The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature

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PH ILOSOPH Y
A N D L IT ER AT U R E
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PH ILOSOPH Y
Edited by
RICHARD ELDRIDGE
1
2009
1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The Oxford handbook of philosophy and literature / edited by

Richard Eldridge.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and Index.
ISBN 978-0-19-518263-7
1. Literature—Philosophy. I. Eldridge, Richard Thomas, 1953–
II. Title: Handbook of philosophy and literature.
PN45.084 2009
801–dc22 2008041062
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
Contents
Contributors ix
Introduction—Philosophy and Literature as Forms of Attention 3

Richard Eldridge
Part I. Genres
1. Epic 19
Gregory Nagy
2. Lyric 45
Susan Stewart
3. Tragedy 71
J. M. Bernstein
4. Comedy 95
Timothy Gould
5. Pastoral 117
Mark Payne
6. Satire 139
R. Bracht Branham
7. The Novel 162

Anthony J. Cascardi
8. Autobiography and Biography 180

Stephen Mulhall
9. Experimental Writing 199

R. M. Berry
vi contents
Part II. Periods and Modes
10. Realism 223

Bernard Harrison
11. Romanticism 247

Nikolas Kompridis
12. Idealism 271

Toril Moi
13. Modernism 298

Philip Weinstein
14. Postcolonialism 322

Simona Bertacco
Part III. Devices and Powers
15. Imagination 349

Kirk Pillow
16. Plot 369

Alan Singer
17. Character 393

Stanley Bates
18. Style 420

Charles Altieri
19. Emotion, Memory, and Trauma 442

Glenn W. Most
Part IV. Contexts and Uses
20. Literature and Knowledge 467

John Gibson
contents vii
21. Literature and Morality 486

Ted Cohen
22. Literature and Politics 496

Fred Rush
Index 517
Contributors
Charles Altieri teaches in the English Department at University of California,

Berkeley. His most recent books are The Particulars of Rapture and The Art of
Twentieth Century American Poetry. He is working toward a book on the poetry of
Wallace Stevens.
Stanley Bates teaches philosophy at Middlebury College. He has written

on ethics, aesthetics, film, Kant, Thoreau, Wittgenstein, and Cavell, He is
the coeditor of Walter Cerf: A Personal Odyssey, to which he contributed an
introductory essay.
J. M. Bernstein is University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the

New School for Social Research. Among his books are The Fate of Art, Adorno:
Disenchantment and Ethics, and Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and
the Meaning of Painting. He edited and introduced Classic and Romantic German
Aesthetics. He is currently working on a book provisionally titled Torture and Dignity.
R. M. Berry is coeditor of Fiction’s Present: Situating Contemporary Narrative

Innovation and author, most recently, of the novel Frank and story collection
Dictionary of Modern Anguish. His critical writings have appeared in Soundings,
Symploke, Philosophy and Literature, Narrative, and various anthologies. He is
currently professor and chair of English at Florida State University.
Simona Bertacco is assistant professor of English literature at the University

of Milan. Her research focuses on issues in postcolonialism, women’s and gender
studies, and translation studies. Her publications include Out of Place: The
Writings of Robert Kroetsch, Postcolonial to Multicultural: An Anthology of Texts
from the English-Speaking World, and Sul Corpo: Culture/Politiche/Estetiche (On
the Body: Cultures/Politics/Aesthetics), coedited with Nicoletta Vallorani.
R. Bracht Branham teaches classics, comparative literature, and philosophy

at Emory University. He is coeditor (with M. O. Goulet-Cazé) of The Cynics: The
Cynic Movement in Antiquity and Its Legacy and editor of Bakhtin and the Classics
and The Bakhtin Circle and Ancient Narrative.
Anthony J. Cascardi is director of the Townsend Center for the Humanities

and Ancker Professor in the departments of Comparative Literature, Rhetoric,
and Spanish at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of
x contributors
numerous essays and books, including The Subject of Modernity and Consequences
of Enlightenment, and is editor of Literature and the Question of Philosophy. He
serves on numerous boards and as the general academic editor of the Penn State
series of books in Literature and Philosophy.
Ted Cohen is professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. He is a past

president of the American Society for Aesthetics and of the Central Division of
the American Philosophical Association. He is the author of Jokes: Philosophical
Thoughts on Joking Matters and Thinking of Others: The Talent for Metaphor.
Richard Eldridge is Charles and Harriett Cox McDowell Professor of

Philosophy at Swarthmore College. He is the author of On Moral Personhood:
Philosophy, Literature, Criticism, Self-Understanding; Leading a Human Life:
Wittgenstein, Intentionality, and Romanticism; The Persistence of Romanticism;
An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art; and, most recently, Literature, Life,
and Modernity; and he is the editor of Beyond Representation and Stanley
Cavell.
John Gibson is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Louisville.

He is the author of Fiction and the Weave of Life (Oxford UP, 2007) and coeditor
of A Sense of the World: Essays on Fiction, Narrative and Knowledge and The
Literary Wittgenstein. He is currently working on a new book titled Poetry,
Metaphor, and Nonsense: An Essay on Meaning.
Timothy Gould is professor of philosophy at the Metropolitan State College

of Denver. He has written articles on Kant’s aesthetics, Emerson, Thoreau,
Nietzsche, Romanticism, and Wittgenstein and is the author of Hearing Things:
Voice and Method in the Writing of Stanley Cavell. He is completing a book
manuscript titled The Names of Action, with chapters on Austin, Wittgenstein,
Cavell, Emerson, Marx, and Nietzsche. He has also been writing a series of essays
on narrative in comedy, history, movies, autobiography, and trauma, tentatively
titled Saving the Story.
Bernard Harrison currently holds an Emeritus Chair in Philosophy at the

University of Utah. At the University of Sussex, where he taught from 1963 to
1992, he profited from the presence of a stellar group of colleagues in literary
studies, including A. D. Nuttall, Stephen Medcalf, and Gabriel Josipovici. His
interests include the interfaces between literature, moral philosophy, and the
philosophy of language. His books include Fielding’s Tom Jones: The Novelist
as Moral Philosopher, Inconvenient Fictions: Literature and the Limits of Theory,
and (with Patricia Hanna) Word and World: Practice and the Foundations of
Language.
Nikolas Kompridis is currently a visiting professor in the Department of

Political Science and the Centre for Ethics at the University of Toronto. He is the
contributors xi
author of Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and Future and
numerous articles on topics in political philosophy, aesthetics, and critical theory
as well as the editor of Philosophical Romanticism. He is now working on three
forthcoming books, The Freedom to Begin Anew: Re-imagining Public Reason and
Democratic Politics, Receptive Agency: A Philosophy of Music after Adorno (after
Cavell), and The Aesthetic Turn in Political Theory.
Toril Moi is James B. Duke Professor of Literature and Romance Studies and
professor of English and theater studies at Duke University. She is the author of
Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory, Simone de Beauvoir: The Making
of an Intellectual Woman, and What Is a Woman? And Other Essays. She is also the
editor of The Kristeva Reader and French Feminist Thought. Her most recent book
is Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theater, Philosophy.
Glenn W. Most is professor of Greek philology at the Scuola Normale

Superiore di Pisa and Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the
University of Chicago. He has published widely on ancient and modern
literature, philosophy, and art, on literary theory, and on the reception of
antiquity. His most recent books include Doubting Thomas and Hesiod. The
Classical Tradition. A Guide, coedited with Anthony Grafton and Salvatore
Settis, should appear in 2009.
Stephen Mulhall is fellow and tutor in philosophy at New College, Oxford.

His current research concerns Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Nietzsche. His most
recent publications are On Film and The Wounded Animal: J. M. Coetzee and the
Difficulty of Reality in Literature and Philosophy.
Gregory Nagy is the author of The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero
in Archaic Greek Poetry. Other publications include Plato’s Rhapsody and Homer’s
Music: The Poetics of the Panathenaic Festival in Classical Athens. He coedited with
Stephen A. Mitchell the second, 40th-anniversary edition of Albert Lord, The
Singer of Tales, coauthoring with Mitchell the new introduction. Since 2000, he
has been the director of the Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington,
D.C., while continuing to teach at the Harvard campus in Cambridge as the
Francis Jones Professor of Classical Greek Literature and professor of comparative
literature.
Mark Payne, assistant professor of Classics at the University of Chicago, is

the author of Theocritus and the Invention of Fiction and articles on Pindar and
Hölderlin, Pindar and Paul Celan, ecphrasis and inalienable gifts, and the idea
of poetic childhood in Hellenistic poetry. He is now working on a book about
animals in ancient and modern literature.
Kirk Pillow is dean of the Corcoran College of Art and Design within the
Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. He is the author of Sublime
xii contributors
Understanding: Aesthetic Reflection in Kant and Hegel and articles on imagination,

metaphor, and contemporary art.
Fred Rush teaches philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. He is the

author of On Architecture and of a number of essays at the intersection of
German philosophy, aesthetics, and political theory. He is also the editor
of The Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory and coeditor of the journal
Internationales Jahrbuch des Deutschen Idealismus.
Alan Singer is professor of English at Temple University. He publishes on

aesthetics and literary theory. His most recently published book is Aesthetic
Reason: Artworks and the Deliberative Ethos. He has just completed a book on
self-deception and aesthetic value.
Susan Stewart, poet, critic, and translator, is the Annan Professor of English at
Princeton University. Her five books of poems include Columbarium, which won
the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry in 2003, and, most recently,
Red Rover. Her prose works include On Longing, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses,
and The Open Studio: Essays on Art and Aesthetics. She is a current chancellor of
the Academy of American Poets, a former MacArthur Fellow and Guggenheim
Fellow, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Philip Weinstein is Alexander Griswold Cummins Professor of English at

Swarthmore College. His teaching and his research both focus on modernist
literature and philosophy. His writings include The Semantics of Desire: Changing
Models of Identity from Dickens to Joyce, Faulkner’s Subject: A Cosmos No One
Owns, What Else but Love? The Ordeal of Race in Faulkner and Morrison, and
Unknowing: The Work of Modernism Fiction. In 2009 Oxford UP will bring out
his latest book, a study of Faulkner’s life and work titled Becoming Faulkner.
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PH ILOSOPH Y
INTRODUCTION
richard eldridge
I said, “we were not stocks and stones”—’tis very well. I should
have added, nor are we angels, I wish we were,—but men
cloathed with bodies, and governed by our imaginations;—
and what a junketing piece of work of it there is, betwixt
these and our seven senses. . . .
For my hobby-horse, if you recollect a little, is no way

a vicious beast; he has scarce one hair or lineament of the
ass about him—’Tis the sporting little fi lly-folly which
carries you out for the present hour—a maggot, a butterfly
a picture, a fiddle-stick—an uncle Toby’s siege—or an any
thing, which a man makes a shift to get a stride on, to cater
it away from the cares and solicitudes of life—’tis as useful a
beast as is in the whole creation—nor do I really see how the
world could do without it.
—Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions
of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
As these two epigraphs from Tristram Shandy eloquently indicate, human beings
are complicated animals who are freighted with imaginations that range beyond
the senses; they use their imaginations both to escape from life and to find lines of
direction and interest within it. Certain exercises of imagination can seem fruit-
less and strange, yet also compelling and necessary for forming and maintaining
substantial commitments.
Both literature (both its production and the critical study of it) and philosophy
as disciplines have often been seen (sometimes by each other) as embodying either
4 philosophy and literature as forms of attention
strange fruitlessness or compelling necessity—sometimes both. As early as Plato’s

Ion, literary works and their authors were cast as divinely inspired, but wayward,
uninformed by craft, and useless for the serious business of life. As early as Aristo-
phanes’ Clouds, philosophy is seen as comically pretentious and ridiculous. With
the steady separation of modern science from natural philosophy since the seven-
teenth century, this impression of philosophy as comical has only widened.
Both literary writers (along with many of those who study them) and phi-
losophers (and those who study them) have long insisted, with considerable force,
that they are attending seriously to life, not escaping from it. Whatever their wild
varieties of form, the texts that are produced by philosophical and literary writ-
ers differ significantly from mere lists of otherwise unassociated words and from
sonic word play alone. Some forms of attention and discipline seem to control
both philosophical and literary production, even while imagination (beyond
sensation, measurement, and calculation) remains central, while which forms of
discipline and why and how they control production remain unclear and deeply
contested.
In contrast with the focus on material actualities that is typical of the natural
sciences (however mediated that focus is by imagination), philosophy and litera-
ture as forms of attention focus more on human commitments and passions. At its
most abstract and general, philosophy undertakes to specify ideal commitments,
or the commitments that it would be most effectively worthwhile to have, even if
their fulfi llments remain contingent and interruptible. The effort is, inter alia, to
specify justice as an ideal form of social life, or morality as an ideal form of personal
and immediate interpersonal comportment, or a practice of inquiry as an ideal
form of cognitive engagement with the real, or ideal success in formal arrange-
ment. Yet any such effort at least runs a risk of being fantastically ad hoc and empty
in relation to empirical details of present material circumstance that remain, in
part, hindrances not so easily assimilated to pursuits of the ideal. Tyrannical, sec-
tarian domination may in turn result from attempting to put fantastic ideals into
actual practice. Hence, close attention to material circumstances and passions for
their own sakes seems necessary to correct abstract ideal theorizing that is always
possibly premature. Philosophy seems to need correction by literature’s attention
to how any commitments might in particular be lived, if it is to avoid comic irrel-
evance and the rationalization of domination.
Literature, in contrast, focuses on the particular in the universal, undertak-
ing to track what is most likely to come, tragically or comically, of the bearing of
particular passions in circumstances that remain always in part intractable. This
literary form of attention runs the risk, however, of seeing human beings as caught
up only and always in pieces of good or bad luck, failing to discern any genuine
universals that human beings might well pursue. Human life may be presented
as one damn thing after another, without any clear possibilities either of fruitful
emplotment or of evident connections among distinct human lives. Unilluminat-
ing particularism is as least a possible fate of close attention to material circum-
stances and passions, a possible fate that it becomes increasingly difficult to avoid
introduction 5
in the wake of the modern disenchantment of nature. Samuel Beckett, for example,
favors a form of literature that consists in “the expression that there is nothing to
express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power
to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express” (1965: 13).
If that is what literature in the end amounts to, then it will be impossible to define,
even provisionally and gesturally, and it will become instead a thing of refusals of
meaning and resistances to it. As Jacques Derrida puts it, “It’s the most interesting
thing in the world, maybe even more interesting than the world, and this is why,
if it has no definition, what is heralded and refused under the name of literature
cannot be identified with any other discourse. It will never be scientific, philo-
sophical, conversational” (1992: 47). Yet if it affords only stuttering, without gen-
eralizable meaning of any kind, then the point of the literary work is desperately
unclear, however subjectively important it is felt to be by certain isolated intellec-
tuals. Hence, literature seems to need correction by philosophy’s efforts to trace
universals and to discern and specify ideal forms of commitment, if it is to avoid
particularistic emptiness and collapse into light entertainment at best, insignifi-
cant word play at worst.
In fact, both philosophy and literature at their bests have engaged with each
other to develop forms of attention to human life and to human commitments
and passions while avoiding both empty idealism and empty particularism. Phi-
losophy has its particular initiating perplexities and its forms of the emplotment
of the progress of an implied protagonist, including at least dialogues, confessions,
summas, meditations, essays, treatises, tractates, critiques, phenomenologies,
manifestoes, postscripts, genealogies, and investigations, among others. Litera-
ture has its forms of appeal to general philosophical terms, as it undertakes to
treat the particularities with which it engages, however sotto voce, as significant
instances of some more general idea, concept, or theory of the human; emplot-
ment of the plausible is impossible without some more general concept of the
probable or necessary. As Asja Szafraniec usefully remarks, “[L]iterature does not
exorcise the universal from itself but negotiates an intersection of the singular
and universal within itself as a singular work” (2007: 57). Hence, each form of
attention—philosophy and literature—both negotiates with and resists the other,
engages with and excludes it.
If we focus abstractly on philosophy’s concern with ideal, general commit-
ments and literature’s attention to particulars as objects of passion, then we might
develop something like the following table of oppositions:
Philosophy Literature
Universality Particularity
Reason (Particularized) Imagination
Ideal Symbolic Order Primary Process
Detachment Engagement
Insight Emotion
Such an abstract set of oppositions has some point in revealing patterns of mutual
contestation. But we would do well to remember also that there are, always, engage-
ment and negotiation as well as resistance and repudiation. When we attend to how
simultaneous engagement and contestation have been played out, we find Socrates,
Plato, and Aristotle not quite wholly displacing and killing off Homeric epic, Pin-
daric Ode, and Sapphic lyric; the modern novel not quite wholly displacing and
killing off theological or rationalist philosophy; artistic modernism not quite dis-
placing and killing off more thematized and emplotted philosophy and literature;
analytical philosophy not quite displacing and killing off literature; mongrelizing
postmodernism not quite displacing and killing off all of philosophy, traditional
narrative literature, and more formally unified modernism; and so on.
Both genres and certain central devices of attention (emplotment, character-
ization, style) then emerge more as ways of registering and coming to terms with
continuing tensions between a standing human need for and possibility of reflec-
tive orientation under reasonable commitments and a standing absence of com-
pleteness of orientation. These tensions are played out within various overlapping
spheres of life: social-historical (economic, sociological, political), ethical-familial,
developmental-psychoanalytic, moral, formal-aesthetic, and cognitive-scientific.
These spheres of life in turn take different historical shapes: the culture of mar-
tial honor of twelfth-century b.c.e. Greece is not the same as the culture of cos-
mopolitan wit in the salons of Berlin circa 1800; the culture of Enlightenment in
eighteenth-century Edinburgh is not the same as the culture of capitalism and the
image in contemporary Tokyo or Milan; the culture of the nineteenth-century
boulevards and arcades in Paris or Vienna is not the same as the cultures of hybrid-
ity crossed with fundamentalism in contemporary Cairo, Los Angeles, or Tehran.
Oslo is not Abu Dhabi; São Paulo is not Beijing; Mumbai is not Philadelphia; and
none of these is Peoria or Surbiton or Yoknapatawpha County or Albogastathir
or Banaras. Yet tensions in life between aspiration supported by reflection and
the empirically happenstantial remain variously evident, and they are taken up in
various and illuminating ways by both literature and philosophy.
Philosophy and literature as forms of attention are then modes of seeking ori-
entation and clarification of commitment and emotion, and both begin within a
specific, situated point of view. Focusing on how each form of attention seeks ori-
entation and clarification within a point of view and from a situation of perplexity,
R. G. Collingwood argues that they are not, ultimately, distinct:
Ever since Pythagoras (or so we are told) invented the word philosophy, in order
to express the notion of the philosopher not as one who possesses wisdom but
as one who aspires to it, students of philosophy have recognized that the essence
of their business lies not in holding this view or that, but in aiming at some
view not yet achieved: in the labour and adventure of thinking, not the results
of it. What a genuine philosopher (as distinct from a teacher of philosophy
for purposes of examination) tries to express when he writes is the experience
he enjoys in the course of this adventure, where theories and systems are only
incidents in the journey. For the poet, there is, perhaps, none of this dynamism
introduction 7
of thinking. He finds himself equipped, as it were, with certain ideas, and

