Showing papers in "New Literary History in 1980"

The Logic of Narrative Possibilities

Abstract: EMIOLOGICAL STUDY of narrative can be divided into two parts: on the one hand, an analysis of the techniques of narrative; on the other, a search for the laws which govern the narrated matter. These laws themselves depend upon two levels of organization: they reflect the logical constraint that any series of events, organized as narrative, must respect in order to be intelligible; and they add to these constraints, valid for all narrative, the conventions of their particular universe which is characteristic of a culture, a period, a literary genre, a narrator's style, even of the narration itself. After examining the method used by Vladimir Propp to discover the specific characteristics of one of these particular domains, that of the Russian folktale, I became convinced of the need to draw a map of the logical possibilities of narrative as a preliminary to any description of a specific literary genre. Once this is accomplished, it will be feasible to attempt a classification of narrative based on structural characteristics as precise as those which help botanists and biologists to define the aims of their studies. But this widening perspective entails the need for a less rigorous method. Let us recall and spell out the modifications which seem indispensable: First, the basic unit, the narrative atom, is still thefunction, applied as in Propp, to actions and events which, when grouped in sequences, generate the narrative. Second, a first grouping of three functions creates the elementary sequence. This triad corresponds to the three obligatory phases of any process: a function which opens the process in the form of an act to be carried out or of an event which is foreseen; a function which achieves this virtuality in the form of an actual act or event; and a function which closes the process in the form of an attained result. Third, the foregoing differ from Propp's method in that none of these functions lead necessarily to the following function in the sequence. On the contrary, when the function which opens the se-

A Map for Rereading: Or, Gender and the Interpretation of Literary Texts

Abstract: PPEALING PARTICULARLY to a generation still in the process of divorcing itself from the New Critics' habit of bracketing off any text as an entity in itself, as though "it could be read, understood, and criticized entirely in its own terms,"1 Harold Bloom has proposed a dialectical theory of influence between poets and poets, as well as between poems and poems which, in essence, does away with the static notion of a fixed or knowable text. As he argued in A Map of Misreading in 1975, "a poem is a response to a poem, as a poet is a response to a poet, or a person to his parent." Thus, for Bloom, "poems ... are neither about 'subjects' nor about 'themselves.' They are necessarily about other poems."2 To read or to know a poem, according to Bloom, engages the reader in an attempt to map the psychodynamic relations by which the poet at hand has willfully misunderstood the work of some precursor (either single or composite) in order to correct, rewrite, or appropriate the prior poetic vision as his own. As first introduced in The Anxiety of Influence in 1973, the resultant "wholly different practical criticism ... give[s] up the failed enterprise of seeking to 'understand' any single poem as an entity in itself" and "pursue[s] instead the quest of learning to read any poem as its poet's deliberate misinterpretation, as a poet, of a precursor poem or of poetry in general."3 What one deciphers in the process of reading, then, is not any discrete entity but, rather, a complex relational event, "itself a synecdoche for a larger whole including other texts."4 "Reading a text is necessarily the reading of a whole system of texts," Bloom explains in Kabbalah and Criticism, "and meaning is always wandering around between texts" (KC, pp. 107-8). To help purchase assent for this "wholly different practical criticism," Bloom asserted an identity between critics and poets as coequal participants in the same "belated and all-but-impossible act" of reading (which, as he hastens to explain in A Map of Misreading, "if strong is always a misreading"-p. 3). As it is a drama of epic proportions, in Bloom's terms, when the ephebe poet attempts to appropriate and

The Aesthetics of British Mercantilism

Abstract: *W A -yHATEVER ELSE art involves, it characteristically begins with material transmuted from one category of use to another, with a metamorphosis its result. Inert matter is transformed, by the artist's synchrony of eye and hand, into the beloved of Pygmalion. The same categorical shift may be applied in an effort to understand how agents other than artists effect changes in the artistic style of a period. When, for instance, Heinrich Wolfflin observed a metamorphosis occurring in Italian architecture-a transition, that is, from a classical style of the Renaissance to an organismic movement of mass disassembling and reconstructing conventions while arching into unexpected dimensions of space-he expressed the metamorphosis anthropomorphically so that the Baroque style seemed to be a personified movement which itself orchestrated the eyes and hands of artists. Much later in his career Wolfflin partially corrected his mistake, of substituting the organismic result for the cause, by isolating the Counter-Reformation as a nonaesthetic agent for the shift.' But the distorted intentionality of spiritualizing the Counter-Reformation remained.

