Peter Brooks
         Storied Bodies, or Nana at Last Unveil'd
         A major preoccupation of that novel [Zola's Nana] is the
            undressing of the courtesan Nana. One could even say that a major
            dynamic of the novel is stripping Nana, and stripping away at her,
            making per progressively expose the secrets of this golden body
            that has Paris in thrall. The first chapter of the novel provides,
            quite literally, a mise-en-scène for Nana's body, in the
            operetta La Blonde Vénus.When she comes on stage in the third act,
            a shiver passes over the audience, for, we are told, she is nude.
            Yet, we quickly discover, not quite nude: she is covered by a filmy
            shift under which her splendid body lets itself be glimpsed: se
            devinait."It was Venus born from the waves, having only her
            hair as a veil."2 The denuding of nana progresses in chapter
            5 when Comte Muffat and the Prince make their way backstage to her
            dressing room (her undressing room). They surprise her naked to the
            waist, and she then covers herself with a bodice, which only half
            hides her breasts. Despite the repeated references to nana as nude,
            it is only in chapter 7, at the very midpoint of the novel, that
            Nana is finally completely naked. In this scene, she undresses
            before her mirror while Comte Muffat watches, especially looking at
            her looking at herself. Thus she is fully unveiled, frontally in
            the mirror, and from the backside in Muffat's direct view.
            And yet, as we shall see in a moment, even the completely naked
            woman's body bears a troubling veil.
             
            2. Émile Zola, Nana (Paris, 1977), p. 47; hereafter abbreviated N.I
            wish to thank Helen Chillman, Librarian of the Slides and
            Photography Collection, Art and Architecture Library, Yale
            University, for her help in assembling the illustrations
            accompanying this essay.
             
            Peter Brooks is Tripp Professor of Humanities and Director of the
            Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University. The author of The
            Melodramatic Imagination (1976) and Reading for the Plot (1984), he
            is currently working on a study of narrative and the body,
            tentatively called "Storied Bodies."
Jay Clayton
         Narrative and Theories of Desire
         The hope of moving beyond formalism is one of two things that
            unites an otherwise diverse group of literary theorists who have
            begun to explore the role of desire in narrative. Peter Brooks, for
            example, in Reading for the Plot,says in more than one place that
            his interest in desire "derives from my dissatisfaction with
            the various formalisms that have dominated critical thinking about
            narrative."3 Leo Bersani sees desire as establishing a
            crucial link between social and literary structures. Teresa de
            Lauretis faults structuralist models for their inability to
            disclose the ways in which narrative operates, through the desire
            it excites and fulfills, to construct the social world as a system
            of sexual differences. Other names could be added, both within and
            outside the field of narrative theory Nancy Armstrong, Roland
            Barthes, Georges Bataille, Jessica Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze and
            Félix Guattari, René Girard, Luce Irigaray, Fredric Jameson, Peggy
            Kamuf, Linda Kauffman, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Jean
            Laplance, Catharine A. McKinnon, and Eve Kosofsky
            Sedgwick for desire has become one of the master tropes of
            contemporary criticism.
             
            3. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in
            Narrative (New York, 1984), p. 47; hereafter abbreviated RP.
            4. Leo, Bersani, A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in
            Literature (Boston, 1976), p. 13; hereafter abbreviated FA.
            5. Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, The Forms of Violence: Narrative in
            Assyrian Art and Modern Culture (New York, 1985), p. v; hereafter
            abbreviated FV.Although Bersani coauthored this book with Dutoit,
            for convenience I refer to it by Bersani's name alone. This
            practice is justified by two considerations: first, most of the
            arguments about narrative, violence, and desire are elaborations of
            positions that Bersani has taken in earlier works; second, passages
            and examples in the sections with which I shall be dealing (chiefly
            those on narrative and psychoanalysis) are reprinted with only
            minor changes from an article that Bersani published under his own
            name.
             
            Jay Clayton,associate professor of English at Vanderbilt
            University, is the author of Romantic Vision and the Novel (1987)
            and coeditor of Contemporary Literature and Contemporary Theory
            (forthcoming). He is currently completing a study of contemporary
            American literature and theory, Narrative Power.
Linda Seidel
         "Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait": Business as Usual?
         This essay had its beginnings in my desire to reexamine the
            Arnolfini portrait from the perspective of Giovanna Cenami, the
            demure young woman who stands beside the cloaked and hated man on
            the fifteenth-century panel in London. Even though she shares the
            formal prominence with the man in Jan van Eyck's
            unprecedented composition, she has been paid scant attention in the
            literature on the painting. I anticipated, as I began my work that
            inspection of the female subject of the panel would, of necessity,
            amend the authoritative count of the Arnolfini portrait that
            Panofsky first published in 1934. That narrative, which focused on
            the event portrayed, had been recited to me by my teachers as an
            example of interpretive truth; I had committed it to memory as a
            model of our discipline's search for meaning. I never dreamed
            back then that it might be "wrong." Yet, the material I
            encountered as I pursued my inquiry into Giovanna's life
            contradicted Panofsky's assumptions on several key points;
            amendment alone would not do. It seemed necessary for me to
            challenge the venerable interpretation others were starting to
            question,4 even though two generations of students, including my
            own, had learned from it all they thought there was to know about
            "Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait."
             
