Showing papers in "Critical Inquiry in 1979"

How Metaphors Work: A Reply to Donald Davidson

Abstract: 1.-Perplexities about metaphors.1 To be able to produce and understand metaphorical statements is nothing much to boast about: these familiar skills, which children seem to acquire as they learn to talk, are perhaps no more remarkable than our ability to tell and to understand jokes. How odd then that it remains difficult to explain what we do (and should do) in grasping metaphorical statements. In a provocative paper, "What Metaphors Mean,"2 Donald Davidson has recently charged many students of metaphor, ancient and modern, with having committed a "central mistake." According to him, there is "error and confusion" in claiming "that a metaphor has, in addition to its literal sense or meaning, another sense or meaning." The guilty include "literary critics like Richards, Empson, and Winters; philosophers from Aristotle to Max Black; psychologists from Freud and earlier to Skinner and later; and linguists from Plato to Uriel Weinreich and George Lakoff." Good company, if somewhat mixed. The error to be extirpated is the "idea that a metaphor has a special meaning" (p. 32). If Davidson is right, much that has been written about metaphor might well be consigned to the flames. Even if he proves to be wrong, his animadversions should provoke further consideration of the still problematic modus operandi of metaphor.

Metaphor as Moonlighting

Abstract: l.-The Metaphor symposium [Critical Inquiry (Autumn 1978)] is evidence of a growing sense that metaphor is both important and odd-its importance odd and its oddity important-and that its place in a general theory of language and knowledge needs study. Metaphorical use of language differs in significant ways from literal use but is no less comprehensible, no more recondite, no less practical, and no more independent of truth and falsity than is literal use. Far from being a mere matter of ornament, it participates fully in the progress of knowledge: in replacing some stale "natural" kinds with novel and illuminating categories, in contriving facts, in revising theory, and in bringing us new worlds. The oddity is that metaphorical truth is compatible with literal falsity;1 a sentence false when taken literally may be true when taken metaphorically, as in the case of "The joint is jumping" or "The lake is a sapphire". The oddity vanishes upon recognition that a metaphorical application of a term is normally quite different from the literal application. Applied literally, the noun "sapphire" sorts out various things including a certain gem but no lake; applied metaphorically (in the way here in

On the Nature of Moral Values

Abstract: Imagine a dog idling in the foreground, a tree in the middle distance, and a turnip lying on the ground behind the tree. Either of two hypotheses, or a combination of them, may be advanced to explain the dog’s inaction with respect to the turnip: perhaps he is not aware that it is there, and perhaps he does not want a turnip. Such is the bipartite nature of motivation: belief and valuation intertwined. It is the deep old duality of thought and feeling, of the head and the heart, the cortex and the thalamus, the words and the music.

The Inwardness of Mental Life

Abstract: My text is taken from the twenty-third chapter of the first volume of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, beginning at the second paragraph. Laurence Sterne is here tilting at academic theories about the workings of the human mind--chiefly, those of John Locke and David Hartleyand he focuses particularly on theories about the interiority of our mental experience. Take those views with proper, real life seriousness, he implies, and the consequences will be matter for fantasy. To underline the point, he gives his own fantasy free rein: "I have a strong propensity in me," he says, "to begin this chapter very nonsensically, and I will not baulk my fancy." One further gloss before citing the passage: in classical antiquity, the personification of faultfinding, mockery, and ridicule was the god Momus; and the glass of Momus to which Sterne refers was an imagined window placed in the human breast so that "secret thoughts and feelings" would stand clearly revealed. I have trimmed away Sterne's more baroque asides:

Shakespeare and the Kinds of Drama

Abstract: When Johnson, citing the authority of Thomas Rymer, asserted that Shakespeare's natural disposition was for comedy, not tragedy, he was assuming that there were only two genres of drama-comedy and tragedy. The assumption was made apparently without strain and without any sense that its categories imposed undue limitations on the practice of either drama or criticism. Shakespeare was allowed to violate the rules, exculpated by his ignorance of them, and was praised for his fidelity to nature. "Shakespeare's plays are not, in the rigorous or critical sense, either tragedies or comedies, but compositions of a distinct kind; exhibiting the real state of sublunary nature, which partakes of good and evil, joy and sorrow... in which, at the same time, the reveller is hasting to his wine, and the mourner burying his friend."' If we look closely at Johnson's "distinct kind," we shall see that it is not a new genre but a mixture of the two old ones: the kinds remain comedy and tragedy. For Diderot, however, writing at the same time (though for a culture that admittedly had always taken its categories more seriously than the British), there was more to life, even to dramatic and critical life, than comedy and tragedy. Diderot therefore proposed a third genre, a serious bourgeois drama of a sort that could not be described within the limits of either of the traditional kinds.2 In doing this, Diderot assumed that he was doing something new and that the old forms could not