Freud, Morality, and Hermeneutics

Abstract: T oward the end of his essay, talking about current attacks on psychoanalysis by those who would "hermeneuticize" or "deconstruct" it, Regis Durand remarks that "There are those who feel that, far from being obsolete, the Einsteinian and the Freudian revolutions, for instance, have not yet come into their own, have not been translated fully into our modes of thinking." I feel this very strongly, at least in respect to the Freudian revolution. Further, I agree with Durand that there is something suspiciously "defensive" about much recent writing on psychoanalysis. So I should like to begin by expanding on his remarks. What does it mean to say that something has not "been translated fully into our modes of thinking"? I take it to mean that a new way of describing things (quite a lot of important things) has come to seem indispensable, and that the availability of this descriptive vocabulary raises doubts about what other, older, vocabularies we can continue to use. It means that we are

Baudelaire and the Tradition of the Tableau de Paris

Abstract: IN GIVING the title of "Tableaux Parisiens" to an outstanding group of poems in the Fleurs du Mal, Baudelaire played them off against the background of a genre which has been, with the exception of Walter Benjamin, more or less entirely neglected by critics of Baudelaire. Whereas Baudelaire could be sure that the contemporary reader of his poetry would be familiar with this background, the intertextual relation, established with the title of "Tableaux Parisiens," was no longer perceived when the prestige of the genre of tableau de Paris as a popular form of local literature had faded. The great histories of French literature of the nineteenth century do not treat it as a genre of its own; indeed, they do not even mention it. The tableau de Paris as a subliterary genre of feuilletonistic literature did not produce literary works which have become part of the literary tradition. It remained one of those elementary or even trivial forms of spontaneous and time-bound literary communication, which nevertheless are often a fertile soil from which great and lasting literary productions spring. Even the classical works of literature which have become part of our tradition have deep and often unknown relations to that body of anonymous literary work which responds to the necessities of the moment. Baudelaire's "Tableaux Parisiens" are an example for innovation in high literature through adaptation and transformation of nonliterary or subliterary forms of communication. In order to understand the particular quality of innovation in Baudelaire's "Tableaux" we have to examine the particular relationship between the genre of tableau de Paris and its secondary use in the context of lyric poetry. The history of the genre of tableau de Paris, which came to an astonishing prosperity during the first part of the nineteenth century,

Action and Narration in Psychoanalysis

Abstract: F REUD EMPLOYED the term metapsychology to indicate that he was setting forth the general assumptions of a psychoanalytic psychology and the rules of conceptualization and explanation that would govern this psychology. The most general assumptions are these: psychoanalysis is a natural science; it is a general psychology; its method is introspective; its explanations are deterministic; and the pragmatic reality and moral principles to which many of its propositions refer are simply given and unambiguously knowable through scientific methods and sound personal judgment. Freud's rules of conceptualization are of a mixed sort in that they are appropriate both to a Newtonian machine and a Darwinian organism. In its mechanistic aspect, metapsychology is designed to yield accounts of the person as a mental apparatus. This apparatus is both constituted and controlled by principles (pleasure, reality), structures (id, ego, superego), mechanisms (defenses), and functions (reality testing, synthesis, etc.). The apparatus is made to work by mental energies (libido, aggression, and their modified forms). The status of processes in the mental apparatus may be conscious, preconscious (largely verbal and more or less easily made conscious), and unconscious (like the dream, largely imagistic and concrete, and made conscious only under special circumstances such as pathological weakness or creative relaxation of the ego's defenses or the inroads of the psychoanalytic process). The Darwinian organism enters as the carrier of instinctual drives (the source of the libidinal and aggressive energies), inherited emotional reaction tendencies (bisexuality, certain fears and aversions), and a capacity to develop from an initial state of helplessness to one of adaptation to an environment largely hostile to its instinctual nature.

Psychosis and Mourning in Lacan's Hamlet

Abstract: T HE TRAGEDY HAMLET," Lacan says, "is the tragedy of desire."' The winding path of Hamlet's desire will take Lacan through territory familiar to his readers, perhaps new to others: from the object petit a, to the phallus, to foreclosure and mourning, and finally to death. How these views add to our understanding of Hamlet, how far they go beyond Lacan's own indictment of "the sort of hogwash that psychoanalytic texts are full of" (p. 20) remains to be seen. Lacan's own text, titled "Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet," is a text edited from transcripts of his seminar for the academic year 1958-59 on "Desire and Its Interpretation." Its themes resonate with some related essays in Ecrits: A Selection:2 "The signification of the phallus," delivered in May, 1958; "The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire in the Freudian unconscious," presented in September, 1960; and "On a question preliminary to any possible treatment of psychosis," his analysis of Schreber's Memoirs, completed in January, 1958, and to which we will return.3 Norman Holland notes that psychoanalysts "seem to take to Hamlet like kittens to a ball of yarn."4 Lacan is no exception. Lacan's basic thesis can be summarized as follows: Hamlet's

