals, as well as for those who suffer the tyranny of
            authority, corpses are preferable to their living simulacra.
            Few authors at the PEN conference were troubled by these critical
            corpse-makers. They were here to see the authors behind the books
            they'd read, to swap stories and opinions, and to make clear
            to each other what splendid thinkers and noble humans they were
            outside of the poems and stories which had brought them here in the
            middle of winter and New York. In this city, more than any other in
            the history of the word, the word had been turned into gold. If one
            were going to abandon the typewriter for the podium, what better
            place to do it?
             
            In 1985, Richard Stern was given the Medal of Merit, awarded every
            six years to a novelist by the American Academy and Institute of
            Arts and Letters. He is the author of, among other works, the
            novels A Father's Words(1986), Other Men's Daughters
            (1973), and Stitch (1965). His third "orderly
            miscellany," The Position of the Body,will be published in
            September 1986. This essay is part of a longer work. Stern is
            professor of English at the University of Chicago.
Peter Schwenger
         Writing the Unthinkable
         It was a novel, among other things, which originated the atomic
            bomb. H. G. Wells dedicated The World Set Free,published in 1913,
            to Frederick Soddy, a pioneer in the exploration of radioactivity.
            Using Soddy's research as a base, Wells predicted the advent
            of artificial radioactivity in 1933, the year in which it actually
            took place; and he foresaw its use for what he named the
            "atomic bomb." In Wells' novel these bombs are
            used in a world war that erupts in mid-century and is so
            catastrophic that a world government is formed, initiating a new
            age powered by the peaceful use of the atom. The physicist Leo
            Szilard, a long-time admirer of Wells, read this novel in 1932, the
            year before he first intuited the possibility of a nuclear chain
            reaction. The novel seems to have become part of his own mental
            chain reaction. One that took place at an almost unconscious level
            during the spring that Szilard spent at the Strand Palace Hotel in
            London, by his own admission doing nothing. He would only
            monopolize the bath from around nine to twelve in the morning,
            since "there is no place as good to think as a
            bathtub."1 The theories that resulted from this prolonged
            immersion were introduced by references to Wells; and Szilard,
            having realized the atomic bomb, spent the rest of his life trying
            to realize the world government which, in the Wells novel, was its
            consequence.
            Literature, which was part of the genesis of nuclear weaponry,
            continues to be an inextricable aspect of its nature. For Derrida,
            in fact, we are facing
            a phenomenon whose essential feature is that of being fabulously
            textual,through and through. Nuclear weaponry depends, more than
            any weaponry in the past, it seems, upon structures of information
            and communication, structures of language, including non-
            vocalizable language, structures of codes and graphic decoding. But
            the phenomenon if fabulously textual also to the extent that, at
            the moment, a nuclear war has not taken place: one can only talk
            and write about it.2
            The linguistic nature of the arms race, of peace talks and
            negotiations, has been thoroughly analyzed. Likewise there is a
            growing number of books on the nature of nuclear war. But there is
            also a growing body of novels, poems, and plays making up a
            literature of nuclear holocaust. As the example of Wells'
            novel shows, this is not altogether unprecedented; nuclear
            literature predates Hiroshima. But the subject of nuclear war has,
            up till now, mainly served the purposes of science fiction; only
            rarely as in the cases of A Canticle for Leibowitz and On the
            Beach have science fiction authors risen above the lowest
            common denominator of that genre. In the 1980s, every year sees the
            publication of works which demand serious attention both as
            literature and as fictive strategies for comprehending a subject
            that is commonly called "unthinkable." Russell
            Hoban's Riddley Walker,Bernard Malamud's God's
            Grace,Maggie Gee's The Burning Book,Tim O'Brien's
            Nuclear Age these works explicitly preoccupied with nuclear
            holocaust may be supplemented by other works of the eighties with a
            persistent apocalyptic undertone, works such as Doris
            Lessing's Canopus in Argos series, Umberto Eco's Name
            of the Rose,and Mario Vargas Llosa's War of the End of the
            World. And these are only the literary manifestations of a
            widespread movement in all the arts aimed at expressing the
            dominant condition of our time.3
             