expresses the way in which it feels to possess them. Poetry, then, in so far as it
is the poetry of a thinking man and addressed to a thinking audience, may be
described as expressing the intellectual emotion attendant upon thinking in
a certain way: philosophy, the intellectual emotion attendant upon trying to
think better. . . . [But] in so far as each is good, each converges, as regards style
and literary form, with the other; in the limiting case where each was as good as
it ought to be, the distinction would disappear. (1938: 297, 298)
Collingwood may somewhat overstate his claim: philosophy and literature are
at least comparatively distinct from one another, in that philosophy foregrounds
result, impersonality, and attention to general discursive and practical commit-
ment, while literature foregrounds process, personal engagement, particularity,
and perplexity. Yet philosophy, too, begins in perplexity; and literature, too, seeks
at least implicit generalizable significance. Both exist in the space of clarification. As
Kantian critique, Dewey on the reflex arc, and Wittgenstein’s later criticisms of the
Tractatus myth of simple objects should have taught us, there is no getting beneath
conceptual commitments and ways of taking objects to identify sempiternal,
ultimate metaphysical objects, while still retaining a point of view. Point-of-view
having lacks any fi xed, ultimate ground, and it inherently involves discursive tak-
ings that are themselves contestable and freighted with perplexities and emotional
opacities. (This should cast doubt on any strict and absolute opposition between
a literal language that records the real and a figurative-expressive language that
stylizes stance and attitude: representation cannot be absolutely separated from
stance, attitude, and expression of interest and mood.) Human subjectivity as such
occupies a position of transcendental homelessness that commits it to the seeking
of orientation and clarification.1 This transcendental homelessness may be sensed
more sharply in technological modernity and in otherwise fragmented cultures
than elsewhere, but there is good reason to think that it attaches in some measure
to the bearing of a point of view as such. In mutual engagement and mutual con-
testation, philosophy and literature as forms of attention arise from within this
situation of the human subject.
The most critically astute and historically perceptive general philosophical
account of the roles of literature and poetic imagination in human life remains
Hegel’s Lectures on Fine Art. Hegel begins by noting that both literature and phi-
losophy address oppositions, between abstract law, legislative reason, duty, and
civic order, on the one hand, and inclinations, sensuous impulses, and somatic
responses to an abundance of new phenomena, on the other. These oppositions
are natural to human life as such; coherent commitments that would resolve these
oppositions never lie fully ready to hand. In Hegel’s full history of forms of art, it is
these oppositions that function more effectively as a universal that informs human
life than does any logic-governed concept of freedom. But while they are univer-
sal, these oppositions also take specific shapes in specific historical circumstances;
in particular, modernity exacerbates them, as the social division of labor and the
need to make a life via specialized skill within a market economy increase.
These are oppositions which have not been invented at all by the subtlety of
reflection or the pedantry of philosophy; in numerous forms they have always
preoccupied and troubled the human consciousness, even if it is modern culture
that has first worked them out most sharply and driven them up to the peak of
harshest contradiction. (Hegel 1975, 1: 54)
Though they effectively lack any superintending logic (more so than Hegel’s offi-
cial doctrine would allow), these oppositions can nonetheless be addressed and
worked through partially. One can seek in abstract reflection informed by his-
torical awareness to determine more adequate commitments and practices that
will moderate these oppositions for many to some degree; general philosophical
theories of commitments, practices, and institutions can yield some fruits. Or, and
also at the same time, the work of imagination can recontextualize, emplot, and
redirect commitments that remain significantly tied to particulars, yielding mod-
est routes of orientation via the exemplary. It can take up, elaborate, and clarify
initially inchoate but real emotional perplexities and somatic investments as they
continue to inhabit any form of institutionalized social life.
As Hegel notices, it is poetry that first answers to a standing need for orienta-
tion toward the more fit and satisfying exercise of human powers within opposi-
tions. (“Poetry” [Poesie] is Hegel’s term for all significant imaginative dramatic
literature, including epic, lyric, tragedy, comedy, romance, the novel, and other
related genres and subgenres.) “Man exists conformably to the law of his existence
only when he knows what he is and what his surroundings are: he must know what
the powers are which drive and direct him, and it is such a knowledge that poetry
provides in its original and substantive form” (Hegel 1975, 2: 973). First in epic
and then in further imaginative, dramatic forms, poetry (literature) presents not
material things as they are and may be discerned via impersonal measurement, in
themselves, but rather things as they matter to us, for good or ill, in feeling and
within emplotments of engagements. “The poetic imagination, as the activity of a
poet, does not, as plastic art does, set before our eyes the thing itself in its external
reality (even if that reality be produced by art), but gives us on the contrary an
inner vision and feeling of it” (Hegel 1975, 2: 1111).
The work of poetic or literary presentation is then in general to address and
work through a structure of feeling that has arisen in relation to the lived expe-
rience of oppositions, as these oppositions circumstantially take on new shapes
and mobilize somatic investments. Feeling is tested for aptness in relation to its
occasioning perplexities, subjected to complex modulation and development via
emplotment of what is or may be going on, and focused. It is transformed from a
suffered burden deriving from happenstance into an active response of felt engage-
ment, for which both author and reader can then take responsibility, thus making
the continuing of the life of a subject, always caught up in feeling, more bearable.
[Poetry’s] task, namely, is to liberate the spirit not from but in feeling. The blind
dominion of passion lies in an unconscious and dull unity between
itself and the entirety of a heart that cannot rise out of itself into ideas and
introduction 9
self-expression. Poetry does deliver the heart from this slavery to passion by
making it see itself, but it does not stop at merely extricating this felt passion
from its immediate unity with the heart but makes of it an object purified from
all accidental moods, an object in which the inner life, liberated and with its
self-consciousness satisfied, reverts freely at the same time into itself and is at
home with itself. (Hegel 1975, 2: 1112)
Liberation in feeling is not a matter simply of settling on classifications, normative

stances, general principles, or policies for future comportment (however impor-
tant the testing of all these may also be). Instead, it involves animation—more
fully achieved ensoulment—within feeling. As Kant puts it, the work of poetic
imagination in attending to things is not that of classification alone; rather, it car-
ries out “the addition to a concept of much that is unnameable, the feeling of which
animates the cognitive faculties and combines spirit with what would otherwise
be the mere letter of language.”2 Without this animation or ensoulment, involving
feeling’s response to what is unnameable in experience, but feeling then developed,
modulated, and brought to poetic expression, human life threatens to be dull, dis-
engaged, dispirited, and evacuated of responsive subjectivity. Or, in Hegel’s devel-
opment of this same point,
[t]he universal and the rational are not expressed in poetry in abstract
universality and philosophically proved interconnection, or with their aspects
merely related together as in scientific [wissenschaftlich] thinking, but instead as
animated, manifest, ensouled, determining the whole, and yet at the same time
expressed in such a way that the all-comprising unity, the real animating soul, is
made to work only in secret from within outwards. (1975, 2: 973)
Relating the incidents, scenes, persons, thoughts, moods, and feelings that are
presented in a literary work of art so as to invite, sustain, and develop emotional
engagement, animation, and ensoulment is not, then, the presentation of the
merely materially real either enumeratively or theoretically. “In general we may
describe poetry’s way of putting things as figurative because it brings before our
eyes . . . an appearance such that in it we immediately recognize the essence [or
what is significant for us within feeling in relation to possibilities of fuller and
freer life] through, and inseparably from, the external aspect and its individuality”
(Hegel 1975, 2: 1002). Thought, feeling, language, and subject matter remain teth-
ered to one another via figuration, in a sustained act of attention in the furtherance
of life.
Given that human subjects necessarily exist in material and cultural situa-
tions that are shared at least to some extent, the poetic work of attention and of
the working through of feeling must not be uniquely individual. It is a criterion of
success for literary and poetic attention that some resonance with the development
of the situation in language be achieved with some others. In a thought that Hegel
shares with Wordsworth and Collingwood, among others, casual and incidental
rendering, as merely happenstantial, must be distinguished from successful atten-
tion that deploys the powers of a subject in an exemplary and resonant way:
In order that this [poetic] expression may not remain a merely casual expression
of an individual’s own immediate feelings and ideas, it becomes the language of
the poetic inner life, and therefore however intimately the insights and feelings
which the poet describes as his own belong to him as a single individual, they
must nevertheless possess a universal validity, i.e. they must be genuine feelings
and meditations for which the poet invents or finds the adequate and lively
expression. (1975, 2: 1111–12)
How the required exemplarity and resonance are to be achieved remains, however,
deeply unclear, according to Hegel. Whatever the achievements of modern social
institutions may be, there remain enough oppositions in life to provoke manifold
varieties of emotional perplexities and inchoate somatic investments that require
working through. Hence, “the most heterogeneous works count as poetry” (1975,
2: 971); there are no rules of taste, no necessary forms of organization or diction,
no necessary subject matters. Instead, poetic imagination in finding and integrat-
ing appropriate organization, style, and subject, so as to achieve effective working
through, is all.
Hegel’s own historical account of the rises and falls of distinct forms of social
life, and so, he argues, of the literary forms appropriate to them, is both exces-
sively, implausibly rigid and yet insightful in its attention to the importance of
social-material circumstances for the practice of literary art. The excessive and
implausible rigidity consist in his supposing that forms of social life are more or
less coherent wholes, not mongrels; that the boundaries between them are more
or less clear; and that their historical succession is governed by a superintending
logic. And yet his insights are penetrating, especially in his account of epic. “Epic
proper,” Hegel argues, is “actualized in the most artistically adequate way [only]
by the Greeks” (1975, 2: 1093)—indeed, only by Homer. This is because a celebra-
tory song of accepted heroic virtues (including accepted virtues in conflict with
one another), if it is to do the artistic work of working through an emotionally
freighted point of view that is shared, presupposes a certain social world in which
these virtues are accepted and common attitudes toward them are held. This is
possible only under specific material circumstances:
The state of human life most suitable as the background of an epic is that in
which [a universal ethical ground] exists for individuals already as a present
reality but which remains most closely connected with them by the tie of a
common primitive life. . . . The relations of ethical life, the bond of the family,
as well as the bond of the people—as an entire nation—in war and peace
must all have been discovered, framed, and developed; but on the other
hand, not yet developed into the form of universal institutions, obligations,
and laws valid in themselves without any ratification by the living subjective
personality of individuals, and indeed possessed of the power of subsisting
even against the will of individuals. . . . [Man] must still feel himself alive
in . . . the means for satisfying his needs: e.g. house and garden, tents, seats,
beds, swords and lances, ships for crossing the sea, chariots to take him to
battle, kettles and roasting-tins, slaughter of animals, food and drink . . . with
his whole mind and self, and therefore give a really human, animated, and
introduction 11
individual stamp to what is inherently external by bringing it into close

connection with the human individual. Our modern machines and factories
with their products, as well as our general way of satisfying the needs of
our external life, would from this point of view be just as unsuitable as our
modern political organization is for the social background required for the
primitive epic. (Hegel 1975, 2: 1051–53)
Certain conceptions of human character must further be both commonly

accepted and worked into the successful epic text. Inwardness and moralism
must have little place. Counsel and freely willed participation—and only these,
not statute—hold the Greeks together as a warring body. Hence, Agamemnon’s
“position as overlord does not become the dry connection of command and obe-
dience, of a master and his servants” (Hegel 1975, 2: 1053), and “Achilles, as an
epic character, should not be given moral lectures as if he were a schoolboy”
(1068). Hence, if there are modern epics—Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings or
The Golden Compass—these must tend strongly toward compensatory escapism
rather than objective social description, and they will be set in a time long ago
and far away.
We should not, however, suppose that Homer merely describes actual events.
The heroic virtues must be developed artistically, presented, for example, through
extended, predominantly visual similes3 and set within plots in which choices
about foci of attention must be made:
But we must not put the matter at all as if a people in its heroic age as such, the
cradle of its epic, already had the skill to be able to describe itself poetically. . . .
The need to make play with ideas in such a presentation, i.e. the development of
art, necessarily arises later than the life and the spirit which is naively at home
in its immediate poetic existence. Homer and the poems bearing his name are
centuries later than the Trojan war which counts as an actual fact. . . . [Yet] in
spite of the separation in time, a close connection must nevertheless still be left
between the poet and his material. The poet must still be wholly absorbed in
these old circumstances, ways of looking at things, and faith, and all he needs to
do is to bring a poetic consciousness and artistic portrayal to his subject which
is in fact the real basis of his actual life. (Hegel 1975, 2: 1046–47)
Proper to epic, then, as a form of effective high literary art is “the objective presen-
tation of a self-grounded world, . . . a world to which the poet’s own way of looking
at things is akin and with which he can identify himself” (1047); absent such a
world and wholehearted identification with it, the production of epic as the highest
form of literary art is impossible.
Yet beyond this singular case, correlations between social and literary forms
are much looser and for some literary forms largely absent. In particular, lyric,
unlike epic, “has the advantage of being producible at almost any moment in a
nation’s history, [and] its contents may be of extreme variety and touch national
life in every direction” (Hegel 1975, 2: 1113–14). The task of the lyric poet, as of, later,
the modern novelist and writer of shorter forms of artistic prose, all of whom live
amidst greater varieties of individualization, is only
that he shall entirely assimilate and make his own the objective subject-matter.
For the truly lyrical poet lives in himself, treats circumstances in accordance
with his own poetic individual outlook, and now, however variously his inner
life may be fused with the world confronting him and with its situations,
complexities and fates, what he nevertheless manifests in his portrayal of
this material is only the inherent and independent life of his feelings and
meditations. (1118)
A more individualized working through of emotionally freighted point-of-view

having, with more uncertain reception, is now the norm. Forms multiply, effec-
tively achieved resonances become more distinctly sectarian, and more markedly
individual style and diction become more foregrounded.
Everywhere, and whether one locates its beginnings in fourteenth-century
Italy, in seventeenth-century science, or distantly in Hellenic and Roman cos-
mopolitanism, the modern is marked by awareness of difference, contingency,
variability, and the consequent impossibility of the full consolidation of mean-
ingful culture without significant opacities, disenfranchisements, and perplexi-
ties. Whatever we make of postmodernity—whether it is something genuinely new
and different or rather a late moment of modernity—these awarenesses become
yet more prominent. The importance of literature in working through emotions
initiated by perplexities becomes all the more significant, in contrast with, say,
theology, as both perplexities and felt awarenesses of them increase. As a result,
as J. M. Bernstein puts it, “modern works of art are riven with a reflective, critical
self-consciousness of themselves as works of art in relation to (postulated, pos-
ited, proposed, invented) indeterminate ideals from which they remain forever
separate” (2006: 150). They undertake the work of working through, in the hope
of achieving the clarification and consolidation of felt interest, while knowing that
achievements of fullest clarification, consolidation, and resonance remain elusive.
Experimentalism and the marking of literary style as differing from communica-
tive norms become more prominent, as modes of distinctly literary achievement
are sought and resought. As new perplexities and consequent emotional burdens
are brought into attention, the devices of the Freudian primary process (conden-
sation, displacement, considerations of representability, and secondary revision)
jostle against direct communicative intent, too ready emplotment, cliché, and the
didactic. Figuration holds open the space of attention to the difficult and emotion-
ally perplexing. Finitude in undertaking to perfect practical and discursive com-
mitments is fully accepted, and the work of literary attending goes on.
And yet address to the perplexing situation of subjects remains possible, even
in the absence of the achievement of absolute orientation. In a characterization
that may be taken as well to describe the condition of modern literature as such,
György Lukács describes “the irony of the novel” as
the self-correction of the world’s fragility: inadequate relations can transform
themselves into a fanciful yet well-ordered round of misunderstandings and
cross-purposes, within which everything is seen as many-sided, within which
things appear as isolated and yet connected, as full of value and yet totally
introduction 13
devoid of it, as abstract fragments and as concrete, autonomous life, as flowering

and as decaying, as the infliction of suffering and as suffering itself. (1971: 75)
Engaging with philosophical general terms, yet denying finality in their applica-
tion, correcting the world’s fragility without denying it, and acknowledging and
working through perplexities without dismissing them, literature and philosophy
as imaginative disciplines are forms of attention both to the generalities and to the
difficult particulars of human life.
Given the partly complementary, partly opposed forms of attention to human
life that are cultivated in literary and philosophical writing, as they engage with
and contest one another, it is not clear that philosophy and literature is a distinct
subfield of philosophy, comparable, say, to ethics, epistemology, or the philosophy
of science (the subjects of other Oxford Handbooks), nor is it clear that it should be.
There are numbers of courses with the title “Philosophy and Literature” that are
taught in many places, but these courses often do not share any specific readings
or organizational scheme with one another. They are generally determined by the
interests of a particular instructor, and they generally lie somewhat aslant the main
curricula in both philosophy and literary studies.
In thinking about the relations of complementarity and opposition between
philosophy and literature, I have taken the “and” in the title seriously. Specifi-
cally, I have resisted the idea to organize the collection around the philosophy of
literature, treating topics such as the definition of literature, fictional objects and
fictional worlds, interpretation, emotions about literature, and so forth, as self-
standing topics in their own right to be submitted to the normal standards for the
treatment of distinctly philosophical problems. Several other collections already
exist that usefully collect the most important treatments of these problems. More
important, however, this style of normal philosophical problem solving tends to
detract from full attention both to the powers and interest of literature and to the
uneasy affinities and disaffinities between philosophy and literature as practices.
It seeks to understand the work of literature too readily against the background of
protocols of knowing that were developed principally within the epistemology of
the natural sciences, thus all but inevitably casting literature as secondary, decora-
tive, or deficient.
This collection is also not devoted to philosophy in literature; literary works
are not to be taken as mere instances of philosophical stances that are more articu-
lately and adequately worked out elsewhere, as one might, for example, take Sar-
tre’s Nausea as an illustration of Being and Nothingness. This approach, too, scants
both the powers of literature and the engagements and contestations that bind
philosophy and literature to one another as forms of attention and disciplines of
culture.
Instead, this collection is organized around considerations of genre, of certain
large-scale historical changes in dominant forms of sensibility and expression, of
central devices for developing and sustaining literary attention, and finally, of the
uses of literature.
Contributors were invited to explore the interests for human life of specific
genres of literature, to consider broad modes of attention that have marked off cer-
tain large cultural periods from one another and yet may also be available at many
times, to trace the workings of certain central devices for achieving attention, and
to consider literature as a practice in relation to the practices of inquiry, moral-
ity, and politics. As they appeared, the essays developed increasing resonances
with one another, as an essay on a given period or device charted its course via
comparisons with a neighboring period or device that was the subject of another
essay. Various overlapping themes—what words and characters are; how imagina-
tion works; the kinds of significances social circumstances have for imaginative
literary production; the needs and interests of situated subjects; the distinctive-
ness of artistic presentation; the fact of style; the significances of Aristotle, Hegel,
Nietzsche, Lukács, and Wittgenstein, among others, for thinking about literary
practice—became increasingly clear and prominent. It has been both a pleasure
and an education for me to work with the contributors who have taken up the
invitation to explore philosophy and literature with perceptiveness, subtlety, and
argumentative cogency that go well beyond what anyone could have hoped for.
Given the powers of their essays, I am confident in trusting that other readers will
experience similar tuitions and delights.
NOTES
1. György Lukács introduces the notion of transcendental homelessness in order to

characterize the situation of the subject in modernity in The Theory of the Novel (1920,
reprinted 1971: 61). I follow him in thinking of this transcendental homelessness as
especially marked in modernity, but reject his claim that it was altogether absent among
the eighth–century b.c.e. Greeks.
2. Kant 2000: 194 (p. 316 Akademie edition); translation slightly modified, adding
“what would otherwise be” for “als blobem.”
3. On the artistry of visual witness in Homer, see Auerbach (1953), especially chap. 1,
“Odysseus’ Scar,” and Ledbetter 2002: chap. 1, “Supernatural Knowledge in Homeric
Poetics.”
REFERENCES
Auerbach, E. (1953). Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (W.R.