Repetition, Repression, and Return: Great Expectations and the Study of Plot

Abstract: HAT FOLLOWS is intended primarily as a discourse on plot, // a concept which has mostly gone unhonored in modern criticism, no doubt because it appears to belong to the popular, even the commercial side of literature. "Reading for the plot," we were taught, is a low form of activity. Long caught in valuations set by a criticism conceived for the lyric, the study of narrative has more recently found its way back to a quasi-Aristotelian view of the logical priority of plot in narrative forms. In the wake of Russian Formalism, French "narratology" has made us sensitive to the functional logic of actions, to the workings of sequence and transformation in the constitution of recognizable narrative units, to the presence of codes of narration that demand decoding in consecutive, irreversible order.' Plot as I understand it, however, suggests a focus somewhat more specific than the questions of structure, discourse, and narrativity addressed by most narratology. We may want to conceive of plot less as a structure than as a structuring operation, used, or made necessary, by those meanings that develop only through sequence and succession: an interpretative operation specific to narrative signification. The word plot, any dictionary tells us, covers a range of meanings, from the bounded piece of land, through the ground plan of a building, the chart or map, the outline of a literary work, to the sense (separately derived from the French complot) of the scheme or secret machination, to the accomplishment of some purpose, usually illegal. All these meanings, I think, usefully cohere in our common sense of plot: it is not only the outline of a narrative, demarcating its boundaries, it also suggests its intention of meaning, the direction of its scheme or machination for accomplishing a purpose. Plots have not only design, but intentionality as well. Some narratives clearly give us a sense of "plottedness" in higher degree than others. Our identification of this sense of plottedness may provide a more concrete and analyzable way into the question of plots than an abstract definition of the subject, and a way that necessarily finds its focus in the readership of plot, in the reader's recogni-

Opening Signals in Narrative

Abstract: L -OUIS ARAGON, having agreed to improvise on the subject of his own creative processes, proposed an impertinent title: I Never Learned to Write.' This title, which also provides the last sentence of the essay ("Je n'ai jamais appris a ecrire") becomes less scabrous if one remembers to quote it in full, with its coordinating particle and its final Latin word pointing to the problem of poetic or fictional beginnings: "Je n'ai jamais appris a ecrire ou 'les incipit.' " For what Aragon claims never to have known in advance is the "unfolding" of his stories, the "deroulement" of his textual landscape, which he discovered, as he says, as though he were his own reader. At a paradoxical extreme, it would seem that all a text needs to be constituted and propelled forward is a first word. The writer as reader. Aragon, as a child, discovered that hearing and lying, reading and playing, interpreting and inventing, are the same. An initial word meant the necessity of the game as well as the game of necessity. Hence the assertion: "I never wrote my novels, I read them." What is involved is the threshold of the text: not merely the generative, matricial virtue of the initial (and perhaps arbitrary) attack, but that point both in time and space where a text, separating itself from what it was and is not, comes into being. "On pense a partir de ce qu'on ecrit": the key expression a partir de, referring to a supposedly dynamic point of origin, occurs again some ten pages later, as Aragon speculates on the mechanism of writing "a partir d'une phrase, d'une image." The Surrealists were fond of invoking the phrase de reveil, that galvanizing opening and revelatory sentence. Revelatory, because the incipit meant the initial incantation as well as the first signal of the initiation. It is not surprising that mythical notions press themselves forward. Every opening of a novel or a poem, says Aragon, revives the image of Hercules at the crossroads. Image of destiny? It would seem

Tableau and Coup de Theatre: On the Social Psychology of Diderot's Bourgeois Tragedy

Abstract: " T-*_ HE BOURGEOIS DRAMA is the first which developed out of a conscious class conflict. It is the first which aimed at giving expression to the ways of feeling and thinking of a class struggling for freedom and power, and at showing its relationship to the other classes. It follows, therefore, that in general, both classes must appear in the drama, the class which is struggling as well as the one against which the struggle takes place."' This view was advanced by Georg Lukacs in 1914, in an essay entitled "On the Sociology of Modern Drama." Forty years later, Arnold Hauser wrote in his Social History of Art and Literature that bourgeois drama is the first which makes social conflict "its explicit subject matter and which openly places itself in the service of the class struggle."2 These observations are contradicted in an unsettling manner by the works which introduced the new genre in England, France, and Germany in the eighteenth century: Lillo's London Merchant (1731), Lessing's Miss Sara Sampson (1755), and Diderot's Le Fils naturel (1757) and Le Pere de famille (1758). None of these plays depicts the conflict between the middle class and the nobility. Lessing's and Diderot's heroes, Sir William Sampson and M. d'Orbesson, belong to the aristocracy, not the bourgeoisie. To be sure, there are plays which conform much more closely to the descriptions given by Lukacs and Hauser, for example, Lessing's Emilia Galotti and Lenz's Hofmeister; however, as both of these were written in the 1770s, they can hardly reflect the conditions under which the genre first emerged. And an older bourgeois