            1. Leo Szilard, Leo Szilard: His Version of the Facts: Selected
            Recollections and Correspondence,ed. Spencer R. Weart and Gertrud
            Weiss Szilard (Cambridge, Mass., 1978), p. 19.
            2. Jacques Derrida, "No Apocalypse, Not Now (full speed
            ahead, seven missiles, seven missives)," Diacritics 14
            (Summer 1984), p. 23.
            3. Examples can be found in painting (Robert Rosenquist, Five New
            Clear Women), mixed media (Robert Morris, Restless Sleepers/Atomic
            Shroud), opera (Philip Glass, Einstein on the Beach), oratorio
            (Michael Berkeley and Ian MacEwan, Or Shall We Die?), dance (Danny
            Grossman, Endangered Species), film (Testament), television (The
            Day After), and popular music (U-2, Unforgettable Fire).
             
            Peter Schwenger is associate professor of English at Mount St.
            Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The author of Phallic
            Critiques: Masculinity and Twentieth-Century Literature,he is
            working on a book-length study of nuclear holocaust literature.
Mary Ann Caws
         Literal or Liberal: Translating Perception
         Any even cursory examination of what it is to exchange words about
            X or to exchange views about Y requires hard thought about what it
            is to exchange,period. How do we invest in what we give out, and
            how do we get it back? In kind, or differently moneyed? And, more
            crucial to the topic into which I am about to make a foolhardy
            plunge, is there such a thing as free exchange? And if so, what is
            it worth?
            How do we perceive worth anyway? What relation does such perception
            of the invisible system of the initially visible coinage of
            exchange bear to present visual perception, and then to seeing? And
            what does perception matter anyway, in relation to writing,
            reading, and exchanging words? Which is primary?
            All these questions in their institutional setting, or then
            in their freedom from context can themselves be related to
            and gathered up into the notion of translation, or the carrying
            over from one side to, and into, another. All we can learn about
            speaking and the ways it is taught, reading and the ways we learn
            it, seeing and the ways it teaches us is translated and transported
            from sight and its constraints and choices to language and its own.
            How we read both is itself a subject of choice and constraint, of
            freedom and explicit value-placing, of variety and fidelity to
            certain ends.
             