Trask, trans.). Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Beckett, S. (1965). “Three Dialogues.” In M. Esslin (ed.), Samuel Beckett: A Collection of
Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall. (Original work published 1949).
introduction 15
Bernstein, J. M. (2006). “Poesy and the Arbitrariness of the Sign: Notes for a Critique
of Jena Romanticism.” In N. Kompridis (ed.), Philosophical Romanticism. London:
Routledge.
Collingwood, R. G. (1938). The Principles of Art. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Derrida, J. (1992). “ ‘This Strange Institution Called Literature’: An Interview with
Jacques Derrida.” In D. Attridge (ed.), Acts of Literature. New York: Routledge.
Hegel, G. W. F. (1975). Lectures on Fine Art (T. M. Knox, trans.). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Kant, I. (2000). Critique of the Power of Judgment (P. Guyer, ed.; P. Guyer and
E. Matthews, trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Original work
published 1790).
Ledbetter, G. M. (2002). Poetics Before Plato. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Lukács, G. (1971). The Theory of The Novel (A. Bostock, trans.). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press. (Original work published 1920).
Szafraniec, A. (2007). Beckett, Derrida, and the Event of Literature. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
part i
GENRES
 
EPIC
gregory nagy
W is epic? For a definition, we must look to the origins of the term. The word
“epic” comes from the ancient Greek noun epos, which refers to a literary genre
that we understand as “epic.” But the question is, can we say that this word “epic”
refers to the same genre as epos? The simple answer is no. But the answer is compli-
cated by the fact that there is no single understanding of the concept of a “genre”—
let alone the concept of “epic.”
This is to be expected, since literary genres do not exist in a vacuum. It is not
that literature is made up of a fi xed set of genres, such as epic and tragedy. Rather,
different literatures have different genres. And even the genres we find in any one
particular literature may change over time.
Any given genre in any given literature needs to be defined in relation to the other
existing genres in that literature (Slatkin 1987). From a worldwide survey of litera-
tures and preliteratures, it is evident that genres exist “in a relationship of interdepen-
dence, in which they have complementary functions in conveying different aspects of
a coherent ideology or system of beliefs about the world” (Slatkin 1987: 260).
With the advent of modernity, however, the sense of “coherent ideology or sys-
tem of beliefs” is eroded. Modern critics react to this erosion by expressing a sense
of discomfort with mechanical applications of classifications based on genre (see
Todorov 1990). One such critic, Benedetto Croce, went so far as to define any great
work of literature as something that is sui generis (Croce 1902). So, a great work,
to be truly great, has to become a genre in and of itself. It is as if a great work of
literature had to transcend its own genre simply because of its greatness.
Paradoxically, Croce’s modern formulation applies to the oldest attested genre
in European literature: epic. What defined epic was a great work that was in fact
considered to be sui generis. The genre of epic as understood by ancient critics was
ultimately defined by the greatest work of literature in the general estimation of
the ancient Greeks. That work was a combination of two mutually complementary
20 genres
poetic compositions attributed to a figure who was venerated as the greatest of all
poets. That figure, who was considered to be so ancient as to be prehistoric even
for the ancients, was Homer. And the two mutually complementary compositions
attributed to Homer were the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Looking for testimony from the ancient world, we find the clearest and most
accurate overall assessment of these two poems in the Poetics of Aristotle, who
flourished in the city of Athens in the fourth century b.c.e. This assessment is
linked to his view of epic as a genre.
Aristotle compares epic with other genres such as tragedy, dithyramb, and
comedy. Epic is the first of these genres to be mentioned at the very beginning of
Poetics (1447a):
Concerning poetic craft [poiē tikē (tekhnē)] in and of itself, and its forms [eidos
(plural)], and what potential each form has; and how mythical plots [muthoi]
must be put together if the poetic composition [poiē sis] is to be good at doing
what it does; and how many parts it is made of, and what kinds of parts they are;
and, likewise, all other questions that belong to the same line of inquiry—let us
speak about all these things by starting, in accordance with the natural order,
from first principles. So, the composition of epic [epopoiia = the poiē sis of epos]
and the composition [poiēsis] of tragedy, as well as comedy and the poetic craft
[poiētikē (tekhnē)] of the dithyramb and most sorts of crafts related to the aulos1
and the kithara2—all of these crafts, as it happens, are instances of re-enactment
[mimēsis],3 taken as a whole. There are three things that make these instances of
re-enactment different from each other: (1) re-enacting [mimeîsthai] things in
different media, or (2) re-enacting different things, or (3) re-enacting in a mode
[tropos] that is different and not the same as the other modes.
As we learn from Aristotle’s subsequent analysis in the Poetics, the act of reen-
actment or mimēsis was considered to be an act of representing a preexisting
something. The various different media used for representation involved various
different combinations or noncombinations of recitation, singing, dancing, and
the playing of musical instruments such as the kithara and the aulos. In the case
of epic in the time of Aristotle, its medium was recitation, without instrumental
accompaniment.
As for the mode of making a reenactment or mimēsis in the genre of epic, it was
basically diegetic, which is to say that the actions of characters were being reenacted
by way of diēgēsis, or narration; by contrast, the mode of making a reenactment
in other genres such as tragedy or comedy was dramatic, which is to say that the
actions of characters were being reenacted by actors interacting with each other or
with a singing and dancing ensemble called the khoros, or chorus. It is important
to add that the act of narrating epic in the time of Aristotle was in its own right an
act of reenactment, or mimēsis. That is because the narrator of epic was in effect
reenacting characters whenever he quoted, as it were, the words spoken by these
characters in the act of interacting with each other. It is also because the narrator of
the narrative that is epic was in effect reenacting a notionally prototypical master
narrative, narrated by a notionally prototypical master narrator, that is, by Homer.
epic 21
In order to discern more precisely Aristotle’s view of epic as a genre, we need

to look more closely at the terminology he uses in the statement I have quoted.
His word for “genre,” eidos, is used in a comparable way by his teacher, Plato, in
contexts of analyzing the genres of poetry and song making as found in the perfor-
mances of drama (as in Laws 3.700a). But Plato also uses eidos in the absolutized
sense of “Form” with reference to his Theory of Forms (as in Republic 10.596a). For
Aristotle, by contrast, an eidos, or genre, such as epic is to be defined comparatively
in relation to the other genres that he is considering, such as tragedy (Nagy 1999a:
21–32, esp. 29 n. 22). Aristotle’s point of view is validated by comparative evidence:
as I have already noted, a genre is not something absolute but relative, depending
on the coexistence of given genres at a given time and place (Slatkin 1987).
Aristotle’s assessment of epic as a genre takes into consideration not only
other coexisting genres but also the nature of poetry itself. His key expression
is poiētikē(tekhnē), or “poetic craft.” The adjective poiētikē can be translated as
“poetic” simply because it refers to the craft of composing poetry. Similarly, the
noun poiēsis can be translated as “poetry” simply because it refers to the act of
composing poetry. But the more basic idea inherent in these words deriving from
the stem poiē- is “composition” pure and simple. The verb poieîn, which means
“compose” or simply “make,” can refer to the making of any artifact, not only
an artifact that happens to be a poem (Ford 2002: 132–39). So the fact that poiēsis
and poiētikē are used exclusively to refer to the making of poetry, not to any other
kind of making, shows that making poetry was considered to be a most basic kind
of making. That is why poiēsis means not just any kind of making but rather, more
specifically, the making of poetry.
Studying the various poetic genres considered by Aristotle in his Poetics, we
find that the making of poetry is not only a matter of composition but also a mat-
ter of performance. Essentially, the genres he considers happen to correspond to
two programs of performances that took place at the two greatest festivals of the
Athenian state. At the feast of the City Dionysia of Athens, celebrated in the early
spring, there were competitions in the performances of tragedies, comedies, dithy-
rambs, and satyr dramas. At the feast of the Panathenaia of Athens, celebrated in
the late summer, there were competitions in the performances of tunes played on
the kithara or on the aulos, and of lyric songs sung to instrumental accompani-
ment by the kithara or by the aulos, and also of epic poetry recited without any
instrumental accompaniment (Nagy 1996a: 81–82; see also 26–27 n. 8).4
From the wording of Aristotle, it is clear that each of these genres was associ-
ated with a distinct tekhnē, or craft. That is, the overall poiētikē tekhnē (poetic
craft) was subdivided into a variety of specialized tekhnai (crafts). One such craft
was epic.
The term that Aristotle uses to designate the craft of making epic, epopoiia
(making of epos), indicates that the concept of making epic was equated with the
most general concept of making poetry, since the word used to designate “epic,”
epē, which is the plural of epos, is simply the general word used to designate any
kind of poetry produced by way of poiēsis, that is, by way of “making” poetry. For
22 genres
example, in the Clouds, a comedy by Aristophanes dating back to the fifth century
b.c.e., epē refers to the recited “verses” of his comedy (verse 544); in another of his
comedies, the Frogs (verse 862), epē again refers to the recited “verses”—as opposed
to the sung “lyrics,” which are melē (melos plural).
This usage, dating back to the classical period of comedy in the fifth century
b.c.e., is most significant. We have already seen that the act of making poetry,
poiēsis, was considered to be a most basic kind of making. Now we see that the act
of making epic poetry, epopoiia, was considered to be a most basic kind of making
poetry itself, since epē can refer to any kind of poetic verse that is recited—even
the recited verses of comedy as distinct from the sung verses in that genre. In other
words, to say epē is the most general way of referring to the “verses” of poetry. The
linguistic prehistory of epē helps explain its ultimate meaning: etymologically, this
word means simply “words” or “wording.” It is cognate with Latin vox, the mean-
ing of which is parallel: vox refers to whatever sounds are made by the human
voice.
Though the ancient Greeks perceived epic as a most general category in the era
of Aristotle, it had a most special status in their civilization. It was considered to be
poetry par excellence. The key to this status was the poet par excellence, Homer.
This figure was considered to be the supreme poet not only of epic but also of all
poetry. As we see from the usage of Plato (Gorgias 485d) as well as Aristotle (Rheto-
ric 1.1365a11), to say ho poiētēs (“the poet”) without any mention of a name was
tantamount to saying “Homer.” Homer was for them and for all Greeks of their
time the poet par excellence.
In the age of Plato and Aristotle, the prehistoric figure called Homer was under-
stood to be the poet who composed two epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Other
epics were attributed to figures other than Homer. Those epics, which were classed
in a grouping of epics known as the Cycle (kuklos), were considered inferior to the
two epics attributed to Homer. Aristotle says so explicitly in his Poetics, naming
two epics of the Cycle as examples, the Cypria and the Little Iliad (1459a–b).5
In order to understand the special status of the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey,
more needs to be said about the actual performance traditions of epic in the time of
Plato and Aristotle. By that time, the traditions of performing epic at the festival of
the Panathenaia in Athens had achieved a most specialized status. The performers
were professional specialists called rhapsōidoi or “rhapsodes,” as we see most clearly
from a dialogue of Plato, Ion, named after a celebrated rhapsōidos (rhapsode) who
flourished in the late fifth century b.c.e., the era of the historical Socrates.
The status of the rhapsode can be reconstructed from the following words of
Plato’s Socrates (Ion 533b–c):
Here is another thing. As far as I can tell, neither in (1) playing on the aulos
[= aulēsis] nor in (2) playing on the kithara [= kitharisis] nor in (3) singing
and playing on the kithara [= kitharōidia] nor in (4) performing as a rhapsode
[= rhapsōidia] have you seen any man who is skilled at explaining about
(1) Olympus6 or about (2) Thamyras7 or about (3) Orpheus or about (4) Phemios
of Ithaca, the rhapsode [= rhapsōidos]8 —but who is perplexed about Ion of
epic 23
Ephesus and is unable to formulate what things Ion performs well as a rhapsode
[= rhapsōideîn] and what things he does not.
In this passage, Socrates links the rhapsodes with other professional performers
such as auletes (aulos players), citharists (kithara players), and citharodes (kithara
singers). These types of performers correspond to the performers that actually
competed at the Panathenaia in the age of Plato, as we learn from an Athenian
inscription dated at around 380 b.c.e. (IG II2 2311), which records the winners of
competitions in performance at the Panathenaia.9 We also learn about these cat-
egories of competition from Plato’s Laws (6.764d–e), where we read of rhapsodes,
citharodes, and auletes—and where the wording makes it clear that the point of
reference is the Panathenaia (Nagy 2002: 38, 40, 42).
The evidence from Plato about these categories of competition at the Panathenaia
is supplemented by what we read in the Aristotelian Constitution of the Athenians
(60.1), where the author refers to these same Panathenaic categories of competi-
tion and where the overall competition is specified as the “competition [agōn] in
mousikē.”
What does the author mean by mousikē here? In Aristotelian usage, this word
is a shorthand way of saying mousikē tekhnē, meaning “craft of the Muses,” that
is, musical craft in the etymological sense of the word “musical.” It is misleading,
however, to think of ancient Greek mousikē in the modern sense of “music,” since
the categories of “musical” performers at the Panathenaia included rhapsodes.
The performative medium of rhapsodes in the era of Aristotle was recitative and
thus not musical in the modern sense of the word. By “recitative,” to be more
precise, I mean (1) performed without singing and (2) performed without the
instrumental accompaniment of the kithara or the aulos (Nagy 2002: 36, 41–42).
In this era, the competitive performances of the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey by
rhapsodes at the Panathenaia were “musical” only in an etymological sense, and
the medium of the rhapsode was in fact closer to what we call “poetry” and fur-
ther from what we call “music” in the modern sense of the word. Still, the fact
remains that the performances of rhapsodes belonged to what is called the “com-
petition [agōn] in mousikē,” just like the performances of citharodes (kithara
singers), citharists (kithara players), auletes (aulos players), and so on (Nagy
2002: 36, 41–42).
The “musical” performers mentioned in Plato’s Ion need to be seen in the light
of the dramatic moment that serves as the setting for this Platonic dialogue. Ion, a
rhapsode from the city of Ephesus, has just arrived in Athens, intending to compete
for first prize at the festival of the Panathenaia (Ion 530b). Plato’s wording makes
it explicit that the occasion for performances by rhapsodes at the Panathenaia was
in effect a competition or contest among rhapsodes—an agōn (Ion 530a)—and
that the agonistic craft of the rhapsodes is included under the general category of
mousikē (530a). When Ion says that he hopes to win first prize at the Panathenaia,
he adds that he has just won first prize in an agōn of rhapsodes at the feast of the
Asklepieia in Epidaurus (530a–b) (Nagy 2002: 22, 37–38, 99).
24 genres
At the agōn of mousikē held at the Panathenaia, the contests of citharodes,