Reflexivity and Reading

Abstract: T HE MOST OBVIOUS effect of the breaking open of the structuralist closure has been to renew discussion of those problems of reception and reading which could not be taken into account by the Saussurian notion of the text, modeled on the dichotomy of langue and parole. Inspired by this new direction in research, particularly by the contributions of the Constance school, the present study will investigate, from the point of view of the addressee, reflexive texts which contain mise(s) en abyme (i.e., texts containing one or more doublings which function as mirrors or microcosms of the text). By viewing mise en abyme as a factor in the readability of the text and evaluating its impact on the process of reception, I hope to contribute to current work on the "rhetoric of reading."1 At least three reasons can be suggested for relating mise en abyme and reception. The first, which I shall try to justify below, is that mise en abyme appears as a privileged object for the constitution of a theory of reading, involving, as will be seen, the various aspects of such a theory. Conversely, the theory of reading may clarify mise en abyme better than previous approaches, which have centered on one or a combination of the following elements: the writer and the written, the text alone, the text and its textualization.2 The second reason concerns the possibility of broadening and internationalizing research, since the articulation of mise en abyme and of the problematics of reception may bring to bear upon one another two literary traditions which are complementary despite being relatively ignorant of each other. The first of these, the German and Anglo-Saxon tradition, constricted by its search for realism, delegates a minor role to reflexivity and self-representation, leaving reception and communication to dominate the idea of the literary text favored by these critics.3 The second, or French tradition, conceives of reflexivity in the wake of Mallarme, Proust, and the Nouveau Roman but, in part for that very reason, has remained longer than its counterparts over the Rhine, the Channel, and the Atlantic enslaved by substantialist and autonomist notions of the text.

Hermeneutics of Texts and Hermeneutics of Action

Abstract: rT ZaiHE QUESTION of the relationship of the hermeneutics of texts and the hermeneutics of actions is primarily a question of what both have in common. What common output, what common structure, fits the interpretation of texts and the interpretation (i.e., the systematic understanding) of actions, either those of others or my own? The question seems burdened from the start with a special difficulty. This difficulty results from the fact that, in light of the extreme variability of texts, the express or tacit difference of their intentions, their form of expression, etc., it is not at all easy to say in general what it means "to interpret a text." What is there in common between the interpretation of a poetic art object and that of a chapter from the Critique of Pure Reason? Even more, a general difficulty is added to this special one. Within its own tradition, "hermeneutics" is almost exclusively identified with text interpretation, so that the question of the relationship of the hermeneutics of texts and that of actions appears from the start in the light of a false anticipation. The hermeneutics of actions appears possible only insofar as action is at least linked to a verbal manifestation, i.e., either verbally presented with respect to intention, choice of means, accompanying circumstances, etc., or else entirely subsumed in a verbal manifestation. Otherwise, the maxim holds that while all speech is action, not all action is verbally manifested. How should action be interpreted when it is not presented through language? That speech is a possible paradigm for action has as little force against this as that there is a type of hermeneutics of actions, namely, biography and autobiography, that has repeatedly served as a paradigm for hermeneutic practice ever since Dilthey. Thus the verdict seems to be spoken about the possibility of a hermeneutics of actions and hence too the verdict about the relationship of the hermeneutics of actions to text hermeneutics. Indeed, actions cannot be interpreted so long as they neither represent themselves in some fashion nor can be preserved and passed

The Act of Writing Fiction

Abstract: s WE ARE ENJOYING a novel of the traditional kind, it does not seem to us that there is anything anomalous in its language, or that the statements constituting most of its text are of a deviant logical nature. It does not appear to us that these sentences have anything less than full referential force, nor that their apophantic power is reduced or nullified. Things, some fantastic and some ordinary, are spoken of in the novel in basically the same way in which ordinary or notable things are spoken of in historiographic or journalistic texts or in accounts of everyday life, that is, by describing and narrating them. Novelistic discourse will catch our attention and distinguish itself, if at all, not by deficiency but by perfection, by the apparent thoroughness of the presentation of the objects in refer-

Six Theses on the Novel, and Some Metaphors

Abstract: play with categories requires a lot of concrete stuff; the activity of the game is mental, but its playing out necessitates pieces, and of these the novel is prodigal. Because the furniture of a given novelistic text will appear to correspond more comprehensively to the furniture of a given culture than is the case with poetic or dramatic or traditionalizing prose genres, novels always contain the potential for mass popularity. They may be perceived as less mediated than other, more "literary" genres. At the literal level of such cultural cartography, where the blue on the map "is" water, novels may provide the comfort of mere familiarity-a coziness rather than a shock of recognition-or they may assuage the reader's simple curiosity [Neugier]. ("So that's how airports/hotels/hospitals/legislatures/whorehouses work!") This is the most obvious and unavoidable aspect of novelistic texts: the minimum specificity dragooned from a particular culture in order to remodel the systematics of any culture. The novel is also peculiarly susceptible to being read in the light of various ideologies. A novel is a cracking tower of ideologies, from which different ages and different readerships may draw this or that ideological fraction but in which there always remains more complex substance ("crude") to be refined, no matter at what level a particular reading is extracted. Novelistic cultures have experienced the shock of epistemic relativity, reinforced by the technology of printing; they cannot go home 419 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.123 on Mon, 18 Jul 2016 05:38:05 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms NEW LITERARY HISTORY again to a shared cosmology that knows an Other but no otherness. Thus the solitary reader reading a book read by many other such solitary readers is an image of the paradox of the novel. It defines not only the novel's radical of reception but the world to which it is proper as well: mass privacy.