The Labors of Psyche: Toward a Theory of Female Heroism

Abstract: The heroic age seems always to be past, and yet, whatever time we live in, we seem always to need heroes: figures who attract and capture our imaginations, whose thoughts and actions cut new channels, whose lives matter because they occupy new territory or suggest alternatives to the cramped dailiness of ordinary existence. The hero, in this view, is not so much a god, a warrior, or giant as a human being living at the furthest extreme of the possible. Since in reality no one could live perpetually in such extremity-unswerving, unpausing, unrelenting-the heroic character-even when the hero is a supposedly "historical" figure-is always an invention, a patterned fictionalizing and heightening of the mundane, the result of a collaboration, entered into for the sake of human progress, between the hero's self and some surrounding social group or audience. Born when society is stuck, when it has defined some aspect of the quotidian as problematic or suddenly charged with significance, the hero is a necessary figure when customary responses to such situations are irrelevant or impotent, when whatever seems rational seems also inappropriate. An honored figure, the hero is also an ambiguous one, acting on behalf of impulses society must recognize but would prefer to ignore, society's agent but also its hostage. The makers of a new cosmogony are, conservatively speaking, heretics. Greatness may be seen as but another name for villainy. Those who hear voices or march to the music of a different drummer may as easily be perceived as witches or lunatics as saints, saviors, or even sane. The ambiguity which surrounds this figure is in direct proportion to the ambivalence of society about the need to

The Masculine Mode

Abstract: "If we insist on discovering something we can clearly label as a 'feminine mode,' then we are honor-bound, also, to delineate its counterpart, the 'masculine mode.' " This statement by Annette Kolodny does not affirm that such a counterpart exists;' Kolodny instead is making a point about the difficulty of determining common traits of writing by women. To suggest a similar assessment of writing by men is to remind us that the rich variety of writing by either sex resists any attempt at limiting its nature by sexual characteristics alone. Yet in the remainder of her essay, Kolodny investigates certain traits of perception and style which, if not definitive of writing by women, are recurrently found in it; and she argues convincingly for the value of such investigations. Why, then, shouldn't there be a similar value in investigating the possible nature of a masculine mode? With us already is the social context out of which such an investigation would naturally arise; and it is similar to that which saw the rise of women's studies about ten years ago. As a men's movement begins to evolve, an increasing number of books are being published which analyze the nature of masculinity; magazines and newsletters proliferate; conferences are organized.2 Like the wom-

On Makavejev on Bergman

Abstract: In our times, from the highest class of society down to the lowest, every one lives as under the eye of a hostile and dreaded censorship. Not only in what concerns others, but in what concerns themselves, the individual, or the family, do not ask themselves-what do I prefer? or, what would suit my character and disposition? or, what would allow the best and highest in me to have fair play, and enable it to grow and thrive? They ask themselves, what is suitable to my position? what is usually done by persons of my station and pecuniary circumstances? or (worse still) what is usually done by persons of a station and circumstances superior to mine? I do not mean that they choose what is customary, in preference to what suits their inclination. It does not occur to them to have any inclination, except for what is customary. Thus the mind itself is bowed to the yoke: even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing thought of; they like in crowds; they exercise choice only among things commonly done: peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct, are shunned equally with crimes: until by dint of not following their own nature, they have no nature to follow: their human capacities are withered and starved: they become incapable of any strong wishes or native pleasures, and are generally without either opinions or feelings of home growth, or properly their own. Now is this, or is it not, the desirable condition of human nature? -JOHN STUART MILL, On Liberty

But That Was in Another Ball Park: A Reply to Stanley Fish

Abstract: Stanley Fish's essay, "Normal Circumstances . . .and Other Special Cases" (Critical Inquiry 4 [Summer 1978]: 625-44), is so agile and compelling that it may seem unduly quarrelsome to raise questions about it. But it presents a picture of the way we understand both events and texts that one would not, I presume, want to accept unless there were no conceivable escape. The essay suggests that literary texts and what they contain change; that two readers with different "interpretive assumptions" do not, indeed cannot, read the same text even if they are reading things called, say, Samson Agonistes, consisting of the same words in the same order; that meaning results from the interplay of our "verbal and mental categories" and "situations" alone and is not constrained by the language used; that there is no difference between direct and indirect speech acts; that the illocutionary force of any utterance is determined entirely by the context in which it is uttered.