aulodes, citharists, and auletes may have varied in content from one season to the
next, but the overall content of what the rhapsodes had to perform was invari-
able—at least, it had become an invariable by the time of Plato. That invariable was
the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey, performed season after season at the Panathenaia.
Though we know precious little about the Panathenaic performances of
Homer by rhapsodes in the age of Plato, there is sufficient evidence for positing
three features: (1) the rhapsodes performed in sequence the Homeric Iliad and
Odyssey, (2) each of these two epics was divided into 24 rhapsodic performance
units or rhapsōidiai (rhapsodies), and (3) the rhapsodes were actively competing
as well as collaborating with each other in the process of taking turns in perform-
ing sequentially the epic narrative (Nagy 2002: 36–69).10 There is room for doubt
about the specifics of all three of these posited features (Burgess 2004), but there
is one overall feature, essential to the argument at hand, that seems beyond doubt:
in the era of the Athenian democracy, the repertoire of rhapsodes performing at
the Panathenaia was confined exclusively to the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey (Nagy
2002: 10–12 n. 16).
To advance the argument further, I adduce three interconnected details. The
first two come from the Ion of Plato, while the third comes from the Panegyricus
of Isocrates. The first detail has to do with a boast made by the rhapsode Ion: he
claims that he is worthy of being awarded the prize of a golden stephanos (garland)
by the Homēridai (descendants of Homer) (Ion 530d). The prize that is mentioned
here is mentioned again in two other contexts (Ion 535d, 541c). In one of these two
contexts, the golden garland is associated with the words thusiai (feasts) and heor-
tai (festivals) (Ion 535d). These words are appropriate designations of the festival of
the Panathenaia. Piecing together what we learn from all three contexts (Ion 530d,
535d, 541c), I infer that the awarding of a golden garland to Ion by the Homēridai
is connected with the winning of first prize in the competition of rhapsodes at the
Panathenaia.11 An additional piece of evidence is the inscription I mentioned above
(IG II2 2311) concerning the prizes won at the Panathenaia in Athens for the year
380 b.c.e.: the first prize in the competition of citharodes is a golden stephanos val-
ued at 1,000 drachmas, which is awarded in addition to a cash prize of silver valued
at 500 drachmas. Though the portion of the inscription dealing with the competi-
tion of rhapsodes is lost, it is generally agreed that the missing portion indicated
that the first prize in the corresponding competition of rhapsodes was likewise a
golden stephanos and that the amount of cash awarded as first prize to the winning
rhapsode was comparable to the amount awarded to the winning citharode (Nagy
2002: 51 n. 16).
The fact that the Homēridai are linked with the performances of Homeric
poetry by rhapsodes at the Panathenaia in Athens is relevant to another fact: Homer
himself is linked with the performances of the Iliad and the Odyssey in Athens. Evi-
dence for the linkage comes from myths preserved in the Lives of Homer traditions,
especially in the Herodotean Life of Homer (Vita 1) and in the Certamen or Contest
of Homer and Hesiod (Vita 2; Nagy 2004a).12 According to the Certamen, the people
epic 25
of the island state of Chios claimed that Homer was the ancestor of a genos (lin-
eage) from Chios who called themselves the Homēridai (Vita 2.13–15). According
to the Herodotean Life of Homer, Homer composed both the Iliad and the Odyssey
in the city of Chios (Vita 1.346–98) and planned to perform both epics in Athens
(1.483–84), but he died before he reached his destination (1.484–509). In this ver-
sion, the myth specifies that Homer augments his composition of both the Iliad
and the Odyssey by adding verses that center on the glorification of Athens (1.378–
98). Only after he finishes his glorification of Athens does Homer finish composing
the Iliad and Odyssey—only then does he take leave of Chios and set sail to tour the
rest of Hellas (1.400), intending ultimately to reach the city of Athens (1.483–84). I
infer that these references picturing Athens as the ultimate destination for Homer’s
would-be performance of his Iliad and Odyssey are a mythological analogue to
the ritual presence of the Homēridai at the rhapsodes’ actual performances of the
Homeric Iliad and Odyssey at the Panathenaia in Athens.
I now come to a second interconnected detail in Plato’s Ion. It has to do with
the dramatized circumstances of the Ion’s dialogue with Socrates, which happens
on the eve of the day when this rhapsode enters the agōn of mousikē at the Panath-
enaia (530a–b): Ion will be competing with other rhapsodes in the performance of
Homeric poetry, and he expects to win the first prize in that competition.13 Of spe-
cial interest here is the term mousikē (tekhnē), which means literally “craft (tekhnē)
of the Muses.” As described above, it would be anachronistic to translate this term
as “music,” since it applies not only to the craft of singing lyric accompanied by
the kithara or aulos, as represented by citharodes and aulodes, but also to the craft
of reciting epic without any instrumental accompaniment. That particular craft is
represented by rhapsodes at the Panathenaia.
The third and decisive interconnected detail comes from a passage in the Pan-
egyricus of Isocrates (159), concerning the repertoire of rhapsodes competing with
each other in the athloi (competitions) of mousikē at the Panathenaia:
I think that the poetry [poiēsis] of Homer received all the more glory because he
celebrated so beautifully those who waged war against the barbarians, and it was
because of this that our (Athenian) ancestors wanted to make his craft [tekhnē]
a thing to be honored both in the competitions [of rhapsodes] in mousikē and in
the education of the young, so that we, having the chance to hear often his
[= Homer’s] verses [epos plural], may learn thoroughly the existing
hostility against them [= the barbarians], and so that we may admire the
accomplishments of those who had waged war and desire to accomplish the
same deeds that they had accomplished.14
For Isocrates, Homer is the foundational point of reference to what we would call
“Western” civilization, in sharp contrast to the “barbarians.” In the reference that
this contemporary of Plato is making here to Homer, the wording assumes that
the epics performed at the Panathenaia were totally familiar to all Athenians. Such
epics, in the Athens of Isocrates and Plato in the fourth century b.c.e., can only be
the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey. Even in the general usage of Isocrates (2.48; 10.65;
12.18, 33, 293; 13.2), we find that the term “Homer” refers to no poet other than the
26 genres
poet of the Iliad and Odyssey. The same goes for the general usage of Plato himself
(a case in point is Ion 539d).
Also relevant in this passage from Isocrates is the designation of Homeric
poiēsis (poetic composition) as a tekhnē (craft). As we see from his wording, Iso-
crates links the craft of Homer with (1) the Panathenaic athloi (competitions) of
rhapsodes and (2) the paideusis (education) of the young. In view of the fact that
mousikē was an appropriate term for designating not only the craft of, say, cith-
arodes performing lyric poetry at the Panathenaia but also the craft of rhapsodes
performing the epic poetry of Homer at the same festival, I stress once again that it
is misleading to understand mousikē as “music” in the modern sense of the word.
Pursuing this idea of the rhapsode as a master of mousikē, I return to the pas-
sage I quoted above from Plato’s Ion (533b–c), which lists mythical prototypes
corresponding to the categories of performers who compete in the agōn (competi-
tion) of mousikē at the Panathenaia. The correspondences are anachronistic—and
revealing in their anachronisms. There is Orpheus, master kitharōidos (citharode),
that is, one who sings while accompanying himself on the kithara; there is Thamy-
ras, master kitharistēs (citharist), that is, one who plays on the kithara but does
not sing;15 there is Olympus, master aulētēs (aulete), that is, one who plays on the
reed or aulos; and, finally, there is Phemios, master rhapsōidos (rhapsode). The
key figure in this quartet is Phemios the rhapsode. By contrast with the generic
rhapsode who recited Homer in the age of Plato, without musical accompaniment,
the prototypical rhapsode Phemios matches an earlier vision of Homer: inside the
narrative of the Homeric Odyssey, Phemios is not a reciter but an aoidos (singer;
i 325, 346, 347; xxii 330, 345, 376) who literally “sings” (aeidein; i 154, 155, 325, 326,
350; xvii 262; xxii 331, 346, 348; noun aoidē, i 159, 328, 340, 351) as he performs his
epics inside the epic of the Odyssey (at i 326, the epic sung by Phemios is a nostos
[song of homecoming]), and he even accompanies himself on the equivalent of a
kithara (kitharis, i 153, 159; elsewhere, his instrument is called a phorminx [xvii 262;
xxii 332, 340]; verb phormizein, i 155).
What, then, is the formal difference in Plato’s Ion between Phemios the “rhap-
sode” and Orpheus the “citharode”? After all, Orpheus—just like Phemios—is
imagined as singing and accompanying himself on the kithara. The difference is
that Phemios, as a rhapsode, is a worthy point of comparison for Homer as the
ultimate poet, whereas Orpheus, as a citharode, is not. The “music” of Phemios as
a rhapsode is central at the Panathenaia in the days of Plato, whereas the “music” of
Orpheus is marginalized. Even as a citharode, Orpheus is mockingly marginalized
(Plato, Symposium 179d–e).
Let us pursue further the idea that Orpheus, the mythical citharode of Plato’s
Ion, is a specialist in “music” and thus a foil for Homer. The same goes for Thamy-
ras, the mythical citharist, and for Olympus, the mythical aulete: they, too, are
specialists and thus foils for Homer.16 By contrast, Phemios, the mythical rhap-
sode, is a surrogate for Homer as the ultimate generalist in the “music” of the Pana-
thenaia. Not only the mythical rhapsode but also the contemporary rhapsodes in
the days of Plato—as represented by Ion himself—figure as surrogates of Homer
epic 27
in the context of the Panathenaia. As noted above, the performances of Ion and
his colleagues at that festival are restricted to the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey. As
surrogates of Homer, the rhapsodes performing at the Panathenaia must be gen-
eralists in “music” just like Homer, who is viewed as the generalized embodiment
of poetry par excellence in the days of Plato. That is why Homer is known as the
poiētēs (poet) par excellence and that is why his compositions are known as poiēsis
(poetry or poetic creation) par excellence.
Thus, the generic rhapsode performing the poetry of Homer at the Panathe-
naia becomes a generalized representative of poetry as “music”: his identity extends
from the prototypical singer who sings Homeric song all the way to the contempo-
rary rhapsode who recites Homeric poetry. By extension, Ion the rhapsode may at
first seem like a generalized representative of poetry in his own right, for the simple
reason that he is a representative of Homeric poetry. To the extent that Homer the
poet is considered a generalist, not a specialist, so too the rhapsode who performs
Homer may at first seem like a generalist in poetry.
If Ion the rhapsode is a generalist in poetry, then he can be held responsible by
Plato’s Socrates not only for Homeric poetry but also for all poetry. That is Ion’s
good fortune, from his own standpoint as the most prestigious rhapsode in his
time, “the best rhapsode of the Hellenes” (Ion 541b).17 That is also Ion’s misfortune,
from the standpoint of the philosophical agenda built into the dialogue named
after him. If Plato’s Socrates can succeed in discrediting Ion, he can discredit a
man who represents the best of all poetry in the days of Plato.18 In the process,
Plato is also discrediting the Panathenaic standard of Homeric poetry, which sets
the criteria for what is the best of all poetry.
One way for Socrates to discredit Ion is to show that the rhapsode who per-
forms Homer, unlike Homer, is in fact no generalist in poetry. Plato’s Socrates
forces Ion to admit that he is a specialist: when Socrates asks Ion whether he is an
expert in the poetry of Hesiod or Archilochus, the rhapsode replies that he is not,
and that his expertise in Homer is hikanon (sufficient; Ion 531a).19 Ion is forced to
admit that he is an expert in Homer—and Homer only—but he justifies his non-
expertise in other poets on the grounds that Homer is superior to all other poets
(531a–32c).20 This formulation suits perfectly a Panathenaic rhapsode, in terms of
my argument that Homeric poetry was the only poetry performed by rhapsodes at
the Panathenaia in the days of Plato.
In the context of the Panathenaia, the figure of Homer evolved to the point
of becoming the all-sufficient poet, the ultimate generalist in poetry. By the age
of Plato, the feast of the Panathenaia could leave no room for any poet other than
Homer in the rhapsodic competitions—no Hesiod, no Archilochus—not to men-
tion Orpheus and Musaeus or the poets of the Epic Cycle. Only in the citharodic
(and aulodic) competitions at the Panathenaia was there room left for other poets—
and these poets had to be nonepic poets, that is, lyric poets, such as Simonides.21
And yet, all early poets are linked, says Plato’s Socrates, to the single and abso-
lute source of poetic or “musical” inspiration, the Muses. Just as rhapsodes are
hermēneis (interpreters) of poets, so also poets are hermēneis (interpreters) of the
28 genres
Muses (Ion 535b). Below I quote a passage from Plato’s Ion where a collectivized
concept of the Muses as a single absolute source of all poetry or (music)—in the
literal sense of mousikē (craft [tekhnē] of the Muses)—is expressed by Socrates
through the metaphor of the Heraclean or Magnesian stone, that is, the magnet
(Ion 533d). Poets are imagined as metallic rings directly linked to a prototypical
magnet of poetic inspiration, the Muses. Poets, as direct links to the magnet, are
the prētoi daktulioi (first rings). As we are about to see, Plato’s Socrates expresses the
direct linkage of the metallic rings to the prototypical magnet by way of the verb
exartân (link), which I translate as “magnetically link,” and he makes it explicit
that the poets symbolized by the metallic rings are likewise prototypical, namely,
Orpheus, Musaeus, and Homer—in that order (Ion 536a–c):
One of the given poets [poie-tai] is magnetically linked [exartân] to one Muse,
and another poet [poie-te-s] to another Muse. And we express this idea [= auto
“it” = passive of exartân = “is magnetically linked to”] by saying “is possessed
by” [= passive of katekhein]. And it [= the idea of “is possessed by”] is pretty
much the same sort of thing, since he [= the poet] is literally “held fast”
[= passive of ekhein] (by the Muse). Then, from these first rings, that is, from the
poets [poie-tai], each different person is magnetically linked [artân] to a different
poet [poie-te-s], becoming divinely possessed [= entheos]: some persons are
magnetically linked to Orpheus, some to Musaeus, and the majority, to Homer;
they [= these persons] are possessed [= passive of katekhein] (by the poets), and
they are literally “held fast” [= passive of ekhein]. You, Ion, are one of these
persons, and you are possessed [= passive of katekhein] by Homer. When anyone
sings the poetry of any other poet, you are asleep and do not know what to say,
but when anyone voices the song of this poet [= Homer], then, right away, you
are awake and your spirit is dancing and you know very well what to say. For
you say what you say about Homer not by means of a craft [tekhne-] or expertise
[episte-me-] but rather by means of a god-given legacy [moira] and a state of
possession [katoke-khe-]. (Ion 536a–c)
Of supreme importance is the image of the first rings (prētoi daktulioi) as visual-
ized here in Plato’s Ion (536b). The first rings are symbols for the three First Poets,
named here as Orpheus, Musaeus, and Homer—in that order. It is made clear
that the performers of Homer outnumber by far the performers of Orpheus and
Musaeus in the era of Socrates. One such performer of Homer is Ion the rhapsode,
described as a middle ring in comparison to Homer. By implication, performers
of Orpheus and Musaeus are likewise middle rings in comparison to Orpheus and
Musaeus themselves, who are first rings like Homer.
A figure like Ion, as a rhapsode, is not a prototypical poet—he is no first ring;
he is not even a poet. As a performer, the rhapsode is merely a middle ring linked
magnetically to one of the first rings, in this case, to Homer. Performers of epic,
like performers of drama, are middle rings in relation to the poets of epic and the
poets of drama, who are first rings, whereas the audiences watching rhapsodes per-
forming Homer—who are like the audiences watching actors performing drama in
the theater—are the last rings, described as follows by Plato’s Socrates: “Of course
you know that this person we talked about, the spectator [theatēs] in the audience,
epic 29
is the last of the rings—I mean, the rings that get their power from each other
through the force of the Heraclean stone. The middle ring is the rhapsode—that’s
you [= Ion]—as well as the actor [hupokritēs]. And the first ring is the Poet [poiētēs]
himself” (Ion 535e–36a).
In introducing this passage, I deliberately used a visual metaphor when I said
that the audiences of epic and of drama were “watching” the performers, not just
“listening” to them. The wording in the passage makes it explicit that the audi-
ences are “spectators” (theatai). In using the word theatēs (spectator) here in the
Ion (535e), Plato’s Socrates makes no distinction between the audiences who attend
performances of Homeric epic at the Panathenaia and the audiences who attend
performances of drama at the City Dionysia and other dramatic festivals.22 The
audiences of both epic and drama are the “last” ring. Then there is the “middle”
ring, and Socrates places Ion the rhapsode into this category, along with the generic
hupokritēs (actor) of drama.
In order to discredit Ion, Plato’s Socrates has in effect disconnected the pres-
tige of Ion as the performer of Homeric poetry from the prestige of Homer as
the notional composer of Homeric poetry. This way, the prestige of Homer is not
directly challenged, just as the prestige of Homeric poetry as the premier poetic
event of the Panathenaia cannot be challenged. The idea of Homer as the all-
sufficient and all-encompassing Poet is a given. It is already a historical reality.
The dominant status of Homeric poetry is not the only historical reality rel-
evant to the argument in Plato’s Ion. Another reality is the dominant status of the
actual craft of rhapsodically performing—and interpreting—Homeric poetry at
the Panathenaia in the dramatic time of Plato’s dialogues. I say “craft” in view of
the explicit designation rhapsēidikē tekhnē (rhapsodic craft) as we see it applied by
Plato’s Socrates at later stages of his argumentation in Ion (538b, 538c, 538d, 539e,
540a, 540d, 541a). Thus, the rhapsēidikē tekhnē (rhapsodic craft) of the Panathenaic
rhapsode is another given—it, too, is already a historical reality.
At the earliest stages of his argumentation, however, Plato’s Socrates avoids
referring to this tekhnē of the rhapsode. Instead, he speaks only about the over-
all craft of the poet, which is designated as poiētikē tekhnē (poetic craft), and he
induces Ion to admit that this craft is a holon, an integral whole, just like other
tekhnai (Ion 532c). For the moment, I translate poiētikē as “poetic craft,” but, as we
have seen, it is more accurate to render this word as “craft of composition,” since
the poiētēs as “poet” is the composer par excellence.
Then Socrates induces Ion to admit that the craft of painters, graphikē tekhnē,
is likewise a holon (whole; 532e), and that craftsmen are like painters—and sculp-
tors, he adds—in that they need to be experts in the totality of their respective
crafts (532e–33b). By the time he speaks about the craft of sculptors, Plato’s Socrates
has already omitted the word tekhnē. This omission facilitates his transition to
the passage I have already mentioned about craftsmen such as auletes, citharists,
citharodes, and rhapsodes (Ion 533b–c). Far from speaking of these craftsmen as
representatives of separate crafts, Plato’s Socrates groups them together as repre-
sentatives of a single craft, to which he had referred earlier as that integral whole,
30 genres
the poiētikē tekhnē. How could it be, asks Socrates, that any one of these crafts-
men—auletes and citharists and citharodes and rhapsodes—could fail to be an
expert in that integral whole, in that single craft of theirs, that is, in the poiētikē
tekhnē? Ion, who has already accepted the premise that the poiētikē tekhnē is an
integral whole, a holon, is now forced to admit that he simply cannot claim to be
such an expert; instead, Ion is an expert only in one aspect of that craft, that is, in
the poetry of Homer (533c). From the standpoint of a performer’s craft, that poetry
must be restricted to epic. The poetry of Homer, as far as a rhapsode like Ion is
concerned, can only be epic poetry.
Next, Plato’s Socrates induces Ion to accept the idea that the rhapsode’s profes-
sion is therefore not even a matter of tekhnē but, rather, a matter of inspiration (Ion
533e). By implication, the rhapsode is an expert only in the craft of mousikē, the
craft of the Muse who inspires poets, not in the craft of the poet himself, that is, in
the craft of poiētikē. This way, as we have already seen, Ion’s authority as a rhapsode
can still be validated as “magnetically” linked to the authority of Homer as poet,
which in turn is “magnetically” linked to the authority of his inspiring Muse as the
ultimate source—the ultimate inspiration. Once Ion accepts this idea, however,
his authority as a thinker is thereby discredited: he has in effect admitted that,
as a rhapsode, he has no mind of his own and simply speaks the mind of Homer.
Only after the rhapsode has accepted the idea that he is an inspired performer does
Socrates start speaking openly about the “rhapsodic craft,” rhapsēidikē tekhnē, in
his continued dialogue with the rhapsode. By now it is safe for Socrates to speak
this way. Since Ion has already been discredited as a thinker, he cannot invoke his
prestigious rhapsodic craft as a source for independent thinking. Even the prestige
of Homeric knowledge—to the extent that the rhapsode derives it from his rhap-
sodic craft—has been diminished: by now the rhapsode’s general knowledge seems
less impressive than the specialized knowledge that other craftsmen derive from
their own specialized crafts.
From the standpoint of a rhapsode, Ion’s mistake in the Platonic dialogue
named after him is that he missed the chance of asserting, from the very start, that
there was indeed such a thing as a “rhapsodic craft,” a rhapsēidikē tekhnē. He also
missed the chance of asserting that the prestige of this distinct craft was superior
to the prestige of other distinct crafts such as those represented by auletes and cit-
harists and maybe even citharodes—at least, at the Panathenaia.
As the craft of rhapsodically performing Homeric poetry evolved in the con-
text of “musical” competitions at the Panathenaia, it had reached a level of prestige
that overshadowed other forms of performance as they too evolved in the context
of competitions at the same festival. I have already quoted the passage where these
other forms are listed alongside the premier form, that is, alongside the craft of
rhapsodically performing Homeric poetry (Ion 533b–c). In this passage, which lists
the various crafts of performing various kinds of “music” at the Panathenaia, Plato’s
Socrates shades over the historical fact that the repertoire of rhapsodes who com-
peted at the Panathenaia was by this time restricted to Homeric poetry, whereas
the repertoire of, say, the citharodes was not restricted to the poetry of any single
epic 31
master of lyric. Plato’s Socrates makes it look like a deficiency that Ion the rhapsode
performs—and interprets—Homer and only Homer. Philosophically, this special-
ization may indeed be a deficiency, but historically, it is a clear indication of the
prestige inherent in the craft of performing the epic of Homer in Athens.
In this same passage from Plato’s Ion (533b–c), the wording shows that any
rhapsode who competes at the Panathenaia practices the craft of a performer, not
a composer. The same holds for the crafts of the auletes, the citharists, and the
citharodes. All such craftsmen are being viewed as performers at festivals like the
Panathenaia, not as composers. Moreover, this view extends also to the prototypes
of these craftsmen, that is, to Olympos, Thamyras, Orpheus, and Phemios. All
four of these prototypical figures are viewed here as performers in their own right,
not as composers per se.
The specialization of these four prototypes of Panathenaic performance is
most striking in the case of Phemios, who is being equated in this passage with the
figure of an archetypal rhapsode. Plato’s Socrates exploits this equation to further
his philosophical agenda. We have already seen that the rhapsode can perform and
even interpret the content of what he performs at the Panathenaia, that is, the epics
of Homer, but he is not the composer of this content. Therefore, the rhapsode is not
a poet. If Phemios is a rhapsode, then he is not a poiētēs (poet) in the literal sense of
this word: he is not the “maker” of the content. Only Homer can be said to poieîn
(make) the content of Homeric poetry.
From what we have already seen about Phemios, we can picture him as a self-
representation of Homer in Homer (Graziosi 2002: 25 n. 15, 39–40). And yet, the
self that is Homer changes over time. When Phemios is equated with a rhapsode
in Plato’s Ion, this equation implies that Phemios is no longer a poet like Homer,
since the rhapsode who competes at the Panathenaia is no composer like Homer
but merely a performer of Homer. To equate the Panathenaic rhapsode with the
self-represented Homer that is Phemios is to detract from Homer the poet. If Phe-
mios in the Homeric Odyssey is merely performing but not composing, like some
rhapsode competing at the Panathenaia, then he has no say about determining the
content of what he performs. Such a recreated Homer can only say what Homer is
saying. And what exactly is it that Homer is saying? According to Plato’s Socrates,
Homer in turn can only say what the Muse is saying.
Thus, Plato’s Socrates exploits the equating of Phemios with a rhapsode by
using it as proof for his argument that the rhapsode has no mind of his own when
he performs Homer. This argument, however, can be used to discredit the rhap-
sode only if the craft of the rhapsode has already been discredited. Plato’s Socrates
has managed to accomplish that by initially eliding the fact that the rhapsode has
his own tekhnē (craft), the rhapsēidikē tekhnē. The rhapsode’s understanding of
Homer, in terms of this tekhnē, does not need to be separated from the idea that the
rhapsode is inspired by the Muse of Homer. In terms of this tekhnē, the professional
conceit of the Panathenaic rhapsode is that he reads, as it were, the mind of Homer.
The rhapsode’s mind has learned the meaning or dianoia of Homer (Ion 530b–c;
Nagy 2002: 29–30 n. 16). The living proof of this conceit is the rhapsode’s capacity
32 genres
to perform Homer by heart at the Panathenaia and to be the perfect hermēneus