Reply to Commentaries: Women Writers, Literary Historians, and Martian Readers

Abstract: B ECAUSE OF its ongoing interest in a revisionist correction of traditional canons that either altogether omit women writers or relegate them to only minor status, feminist criticism, as practiced in the American academy, has inevitably engaged questions of literary history.1 Thus Jerome Beaty quite properly places my "A Map for Rereading: Or, Gender and the Interpretation of Literary Texts" within the context of that abiding feminist concern (although feminists, like other critics, arrive at that concern without necessarily being "driven" there, as he suggests, and certainly without all the unpleasant emotional baggage that such a verb implies). He errs, however, when he too narrowly identifies such "explorations of history" as exclusively "searching for literary roots." Feminist explorations into literary history do not stop at the archeological function: that is, excavating lesser known precursors for the better known women writers of yesterday and today. Equally important is the feminist exploration of the various theories of literary history which have, at successive periods, resulted in something like our schoolbook anthologies of major authors. Here feminist critics are quick to point out that any theory of literary history is really a model, devised to satisfy an assumed need to chart the continuities and discontinuities, as well as the influences upon and the interconnections among works, genres, and authors; but it is always, we remind our colleagues, a model of our own making. It has taken very different shapes and explained its inclusions and exclusions in very different ways, when one ideological stance-Marxism, formalism, psychologismreplaced another as the groundwork of contemporary theory. In our own time, uncertain as to which, if any, model reflects anything like an accurate literary history or adequately accounts for our canonical choices, and pressured further by the feminists' call for some justification of the criteria by which women's writings have been so consistently excluded both from remembered history and from canon-

The Position of the Narrative in Contemporary Society

Abstract: What is narrative? To judge from the plethora of definitions, the lexical disparity and conflicting assumptions of the essays gathered here, one might conclude that the gods themselves disagree, that the literati do not share a clear conception of narrative. Such a judgment would be correct. For despite prescient efforts by our editor, there has not emerged a focused vision of narrative among those who are creating a new literary history. This is no accident. The fact is that narrative no longer provides an adequate voice for the postmodern world. Narratives, of course, are still being written, but they are elaborations of an outworn paradigm. Such conventional literature catches only those fish that are already dead. Result: a proliferation of new uses of the term narrative to apply to wholly new literary forms, a satirization or reification of the apodictic properties of narration. What is the social situation in which old forms of narrative have

Politics and Genre in Nonfiction Prose

Abstract: I WANT TO CONSIDER a familiar kind of book, and my starting point is Frye's notion, "radical of presentation," on which he grounds the theory of genres in Anatomy of Criticism. Or rather, he claims to do so, saying that "the basis of generic criticism ... is rhetorical, in the sense that the genre is determined by the conditions established between the poet and his public." This idea directly sponsors his initial division of literature into four genres. In epos the poet recites directly to his audience. In fiction, audience and author are hidden from each other, with the book mediating. The poet of drama is concealed, while characters speaking the poet's words directly confront the audience. By contrast, in the lyric radical of presentation, the audience is concealed from the poet and, as it were, overhears him. Frye's two terms-an author and an audience-and his one two-valued relationship between them-concealment/confrontation-neatly define four main genres.' Fair enough, as an abstract beginning. But Frye breaks off this line of inquiry before long (at least I lose track of it), and when he comes round to discussing the specific forms of epos, lyric, drama, and fiction, he pretty much ignores "the conditions established between the poet and his audience," except for some remarks in the section on drama which are among the most illuminating of the whole essay. There he speaks of the audience's status, relative to poet and characters, and of the relation of all three to the society's history. I wish he had done likewise in discussing the other genres, for I suspect that only by being historically and socially specific can one build an understanding of genres on the connections between poet and public.2 Perhaps that is why the essay on genres seems to many readers the least satisfactory in the Anatomy. Anyhow, I want to press Frye's initial point somewhat farther, in discussing what I take to be one genre of nonfiction prose. In violation of the first rule of genre theory, I won't coin a name for itthough it could be called, by someone with a taste for naming, social

Wasteland and round Table: The Historical Significance of Myths of Dearth and Plenty in Old French Romance