            Mary Ann Caws is professor of English, French, and comparative
            literature in the Graduate School, City University of New York. She
            is past president of the Modern Language Association and the author
            of, among other works, The Eye in the Text: Essays on Perception,
            Mannerist to Modern (1981), Architextures in Surrealism and After
            (1981), Reading Frames in Modern Fiction (1985), and Interferences
            (in progress).
Dorothy Mermin
         The Damsel, the Knight, and the Victorian Woman_Poet
         The association of poetry and femininity … excluded women poets.
            For the female figures onto whom the men projected their artistic
            selves Tennyson's Mariana and Lady of Shalott,
            Browning's Pippa and Balaustion, Arnold's Iseult of
            Brittany represent an intensification of only a part of the
            poet, not his full consciousness: a part, furthermore, which is
            defined as separate from and ignorant of the public world and the
            great range of human experience in society. Such figures could not
            write their own poems; the male poet, who stands outside the
            private world of art, has to do that for them. The Lady of Shalott
            could not imagine someone complex and experienced enough to imagine
            the world beyond range of her windows, or to imagine her. A woman
            poet who identified herself with such a stock figure of intense and
            isolated art would hardly be able to write at all. Or, like the
            Lady of Shalott preparing her death-ship, she could write only her
            own name, only herself. For a man, writing poetry meant an apparent
            withdrawal from the public sphere (although honor and fame might in
            time return him to it), but for a woman it meant just the opposite:
            a move toward public engagement and self-assertion in the masculine
            world. She could not just reverse the roles in her poetry and
            create a comparable male self-projection, since the male in this
            set of opposites is defined as experienced, complexly self-
            conscious, and part of the public world and therefore could not
            serve as a figure for the poet. (When Elizabeth Bishop makes the
            reversal in "The Gentleman of Shalott" the result is a
            very un-Victorian sort of comedy.) We can formulate the problem
            like this: a man's poem which contains a female self-
            projection shows to distinctly different figures, poet and
            projection; in a woman's poem on the same model, the two
            would blur into one.
            Furthermore, it's not really poets that are women, for the
            Victorians: poems are women. The cliché that style is the man
            arises more readily and with much greater literalness and force
            when the stylist is a woman, and it is often charged with erotic
            intensity. The young lovers in Gilbert and Sullivan's
            Iolanthe describe their perfect love by singing that he is the
            sculptor and she the clay, he the singer and she the song. Ladislaw
            in Middlemarch tells Dorothea that she needn't write poems
            because she isa poem. Edgar Allan Poe remarks in a review of
            Barrett Browning's works that "a woman and her book are
            identical." In her love letters Barrett Browning herself
            worried about the problem of her identity was she her poems,
            were they she, which was Browning in love with? "I love your
            verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett," he had written
            disconcertingly in his first letter, "… and I love you
            too." […] As we can see in Tennyson's The Princess, the
            lyric in particular seemed female to Victorians private,
            nonlogical, purely emotional and it is surely no accident
            that large numbers of English and American women began to publish
            poetry in the nineteenth century, when the lyric established its
            dominance. Victorian poems like Victorian women were expected to be
            morally and spiritually uplifting, to stay mostly in the private
            sphere, and to provide emotional stimulus and release for
            overtasked men of affairs.9 All this may have encouraged women to
            write poetry, but at the same time it made writing peculiarly
            difficult because it reinforced the aspects of conventional
            Victorian femininity narcissism, passivity, submission,
            silence most inimical to creative activity. Since women
            already are the objects they try to create, why should they write?
             
            9. John Woolford points this out in "EBB: Woman and
            Poet," Browning Society Notes9 (Dec. 1979): 4.
             
            Dorothy Merminis professor and chairman in the department of
            English at Cornell University. She is the author of The Audience in
            the Poem and is currently working on a critical study of Elizabeth
            Barrett Browning.
Robert P. Harrison
         The Italian Silence
         During the latter half of the thirteenth century there arose around
            Tuscany a strange and unprecedented poetry, erudite, abstract, and
            arrogantly intellectual. It sang beyond courtly conventions about
            the wonders of the rational universe whose complex secrets the new
            speculative sciences were eagerly systematizing. Appropriating the
            language of natural philosophy, Aristotelian psychology, and even
            theology, love poetry developed a new theoretical understanding of
            its enterprise which allowed it to redefine love as spiritualized
            search for knowledge. This intellectualization of erotic desire
            culminates in the Florentine sitlnovisti, a handful of learned
            poets who turned love poetry into an eclectic philosophical affair.
            Guido Cavalcanti's famous canzone "Donna me
            prega" was universally considered to be not only the
            technically most perfect canzone ever written but also a rigorous
            philosophical treatise. As much as in our own day, exegeses of the
            poem were forced into the arcana of Scholastic Aristotelianism in
            order to make sense of its abstract, psychologistic definition of
            love's essence. While Cavalcanti lyricized an Averroistic
            logic of the unified intellect, his younger friend Dante was
            preparing to put all of medieval philosophy, theology, and science
            into terza rima.It was in this terza rima that medieval Paris found
            perhaps its most felicitous expression, for the Divine
            Comedyrepresents, among other things, a creative transfiguration of
            the critical discourses Paris was diffusing throughout Europe.
            What recalls that situation today is the way Paris again marks the
            center of critical thought, while in Italiy a new generation of
            poets has emerged that translates the lessons of contemporary
            philosophy into poetry. In this essay I plan to discuss some of the
            most radical or, by analogy, "stilnovistic" of these
            lyricists. For purposes of convenience I will refer to them as the
            "favorite malice" poets. The phrase comes from the
            title of an anthology of select contemporary Italian poetry,
            recently published in a bilingual English edition: The Favorite
            Malice: Ontology and Reference in Contemporary Italian Poetry.2 The
            title alludes to a passage of Friedrich Nietzsche: "It is my
            favorite malice and art that my silence has learned not to betray
            itself through silence." These words from Thus Spoke
            Zarathrustra ("Upon the Mount of Olives") serves as the
            anthology's epigraphs and signal the peculiar poetics that
            brings the poets together in one volume. They are not brought
            together as a "school" but as a loose convergence of
            individual practices. The most illustrious name among the group is
            that of Andrea Zanzotto (born 1921), who belongs to an older
            generation but whom the other poets call their "youngest
            traveling companion." The "older" companions
            include Nanni Cagnone, Luigi Ballerini, Raffaele Perrotta, and
            Angelo Lumelli.
             