The Bright Chimera: Character as a Literary Term

Abstract: ion. "They had nothing to lose," Aziz thinks of the English, "but he himself was rooted in society and Islam. He belonged to a tradition which bound him, and he had brought children into the world, the 746 Rawdon Wilson The Bright Chimera society of the future. Though he lived so vaguely in this flimsy bungalow, nevertheless he was placed, placed" (p. 126). The communities are rather like concentric spheres that embrace with unequal proximity; Aziz, at the center, looks outwards across what he understands most towards what he understands least. His experience is essentially vortical. "From the moment of his arrest he was done for," Forster writes, "he had dropped like a wounded animal, he had despaired, not through cowardice, but because he knew that an Englishwoman's word would always outweigh his own" (p. 244). In the center there is also his sense of time, causality, and freedom, his love of poetry, his awareness of his professional skill, his belief in friendship, his "two memories," and his affection for life seen in the guise of cameos. Identity, however, is fundamentally a question of relation; in that sense, Aziz's identity is a consciousness of being surrounded, encompassed, whirled. His final retreat to Mau may be seen, then, as more than a desire to win freedom (it is that). It is also his chance to be surrounded by less, to be less encompassed, and so to be more himself. As he had abandoned his bicycle that evening at Hamidullah's, in Mau he more or less abandons his Western medicine: ". . . here in the backwoods he let his instruments rust, ran his little hospital at half steam, and caused no undue alarm" (p. 304). It had always been the case, in any event, that it was "his hand, not his mind, that was scientific" (p. 56). Aziz's final prophetic nationalism, which he flings at (almost as he rides his horse into) Fielding, strikes one as the projection of self-identity upon the immediate encirclement-the only one that finally counts-of his

Poetic Presence and Illusion: Renaissance Theory and the Duplicity of Metaphor

Abstract: My subject is the concept of poetic imagination in the Renaissance as it relates to metaphysical claims on the one hand and to a philosophy of language on the other.* I mean to search for this imagination not only in a few obvious, explicit statements found in the usual theoretical documents but, more important for me, in the language, metaphysics, and implied poetics found in certain rather extraordinary poems. I hope, before I am done, to alter considerably our conventional notion about what the Renaissance mind was capable of conceiving. And I hope that what those concepts themselves were capable of can be shown to be useful to us as we go through our own theoretical wranglings about the relation between language and concepts and between language and things as well as about the arbitrary nature of linguistic signs and the principles behind them of absence and presence, difference and identity. Perhaps our own semiological notions may profit from a newly discovered sophistication in the semiology of Renaissance writers.

George Bernard Shaw: Women and the Body Politic

Abstract: "I say, Archer, my God, what women!" R. L. Stevenson exclaimed to William Archer after reading Shaw's "shilling shocker" Cashel Byron's Profession. From Mrs. Warren, Major Barbara, and St. Joan, to Lina Szczepanowska the Polish acrobat-pilot of Misalliance, Lysistrata the Powermistress-General from The Apple Cart, and the affluent domineering Epifania Fitzfassenden of The Millionairess, the formidable phalanx of new women-unwomenly women-boss women-that was to advance from Shaw's plays wonderfully justifies Stevenson's exclamation. "I am a first class ladies tailor," Shaw admitted to Mrs. Patrick Campbell. But some women saw his creations as an embarrassing army of dummies. For them, the best of Shaw in this respect was his insistence on the virtue of independence. Vivie Warren in Mrs. Warren's Profession achieves this, as Shaw himself did, by substituting work for people; Lesbia Grantham in Getting Married defines her independence by reason of her freedom from the necessity of marriage ("If I am to be a mother, I really cannot have a man bothering me to be a wife at the same time"); Eliza Doolittle establishes her independence through education in Pygmalion. But Cleopatra, at the end of Caesar and Cleopatra, is still immature. By preferring the romantic prospect of Anthony to the distant example of Shaw's superman Caesar, she shows that she has not yet grown from a child into a woman-and maybe never will. In which case, she is better left to Shakespeare. But there is another breed of women, of whom Candida and Ann Whitefield are fair examples, that may appear positively antifeminist.