            4. See, for example, Peter H. Schabacker, "De Matrimonio ad
            Morganaticam Conracto:Jan van Eyck's &lsquo;Arnolfini'
            Portrait Reconsidered," Art Quarterly35 (Winter 1972): 375-
            98, hereafter abbreviated "DM"; Lucy Freeman Sandler,
            "The Handclasp in the Arnolfini Wedding:A Manuscript
            Precedent," Art Bulletin 66 (Sept. 1984): 488-91, hereafter
            abbreviated "H"; and Jan Baptist Bedaux, "The
            Reality of Symbols: The Question of Disguised Symbolism in Jan van
            Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait," Simiolus16 (1986): 5-28,
            hereafter abbreviated "RS."
             
            Linda Seidel,associate professor in the department of art at the
            University of Chicago, is the author of Songs of Glory (1981), a
            study of twelfth-century French architectural sculpture. She is
            currently completing a work on medieval doorway design as an art of
            entry and pursuing a collaborative project with Michael Camille and
            Robert Nelson, Medieval Art and Its Audiences.
Richard Moran
         Seeing and Believing: Metaphor, Image, and Force
         One way in which the characteristic gestures of philosophy and
            criticism differ from each other lies in their involvements with
            disillusionment, with the undoing of our naivete, especially
            regarding what we take ourselves to know about the meaning of what
            we say. Philosophy will often find less than we thought was there,
            perhaps nothing at all, in what we say about the
            "external" world, or in our judgments of value, or in
            our ordinary psychological talk. The work of criticism, on the
            other hand, frequently disillusions by finding disturbingly more in
            what is said than we precritically thought was there. In our
            relation to the meaningfulness of what we say, there is a
            disillusionment of plentitude as well as of emptiness. And no doubt
            what is "less" for one discipline may be
            "more" of what someone else is looking for.
            In recent years, metaphor has attracted more than its share of both
            philosophical and critical attention, including philosophical
            denials of the obvious, as well as critical challenges to the
            obviousness of the ways we talk about metaphor. In this paper I
            discuss a problem of each sort and suggest a complex of relations
            between them. The particular denial of the obvious that I'm
            interested in is the claim recently made by Donald Davidson that
            "a metaphor doesn't say anything beyond its literal
            meaning (nor does its maker say anything, in using the metaphor,
            beyond the literal)," nor is it even correct to speak of
            metaphor as a form of communication.1 There's disillusionment
            with a vengeance; and even if not strictly believable, it is still
            not without its therapeutic value, as we shall see.
             
            1. Donald Davidson, "What Metaphors Mean," in On
            Metaphor,ed. Sheldon Sacks (Chicago, 1979), p. 30; hereafter
            abbreviated "WMM." Davidson's view has found
            supporters among both philosophers and literary theorists. It is,
            for example, important to the early argument of Richard
            Rorty's recent book. See his Contingency, Irony, and
            Solidarity(Cambridge, 1989), p. 18.
             
            Richard Moran is an assistant professor of philosophy at Princeton
            University. He is currently working on a book on subjectivity and
            contemporary concepts of personhood.
Michael Ragussis
         Representation, Conversion, and Literary Form: "Harrington" and the
            Novel of Jewish Identity
         It was [Maria] Edgeworth's deeply personal motive in writing
            Harrington that made possible the special self-reflexive quality
            that informs her novel. In the act of reviewing her role as a
            reader and a writer of anti-Semitic portraits, she was able to
            recognize a tradition of discourse she had at once inherited and
            perpetuated. And only by recognizing such a tradition was she able
            both to subvert it in Harrington and to articulate for future
            writers the way to move beyond it. In short, she boldly turned her
            personal self-examination into a cultural critique: she diagnosed a
            disorder in "the imaginations of the good people of
            England,"4 and in so doing she issued a challenge and founded
            a new tradition. In Harrington Edgeworth inquires into the trials
            that the English imagination must undergo if it is to exorcise the
            powerful figure of Shylock, and thereby issues a challenge taken up
            in subsequent novels (including Ivanhoe, Our Mutual Friend, Daniel
            Deronda, and Ulysses): the tradition I am designating "the
            novel of Jewish Identity" attempts to articulate,
            investigate, and subvert The Merchant of Venice'sfunction as
            the English master text for representing "the Jew."
             