Abstract: N o ISSUE in the study of Old French literature has invited greater interpretative license than the question of the sources of Chretien de Troyes's Conte du Graal. Some explanations are indeed difficult to believe. Take the following for example: that the episode in which Perceval visits a mysterious castle, meets an invalid king, sees a graillike dish and bleeding lance, forgets to ask what they mean, and awakens to find that both castle and king have vanished'-that this aventure is: part of early Aryan literature, derived from an ancient Babylonian cult, the survival of an archaic Indian vegetation ritual or of an esoteric Islamic initiation ceremony; or, that the mysterious meal is, in reality, a Sephardic Jewish Passover seder, that the old king is a secret emissary of the Cathar faith, a medieval version of the Egyptian god Thoth, or a historical image of Baldwin IV afflicted with elephantiasis; or, finally, that the graillike dish represents a "sex symbol of immemorial antiquity," the pearl of Zoroastrian tradition, a talisman of heretical Albigensians worshiped in caves in the Pyrenees, a secret religious relic originating in Hellenic Greece (and preserved in the medieval corpus hermeticum), or a genuine "Great Sapphire" kept in the sacristy of Glastonbury Abbey.2 And, further, we are asked by the scholarly workers at this building site of Babel to believe that all of the above sources of Chretien's tale reached the

The Unbinding Process

Abstract: T iHE QUESTION of the relationship between literature and psychoanalysis has already been abundantly documented, and yet there seems to be plenty more to say about it, since fresh testimony is continually being called to the witness stand. Whether it be a mere coincidence or a meaningful correlation, the literatureand-psychoanalysis theme has never received such lavish attention as it does today precisely at a time when another surreptitious theme keeps cropping up with strange obstinacy: the theme of the death of literature. While some will mourn over literature's demise, others, in spite of their desire to be seen as avant-garde participants in this battle (indeed, one wonders what battle!), wish it would come about sooner. No doubt they look forward to its corpse serving as fertilizer for a new culture. In this respect, one could argue that psychoanalysis may be one of the signs of the imminent death of a senescent culture characterized among other things by the decay of literature, which, to put it optimistically, may herald the appearance of the yet-unborn thoughts on which tomorrow's culture may be founded. For that matter, one can argue just as easily that the death of literature would inevitably bring in its wake the death of psychoanalysis, for despite the profound changes the latter has wrought in the movement of ideas, it belongs to the same culture. While we cannot endorse such judgments without further examination, neither is it possible to dismiss as purely fortuitous this simultaneous emergence of studies bringing psychoanalysis to bear on literature, and of this peculiar sense of literature's decline-be it temporary or definitive. Rather than write on the death of literature, since we are not called upon to testify to its decease, let us consider that a literary mutation has taken place, leaving it for the future to decide whether or not it has been fatal to literature. This mutation is contemporaneous with the birth and development of psychoanalysis. Furthermore, it should be noted that the great majority of literary works which have been the

Metonymy, Schematism, and the Space of Literature

Abstract: W v HAT IS THE RELATION between the language of literary analysis and the language of the text that is the subject of analysis? At the most general level we face here the problem evoked by Jacques Derrida in "La Mythologie blanche": how to account for a structure of metaphor within a philosophical tradition that is itself constituted by (in the double sense of "has its origins in" and "is immanently organized in terms of") that same structure? His succinct formulation is, "la philosophie se prive de ce qu'elle se donne. Ses instruments appartenant a son champ, elle est impuissante a dominer sa tropologie et sa metaphorique generales" ["philosophy deprives itself of what it gives. Since its instruments belong to its field of study, it is powerless to exercise control over its general tropology and metaphorics"].1 But if philosophy (and, by extension, literary criticism) is condemned to renounce those instruments that it has itself

For a History of Spanish Literature "Against the Grain"

Abstract: IN HIS Geschichtsphilosophischen Thesen, written at the end of the thirties, Walter Benjamin set materialist historians the task of writing history against the grain.1 This metaphor has often been used in West Germany, most recently in discussions concerning the revival of the crisis-ridden humanistic disciplines, among them the study of literary history. In the process, the specific meaning of Benjamin's phrase has often been lost. Benjamin employs the metaphor in the context of answering the question why historicist interpretation-the "empathetic" approach to history-needs to be criticized. He reaches the answer that the history with which one is supposed, on historicist principles, to empathize is never "objectively" given in the first place, but is always colored by its transmission within particular traditions. These, according to Benjamin, are the traditions "of the victors," which the materialist historian must look behind and, in fact, rub "against the grain." In keeping with this interpretation of Benjamin, my article attempts a history of Spanish literature "against the grain," since it is directed primarily against the writing of history carried on by the winners of the Spanish Civil War. In this article I should like, by way of introduction, to justify my interest in the critical writing of history and of the history of litera-

Literature and Social Action: Reflections on the Reflection Theory of Literary Art