Beyond Visual and Aural Criteria: The Importance of Flavor in Chinese Literary Criticism

Abstract: In Western literary criticism, our vocabulary of description frequently refers to the senses and their hierarchical arrangement--from sight to sound to touch to taste to smell. We speak of "form" and allude initially to the visual; we talk of "harmony" and refer primarily to the aural; we identify "substance" and point to the haptic. In critical discourse, such perceptual terms can be synaesthetically transferred, and thus we may naturally speak of "a harmony of colors," "a substantial work of art," "a harmonious design." Descriptors of the lower senses, however, are much less adaptable and versatile. "A fragrant picture" is more likely to be a trivial comment than an aesthetic judgment of quality; "a flavorful symphony" is at best an awkward evaluation. Furthermore, while visual and aural terms often describe the lower senses-"a vivid taste," "a quiet scent"--the reverse does not always make sense: "a tasty sonata"? "an odorous sculpture"? No doubt this is partially due to our greater reliance on our senses of sight and sound and our neglect of our senses of taste and smell; this bias is reflected in the greater number of visual, aural, and haptic descriptors in our vocabulary. Chinese literary criticism contrasts markedly with this Western tradition in its valorization of both

Metalinguistics and Science Fiction

Abstract: In this essay I argue that science fiction is a peculiarly rich field in which to find examples of the metalinguistic function of language; that an exploration of this field will yield a taxonomy for the varieties of metalinguistic function based on the differing uses to which language may be put; and that each variety of metalinguistic function, whatever other uses it may have, shares the property of making a reality claim for the text that employs it. Science fictions, like fairy tales and fantastic literature of all types, tell stories of worlds not quite our own. However, unlike the enchantments of Faerie, the narrations of science fiction seem to encourage explicit consideration of the nature of the narrative worlds themselves. H. G. Wells' Time Traveller, for example, having finished a comfortable Victorian dinner with his comfortable Victorian friends, relates his tale of the far future, reciting the body of the book that we readers in fact have in our hands (The Time Machine, 1895). But his companions are naturally skeptical. "'No,' " the Time Traveller finally admits,

Levels of Information Processing in Reading Poetry

Abstract: When one is confronted with variant readings of a poem, one may attempt to account for them in terms of either the poem or the reader since the reading of a poem is a process which involves both; however, a satisfactory explanation focusing on one of these factors, poem or reader, is likely to have something to say, or at least to imply, about the other.' Elsewhere, in order to account for legitimate variant readings of Donne's holy sonnet "Batter my heart," I have shown how, at different times, it can be read as a poem, a prayer, or a meditation, that is, as three different deep structures of one surface structure, each demanding different kinds of cooperation on the reader's part.2 In the present essay I shall focus on differences of personality, or on differences of

"Fiction and the Shape of Belief": Fifteen Years Later

Abstract: Why, after so much time, does this book retain so great a potency? Very few works of theoretical criticism do. It is true that for some, including me, its potency is akin to that of a persistent case of poison ivy, \"a source of little visible delight, but necessary.\" Cathy, of course, is speaking not of poison ivy but of her love for Heathcliff, and I do not want to suggest that Fiction and the Shape of Belief takes the form of that critical \"existence beyond ourselves\" with which we all seek to merge. Still, it constitutes for many of us a kind of antithetical shadow text, nagging us with its unexorcisable wit, rigor, and subtlety. How can that be? How can a theoretical argument that ignores the properties or existence of a language system nearly altogether, posits the objective solidity of the text, depends boldly on such fabrications as \"character,\" and generally makes quite a parade of its unexamined assumptions survive, even as an irritant, in the heyday of Derrida, Bloom, and Fish? I have no worthwhile answers to this question; what follows is primarily an expansion on bafflement. One thing seems certain: the book and the tradition it represents do survive, not only in the all-too-expected form-solemn essays, published by Chicago students, which depend on Sacks' classifications--but in surprising forms as well. A stealthy admiration for the work is whispered at conferences on deconstruction; footnotes are aimed, with varying degrees of inaccuracy, at it; it is used with surprising frequency as a tool for elucidating narrative structures. No system I know of is more useful in demonstrating what the work under consideration very clearly is not.1

On Judging Art without Absolutes

Abstract: Like most other art historians, I choose to lecture on Rembrandt and Picasso in an introductory course because I think they are good artists and I enjoy looking at their paintings. This makes me a quite different kind of creature from a political, social, or economic historian, who does exercise preferences in the choice of theme and method but is not expected to enter into a personal, certainly not an emotional, interaction with the events or documents he encounters. I shall not discuss the

Do Computer Poems Show That an Author's Intention Is Irrelevant to the Meaning of a Literary Work?