            Maria Edgeworth, Harrington,vol. 9 of Tales and Novels (New York,
            1967), p. 148; hereafter cited by page number.
             
            Michael Ragussis,professor of English at Georgetown University, is
            the author of The Subterfuge of Art: Language and the Romantic
            Tradition (1978) and Acts of Naming: The Family Plot in Fiction
            (1986). He is currently working on a book-length study entitled
            "Figures of Conversion: Jewish Identity and British
            Fiction."
Margaret Olin
         Validation by Touch in Kandinsky's Early Abstract Art
         Some recent artists and critics have taken it upon themselves to
            demystify the notion of stylistic unity. Their task has included
            the historical reconception of a few "modernist"
            artists along "postmodern" lines, usually as precursors
            of current semiotic strategies.11 These artists may have used a set
            of incompatible styles to expose the artificiality of competing
            stylistic conventions, or even to challenge the myth that
            celebrates the authenticity of artistic expressiveness. Pablo
            Picasso and Marcel Duchamp, otherwise very different artists, have
            both been seen as having "deconstructed" the concept of
            authenticity by problematizing basic means of artistic reference.12
            But the desire to challenge conventions must not be misconstrued as
            an enduring element of an iconoclastic artist's personality.
            Otherwise, the characterization is merely an updated version of the
            traditional argument for authorial unity.
             
            11. The terms "modern" and "postmodern" are
            used in a variety of ways in contemporary criticism. Here,
            "modern" refers to nineteenth- and twentieth-century
            artists who embrace the notion of originality, and
            "postmodern" to those who would attack the notion by
            exposing the conventionality at its center. Although some critics
            who profess "modernism" do not mention
            "originality" by name, most subscribe to it in some
            form, often with the originality and self-sufficiency of the artist
            transposed to that of the work. This is especially true of the
            criticism of Clement Greenburg and Michael Fried.
            12. Rosalind Krauss rightly uses the semiotic complications of
            Picasso's art to object to autobiographical interpretations
            of his work. In the course of the argument, she refers to
            Picasso's semiotics as part of the "proto-
            history" of postmodernist art. See Krauss, "In the Name
            of Picasso," The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other
            Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), pp. 38-39. Arguments for
            Duchamp's protopostmodernism are much more common. For one
            example, see Krauss, "Notes on the Index: Part 1," The
            Originality of the Avant-Garde,pp. 196-209.
             
            Margaret Olin is an assistant professor in the department of art
            history and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of
            Chicago. She is presently writing a book on the theories of Alois
            Riegl.
Daniel Cottom
         Purity
         Once an artist imagined how he would look if he plucked out an
            offending eye. He painted a self-portrait in which the orbit on the
            right side of his face was gaping, dolorous. Seven years passed,
            and then there came a day when the artist tried to break up a fight
            among his friends. In the ensuing melee he lost his left
            eye the one he must have painted out all those years before,
            when working on the self-portrait, if he based his image on the
            sight of himself in a mirror. Mirrors, of course, reverse the
            images before them.
            If we could forget niggling qualifications, epistemological hedges,
            all the huffing and puffing of the sense of responsibility that
            distinguishes intellectuals from assassins, then this story might
            be frightening, uncanny. As it is, I suspect most of my readers
            would find it terrible only in the derogatory sense. Although it
            has a certain primitive simplicity, it seems facile, as if it might
            have served for one of the weaker episodes in Walter Scott's
            Waverley novels or Rod Serling's "Twilight Zone."
            Even if it were presented by a master of simple plots, I can
            imagine it succeeding only as an occasion for metaphysical
            conjectures, glistening thorns and blossoms of irony, and the like.
            (Play around with the comparison to Picture of Dorian Gray,sure,
            and throw in a reference to E. T. A. Hoffmann, do a turn on Lewis
            Carroll, or tell us one more time about the sly ruses of
            representation, if you must none of this will make the story
            moving.) And even if I were to say that this is a true story, that
            Victor Brauner painted this Autoportraitin 1931 and suffered this
            injury in 1938, it seems unlikely that it would be more affecting.
            How could such a corny plot raise a shiver from anyone past the age
            of reason? If this story is true, so much the worse for truth. It
            ought to know better than to seek us out with such shopworn
            devices.
             
            Daniel Cottom is a professor in the English department at the
            University of Florida. His most recent book is Text and Culture:
            The Politics of Interpretation (1989). He is currently completing a
            book on spiritualism and surrealism.