Abstract: rT Z o RAISE THE QUESTION of the relation between literature and social action is to ask about the ways in which all aspects of the literary world-production, product, exchange, and consumption-relate to that larger structure which, since the eighteenth century in the West, has come to be called "society." We are not, I submit, clear about the precise nature of this "society." Indeed, the social sciences were constituted in their specifically modern form in order to deal with the problem of identifying what might count as a uniquely "social" act. Political action, economic action, religious action, and so on, are all manifestly different kinds of social actions; but wherein their shared sociality consists is unclear. Differences over the nature of this pervasive sociality account for the different notions of what a proper social science should be. Obviously, a social action is any action involving exchange between two or more human beings under conditions of some sort of mutuality of interest, intention, or need. But beyond this basic agreement on the exchange nature of the social act, very little else can be said without lapsing into ideological argument. It follows that any effort to determine the status of literary work as a kind of "social action," as an effect of social causes, or as a reflection of social structures, conditions, etc., will be tinged by ideological special pleading-ideological in the degree to which one must presuppose a specific answer to the question "What is the nature of society?" before proceeding to establish the ways in which "literature" is related to a given social formation. It might be noted as well that if the concept of the "social" underlies all debate among different kinds of social theorists, the concept of "literature" is not less contested among theorists of literature. Here, too, in order to enable investigation, it is necessary simply to assume that one knows what literature consists of, wherein it differs from language in general on the one side, and discourse specifically on the other, in order to inquire into a given literary work's relationship to the various social milieus in which it arose and in which it finds its

Irony, Literature, and Schizophrenia

Abstract: IN A WAY, both irony and art are special cases of schizophrenic communication. With regard to their logical structure, and to a great extent their psychological function, each of these three forms of communication follows a pattern which one could call "playing at not playing." That is, they deal with a type of behavior which is in itself paradoxical, a type of behavior whereby level and metalevel are mutually contradictory. I will attempt to explain these contentions a little more clearly by describing the origin of the concepts and theories upon which they are based.1

Psychoanalytic Psychology of the Self and Literature

Abstract: IVE DECADE after Freud's last major statement about psychoanalysis and literature on the occasion of receiving the Goethe prize, we are again witnessing the impact of new and powerful psychoanalytic ideas.1 Not only within the field of clinical and theoretical psychoanalysis proper but also in their reverberations in the contiguous fields of art, literature, history, sociology, anthropology, and religion, the conceptualization of Heinz Kohut's psychoanalytic psychology of the self has led to a renewed examination of the contribution of psychoanalysis to its sister sciences in the study of man.2 While staying strictly within the classic psychoanalytic method as developed by Freud and, consequently, within the field of study as delineated by the applicability of the classic psychoanalytic method, Kohut has achieved a major expansion of the range of the phenomena that can come under psychoanalytic scrutiny. He has facilitated the articulation of psychoanalysis with other contemporary sciences, bridged the gap between depth psychology and the humanities, and expanded the applicability of psychoanalysis clinically and in nonclinical areas. The apparent familiarity yet, pari passu, the surprising novelty of the outstanding features of Kohut's psychology of the self, being both continuous with classical Freudian psychoanalysis and yet a decided departure in a new direction, can perhaps be dramatized in analogy to the sudden reversal of figure and ground that can occur when an observer intently yet openly looks at certain geometric configurations. In depth psychology the changed gestalt resulting when figure and ground are suddenly inverted comes about by a number of shifts in attention leading to a new synthesis, i.e.: (1) a shift away from giving

Regarding the Author as Patient

Abstract: ficant than how he says it, fantasies are more significant than events, the unexpected is always more significant than the expected, unless one's expectations were generated by a theory that rejects ordinary assumptions and intuitions. Genius and madness share techniques. And so on. The metaphor has been heuristic and certainly productive. And yet like most metaphors, even as it directs our attention towards certain truths, it distracts us from others. There are important differences in the aim and the form of the two ventures, in the texts and the contexts. Imagine a poet or a novelist on the analyst's couch, generating a text, furnishing material for the psychoanalysis, while the analyst listens, occasionally takes a note, keeps track of the slow progress of the minute hand, and now and then asks a question or, more rarely, ventures an interpretation. Imagine the same writer alone, writing, generating another text, furnishing material, he hopes,1 for the literary critic, and for his private vision of the common reader, the person who knows nothing of deconstruction, but who "is guided by an instinct to create for himself; out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole."2 Rather than reviewing what these events and their products and consequences have in common, I would like to discuss a few of their most fundamental differences. First, the writer and the patient have different aims and different audiences. Likewise the psychoanalyst has different aims than the literary critic, and looks to different audiences. Second, there are differences in the texts themselves, and in the tools (and liberties) available to the interpreter, partly due to the differences in the aims of the speaker, and partly due to differences in the form of the relationship between the two parties.