Abstract: It is often claimed that poems produced by a computer show that there is no logical connection between the meaning of a literary work and its author's intention.' I shall argue in the following that this is not the case; and in particular, that to "interpret" a computer "poem" is not to interpret a poem. It is certainly true that a syntactically and semantically well-formed sentence has meaning quite independently of what a particular person who utters the sentence on some occasion might mean by his utterance. Thus what the example of computer "poetry" is thought to show is that the interpretation of literary works (or of utterances in ordinary discourse) does not, as a matter of logic, involve any appeal to the author's intention. In other words, the claim is that to interpret a literary work written by a person is (as a matter of logic) to interpret the word sequence of which it consists in abstraction from anyone's (in particular, the author's) use of that word sequence. That this should be so is not obvious. For the literary works commonly read and interpreted do have authors (although some of them may be anonymous), and in writing a work, they are using words and sentences in a particular way to convey something. But in interpreting a poem produced by a computer, that is, by a random combination of a certain set of words, punctuation marks, spaces, etc., we are not dealing with anyone's use of the words or sentences which constitute the text (except possibly the programmer's; thus

The Literary Theoretical Contribution of Sheldon Sacks

Abstract: Behind all of Sheldon Sacks' writing and teaching lay an intense belief in the objectivity of literary experience and our capacity to achieve a shared conceptual understanding of the forms which underlie it. Literary criticism for him was not the critic's unique and unrepeatable performance but a serious inquiry-a critical inquiry-seeking explicit and precise explanatory concepts which others could grasp, test, and build upon. His effort was to show that we could in significant measure understand and explain literature and its value as standing independent of our understanding and explanation, and it was this double emphasis on the real being of literature and the possibility of valid conceptualization of it which gave his thought its appeal for those whom it influenced. His creative constitution-and the length and circumstances of his lifewere such as to allow only the one sustained effort of Fiction and the Shape of Belief and a series of articles in which he modified and expanded the application of the ideas developed therein. Yet in this relatively small body of work he revised and extended the ideas of the Chicago School within which he worked so as to achieve what seem to me genuine advances in the explicit conception of novelistic forms-what might be called portable ideas, sharp and definite enough to be adopted and used and in their turn revised and refined by others; this sets them apart from much critical work and marks their value and his intention.

Folk Etymology in Sigmund Freud, Christian Morgenstern, and Wallace Stevens

Abstract: 1. The references to Atum and the passage in Genesis are taken from Frits Staal, "Oriental Ideas on the Origin of Language" (presidential address delivered at the American Oriental Society, Toronto, 12 April 1978), p. 3. There Staal refers to Nahum M. Sarna's Understanding Genesis (New York, 1970) for the Atum reference and to Ephraim A. Speiser's Genesis: Introduction, Translation, and Notes (Garden City, N.J., 1964) for the Genesis translation. Staal's article contains an extremely interesting and amusing discussion of the role of naming in Oriental ideas concerning the origin of language, and the reader is urged to consult it.

Chicago Architecture after Mies

Abstract: buildings which he inspired dominate the Chicago cityscape to the point where other solutions to urban architectural problems seem impossible Chicago, more than any other major American city, developed and applied a consistently well-worked style to such an extent that it has become identified with the prosperous look of the modern metropolis Mies' prominence in Chicago, however, tends to obscure the work of other important architects While no single figure has achieved his status, there have been, since 1950, significant challenges to the dominant Miesian aesthetic Bertrand Goldberg, Walter Netsch, Harry Weese, and other second-generation post-Miesians give the city a rich infusion of styles and continue its reputation as a center for innovative architectural ideas

Bloomsbury and "The Vulgar Passions"

Abstract: To attempt to write anything more about Bloomsbury is a proceeding which requires some sort of apology, all the more so when one has already devoted a volume to that subject. My excuse must be that, to judge by the things that are written both in England and in the United States, the false generalizations that are made and the absurdities which are repeated, the things which I wrote in 1968 will bear repetition in 1979. Also, there are statements which need to be corrected or at least modified.