(interpreter) of Homer (Ion 530c; Nagy 2002: 29 n. 16).
What, then, is the poetry of Homer for the rhapsode? As we saw in the pas-
sage I quoted above from Isocrates (Panegyricus 159), Homeric poiēsis (poetry) is
a tekhnē (craft) that is activated in two linked contexts: (1) the Panathenaic athloi
(competitions) of rhapsodes in mousikē (musical craft) and (2) the paideusis (edu-
cation) of the young. The wording of Isocrates makes it clear that Homeric poetry
is a tekhnē in its own right, and that it counts as part of the overall mousikē (musi-
cal craft) of the Panathenaic athloi (Panegyricus 159).
Unlike Isocrates, however, who implicitly identifies the craft of the rhapsode
with the craft of Homer, Plato seeks to make a distinction between the two crafts.
He does this by implicitly making a distinction between the crafts of mousikē and
poiētikē, as if the rhapsode were an expert only in the craft of mousikē, not in the
craft of poiētikē.
Already at the very beginning of the Ion, Plato’s Socrates had drawn Ion’s
attention away from Homeric poetry as a tekhnē (craft) in its own right by speak-
ing instead about the more general concept of poiētikē tekhnē (poetic craft). Once
Socrates induces Ion to admit that the poiētikē tekhnē is a holon (whole) (532c),
much like the tekhnai (crafts) of painting and sculpting (532e–33b), he has already
succeeded in discrediting the craft of performing and teaching Homeric poiēsis
(poetry). Such performing and teaching is in effect the rhapsēidikē tekhnē of Ion.
In order to emphasize the universalized importance of Ion’s craft, I repeat once
again the formulation of Isocrates: the tekhnē (craft) of Homeric poiēsis (poetry)
is coextensive with the paideusis (education) of the young. Ion has unwittingly
discredited his own tekhnē once he admits that he is a specialist in Homer. More-
over, in order to validate his specialty, he is forced to deny that his tekhnē is really
a tekhnē.
Plato’s Socrates has forced Ion to make a choice: the rhapsode’s authority comes
either from inspiration or from the poiētikē tekhnē, the craft of poetry. Ion is forced
to choose inspiration as the source of his ultimate authority, since that inspiration
comes ultimately from the Muse of Homer. Ion is not allowed to claim the craft of
poetry as his ultimate authority because he is forced to admit that he is a master in
only one aspect of that craft, that is, in Homeric poetry. Moreover, he is a master in
only two of three aspects of that poetry, that is, in performing and interpreting it;
he not a master in the third aspect, that is, in composing Homeric poetry.
Plato’s Ion has to make a choice that a rhapsode need not have had to make,
between tekhnē and inspiration. Provided the rhapsode insists that his craft is really
a craft, a specialized rhapsēidikē tekhnē instead of the generalized poiētikē tekhnē, he
can have his own tekhnē and still claim to be inspired by the Muse of Homer. With
his specialized craft, he can lay claim to the generalized and even universalized pai-
deusis (education) represented by the poiēsis (poetry) of Homer, since his rhapsēidikē
tekhnē is part of the overall mousikē tekhnē of performing at the Panathenaia.
The time has come to summarize the distinctions in the meanings of
rhapsēidikē, mousikē, and poiētikē as applied to the word tekhnē (craft) in the age of
epic 33
Plato. The rhapsēidikē tekhnē is the craft of performing recitative poetry at agēnes/
athloi (competitions), especially at the Panathenaia. The mousikē tekhnē is the craft
of performing (1) recitative poetry or (2) song and/or (3) instrumental “music” (in
the modern sense of the word) at these same agēnes/athloi. The poiētikē tekhnē is
the craft of composing—but not necessarily performing—in the media of mousikē
tekhnē and in other media, as well, including tragedy, comedy, dithyramb, satyr
drama, and so on. In the opening of Aristotle’s Poetics, which is, in Greek terms, a
discourse about poiētikē tekhnē, we saw a definition that validates in many ways the
working definition that I have just offered (Poetics 1447a8–18).
In Aristotle’s catalogue of genres of poiētikē tekhnē (poetic craft), we have seen
the dimension of performance, not only the dimension of composition. Essen-
tially, his catalogue corresponds to the program of performances that took place
at the two great festivals of the Athenian state. At the City Dionysia of Athens,
there were competitions in the performances of tragedies, comedies, dithyrambs,
and satyr dramas. At the Panathenaia of Athens, as we have already seen, there
were competitions in the performances of tunes played on the kithara or on the
aulos, and of lyric songs sung to instrumental accompaniment by the kithara or
by the aulos, and also of epic poetry recited without any instrumental accom-
paniment. That is, the overall poiētikē tekhnē (poetic craft) is subdivided into a
variety of specialized tekhnai. Among these specialized tekhnai is the composition
of epic, which as we know corresponds to the performance of epic by rhapsodes
at the Panathenaia.
As we have seen, the term that Aristotle uses for the composing of “epic,”
epopoiia (making of epos), indicates a most general concept, since the word used
to designate “epic,” epē (= epos plural), is simply the general word for any kind of
verbal art created by way of poiēsis. And yet, the whole of Aristotle’s Poetics—and
in fact the whole of Aristotle’s works in general—operates on the understanding
that the only epics of Homer were the Iliad and Odyssey. So epic as a genre is viewed
in a specialized way, even though the wording used to express the idea of epic is
expressed in a most generalized way. Even the wording of Aristotle indicates, of
and by itself, that the composition of Homeric poetry had achieved the most gen-
eralized status as poetry par excellence.
By contrast with the composition of Homeric poetry, we have seen in Plato’s
Ion that its actual performance had achieved a most specialized status as the craft
of the rhapsode, rhapsēidikē tekhnē. For Plato’s Socrates, this craft is no craft at all,
and only the overall poiētikē tekhnē may be considered as a holon (a whole), compa-
rable to the categories of painting or sculpting, each of which is likewise a craft that
may be considered as a whole. As a category, the generalized craft of composing
poetry cannot have as a subcategory the specialized craft of composing Homeric
poetry—let alone any specialized craft of performing Homeric poetry.
This kind of thinking is contradicted by Aristotle’s Poetics, where the general-
ized craft of composing poetry is a category that can in fact have as a subcategory
the specialized craft of composing Homeric poetry—though this specialized craft
is expressed in the most generalized way.
34 genres
Returning to Plato’s Ion, I conclude that the discrediting of the rhapsode’s craft,
the rhapsēidikē tekhnē, can be countered by reconsidering it in its own historical
context. The prestige of this tekhnē is evidently a threat to the philosophical tekhnē
of Plato’s Socrates. As we saw, the rhapsode is not only a performer of Homer: he is
also the hermēneus (interpreter) of Homer (Ion 530c). To speak ably about Homer,
says Ion, is the most important aspect of his tekhnē (craft) (Ion 530c). Homer in
turn is recognized as the ultimate source of paideusis (education) for the Hellenes
(Plato, Republic 10.606e).23 As an exponent of this paideusis, the rhapsode is in
effect a significant rival of the philosopher.
How, then, can the rhapsode defend himself against the dialectic of Plato’s
Socrates? In order to maintain Homer as a generalist in the poiētikē tekhnē, the
rhapsode must insist on being a specialist in the rhapsēidikē tekhnē. That way, he
maintains a prestige that is coextensive with the prestige of Homer as a universal
educator of Hellenes. Since the rhapsode, as a master of the rhapsēidikē tekhnē, is
a specialist performer but not a specialist composer, he cannot be considered a
master of the poiētikē tekhnē. Since the rhapsode is a specialist in performing rec-
itative poetry, to the exclusion of other forms of poetry as also of song and music
(in the modern sense of the word), he cannot be considered a master of the mousikē
tekhnē, either.
A qualification is needed here. Though the rhapsode cannot be a master of
mousikē tekhnē in the restricted sense of the term as used by Plato, things must have
been different in an earlier time. I have in mind a prehistorical time—back when
the craft of the rhapsode could still be understood in a less restricted sense that
matched the literal meaning of mousikē tekhnē (craft of the Muses). If the rhapsode
of prehistoric time was truly master of the “craft of the Muses,” then surely he was
capable of inspiration by the Muses, and just as surely, he was also capable of com-
posing as well as performing. Even the etymology of the word rhapsēidos (he who
sews the songs together) indicates that the rhapsode of prehistoric time had this
capability (Nagy 2002: 61–74 n. 11).
To have this capability is to be an oral poet. Attested in a wide variety of socie-
ties, from prehistoric times all the way into the present, oral poetry can be defined
as a system of verbal art that enables the poet to compose while performing and
perform while composing, though the degrees of composition-in-performance
do vary. A classic demonstration is the 1960 book by Albert Lord, The Singer of
Tales.24
To trace the craft of the rhapsode all the way back to an oral poetic phase is
to achieve a diachronic perspective—as distinct from the synchronic perspective
achieved by way of analyzing this same craft as the medium of ancient Greek epic
in the historical context of Athens in the fourth century b.c.e.25
From such a diachronic perspective, ancient Greek epic can be reassessed
as a genre (Nagy 1999a: 23 n. 8). When we compare it with forms of oral poetry
as attested worldwide in all times and all places, we find a vast array of parallels
(Martin 2005: 9–18). A wide-ranging comparison of existing parallels as analyzed
in current ethnographic research leads to an equally wide-ranging application of
epic 35
the term “epic” to current forms of oral poetry that exhibit such parallels (Foley
2005: 196–212). Conversely, the analysis of existing parallelisms leads to a broader
view of the parameters that define ancient Greek epic as a genre (Martin 2005:
9–19). Such a broadening leads to a refining of comparative methods, which can be
divided into three categories: (1) typological, (2) genealogical, and (3) historical.
And these methods lead in turn to a refining of such concepts as the “epic hero.”26
The need to refine is made clear by Lord in this elegant formulation of the
problems inherent in using such terms as “epic” and “heroic poetry” in his book:
The word “epic,” itself, indeed, has come in time to have many meanings. Epic
sometimes is taken to mean simply a long poem in “high style.” Yet a very great
number of the poems which interest us in this book are comparatively short;
length, in fact, is not a criterion of epic poetry. Other definitions of epic equate
it with heroic poetry. Indeed the term “heroic poetry” is sometimes used . . . to
avoid the very ambiguity in the word epic which troubles us. Yet purists might
very well point out that many of the songs which we include in oral narrative
poetry are romantic or historical and not heroic, no matter what definition of
the hero one may choose. In oral narrative poetry, as a matter of fact, I wish
to include all story poetry, the romantic or historical as well as the heroic;
otherwise I would have to exclude a considerable body of medieval metrical
narrative. (2000: 6)
Even the evidence of Greek literature, which is after all the source of our terminol-
ogy for genres, has its ambiguities. For example, what we reconstruct as the craft
of the rhapsode in its prehistoric oral poetic phase cannot even be confined to a
single genre, epic. Even in historical times, rhapsodes are known to perform in
genres other than epic (Nagy 1996a: 157–60). Moreover, an internal analysis of the
primary evidence for epic, which is the surviving text of the Homeric Iliad and
Odyssey, points to a multiplicity of genres (Martin 1989). So instead of saying that
these existing genres are “subgenres” of a “genre” that is epic, it is more apt to say
that the framing form of the epic is a “supergenre” that accommodates other genres
(Martin 1997: 138–66, esp. 166).
In short, a comparative approach to epic yields a far broader view of ancient
Greek epic as a genre. But such a broadened view does not and, in fact, cannot
explain the history of this genre as exemplified by Homer and by the rhapsodic
craftsmen who mediated Homer well after Homer, in the era of Plato and Aris-
totle. Working our way forward in time beyond the era of Plato and Aristotle, we
find that the history of the genre becomes ever more problematic. And the great-
est problem of them all is the fact that the genre of epic had become equated with
Homer himself, as if Homer could exist without his epic tradition—and without
the authorized mediation of the rhapsode.
But the hard truth is, the prestige of the rhapsode as an authorized mediator
of Homer—let alone poetry in general—was already moribund for intellectuals
in the time of Plato. It was in fact moribund even earlier, in the time of Socrates.
We see it in the casually disparaging remarks of his contemporaries dramatized in
Xenophon’s Symposium (3.6). It was already a case of terminal prestige.27
36 genres
The fatal blow was struck by Plato himself. In the end, Plato’s philosophy killed
off the rhapsode as the authorized mediator of Homer. Not only was Homer, along
with all other poets, banned from the ideal state of Plato’s most definitive philo-
sophical project, the Republic, but perhaps even worse for Homer, his rhapsodic
mediators were rendered obsolete. Homer as the poet par excellence now had to
speak for himself, through his text, without the authorized mediation of the rhap-
sodes. The blow struck by Plato was fatal because the cosmopolitan world of phi-
losophers and other intellectuals could no longer be accommodated by the heroic
world of Homer as mediated by the rhapsode.
In the wake of Plato, the writings of Aristotle show no trace of any role for the
rhapsode in the mediation of Homer—or of epic in general. Now the only person
who can speak for epic is the mythologized culture hero Homer, revered as the
be-all and end-all for defining not only epic but also Greek culture writ large. And
this Homer can speak only through his text, which is by now the only authority that
can back up that text. For Aristotle, this Homer is the ideal poet who defines epic.
Aristotle’s understanding of epic as defined by the ideal poet is most decisive
in the history of literature. Such an understanding leaves as its permanent legacy
an overwhelming burden of the past.28 Even more than that, the burden can be
rethought as an all-consuming anxiety of influence.29
Here I return to the formulation of Croce, who went so far as to define any
great work of literature as something that is sui generis. This formulation, as
I noted from the start, applies to the poetry of the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey. At
least, it applies in the sense that the Greeks did in fact view this poetry as some-
thing that was sui generis. After all, this poetry was thought to be the creation of
the ideal poet. But now the question is, was it really Homer’s greatness that made
him one of a kind, sui generis?
In addressing this question, I find the formulation of Croce insufficient. In
terms of this formulation, as I also noted from the start, it is as if a great work of
literature had to transcend its own genre simply because of its greatness. I highlight
the phrasing “as if,” since I will now argue that the transcendence of Homeric
poetry can be explained in relative rather than absolute terms. This poetry tran-
scended the genre of epic only to the extent that its greatness could not be defined
in terms of other epics. Instead, this greatness could in fact be defined in terms of
another genre. For Plato and Aristotle, that other genre was tragedy.
Both Plato and Aristotle recognized the strongest of affinities between Homer
and tragedy. In the second half of the fifth century b.c.e., which is the truly clas-
sical period of Greek literature, the ultimate poetic craft or tekhnē of poetry was
deemed to be not epic but tragedy. One of the clearest examples is the celebrated
scene of a grand contest held in Hades between Aeschylus and Euripides in the
Frogs of Aristophanes (905–1098). What is at stake in this contest is the superior-
ity or inferiority of the old or the current ways of making tragedy, as represented
by Aeschylus and Euripides, respectively. And the craft of making tragedy is con-
sistently equated with the craft of making poetry par excellence. Throughout the
comedy, there are references to tragedy as the ultimate tekhnē (Frogs 93, 766, 770,
epic 37
780, 786, 793, 811, 831, 850, 939, 961, 973, 1369, 1495). The privileged status of tragedy
as the craft of poetry par excellence is the one given that is held in respect by both
sides in the contest (Herington 1985: 106).
According to Aristotle, the craft of tragedy achieves perfection in its com-
plete and unified structure. And he sees a comparable structure in only two epics,
the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey. In the Poetics, Aristotle says explicitly that only the
Homeric Iliad and Odyssey are comparable to tragedy because only these two epics
show a complete and unified structure, unlike the epics of the Cycle (1459a–b). This
judgment of Aristotle helps explain why he ostentatiously pairs the genre of epic with
the genre of tragedy at the beginning of the Poetics (epopoiia . . . kai hē tēs tragēidias
poiēsis) (Nagy 1999a: 26–27). And he views these two particular genres, epic and
tragedy, as cognates (Poetics 1449a2–6; see Nagy 1999b: Ch. 14, §§1–5). In the works
of Plato, as well, epic is viewed as a cognate of tragedy; more than that, Homer is rep-
resented as a proto-tragedian (Theaetetus 152e; Republic 10.595c, 598d, 605c, 607a).
In the Poetics, Aristotle links the existing forms of epic and tragedy to a proto-
form of humnoi (hymns) and enkēmia (encomia, celebrations, songs of praise), and
he contrasts epic and tragedy with the existing form of comedy, linking that form
with a proto-form of psogoi (invectives) (Poetics 1448b25–27). More generally, Aris-
totle reconstructs a prehistoric dichotomy between the ethics of proto-poets who
are semnoteroi or “more stately” and the ethics of would-be proto-poets who are by
comparison eutelesteroi, that is, “of less value.” According to this construct, poets
who are semnoteroi are those engaged in the mimēsis (reenactment) of actions that
are kala (noble) and that are performed by those who are kaloi (noble), while poets
who are eutelesteroi (of less value) are characterized by actions that are phaula
(base) and are performed by those who are phauloi (base). Here is the wording of
Aristotle: “The more stately ones [semnoteroi] made mimēsis (1) of noble deeds and
(2) of the deeds of (other) such stately ones, while the ones who were of less value
(made mimēsis) of the deeds of the base. In the beginning, the latter made invec-
tives [psogoi], while the former made humnoi and enkēmia” (Poetics 1448b25–27).
I restate two points that Aristotle is making here: first, humnoi (hymns) and
enkēmia (encomia, celebrations, songs of praise) are the undifferentiated proto-
types of epic and tragedy, and second, both of these prototypes involve mimēsis
(reenactment) (Nagy 1990: 6§91 n. 7). Of special relevance is a third point that
Aristotle makes elsewhere in the Poetics: it is not only the prototypical humnoi and
enkēmia but also epic and tragedy that directly involve the mimēsis (reenactment) of
the noble by the noble, as we see in several passages (1448a1–2, 26–27; 1448b34–36;
1449b9–10, 17–20, 24–28). In these passages, the word for “noble” is spoudaioi,
meaning literally “the serious ones.”
The idea that the spoudaioi (serious ones) and the semnoteroi (more stately
ones) are engaging in mimēsis (reenactment) of what is noble is relevant to the
use of the word mimeîsthai (reenact) in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo (Homeric
Hymn 3, verse 163). Here, the performers of mimēsis are the Delian Maidens, whose
“seriousness” or “stateliness” is a given. And the mimēsis is taking place in the
context of a humnos (hymn). For Aristotle, mimēsis takes place in prototypical
38 genres
humnoi that have not yet become differentiated into epic and tragedy. Here in the
Homeric Hymn to Apollo, we see an approximation of such a model, to the extent
that it resembles both epic and tragedy: this hymn is like epic because it has the
same meter as epic, dactylic hexameter, and because its diction is closely related
to epic diction, while it is like tragedy because it is theatrical, as we see from the
usage of the term hupokrinesthai (“respond”) with reference to the quoted words
of the maidens in the hymn (verse 171; Nagy 2003: 21–22). Moreover, the usage of
the term mimeîsthai (“reenact”; verse 163) is, in fact, explicitly theatrical (Nagy
1996a: 80–81). It can be argued that the use of a theatrical word like mimeîsthai in
the Homeric Hymn to Apollo (verse 171) reveals an early phase of an ongoing sym-
biosis of two elements: one was the Homeric tradition as it evolved at the Athenian
festival of the Panathenaia, and the other was the theatrical tradition of drama—
especially tragedy—as it evolved at the Athenian festival of the City Dionysia.30
Aristotle’s association of tragedy with Homer, and of Homer with epic, is not
merely a matter of literary judgment. By the time of Aristotle, as we have already
seen, the only epics performed at the festival of the Panathenaia in Athens were the
Homeric Iliad and Odyssey. These two epics shaped and were shaped by the genre
of tragedy as performed at the festival of the City Dionysia. In Athens, ever since
the sixth century b.c.e., the genre of epic as performed at the Panathenaia and the
genre of tragedy as performed at the City Dionysia were “complementary forms,
evolving together and thereby undergoing a process of mutual assimilation in the
course of their institutional coexistence” (Nagy 1996a: 81).
By the time of Aristotle, this complementarity of epic and tragedy involved
only the epics of the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey, no longer the epics of the Cycle.
This differentiation of the Epic Cycle from the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey can be
linked with the obsolescence of performing the poetry of the Epic Cycle at the
Panathenaia. Not only in the fourth century b.c.e., the age of Aristotle, but also
earlier in the fifth century, the age of Plato’s Socrates, the Homeric Iliad and Odys-
sey were the only epics performed at the festival of the Panathenaia in Athens. The
epics of the Cycle, by contrast, were excluded from the repertoire of the Panath-
enaia in the fifth and fourth centuries b.c.e. (Nagy 2004b: 28–30).31
Two of the most outstanding epics of the Cycle were the Thebaid and the
Epigonoi.32 Such alternative epic poetry was absorbed into the tragic poetry of the
City Dionysia, as in the case of the Seven against Thebes of Aeschylus (produced in
467 b.c.e.), which is evidently a tragic version of the epic Thebaid (Nagy 2000).
In the sixth century b.c.e., by contrast with the fifth and the fourth, the Epic
Cycle was more broadly conceived. And so also Homer was more broadly con-
ceived. The poetic traditions represented by such epics as the Seven against Thebes,
the Epigonoi, the Cypria, and the Little Iliad could be attributed to Homer. In this
earlier era, Homer was a master poet who created not only the Iliad and Odyssey but
also the entire Epic Cycle, and the very concept of the Cycle (kuklos) was a symbol of
a notional totality, the sum total of Homer’s poetic creation (Nagy 1996b: 38).
Such an earlier and broader idea of Homer is incompatible with the Homer of
later times who had only two epics to his name, the Iliad and the Odyssey. From
epic 39
the standpoint of Plato and Aristotle, the epic poetry of such an earlier Homer
could not be sui generis. Not only that, the poetry of such a Homer would not have
been epic. For Plato and Aristotle, only the Homer of the Iliad and Odyssey defined
epic. The epics of the Cycle would not be epic. As Aristotle argues in the Poetics,
epic is defined by way of its affinity with tragedy, which achieves perfection in its
complete and unified structure. Only Homer has that perfection, and that Homer
is the poet of the Iliad and Odyssey. The epics of the Cycle do not have that perfec-
tion, according to Aristotle, and so Homer cannot be the poet of these epics, which
must have been made by other poets. And they are not really epics, since they are
not created by Homer.
Once again, we see that epic must be an ideal genre created by an ideal poet.
Once again, we are confronted with the overwhelming burden of the past, with
an all-consuming anxiety of influence. Once again, we see that the genre of epic is
defined by Homer, and that this genre is therefore sui generis.
How, then, can any new poet recreate epic? The question itself is overwhelm-
ing. The only way to recreate this genre is to become the ideal poet. But how can
any new poet become the ideal poet? The lack of a clear response leaves the genre
of epic stranded in splendid isolation, stranded for good.
That is why the history of epic in world literature is a long-term story of emulat-
ing but not reenacting Homer as a perfect model. How well this model is emulated
depends on how well it is understood, and the levels of understanding vary over
time. In the history of Greek literature after Plato and Aristotle, the most distin-
guished example of emulation is the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes, who
flourished in the third century b.c.e. This poetic achievement displays a masterful
understanding of Homeric poetry—even of its textual and exegetical history (Ren-
gakos 1994). As poetry, however, it does not replace Homer as a new standard to
follow, and the ultimate model remains Homer.
In the history of Roman literature, on the other hand, the most distinguished
example of Homeric emulation becomes an ultimate model of epic in its own right.
That example is the Aeneid of Virgil, who flourished in the second half of the first
century b.c.e. The emulation of Homer by Virgil is made most explicit by way of
the symmetry inherent in this Roman epic: the first half of the Aeneid is clearly
modeled on the Odyssey and the second, on the Iliad.
Virgil’s understanding of his Homeric model is exquisite: as a poet who
emulates the ostensibly ultimate poet, he achieves in his own right the status of
an ultimate poetic model in the overall history of Roman civilization, and this
status rivals that of Homer in the overall history of Greek civilization (Putnam
2005: n. 45, 452–75). Even more, Virgil transcends Roman literature, becoming the
model of epic for all the world literatures that link to Roman literature as their
overall model. For the likes of Petrarch, Milton, Tasso, Camõens, and countless
other major poets in the history of European literature, Virgil becomes the new
ideal poet of epic (Kallendorf 2005: 574–88).
But now a major question looms: though Virgil becomes the new ideal poet of
epic, is his Aeneid really an epic? The answer has to be qualified: Virgil is a poet of
40 genres
epic only to the extent that Homer defines epic in the history of Greek literature after
Plato and Aristotle. Virgil emulates that Homer, just as he emulates other emulators
of Homer, including Apollonius of Rhodes. But his Aeneid is not a reenactment of
the genre represented by the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey. That genre is too narrow to
suit the Aeneid of Virgil. To that extent, Virgil’s epic is not really an epic.
The objection could be made that Virgil’s Aeneid was nevertheless an epic if we
think of epic in his terms. It could be said that Virgil’s own view of epic transcended
Homer, and that his epic model was broader than the Homeric model, which in
turn was narrower than earlier Greek models of epic as a genre. As we have seen,
the history of Greek literature before Plato and Aristotle indicates a broader view
of Homer—and a broader view of what eventually became understood as epic. We
can actually observe Virgil’s own broader view in his reliance on traditions linked
to the so-called Epic Cycle.33 We can even say that Virgil is consistent in indicat-
ing his awareness of poetic formalities that transcended Homer. Nevertheless, this
transcendence was for Virgil a matter of emulating a variety of poets in addition
to Homer—including the poets of epic in the early Republican era of Rome (Gold-
berg 2005: 429–39). It was not a matter of actually reenacting the genre of epic as a
genre in its narrower or broader forms. At best, then, we can follow C. S. Lewis by
referring to the Aeneid of Virgil as “secondary epic.”34
In the end, then, we are left with a paradox. The clearest way for us to view epic
as a genre is to keep on looking at Homer synchronically—as he is understood in
the historical period of Plato and Aristotle. Our view becomes instantly clouded,
however, once we start looking at Homer diachronically. Homer as a model of epic
meant too many different things to too many different poets over the ages. And
that is because poets emulated not the epic of Homer but Homer himself. Much the
same predicament awaited the greatest emulator of Homer, the poet Virgil. When
another great poet, Dante, emulated Virgil in his Divine Comedy, begun in 1307, his
model was clearly Virgil, not the epic of Virgil.
Without the genre of epic, the poet of epic can be emulated at will, without
rules, since the poet seems to have no rules. He is simply a genius. Thomas Black-
well, in his Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (1736), says that Homer was
the ultimate poetic genius because he needed no “rules” for making epic—and
because he did not even know any such rules (Grobman 1979: 186–98). Such is the
fate of epic as genre—once Plato succeeds in detaching Homer from the autho-
rized transmission of Homer by rhapsodes like Ion.
NOTES
1. The aulos was a double reed, most similar in morphology to the oboe.
2. The kithara was a seven-string lyre.
3. Here the word is in the plural, and I render it as “instances of reenactment.” In
the singular, the basic idea of mimēsis is “reenactment”; see Nagy 1990: §1, 46–50.
epic 41
4. For further elaboration, see Rothstein 2004.