Precipitations of Theater: Words, Presence, Time Out of Mind

Abstract: HE CUE IS LYRIC, but a preview of theater-this surreptitious anxiety tensed out of us by words. There is an incitement of action in the insidious motion, a play of mind that will not hold still. What we see in the quatrain is enlarged on the stage, as if the dull substance of the flesh were thought. No sooner thought, it may leap to the quick in a conditional passion: "If beauty have a soul ... If... If ... If . .."; thus Troilus, "publishing a truth" of Cressida, that "inseparate" division, admitting "no orifice for a point as subtle/ As Ariachne's broken woof to enter" (Troilus and Cressida, 5. 2. 134-48), and with another knot of fanatic reason the whole truth shattered to

The Anxiety of Performance

Abstract: TW ^ rE LIVE IN A CULTURE of the spectacular and of the specular: a culture which theatricalizes everything, turns life into mirror effects and performance situations where attention and significance are timed and framed so that what seems to matter most one moment has become trivial the next, expendable; a culture which would seem to value surfaces and appearances yet pursues hysterically a quest for the real. The performative mode is a symptom of such contradictions. It has become prevalent not only in our world but in the different types of discourse which attempt to analyze it, thereby creating the illusion of an adequation and a continuity (if not identity) between experience and theory, between the real and the symbolic.1 It is this particular point of suture/fracture which I attempt to address in the following observations.

Analytical Psychology and Literary Criticism

Abstract: both spring from the same womb: the human psyche. The great new discovery in psychology at the beginning of the century was Sigmund Freud's discovery of the unconscious, which, however, he conceived as purely personal, belonging to the individual alone and harboring repressed, mostly sexual material. C. G. Jung added to this discovery the detection of a still deeper layer of the unconscious, which is transpersonal, common to whole groups of people or even mankind in general. He called it the collective unconscious or objective psyche. I will concentrate in this paper on the role of the latter in literature. Jung himself has dealt in several lectures with the relationship of psychology with literature.1 Insofar as a great amount of literature endeavors to describe the world of human passions, the eternal experiences of joy and sorrow, love, power, hate, intrigue, and transcendence, it is psychology, and it often describes these realms of the human lot so masterfully that psychology not only has nothing to add to it but can even learn from it. Insofar as the writer or artist uses his own conscious experience of human life in his work, he is involuntarily also a psychologist; if he is a truly gifted artist, he finds the best possible expression for what he wants to say, and no psychologist, therefore, can add much insight to it.2 The creative process, however, is a great mystery which we cannot "explain." But we can describe certain of its features. What the psychologist can observe, if he has an opportunity to analyze a creative person, is that in most creative achievements an autonomous unconscious psychic reality intervenes, unpredictably and as if from nowhere, into the work. An unconscious dynamism, which Jung calls the "objective spirit," begins to influence the writer and even often imposes upon him forms of expression which he does not intend to use consciously. This can happen in various degrees. Some artists feel that they themselves mainly give gestalt to what they write, that they consciously choose every word, every turn of the story, drama, or poem. Others feel that they are completely under the dictate of an unknown force, and every word which they write is a surprise to them. But this is only how the writer himself feels; even in the former case the unconscious factor may also have influenced the work, only

Discussion: On Narrative and Narratives

Abstract: basis of the changes it is now undergoing. Then, with an improved awareness of the tradition, the critical eye must return to the present, the better to perceive its biases and limitations. This regressive-progressive procedure should be, and frequently is, accompanied by comparative glances outside of the tradition: What can one learn from the narrative (if such be their nature) traits of The Tale of Genji or Journey to the West? There are no discussions in the present issue of the question of whether narrative in the strictest sense, involving the elucidation and control of existential projects through reenactment and transcendence, is a mode of thought and communication that belongs in exclusivity to Western culture. The clarification of the existential and communicative features of non-Western narrative remains still a scattered enterprise very much in need of a broadly acceptable framework. In the West, narrative reenactment and transcendence developed very early into a primordial form of reflection. Through the emergence of narrative purposes and rules, the rhetorical limits of existen

The Borderlands of Literary Criticism

Abstract: IN RECENT YEARS in both theoretical and methodological discussions of literature and art, there have been many attempts to define the function of "literary criticism" and to construct a definition of critical cultural activity. These considerations are so closely related to the methodological problems of literary research, among other things to hermeneutics, that what is popularly known as literary criticism has become identified with the entire body of cognitive and receptive activities relating to literature.1 Consequently, it is difficult today to put together a definition of this seemingly easily isolated realm. Moreover, one cannot but question the significance of literary criticism as an isolated phenomenon (one which, by the way, is closer to the Slavic and German traditions than to the French and English ones) and attempts made to grasp its essence and distinguish its features. The following observations have a different object: they focus on the "borderlands" of literary criticism. The goal is not to determine the essence of criticism but rather to define criticism's place within a broad spectrum of cultural activities. Initially, however, the essence of criticism must be hypothetically posited so that subsequently it will yield to a certain exactness or relativism to be achieved by confronting and examining areas in doubt. It behooves us, in particular, to regard literary criticism as an activity which is impinged upon by creative actions on the one hand and, on the other, by actions and pronouncements I will term "purely discursive." To be sure, this procedure will lend complexity to the literary critical model (if, indeed, we establish the existence of such a model). At the same time, however, it should help us to understand a realm which cannot be clearly delimited and which, therefore, must be approached in terms of its peripheral areas and grasped through an apprehension of its diverse gradations. Because of their wide-ranging nature, the remarks made here are