Presence and Reference in a Literary Text: The Example of Williams' "This Is Just to Say"

Abstract: The question of the referential qualities of literary language is at once the oldest and the least resolved in literary theory. Aristotle and then Romantic theorists, in their different ways, tried to explain how a literary text is not just a copy of a copy, and now, under pressure from Derrida, many of us wish we could at least show that a text is a copy of something. Still Derridean skepticism has its uses: it makes imperative some theoretical defense of how expressive dimensions of a literary work can be said to tie into our sense of experience, and it defines an opposing position with sufficient clarity that we can see what it might take to present an adequate model of mimesis. My aim in this essay then, is to show how the philosophical position of the later Wittgenstein provides a useful perspective for responding to Derrida, and others in his camp, and for connecting both the expressive and the denotative aspects of literary language to our understanding of ordinary experience.' My vehicle will be the poetics of William Carlos Williams and one poem in particular, "This Is Just to Say." Williams is one of the Anglo-American writers most adamantly opposed to traditional theories of art as mimesis, and he has therefore become the object of very intelligent Derridean analyses. Joseph Riddel, for example, in his

Tonality, Autonomy, and Competence in Post-Classical Music

Abstract: Lawrence Kramer's objections to my sketch of post-classical music history center principally on my treatment of tonality as an historically evolving construct. Kramer would have it that tonality is a constant entity undergoing "constant metamorphosis" but unchanged in its essentials since the latter part of the Enlightenment (or, perhaps, even earlier?). This conception of tonality as an ahistorical complex, admitting only of change in surface detail and precluding any associated sense of historical direction or significant qualitative differences between styles, reveals so clear a structuralist orientation that one wonders less why Kramer attacks my critique of structuralism than why he seems to share my reservations about this movement so wholeheartedly. Constant as tonality seems to Kramer, however, his own account of its contribution to musical intelligibility since the latter eighteenth century suggests, curiously, inconsistencies. His closing assertion, for example, that "As long as music from the Enlightenment to the present has maintained some relationship to the tonal system, it has been widely intelligible as music" (p. 152) can only be interpreted as agreeing with my contention that tonality has thus far proven the only workable basis for purely musical intelligibility on a socially general scale-assuming that by "intelligib[ility] as music," Kramer means an engagement of the mind that goes beyond mere recognition of a medium as music or physical response to sound. The attainment, or at least the approximation, of such a tonally based general intelligibility is, almost surely, a feat most readily associated with the classical style. Yet it is precisely in connection with the classical style that Kramer seems most anxious to adduce

"Pride and Prejudice": Thought, Character, Argument, and Plot

Abstract: When we use words like "Pride and Prejudice" as a name they are no longer three words or one name but a single named-thing, and two or more persons may undertake to discuss that named-thing with some assurance that they are talking about the same thing. It would not be a discussion if they were talking about different things, but, on the other hand, it would not take place if they had the same things to say about it. We usually assume, therefore, that one such statement about the thing-what it is and why-will be shown to be significant and correct, or that the different statements will be shown to have approached the same thing from different perspectives and to have disclosed different aspects of it. Yet a literary object of discussion is not simply an entity; nor is it a variable entity which takes its characteristics from the perspectives in which it is considered. It may, however, be variously considered-in itself as an artificial object, or in terms of the underlying circumstances which condition it and constitute its subject matter as a natural object, or in terms of meanings and references which it employs as a communicative object, or in terms of the ideas and values which it embodies or adumbrates as an intelligible object. We have a tendency, which we owe to Aristotle, to think of the literary object as an artificial object, so radically contrasted to natural objects that we make it a function of art to create probabilities and necessities distinct from those which we encounter in natural occur-