            Robert P. Harrison is assistant professor of Italian at Stanford
            University. He has published a book of poems, The Murano Workshop
            (1979), and articles on Dante, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and liberal
            philology. The Body of Beatriceis the title of his work in
            progress.
Jane Tompkins
         "Indians": Textualism, Morality, and the Problem of History
         This essay enacts a particular instance of the challenge post-
            structuralism poses to the study of history. In simpler, language,
            it concerns the difference that point of view makes when people are
            giving account of events, whether at first or second hand. The
            problem is that if all accounts of events are determined through
            and through by the observer's frame of reference, then one
            will never know, in any given case, what really happened.
            I encountered this problem in concrete terms while preparing to
            teach a course in colonial American literature. I'd set out
            to learn what I could about the Puritans' relations with
            American Indians. All I wanted was a general idea of what had
            happened between the English settlers and the natives in
            seventeenth-century New England; post-structuralism and its
            dilemmas were the furthest things from my mind. I began, more or
            less automatically, with Perry Miller, who hardly mentions the
            Indians at all, then proceeded to the work of historians who had
            dealt exclusively with the European-Indian encounter. At first, it
            was a question of deciding which of these authors to believe, for
            it quickly became apparent that there was no unanimity on the
            subject. As I read one, however, I discovered that the problem was
            more complicated than deciding whose version of events was correct.
            Some of the conflicting accounts were not simply contradictory,
            they were completely incommensurable, in that their assumptions
            about what counted as a valid approach to the subject, and what the
            subject itself was, diverged in fundamental ways. Faced with an
            array of mutually irreconcilable points of view, points of view
            which determined what was being discussed as well as the terms of
            the discussion, I decided to turn to primary sources for
            clarification, only to discover that the primary sources reproduced
            the problem all over again. I found myself, in other words, in an
            epistemological quandary, not only unable to decide among
            conflicting versions of events but also unable to believe that any
            such decision could, in principle, be made. It was a moral quandary
            as well. Knowledge of what really happened when the Europeans and
            the Indians first met seemed particularly important, since the
            result of that encounter was virtual genocide. This was the kind of
            past "mistake" which, presumably, we studied history in
            order to avoid repeating. If studying history couldn't put us
            in touch with actual events and their causes, then what was to
            prevent such atrocities from happening again?
             