5. For editions of the Epic Cycle, see Bernabé 1987 and Davies 1988.
6. The figure of Olympus is a prototypical master of the aulos; see sources and
commentary in Nagy 1990: 3§§7 n. 7, 16–17, 36, 39.
7. The figure of Thamyras/Thamyris is a prototypical master of the kithara in Iliad
2 594–600; see commentary in Nagy 1990: §12, 376n.199, 378–79n. 210.
8. The figure of Phemios is a prototypical singer of epic in Odyssey i, xvii, and
xxii. I will have more to say about him later. On Phemios as a rhapsōidos (rhapsode),
see Graziosi 2002: 25, 39–40; her interpretation is different from the one I offer in what
follows.
9. For further analysis, see Nagy 2002: 38–39, 42 n. 16, 51.
10. For a comparative perspective on the concept of competition-in-collaboration,
see Nagy 1996a: 18 n. 11.
11. In one of these contexts (Ion 535d), it is specified that Ion already wears a golden
garland while he is performing Homer. Perhaps Ion had already won first prize at the
Panathenaia on a previous occasion.
12. My citations from Vita 1 and Vita 2 follow the line numbers in the edition of
T. W. Allen, Homeri Opera V (Oxford 1912).
13. By implication, Ion was performing Homeric poetry also at the agōn of rhapsodes
at the festival of the Asklepieia in Epidaurus, where it is said that he likewise won the first
prize (Ion 530a).
14. For commentary, see Nagy 1996a: 111 n. 24.
15. The nonsinging role of the kitharistēs (citharist) may be etiologically connected
with a myth about a primal “musical” competition between Thamyras/Thamyris and
the Muses (Iliad II 594–600). When Thamyris (as he is called in the Iliad) challenges the
Muses to a duel in singing to the lyre, he is punished for his arrogance by being stuck
dumb in the course of the contest, so this proto-citharist is pictured as a citharode who
lost his voice.
16. In the case of Thamyras, he is presented by Homeric poetry itself as an implicit
foil for Homer.
17. I see no reason to doubt the preeminence of Ion in the historical time that
corresponds to the dramatized time of his encounter with Socrates, sometime in the fifth
century, when the city of Ephesus was still under the domination of the Athenian empire.
In general, it is important to keep in mind that Plato chooses worthy opponents for
Socrates. When Plato’s Socrates predicts that Ion will win first prize in the Panathenaic
competitions that follow the day of their encounter with each other (Ion 530b), I have no
reason to doubt that this detail amounts to a self-fulfilling prophecy, and that the whole
dialogue is predicated on the general success of Ion as a rhapsode.
18. For more on this idea, see Nagy 2002: 9–35.
19. To paraphrase more closely: in Ion (531a–32b), when the rhapsode Ion says
that he can perform and interpret the poetry of Homer but not the poetry of Hesiod
and Archilochus, it is implied that other rhapsodes do indeed perform and interpret
the poetry of Hesiod and Archilochus. For further evidence about the rhapsodic
performance of Hesiod and Archilochus, see Athenaeus 620b–c and the commentary in
Nagy 1996a: 159. 162–63.
20. According to Ion, even where Homer and Hesiod overlap in content, they are
different in quality (532a). By contrast, Plato’s Socrates is represented as an expert in
non-Homeric poetry, as well. His expertise in Hesiodic and Orphic traditions is
especially to be noted.
21. On Simonides at the Panathenaia, see Graziosi 2002: 225–26.
42 genres
22. The theatrical mentality of Athenians is ostentatiously deplored by Kleon as