A Rejoinder to Gerald Graff

Abstract: I am baffled by Gerald Graff 's view that there is no reference to "limitations and shortcomings except a minor one" in my essay "The New Criticism: Pro and Contra," for I rehearse rather fully the main objections made by different groups of critics in a roughly chronological order. Graff adds some new points on which I wish to comment. 1.-On history Graff agrees with me that the New Critics regarded history (mainly the history of words) as an auxiliary to interpretation and that they reacted violently to the preoccupation of academic scholarship with isolated and often trivial historical and biographical circumstances. He also agrees that the New Critics embraced a total historical scheme, the fall into "dissociation of sensibility," which he interprets, at the end of his paper, as an understandable reaction against technological society. But Graff forbids them to interpret the past in terms of their interests and biases and refers to books by Rosemond Tuve, Helen Gardner, and J. V. Cunningham containing refutations of the anachronistic readings made by some New Critics. Take the example used by J. V. Cunningham in Tradition and Poetic Structure (Denver, 1960). He points out that "vegetable love" in Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" does not mean "some monstrous and expanding cabbage" but refers to the doctrine of the three souls: the rational, the sensitive, and the vegetable, which is the principle of generation (p. 45). If, however, we look into the incriminated essay by T. S. Eliot on Marvell, we cannot find anything that would prove that Eliot misread this word. Eliot merely says: "We can easily recognize a witty fancy in successive images ('my vegetable love,' 'till the conversion of the Jews')" (Selected Essays [London, 1962], p. 282).

The Shape of Post-Classical Music

Abstract: I admire Rose Rosengard Subotnik's account of the problems inherent in structuralist attempts to formulate a semiology of music and in structuralist ventures generally.' Subotnik's version of the history of music since the Enlightenment, however, seems questionable to me in a number of ways and it demands to be questioned seriously because of the importance of the issues that she raises. Briefly, Subotnik argues that the classical style of Mozart and Haydn sustains a "dual structure" in which general truth or meaning is unified with the particular structure of individual works. Subotnik does not define the nature of this unity but suggests that it is essentially a matter of context: the dual structure obtains where the structure of a given piece becomes unproblematically intelligible by reference to a system of norms accessible to a competent listener. This unity, according to Subotnik, begins to erode with Beethoven, decays radically as the nineteenth century progresses, and has vanished completely in twentieth-century music. Post-classical music, in this view, becomes unintelligible as it becomes individual; its musical structure loses its autonomy and moves constantly closer to natural language-from which it needs supplements--because it is ever more remote from a generally accessible and verifiable system of meanings. This view is recognizably a version of the myth, first crystallized in the work of Sch6nberg, that the increasing chromaticism of nineteenthcentury music led by an inevitable historical process to a breakdown of

Arguing with Shelly

Abstract: Arguing with Sheldon Sacks was one of the great intellectual pleasures of life. I have seldom met anyone who enjoyed argument so much or who put more into it. Logical discriminations that might seem arid and impersonal on other people's lips rarely seemed that way on his. He was wonderfully quick at taking a point (like many of the best arguers he often read your thoughts, sometimes before you knew you had them), stubborn in defending a position, courteous in rebuttal, witty, modest, ingenious, and heated. He played the chords of your sympathies like a cello. And best of all, perhaps, he was unfailingly serious. Much as he liked the give and take of argument, it never twisted into a mere performance or a joust of words. Getting at the complicated truth, worrying it and probing it from every side, meant far more to him than the winning or losing. As a literary theorist he cared deeply about his positions, but not only because they were his. He was one of the very few great talkers I have known who did not prefer monologue, in the long run, to dialogue. Now all the arguments have shifted. Henceforth they must be carried on only in the dumbest way, on that cold, two-dimensional sheet where words congeal in black and white and several people cannot talk at once. Arguing with Shelly's work is not as satisfying as arguing with Shelly. The qualities of his conversation, especially that insinuating play of mind, can be found in his writing, but not without a good deal of digging (I myself was unable to catch his distinctive voice-the quiet irony, the artful hesitations-until I had heard it in person). Nor was his work completed. Fiction and the Shape of Belief marks only one stage in an

Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom

Abstract: with a different phase in the struggle for black freedom and equality. When Uncle Tom's Cabin first appeared-serially in 1851-52 and in book form in 1852-it became an important event in the struggle to free the Negro and the nation from slavery. Over three hundred thousand copies of the book were sold in the United States in the first year of its publication, and it has been estimated that total sales in that year, including translations and English editions published abroad, amounted to an astonishing 2.5 million. Originally blacks were at one with whites in their approval of Uncle Tom. The Call issued for the National Negro Conference in 1853 in Rochester, New York, concluded the list of reasons "for our union, cooperation and action" with "the propitious awakening to the fact of our condition at home and abroad, which followed the publication of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin.' " Josiah Henson, the escaped slave whose life story influenced Stowe, wrote in the enlarged edition of his