            Jane Tompkinsis professor of English at Duke University. She is the
            author of Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American
            Fiction, 1790-1860 (1985) and editor of Reader-Response Criticism:
            From Formalism to Post-Structuralism (1980). Her current work
            concerns the construction of male identity in American popular
            culture.
Christopher L. Miller
         Theories of Africans: The Question of Literary Anthropology
         Literary criticism at the present moment seems ready to open its
            doors once again to the outside world, even if that world is only a
            series of other academic disciplines, each cloistered in its own
            way. For the reader of black African literature in French, the
            opening comes none too soon. The program for reading Camara Laye,
            Ahmadou Kourouma, and Yambo Ouologuem should never have been the
            program prescribed for Rousseau, Wordsworth, or Blanchot. If one is
            willing to read a literature that might not be a rewriting  of
            Hegel (or even of Kant), and if the negative knowledge of recent
            theoretical criticism is questioned in the universality of its
            applications, then what is really open to a Western reader of non-
            Western literature? Claiming a break with his/her own culture and
            critical upbringing, can he/she the Other, the African, as if from
            an authentically African point of view, interpreting Africa in
            African terms, perceiving rather than projecting?
            The goal of breaking through the nets of Western criticism, of
            reading African literature in a nonethnocentric, nonprojective
            fashion, will remain both indisputably desirable and ultimately
            unattainable. No matter how many languages I learn or ethnologies I
            study, I cannot make myself into an African. The Western
            scholar's claim to mastery of things African, albeit
            motivated by xenophilia rather than xenophobia, risks subjugation
            of the object to a new set of Western models. J. P. Makouta-
            M'Boukou rightly scolds Western critics who refuse to take
            into account the distance between themselves and African culture,
            and who read African literature only in function of their own
            cultural context.1 Wole Soyinka, more forbiddingly, complains:
            "We black Africans have been blandly invited to submit
            ourselves to a second epoch of colonisation this time by a
            universal-humanoid abstraction defined and conducted by individuals
            whose theories and prescriptions are derived from the apprehension
            of their world and their history, their social neuroses and
            theirvalue systems."2
             
            1. See J. P. Makouta-M'Boukou, Introduction à l'étude
            du roman négro-africain de langue française(Abidjan, Ivory Coast,
            1980), p. 9.
            2. Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature, and the African World
            (Cambridge, 1976), p. x.
             
            Christopher L. Miller,Charles B. G. Murphy Assistant Professor of
            French and of African and Afro-American Studies at Yale University,
            is author of Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French (1985).
            He is working at present on a study of francophone black African
            literature, for which he will have a Fulbright Africa Research
            grant.
Anne McClintock and Rob Nixon
         No Names Apart: The Separation of Word and_History_in_Derrida's_"Le
            Dernier Mot du Racisme"
         As it stands, Derrida's protest is deficient in any sense of
            how the discourses of South African racism have been at once
            historically constituted and politically constitutive. For to begin
            to investigate how the representation of racial difference has
            functioned in South Africa's political and economic life, it
            is necessary to recognize and track the shifting character of these
            discourses. Derrida, however, blurs historical differences by
            conferring on the single term apartheid a spurious autonomy and
            agency: "The word concentrates separation…. By isolating
            being apart in some sort of essence or hypostasis, the word
            corrupts it into a quasi-ontological segregation" (p. 292).
            Is it indeed the word, apartheid, or is it Derrida himself,
            operating here in "another regime of abstraction" (p.
            292), removing the word from its place in the discourse of South
            African racism, raising it to another power, and setting separation
            itself apart? Derrida is repelled by the word, yet seduced by its
            divisiveness, the division in the inner structure of the term
            itself which he elevates to a state of being.
            The essay's opening analysis of the word apartheid is, then,
            symptomatic of a severance of word from history. When Derrida asks,
            "Hasn't apartheid always been the archival record of
            the unnameable?" (p. 291), the answer is a straightforward
            no. Despite its notoriety and currency overseas, the term
            apartheidhas not always been the "watchword" of the
            Nationalist regime. (p. 291). It has its own history, and that
            history is closely entwined with a developing ideology of race
            which has not only been created to deliberately rationalize and
            temper South Africa's image at home and abroad, but can also
            be seen to be intimately allied to different stages of the
            country's political and economic development. Because he
            views apartheid as a "unique appellation" (p. 291),
            Derrida has little to say about the politically persuasive function
            that successive racist lexicons have served in South Africa. To
            face the challenge of investigating the strategic role of
            representation, one would have to part ways with him by releasing
            that pariah of a word, apartheid,from its quarantine from
            historical process, examining it instead in the context of
            developing discourses of racial difference.
             