“quoted” by Thucydides: “theatai men tōn logōn . . . akroatai de tōn ergōn [spectators of
words, audiences of deeds]” (History of the Peloponnesian War 3.38.4).
23. See also Plato Republic 2.376e–98b and the commentary of Murray 1996: 205.
24. Lord 2000; see also S. Mitchell and G. Nagy, “Introduction to the Second
Edition”: vii–xxix.
25. On the hermeneutics of synchronic and diachronic approaches, see Saussure 1972: 117.
26. For a survey of the varieties of epic in world literatures, see Nagy 2005: 71–89;
a fuller version is available at http://chs.harvard.edu/publications.sec/online_print_
books.ssp/gregory_nagy_the_epic/bn_u_tei.xml_ 5.
27. For the term “terminal prestige,” see McClary 1989.
28. In using the term “burden of the past,” I follow the hermeneutics developed in
Bate 1970.
29. In using the term “anxiety of influence,” I follow the hermeneutics developed in
Bloom 1997.
30. Nagy 1996a: 81. The symmetry of the Panathenaia and the City Dionysia
as the two most important festivals of the Athenians is evident in a formulation by
Demosthenes in the First Philippic (4.35).
31. On the concept of a “Panathenaic bottleneck,” see Nagy 2004b: 30.
32. For an appreciation of the epic Thebaid as an esthetic rival of the Iliad and
Odyssey, see especially Pausanias 9.9.5. The wording of Herodotus 5.67 suggests that
the epic themes of the Thebaid and the Epigonoi may have been the basic repertoire for
performances at the festivals of Argos and Sikyon; see Cingano 1985, with reference to
Herodotus 5.67. See also Nagy 1990: §1, 22.
33. Such a reliance is typical of Roman epic poetry in general; see Farrell 2005: 425–28.
34. I am grateful to Richard Eldridge for guiding me to this felicitous wording, to
be found in C. S. Lewis’s A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942/1961). His chapter 3 is called
“Primary Epic,” and it begins with this distinction: “The secondary here means not
‘the second rate,’ but what comes after, and grows out of, the primary” (13). Lewis takes
Homeric poetry and Beowulf as his principal examples of primary epics. Chapter 6 is called
“Virgil and the Subject of Secondary Epic,” and it begins with this sentence: “The epic
subject, as later critics came to understand it, is Virgil’s invention; he has altered the very
meaning of the word epic.” The underlying idea is that a subject or theme may be invented
by a poet for a new readership. But the distinction seems to trace to Milton’s “The Reason
of Church Government” (1957: 669–70). The epics of Homer (and of Virgil and Tasso)
result, he says, from “the inspired gift of God rarely bestow’d, but yet to some (though
most abuse) in every nation: and are of power beside the office of a pulpit, to inbreed and
cherish in a great people the seeds of vertu, and publick civility.” There is a summary of the
distinction in Jenkyns 1992: 55–56, where it is treated as a commonplace among critics.
REFERENCES
Bate, W. J. (1970). The Burden of the Past and the English Poet. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press.
Bernabé, A., ed. (1987). Poetae Epici Graeci (Part 1). Leipzig: K.G. Saur.
epic 43
Bloom, H. (1997). The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University
Burgess, J. S. (2004). “Performance and the Epic Cycle.” Classical Journal 100, 1–23.
Cingano, E. (1985). “Clistene di Sicione, Erodoto e i poemi del Ciclo tebano.” Quaderni
Urbinati di Cultura Classica 20, 31–40.
Croce, B. (1902). Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale. Florence:
Sandron.
Davies, M., ed. (1988). Epicorum Graecorum Fragmenta. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and
Ruprecht.
Farrell, J. (2005). “The Origins and Essence of Roman Epic.” In J. M. Foley (ed.),
Companion to Ancient Epic. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Foley, J. M. (2005). “Analogues: Modern Oral Epics.” In J. M. Foley (ed.), Companion to
Ancient Epic. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ford, A. (2002). The Origins of Criticism: Literary Culture and Poetic Theory in Classical
Greece. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Goldberg, S. M. (2005). “Early Republican Epic.” In J. M. Foley (ed.), Companion to
Graziosi, B. (2002). Inventing Homer: The Early Reception of Epic. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Grobman, N. R. (1979). “Thomas Blackwell’s Commentary on The Oral Nature of Epic.”
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Herington, J. (1985). Poetry into Drama: Early Tragedy and the Greek Poetic Tradition.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Jenkyns, R. (1992). Classical Epic: Homer and Virgil. London: Duckworth.
Kallendorf, C. (2005). “Virgil’s Post-classical Legacy.” In J. M. Foley (ed.), Companion to
Lewis, C. S. (1942/1961). A Preface to Paradise Lost. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Martin, R. P. (1989). The Language of Heroes. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University
Press.
—— . (1997). “Similes and Performance.” In E. Bakker and A. Kahane (eds.), Written
Voices, Spoken Signs. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
—— . (2005). “Epic as Genre.” In J. M. Foley (ed.), Companion to Ancient Epic. Oxford:
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Milton, J. (1957). Complete Poems and Major Prose (M. Y. Hughes, ed.). New York:
Odyssey Press.
Murray, P. (1996). Plato on Poetry: Ion, Republic 376e–398b, Republic 595–608b. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Nagy, G. (1990). Pindar’s Homer: The Lyric Possession of an Epic Past. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press.
—— . (1996a). Poetry as Performance: Homer and Beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge
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—— . (1996b.) Homeric Questions. Austin: University of Texas Press.
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Epic Traditions in the Contemporary World: The Poetics of Community. Berkeley:
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—— . (1999b). The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry (2nd
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Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 100, 97–118.
—— . (2002). Plato’s Rhapsody and Homer’s Music: The Poetics of the Panathenaic Festival
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—— . (2003). Homeric Responses. Austin: University of Texas Press.
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du monde grec ancien 2, 259–68.
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University Press. (Original work published in 1978).
 
LYRIC
susan stewart
Il existe donc aussi nécessairement une manière lyrique de

parler, et un monde lyrique, une atmosphère lyrique, des
paysages, des hommes, des femmes, des animaux qui tous
participent du caractère affectionné par la Lyre
—Baudelaire, “Sur Mes Contemporains”1
Philosophy, the love of wisdom,2 and lyric, words meant to be sung to the musical
accompaniment of a lyre, seem, at least etymologically, to have little to do with
each other. Philosophers may even say we make a category mistake in compar-
ing them, since the first term refers to the pursuit of knowledge of truth and the
second term refers to an expressive art form. Yet both philosophers and lyric poets
are solo speakers, and their common material is language—indeed, they share the
same language, for it is not that there are separate tongues for each. Philosophers
and poets are alike in certain actions, as well: they convey intelligible statements;
employ formal structures with beginnings, middles, and ends; and hope to con-
vince or move their audiences, and so incorporate a social view from the outset
(see Preminger and Bogan 1993: 906). Familiar issues of interpretation, making,
and consequence arise whenever we consider the relations between these two
endeavors.
Nevertheless, these shared materials and aims conceal some important differ-
ences. The language of philosophy strives for clarity and singularity of reference.
Lyric, in contrast, is always overdetermined; its images, symbols, sounds, the very
grain of the voices it suggests, all compete for our attention and throw us back,
whether we are listening or reading, to repeated consideration of the whole. Phi-
losophy should be paraphrasable and translatable if its truth claims are universal,
46 genres
but poetry has finality of form, and to paraphrase it is a heresy; to translate it,
a betrayal. And whereas philosophy and poetry both involve rhetorical develop-
ment, their respective attitudes toward rhetoric differ: the philosopher asks for
comprehension and often tolerates, even encourages, skepticism; the poet asks for,
at least, attention and, at most, appreciation. The differences between intending
toward truth, which may involve a process of constant detachment and even alien-
ation from earlier practices, and moving an audience rhythmically and musically,
which may produce somatic states of pleasure and pain, further distinguish the
obligations of philosophy to clarification and the obligations of lyric to reception.
The philosopher convinces; the poet enchants and absorbs. Individual lyrics, like
any work of art, must have closure, yet the cultural task of lyric—whether it is the
expression of emotion, praise, or a summoning of the originary power of words—
is, like philosophy, an incomplete project.
Here, lyric poetry and philosophy can both be seen to stem from traditions
of wisdom literature wherein speakers who are vates or sages deliver prophecies,
oracles, and other powerful utterances that will be deciphered or interpreted by
ordinary men and women. Myths as cosmological explanations, and thereby solu-
tions to recurring problems or paradoxes in a way of life, are commonly held and
told, frequently in metrically organized form. Myth is at other times broken by
song, as in cante-fable form, and song is often a reflection upon a prior framework
of myth that provides a vast system of shared references. Shifts from narrative to
song reflect the fundamental difference between speaking and singing, a differ-
ence that appears in every known repertoire of genres and that neurologists now
believe may lie in separate brain functions—one that produces context-bound dis-
cursive sentences and another that produces repeatable utterances such as rhymes
and “sing-song.”3
At the core of lyric, effecting both somatic and semantic transport, is the pre-
sentation of metaphor: the fusion of feeling and fact, particular and abstraction,
one moment transposed to another and compelling recognition. Lyric is in this
sense also influenced by such simple gnomic genres as proverbs and riddles, which,
too, are measured and rhymed and require a deciphering interpretation.4 Proverbs
are tendered by the elderly and wise and, once grasped, offered up for practical use
in the conduct of everyday life. Riddles arise from new experiences—from what
we might call experiences of juvenility—since they involve apprehending phenom-
ena beyond the paths of habit. Riddles shift perspectives and create unpredictable
combinations of categories. All in all, there is a great deal of redundancy in the
content of any genre system, yet each particular genre has its role, and it is in lyric
that we find gestures of citing and applying, on the one hand, and breaking up and
reforming, on the other—gestures that indicate the relation of individual voice to
the contingent propulsions of interior physical states and external social pressures
and values.
How did the early fusion of poetic and philosophical language under the cat-
egories of wisdom literature eventually, at least in the West, dissolve? To answer
this question, we should begin with Plato. In book 10 of The Republic, as part of
lyric 47
his presentation of Socrates’ arguments to Glaucon, Plato contends there is an

“ancient quarrel” between poetry and philosophy, one that, for Socrates, stems
from the consequences of enigma and inspiration—those very qualities for which
wisdom literature traditionally is admired. Under Plato’s theory of ideal forms, any
work of art, as an imitation of an imitation, and so thrice removed from the reality
of ideal forms, is “an indistinct expression of the truth.” Plato’s criticism thus aug-
ments the eighth-century b.c.e. attack on Homer by Hesiod, who claimed a greater
obligation than the earlier poet to both truth and usefulness. Heraclitus (c. 540–
c. 470 b.c.e.) also suggested that Homer should be “excluded from the contests and
scourged with rods” (quoted in Curtius 1991: 204). And Xenophanes (c. 570–c. 490
b.c.e.) mentions that both Homer and Hesiod himself write inappropriately about
the scandalous behavior of the gods (Russell and Winterbottom 1972: 4)5
Even so, perhaps this quarrel between poetry and philosophy is not as ancient
as Plato contends, for philosophy was in many ways being invented by Plato at that
moment; he was the first to mention such a quarrel as a traditional one, and he
struggled to define his intellectual enterprise against the cultural authority of poets
and dramatists (Nightingale 1995: 60–67).6 Plato’s condemnation of epic and tragic
poetry in book 10 of the Republic, and in his dialogues Ion, Gorgias, and Phaedrus,
is part of a larger attack on the cultural role of the poet, who “arouses, nourishes,
and strengthens this part of the soul [the passions] and so destroys the rational
one . . . the imitative poet puts a bad constitution in the soul of each individual by
making images that are far removed from the truth and by gratifying the irrational
part” (Plato 1983, 10: 276). His Socrates says that the poet misleads because he does
not really know what he is saying, cannot interpret his own actions, and is bound
to lead others astray; implicitly, Socrates is also contending that philosophers enjoy
a full consciousness of the sources and connotations of their language and of the
consequences that ensue. The fear of loss of control and contagion here is accom-
panied by a wish for mastery.
Nevertheless, as long as it is not directed toward stirring up and exaggerating
emotions that would be better left to cool, lyric poetry is given a somewhat lighter
sentence by Plato. He writes, again in the voice of Socrates,
You can agree that Homer is most poetic and that he stands first among the
tragedians, but you must know for sure that hymns to the gods and eulogies of
good men are the only poetry which we can admit into our city. If you admit
the Muse of sweet pleasure, whether in lyrics or epic, pleasure and pain will rule
as monarchs in your city, instead of the law and that rational principle which is
always and by all thought to be the best. (1983, 10: 251)7
If lyric poets are going to create, beyond their conscious will, forms driven by inspi-
ration and resulting in somatic responses from their audiences, their activities will
be judged only by the worthiness of the objects they represent.
Platonism has a continuous, if often subtle, impact on later thinking regarding
the relations between philosophy and poetry, leaving us with a division of labor
between them. Even so, a closer look reveals that the quarrel between poetry and
48 genres
philosophy is not only a rhetorical convenience, but also quite one-sided—it is a

quarrel philosophy has with poetry. Socrates and other thinkers are the butt of
jokes in Aristophanes’ contemporary Clouds, Birds, and a few other ancient texts,
but these are lampoons of personalities, hardly sustained critiques of philosophy.
There seems to be not a single treatise wherein philosophy defends itself against
an attack by poetry, but there is a long history of poetic “defenses” in Western
culture—“defenses of poetry” that must protect the form from those heirs of Plato
who would argue its uselessness, poor moral influence, and inauthenticity.8
The “ancient quarrel,” however, is not the only perspective on poetry Plato gives
us: his Symposium presents another view entirely, one that emphasizes a positive
sense of the created dimension of poetic forms. At 205b8–c2, Socrates says “Well,
you know, for example, that ‘poetry’ has a very wide range. After all, everything
that is responsible for creating something out of nothing is a kind of poetry; and so
all the creations of every craft and profession are themselves a kind of poetry, and
everyone who practices a craft is a poet” (Plato 1989: 51). Here Plato is drawing on
the Greek sense of poiesis as making. In the same text, as Socrates discourses on the
teachings of the wise woman Diotima, he argues that there is a coherence between
the beautiful and the good—in this sense, kalos, the beautiful, fine, right, or noble,
is close in meaning to agathos as the good, morally good, or beneficial. Here the
poet is not a fraud and seducer, but rather a maker of perfect forms; the produc-
tion of forms and the production of life are linked in the philosophical search
for truth as an ideal form of love. The Symposium, like the Republic, also strictly
circumscribes what kinds of forms are ideal: they must have unchanging stability
of character; they must be purged of the simultaneous presence of opposites or
contradictions; they must be known by the mind rather than the senses—in other
words, they must be distinguished from the merely perceptible.9 Here is an idea
of poetic justice or fit—the symmetry, isomorphism, and measured rhythms of
poetry all help bring the powers of the daimonic into harmony.
An array of ideas about the systematic exercise of human skill in making
informs the philosophy of Plato’s pupil Aristotle (384–322 b.c.e.). For Aristotle,
essences are produced within and emerge from the natural world, natura naturata.
Such essences are incomplete and overlain with accidental features, but the poet,
who creates an integral or completed form, is able to preserve the essential from the
accidental. Within the domain of human action and human values, poetry yields
an account of nature’s truth by revealing nature’s workings and principles. In his
Physics, Aristotle suggests that the maker partly imitates nature and partly carries to
completion what nature has left incomplete (1941c). And in the Nicomachean Ethics,
he also emphasizes the conceptual origins of art, writing: “[A]11 art is concerned
with coming into being . . . and considering how something may come into being
which is capable of either being or not being and whose origin is in the maker and
not in the thing made” (1941b: 1025). Aristotle suggests the artist sometimes “errs
voluntarily” and that such willed errors are preferable to those made involuntarily;
in this regard, artistic decisions are the opposite of ethics, where to err voluntarily
is a serious offense, and involuntarily a lesser one (1941a: 1027).
lyric 49
Although Aristotle’s Poetics is concerned primarily with tragedy, its account of

the development of monologue, dialogue, and multiple voices is important for the
history of lyric—a form most often expressing a first-person perspective even when
it is sung by a chorus or involves group refrains. There is a role for the reflective
singular voice in evaluating the meaning and consequences of action that, within
the history of poetic forms, lyric speakers continue to assume. Aristotle writes,
“Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history,
since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history
are singulars” (1941a: 1464). As the poet imitates the actions of men, he becomes
the poet of plots rather than verses alone and finds what is probable and possible
in the order of life. In sum, Aristotle places poetry at the center of life and lays the
foundation for an argument that poetry is a means of discovery regarding human
nature; rather than presenting an imitation of an imitation, poetry for Aristotle is,
like all art, a perfected form—an improvement upon nature that penetrates to the
principles of nature.
Early Greek melic poetry took the form of either choral odes sung to flute
accompaniment or solo songs. The choral works included threnodies or dirges,
paeans or hymns, maiden songs, wedding songs, prosodia sung at processions,
dithyrambs in honor of Dionysius, enkomia (praise songs), and epinikia (victory
songs)—all tied to related rituals and punctuating everyday life with occasions for
heightened emotion, reflection, and valuation. The monodies, in contrast, were
sung by characters in a tragedy or to a private audience such as a symposium.
Sappho (c. 620–c. 565 b.c.e.) and Alcaeus (c. 600 b.c.e.) gave their names to char-
acteristic forms of monody built out of isometric strophes.10 Whether framed by
ritual or solitary performance, the objects of praise, celebration, and lament are
individuated and addressed with sustained attention.
In The Discovery of the Mind (1982), Bruno Snell makes a sweeping historical
argument for the centrality of solo lyric in Greek thought. He regards these
“personal lyrics” by Sappho, Alcaeus, Archilochus (c. 680–656 b.c.e.), and
Anacreon (570–480 b.c.e.) as significant evidence of the rise of the concept of the
individual. Snell argues that in talking of themselves in such lyrics, poets came to
be conscious of what was particular or distinctive about their persons. Sentiments
such as Archilochus’s “each man has his heart cheered in his own way” may uni-
versalize the emotion of being cheered, yet they also mark experience as singular.
In Anacreon’s and Archilochus’s poems, individualism is tied to singular choices
and values often at odds with those of society as a whole. A separation between
internal and external values thus arises. Sappho was, of course, quite familiar
with the poems of Archilochus, and Snell argues that what comes to fruition in
her work is this distinction between “what others prize and what one’s own judg-
ment declares to be essential.” The particular fruit she bears is “a new distinction
between Being and appearance . . . since it is understood that love is not a private
whim, not a subjective affectation, but an experience of the supra-personal of
divine dimensions. The lover cannot but find his way to some reality through the
agency of his individual passion” (1982: 53–54).11
50 genres
Snell designates the formal features of lyric—the musical accompaniment that