            Anne McClintock is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Columbia
            University. She is working on a dissertation on race and gender in
            British imperial culture and is the author of a monograph on Simon
            de Beauvoir. Rob Nixon,in the same program at Columbia, is working
            on the topic of exile and Third World-metropolitan relations in the
            writing of V. S. and Shiva Naipaul.
Jacques Derrida
         But, beyond ... (Open Letter to Anne McClintock_and_Rob_Nixon)
         Reading you, I very quickly realized that you had no serious
            objections to make to me, as I will try to demonstrate in a moment.
            So I began to have the following suspicion: what if you had only
            pretended to find something to reproach me with in order to prolong
            the experience over several issues of this distinguished journal?
            That way, the three of us could fill the space of another twenty or
            so pages. My suspicion arose since you obviously agree with me on
            this one point, at least: apartheid,the more it's talked
            about, the better.
            But who will do the talking? And how? These are the questions.
            Because talking about it is not enough. On such a grave subject,
            one must be serious and not say just anything. Well, you, alas, are
            not always as serious as the tone of your paper might lead one to
            think. In your impatient desire to dispense a history lesson, you
            sometimes say just anything. The effect you produce is quite
            determined, but in order to arrive at it, you are willing to put
            forward any kind of countertruth, especially when, in your haste to
            object,you projectinto my text whatever will make your job easier.
            This is a very familiar scenario, as I will try to demonstrate as
            briefly as possible.
             
            Jacques Derrida,Directeur d'Etudes at the Ecole des Hautes
            Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, is the author of, among other
            works, Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, Margins of
            Philosophy,and Dissemination. His most recent contribution to
            ,"Racism's Last Word," appeared
            in the Autumn 1985 issue. Peggy Kamuf teaches French at Miami
            University, Ohio. She is the authorFictions of Feminine Desire.
Tzvetan Todorov
         "Race," Writing, and Culture
         "Racism" is the name given to a type of behavior which
            consists in the display of contempt or aggressiveness toward other
            people on account of physical differences (other than those of sex)
            between them and oneself. It should be noted that this definition
            does not contain the word "race," and this observation
            leads us to the first surprise in this area which contains many:
            whereas racism is a well-attested social phenomenon,
            "race" itself does not exist! Or, to put it more
            clearly: there are a great number of physical differences among
            human groups, but these differences cannot be superimposed; we
            obtain completely divergent subdivisions of the human species
            according to whether we base our description of the
            "races" on an analysis of their epidermis or their
            blood types, their genetic heritages or their bone structures. For
            contemporary biology, the concept of "race" is
            therefore useless. This fact has no influence, however, on racist
            behavior: to justify their contempt or aggressiveness, racists
            invoke not scientific analyses but the most superficial and
            striking of physical characteristics (which, unlike
            "races," do exist) namely, differences in skin
            color, pilosity, and body structure.
            Thus, it is with good cause that the word "race" was
            placed in quotes in the title of this issue: "races" do
            not exist. I am less sure, however, that all the contributors
            managed to avoid postulating the existence, behind this word as
            behind most words, of a thing. In his introduction Gates remarks
            that "race, in these usages, pretends to be an objective term
            of classification, when in fact it is a dangerous trope," and
            he goes on to describe as follows the goal of the special issue:
            "to deconstruct, if you will, the ideas of difference
            inscribed in the trope of race, to explicate discourse itself in
            order to reveal the hidden relations of power and knowledge
            inherent in popular and academic usages of &lsquo;race'
            " ("Writing &lsquo;Race' and the Difference It
            Makes," pp. 5, 6). Up to a point, I agree with him, even if I
            cannot help pointing out (cultural difference oblige) the insistent
            allusions to certain contemporary critical theories
            ("deconstruct" and "difference,"
            "power" and "knowledge") allusions
            which furnish proof that the author of these lines possesses a
            particular knowledge and thereby sets up a particular power
            relationship between himself and the reader. This, however, is not
            the problem. The problem arises on page 15, when the same author
            declares, "We must, I believe, analyze the ways in which
            writing relates to race, how attitudes toward racial differences
            generate and structure literary texts by us and about us."
            What bothers me about this sentence is not so much that
            "generate" and "structure" allude to yet
            another critical theory as that its author seems to be reinstating
            what he himself referred to as the "dangerous trope" of
            "race": if "racial differences" do not
            exist, how can they possibly influence literary texts?
             
            Tzvetan Todorov works at the Centre National de la Recherche
            Scientifique in Paris. His most recent book in translation is The
            Conquest of America (1984). Criticism of Criticism is forthcoming.
            Loulou Mack is a free-lance writer and translator living in Paris.
Houston A. Baker, Jr.
         Caliban's Triple Play
         One legacy of post-Enlightenment dualism in the universe of
            academic discourse is the presence of two approached to notions of
            duality championed by two differing camps. One camp might
            arbitrarily be called debunkers; the other might be labeled
            rationalists. The strategies of the camps are conditioned by
            traditional notions of inside and outside. Debunkers consider
            themselves outsiders, beyond a deceptive show filled with tricky
            mirrors. Rationalists, by contrast, spend a great deal of time
            among mirrors, listening to explanations from the overseers,
            attempting to absorb sideshow language, hoping to provide
            acceptable analytical accounts. If debunkers are intent on
            discovering generative and, presumably, hidden ideological
            inscriptions of a given discourse its situation on what Amiri
            Baraka calls the "real side" of economic exchange and
            world exploitative power rationalists are concerned to study
            discursive products, to decode or explain them according to forms
            and formulas that claim to avoid general views or judgments of
            ideology. Differentiating the camps also is what might be called a
            thermal gradient: the heat of the debunker's passion is
            palpable. It is unnecessary to command him, in the manner of the
            invisible man's tormentor, to "Get hot, boy! Get
            hot!" Rationalists, by contrast, do not radiate. They appear
            to have nothing personal at stake and remain coolly instructive and
            intelligently unflappable in their analyses.
            This tale of an Enlightenment legacy, as I have told it, contrasts
            a debunking body and rationalist soul. As I have suggested in my
            opening sentence, however, what is at issue is not so much two
            actual and substantially distinctive camps as two metonyms for dual
            approaches to a common subject namely, notions of duality. My
            claim is that the Enlightenment reflexivity of academic discourse,
            devoted to, say, "the Other" and conceived in dualistic
            terms of self-and-other, expresses itself as an opposition. Thos
            whom I have called debunkers gladly accept the Other's
            sovereignty as a bodily and aboriginal donnée; rationalists work to
            discover the dynamics of "othering" engaged in by a
            self-indulgent Western soul. The difficulty of producing usefully
            analytical or political results for either camp is occasioned by
            their joint situation within a post-Enlightenment field (indeed,
            one might say, after the manner of deconstruction, a field full of
            Western metaphysical folk).
             
            Houston A. Baker, Jr. is the Albert M. Greenfield Professor of
            Human Relations at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a poet
            whose recent volume Blues Journeys Home appeared in 1985. He is
            also the author of a number of studies of Afro-American literature
            and culture, including the forthcoming Modernism and the Harlem
            Renaissance.
Harold Fromm
         The Hegemonic Form of Othering; or, The Academic's_Burden
         I knew I was in for trouble, that the going would be rough, when I
            removed the wrapper from the "Race," Writing, and
            Difference issue of  and observed the word
            "race" in quotation marks. Something deep was clearly
            brewing. And any doubts were quickly removed when I turned to the
            opening remarks of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. "Who," he
            asked me, "has seen a black or a red person, a white yellow,
            or brown?" ("Writing &lsquo;Race' and the
            Difference It Makes," p. 6). There was a question that
            spelled trouble, a glove in the face if I ever saw one. Here I was,
            crude, unregenerate, lacking the hypersensitivity that prevents
            someone like Gates from making such infra dig distinctions; here I
            was, daring to use words without quotation marks, actually
            believing that I referred to something identifiable when I spoke of
            black people, Americans, musicians, and whatnot, and being told
            that it was all just my own narcissistic and preemptive fantasy.
            Here I was, faced with the impossible choice of keeping permanently
            quiet or of perpetuating ruthless violence of denying the
            individuality of all of God's creation not only by
            referring to knives, cats, my brother, or Indians, but simply by
            referring at all. But why, I wondered, was only the word
            "race" in quotation marks? Why not every single word in
            the entire issue of ? For to refer, it seems, is to
            colonize, to take things over for one's own brutal use, to
            turn everything else into a mere Other. There was Gates engaging in
            the academic's favorite pastime, épater les bourgeois, and
            here was I, a hopeless bourgeois, just asking for a put-down.
             
            Harold Fromm is an independent scholar who has taught for many
            years in university English departments. He has published articles
            on Leonard and Virginia Woolf as well as on literary theory,
            politics, and professionalism. His most recent work concerns the
            Brontës.
Mary Louise Pratt
         A Reply to Harold Fromm
         Though I doubt it has put a Rolls Royce in anybody's garage,
            the criticism industry is a reality not to be overlooked. Academics
            have a responsibility to stay self-aware and self-critical about
            their own and their profession's interests. All academic
            activity has a careerist dimension, but it obviously cannot be
            explained by that dimension alone, and in this sense Fromm's
            point is simply reductive. But of course it is not all academic
            activity that Fromm is objecting to, only some and notably mine.
            The image of academic colonization suggests one has stepped beyond
            some legitimate borders and laid claim to territory rightfully
            inhabited by others. Whose world was invaded by my essay, or by the
            "Race," Writing, and Difference issue in general? Mr.
            Fromm's, evidently. Fromm wants a world where words stand
            still and refer, and don't get changed. In particular, to use
            his own examples, he wants a world where blacks are blacks, whites
            are whites, Americans are Americans, knives are knives, brothers
            are brothers, and Indians are Indians (Is it the wild west? or
            maybe just Chicago).
             
            Mary Louise Prattis an associate professor in the Department of
            Spanish and Portuguese and the Program in Comparative Literature at
            Stanford University. She is the author of Toward a Speech-Act
            Theory of Literary Discourse.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
         Talkin' That Talk
         Our decision to bracket "race" was designed to call
            attention to the fact that "races," put simply, do not
            exist, and that to claim that they do, for whatever misguided
            reason, is to stand on dangerous ground. Fromm understands this all
            too well, it seems, judging from the satirical tone of his
            response. Were there not countries in which the belief in racial
            essences dictates social and political policy, perhaps I would have
            found Fromm's essay amusing and our gesture merely one more
            token of the academic's tendency to create distinctions which
            common sense alone renders unnecessary. The joke, rather, is on
            Fromm: one's task is most certainly not to remain
            "permanently quiet"; rather, our task is to utilize
            language more precisely, to rid ourselves of the dangers of
            careless usages of problematic terms which are drawn upon to
            delimit and predetermine the lives and choices of human beings who
            are not "white." Fromm's response only reinforces
            Todorov's worry about not bracketing "race" every
            time it occurs in our texts, because "race" (as each
            essay subtly shows) simply does not exist.
             
            Henry Louis Gates, Jr.is professor of English, comparative
            literature, and African studies at Cornell University. He has
            edited several books and has written Figures in Black and The
            Signifying Monkey.