makes the creation of form out of rhythm an analogue for emotional compulsion;
the first-person expression evolving under a restriction of intelligibility toward
others; the mutual articulation of, and tension between, “interior consciousness”
and “external decorum”—and argues that the process of artistic choice, orienta-
tion, closure, and reception created incremental changes in consciousness. Snell
notes that these poets do not simply express their emotions, but rather always
address themselves to a partner, either a deity—especially in prayer—or an indi-
vidual or an entire group of men, writing, “Though the individual who detaches
himself from his environment severs many old bonds, his discovery of the dimen-
sion of the soul once more joins him in company with those who have fought their
way to the same insight. The isolation of the individual is, by the same token, the
forging of new bonds” (1982: 65). The individualism recognized by social sanction
that Snell describes in solo lyric is rooted in theology, but extends into the secular
deictic “now” of the poem’s expression.
Hymn structure remains tied to ritual, and we can see the dynamic of gods,
individuals, and audience in the dialectical three-part structure of Pindaric odes,
yet Pindar also refers to himself and the unfolding nature of his judgments, and we
can trace the continuing force of individual choice in the axiological dimension of
all praise poems. In classical tragedy, lyric poetry similarly serves as the founda-
tion for the judgments of the chorus and the closure of lament: action is suspended
while the chorus deliberates and draws conclusions. In contrast, the first-person
speeches of messengers are based in empirical knowledge and give testimony; they
bring the news and model its emotional reception.
The Hellenistic Latin poets took continuity with their Greek predecessors to
be paramount, yet there is a fundamental difference in these traditions, for Latin
poetry is a poetry of the book. The Late Republican and Augustan poets, Catullus
(c. 84–54 b.c.e.) and Horace (65–8 b.c.e.) particularly, exploit the resources of
written texts, producing refined brief lyrics that continue to explore the interper-
sonal ethics of love and friendship that we find in Greek lyric. Horace, Virgil (70–19
b.c.e.), the writer of love lyrics Propertius (c. 50–c. 15 b.c.e.), and the mythogra-
pher, epistolary poet, and eventual exile Ovid (43 b.c.e.–c. 17 a.d.) all have ambiva-
lent relations to their imperial patrons, and we discern the ancient role of the poet
as vates and judge, as well as the enduring materiality of the book form, beneath
the intellectual and emotional freedom the poet begins to claim in this period.
Oral forms emerge in a continuous stream, broken by temporal pauses and
the structure inherently provided by repetitions of many kinds. But to read a
poem is to project a spatial field in which this stream unfolds. Our sense of the
stanza as a room, of closure reflecting back to the closings of individual stanzas,
is indebted to the poets of this period, and the basic distinction between stichic
and strophic means of organizing lines continues throughout all later poetry
to the present. Greek stichic poetry was more discursive than the musical melic
poetry organized in strophes. After the advent of written texts and, eventually,
printing, the openness of stichic organization often is used as an allusion to oral
lyric 51
composition—particularly to the epics and odes of antiquity. Strophic organiza-

tion often also alludes to songs and other oral forms. Yet strophic poetry also grad-
ually limns spaces within the space of the page, and the stanzas of a poem come to
represent units of contemplation.
Between the second and fourth centuries, the material of writing shifted from
the scroll to the codex, a radical transformation in the experience of reading and
writing exceeded only by the invention of printing in the fifteenth century. In
the early medieval period, a supersensible content is joined to a new awareness
of these material conditions of literacy. Allegory, moving between material signs
and systems of speculative referents, is the appropriate mode of thought for this
experience, and there are a number of medieval innovations in the presentation
of texts. Many of these aid in the creation of arguments for discussion, abstracting
the substance of the text: metatextual structures, such as headings and subhead-
ings, help in such analyses; tables of contents provide an overview of arguments;
the use of margins influences a sense of the “aside,” and of the spatial bounds of
the text, and helps in the summation of arguments, as well (Parkes 1976). Here
again, the presentation of paraphrasable philosophical arguments is distinct from
the set presentation of hymns and prayers. But other devices, such as the orna-
mentation of textual beginnings, demand a commitment to absorbed reading
that bridges philosophical and poetic works. Of course, these material changes
did not simply cause changes in thought and form in poetry and philosophy; they
also must be viewed as responses to the needs of philosophers, poets, and their
audiences.
Augustine of Hippo’s Confessions, written in the late fourth century, are
divided between the narrative of the first half and the prayerful exclamations of
the second half. This split exemplifies a microcosmic relation between universal
salvation and the individual’s turn away from worldly experience and dramati-
cally illustrates the vertical movement from history to eternity. Poetic forms play
a key role in the series of scenes where this turn is evoked. First, in book 8, in the
climactic moment of despair when Augustine has flung himself beneath a fig tree
and poured out his tears in “sacrifice,” he hears the “sing-song voice” of a child,
repeating the refrain, “Take it and read, take it and read.”12 What is this sing-song
voice, and from where has it come? Augustine thinks “hard whether there was any
kind of game in which children used to chant words like these, but I could not
remember ever hearing them before” (1961: 177–78). And in book 9, in the period
after his mother’s death, Augustine describes a scene where the relation between
tears and sing-song is reversed. Here he awakens after a sleep that has brought him
some relief from his sorrow and remembers Ambrose’s “Evening Hymn”:
Deus, Creator omnium,

polique Rector, vestiens
diem decoro lumine
noctem sopora gratia;
Artus solutos ut quies
52 genres
reddat laboris usui,

mentesque fessas allevet,
luctusque solvat anxios.13
The hymn evokes memories of Augustine’s mother, and he is able to release his
tears, letting “them flow as freely as they would, making of them a pillow for my
heart” (1961: 202).
Medieval hymns indeed provide for Augustine a model of time itself. For
example, in book 11, this relation between sing-song, weeping, and reversal
becomes a sustained theory of time. Poetic forms are no longer eruptions in the
flow of secular time: they now provide a model for the subjective consciousness of
time as an eternal present. Realizing that time is “an extension of the mind itself,”
Augustine writes:
Suppose that we hear a noise emitted by some material body. The sound begins
and we continue to hear it. It goes on until finally it ceases. Then there is silence.
The sound has passed and it is no longer sound. Before it began it was future
and could not be measured, because it did not yet exist. Now that it has ceased
it cannot be measured, because it no longer exists. It could only be measured
while it lasted, because then it existed and could be measured. But even then it
was not static, because it was transient, moving continuously toward the point
where it would no longer exist. (1961: 277–78)
He concludes that “what we measure is the interval between a beginning and an
end,” yet he realizes that “we cannot measure it [time] if it is not yet in being, or if
it is no longer in being, or if it has no duration, or if it has no beginning or end.” He
returns once more to the beginning of “Deus Creator omnium,” with its eight syl-
lables alternately short and long. As “far as” he “can trust” his practiced ear, he can
measure these syllables: “It is in my own mind then, that I measure time. I must
not allow my mind to insist that time is something objective.” Poetry becomes the
paradigm for this internal consciousness of time. He describes how silences are
measured against sounds in a poem, how poems can be recalled to mind without
any voicing, and how an interplay between memory and expectation characterizes
the recitation of a poem. Hence, “What is true of the whole psalm is also true of
all its parts and of each syllable. It is true of any longer action in which I may be
engaged and of which the recitation of the psalm may only be a small part. It is true
of a man’s whole life, of which all his actions are parts. It is true of the whole history
of mankind, of which each man’s life is a part” (277–78). Augustine’s microcosmic
thinking makes a hymn the paradigm for the individual’s experience of time and
the human experience of eternity.
Philosophical allegory in the Middle Ages thus presented a lasting model for
poetry of both narrative and lyric kinds, but lyric has precedence in its relation to
hymn and prayer. The shift between narration and prayer, like the shift between
linear thought and abstraction and the shift between literal and symbolic meaning,
also is indicative of medieval practices that might be viewed as “reading into” and
“reading out of”: the commentary and meditation. Both these practices may seem
lyric 53
at first glance to reify the status of the textual artifact and to indicate reverence
toward ideas from the past. But in truth, medieval commentary and meditation
are as much riddling as homage, and result in the reevaluation of philosophical
and poetic arguments as they also assert the importance of individual emotion,
experience, and judgments. Listeners and readers must engage, respond to, and
transpose the material of the text as a literal matter of conversion.
Among the most important of early medieval commentaries is Ambrosius
Theodosius Macrobius’s fourth-century discourse on Cicero’s Dream of Scipio of
54–51 b.c.e. Latin rhetoricians, including Cicero, had criticized the appearance of
poetic fictions such as Plato’s “Vision of Er” in philosophical discourse, but Mac-
robius argues in his Commentary that when the poet is speaking of the soul and
certain gods, “fabulous narratives” have their place (Macrobius 1952: 84–87). Mac-
robius marks a turn that we can follow out to the eleventh-century meditations of
St. Anselm wherein philosophy becomes a spiritually transformative experience,
one concerned not with technical and logical means of solving epistemological
problems, but rather with means of self-analysis and self-discipline.14 Here the
early “consolations,” or independent and self-focused exercises of the Stoics, are
the foundation for a strand of meditation that flowers in the spiritual exercises of
later Christian thought, including those promulgated by Bonaventure’s thirteenth-
century Itinerarium Mentis in Deum and the sixteenth-century Jesuit St. Ignatius of
Loyola’s Exercitia spiritualia (Ignatius 1978). Louis Martz has argued for the influ-
ence of these exercises on metaphysical poetry of the seventeenth century (Martz
1954),15 concluding that many of the exercises were transposed directly into experi-
ments with poetic forms in the work of both Roman Catholic and Protestant poets,
including Richard Crashaw, Robert Southwell, John Donne, and George Herbert.
In the nineteenth century, we find Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “desolate sonnets” of
1885 directly following that set of Ignatius’s spiritual exercises designed as medita-
tions on sin and hell. Though the spiritual consequences of such exercises were
dire for their ancient and medieval practitioners, the sheer imaginative power they
required also led philosophers and poets to domains of extended metaphors and
fictional worlds that would affect many later forms, from philosophical “thought
experiments” to the recurrence of “confessional poetry” well into the twentieth
century.
Nowhere is the medieval poetic allegory of the spiritual journey more deeply
pursued than in Dante’s Commedia. In Dante’s great poem, the external point of
reference is a moral one; it is the ultimate expression of the supernatural and ideal
by a figure who lives in a world replete with significances that must be uncovered
(Santayana 1910: 79). The recursive structure of terza rima embodies a relation
between action, interpretation, and understanding that undergirds the poem:
interpretation and allegory are required; symbols speak to the hidden significance
lying behind all appearances. Dante famously explained the “fourfold method”
of interpreting his work in his 1318 letter to his patron Can Grande that accompa-
nied the dedication of the Paradiso. Using the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt as his
example, he described how (1) on the literal level, the Hebrews celebrated Passover
54 genres
and departed from Egypt; (2) on the allegorical level, the members of the Church
are redeemed through Christ’s sacrifice; (3) on the tropological level, Christians
are transformed from sinfulness to grace; (4) on the anagogical level, the soul
passes from material bondage to eternal existence. This method is indebted to the
practice of Midrash in classical Judaism, where a hermeneutic reading of written
scripture casts light on laws and practices of the present, and it draws as well upon
typological readings of the New Testament as the fulfillment of indications in the
Hebrew Scriptures.
Dante’s process follows the spiritual revision of Christian confession. This is
not a vague goal of his work, but an actual writing practice; he creates a com-
mentary for his early lyrics by reworking them into the Vita Nuova, and there the
relation between lyric and philosophy is expressed as a complementary pattern of
singing and speaking. He goes on to revise the Vita Nuova and later lyrics in the
Convivio, then revises the Convivio in the Commedia, and then revises the Com-
media in de Monarchia.16 In this constantly self-revising and self-perpetuating aes-
thetics, he reflects patterns of the cosmos; the basic form of this art, like the form
of creation, displays the paradox of multeity in unity. Following Augustine’s ideas
regarding creation, Dante contends that as God fills a finite space/time continuum
with a multitude of creatures, so the poet, in imitation of the heavenly maker, cre-
ates his literary universe and populates it with an analogous multitude. Numbers
provide the necessary extension and variety in the poet’s artifact, just as they do in
God’s cosmic creation.
Much in little, complexity in unity—the purest literary expression of this
strain of medieval and early Renaissance aesthetics, however, is not philosophical
prose or even philosophical epic, but rather the sonnet, and especially the sonnet
sequence. Via such a sequence, the poet creates an illusion of temporal dimen-
sion. Under conditions of great formal compression, the sonnet writer is able to
create an exposition, turn, and aphorism: the sonnet thus expresses in condensed,
miniaturized, form features of argument, dialogue, revision, and summarizing
conclusion. It unfolds, with a great deal of novelty, and even surprise, in its sense
and a great deal of repetition in its sounds. Whether it is a Petrarchan sonnet with
an octave and sestet, a Shakespearean or Elizabethan sonnet with three quatrains
and a couplet, or a Spenserian one of interlocking rhymes, it stands balanced on
its concluding lines and could not have arrived at that point without its preceding
mental work. If it indeed developed out of the agon of Sicilian verbal dueling, it
had already by the time of Giacomo da Lentini (1215–1233) incorporated the break
between the initial eight and final six lines that would enable the expression of a
volta, or change of mind, and so two points of view, at the very least, were already
incorporated into the form. Classical lyric tended to reify the poet by singling out
what was individual to his or her person, but late medieval canzone and sonnet
traditions show poetic speakers and the objects of their attention in states of emo-
tional flux and transformation.
By reading a sonnet sequence in its entirety, an experience in durational time,
readers come to know fully the object of love, from the mundane to the celestial,
lyric 55
as an image of perfection and reflection of divine unity. Michel Zink has explained
how medieval writers, especially after the thirteenth century, came to emphasize
concepts of truth and fiction when speaking such emotions: “[T]he problem of
truth lay at the heart of courtly poetics, which presupposed an identity between
the truth of love and that of poetry and made sincerity the touchstone of amo-
rous and poetic perfection” (1999: 62–63). He continues to explain that “at the
end of the thirteenth century the need for universality was no less great in per-
sonal poetry than in lyric poetry, since in any case its satisfaction was necessary for
the audience to be touched by the fortuitous incidents of a particular subjectivity
and to recognize itself in them.” The very codification of the sonnet, its tendency
toward artificiality, led to a possibility of voicing a critique of its emotional stance
within the poem. In his Astrophil and Stella, composed in the 1580s, Sir Philip
Sidney is able to multiply perspectives within the series by fictionalizing the voices
of both the speaker and his love; by the 1590s, the epideictic conventions of sonnet
writing are so fi xed that Shakespeare can use his sonnets to explore not only the
complex psychology of the three figures of his series, but also the limits of poetry
and metaphor itself. It is as if the fi xity of the sonnet and its early conventions of
idealization evolved into more and more sophisticated demands for the sincerity
of psychological realism.
Thus, through sonnet writing and other activities, late medieval and early
Renaissance thinkers value a self-transforming solitude. Petrarch’s excursion to
the summit of Mount Ventoux was an exercise in Christian self-examination, and
his gardening and lonely walks through the countryside of the Vaucluse anticipate
the poet-walkers of the eighteenth century and Romanticism. Far from being a
troubadour, such a poet is a thinker and contemplative who brings back impres-
sions of nature and the fruits of self-scrutiny as the ancient vates once brought back
messages from the gods—not in frenzy, however, but in the face-to-face sincerity
of conversation and epistles that imitate conversation.
At the same time, Renaissance poets return to classical culture’s concerns with
rhetoric and the consequences of poetry for speakers and hearers. The major trea-
tises on poetry revive and continue Plato’s “ancient quarrel.” Julius Caesar Scaliger
(1484–1558) wrote his Poetics of 1561 under the influence of Aristotle, of course,
but he also discusses Horace and the rhetoric of Cicero and Quintilian. Scaliger
emphasizes persuasion and considers the moral effects of poetry to be paramount,
but he is given to inflated historical claims and makes little distinction between
poetry and verse. Ludovico Castelvetro’s commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics, com-
posed and revised between the 1560s and 1576, proposes that poets should invent
their own plots, but then he also praises writers of historical tragedies who suc-
cessfully employ historical events in their work. Though he, too, worries about the
effects of poetry on the “vulgar multitude and common people,” Castelvetro illu-
minates the difference between Plato’s model of the poet as a figure infused with
divine frenzy and the sense of Aristotle who “did not hold the opinion that poetry
was a special gift of the gods, yielded to one man rather than to another, as is the
gift of prophecy” (1971: 146).
56 genres
The most extended and synthetic, if not original, Renaissance argument

regarding the relation of poetry to philosophy, however, is Sidney’s treatise of 1583,
which was not published until 1595, when it appeared posthumously in two ver-
sions under the titles Defense of Poesie and Apologie for Poetry. Sidney wrote his
defense in response to an attack on poetry, The School of Abuse, published in 1579
by the Puritan Stephen Gosson. Gosson had followed closely, even redundantly, the
Republic’s claims as he argued that poetry is a waste of time, the “mother of lies,”
“the nurse of abuse,” and that no less an authority than Plato had banished poets
from his republic. Sidney drew on Aristotle, Plato, Horace, Cicero, Agrippa, and
Erasmus, as well as a range of poetic texts from Greek hymns to the border ballad
“Chevy Chase,” to formulate his reply. Sidney argued that poetry is a form of edu-
cation, that poetry is a moral influence upon other domains of culture, that poets
are revered by everyone, and, in a nod to Neoplatonism, that poetry is an improve-
ment upon nature, writing “only the poet, disdaining to be tied to any . . . subjec-
tion, lifted up with the vigor of his own invention, doth grow in effect another
nature, in making things either better than nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew,
forms such as never were in nature” (1970: 14–15). Sidney also follows Aristotle in
arguing that poetry is part of action, and not gnosis, or knowing, though he consid-
ers such action, the imitation of action that produces movement in an audience,
as of a “higher degree” than teaching alone. Implicitly, the rhetorical emotional
power of poetry is acknowledged, but here turned toward a pedagogical aim. The
goal of poetry for Sidney is knowledge of the self, consistent with Neoplatonic self-
transcendence.
In Sidney’s treatise we see some of the sparks of the quarrel between the ancients
and the moderns that will flare in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries
throughout Western Europe. He in fact notes that the ancient poets “versified” by
quantity, but the modern only by number. He is indebted to classical influences
and at the same time expects the poet to make new forms, to draw forward out of
nature what nature has not yet produced. By the time of the four-way dialogue on
the ancients and the moderns in John Dryden’s 1668 “An Essay of Dramatic Poesy,”
the moderns have begun to win. What does this mean? For poetry, it indicates that
rather than following a process of imitation and citation and obeying ancient rules
of poetic decorum and occasion, the composing poet will be obliged to create new
forms for art and speak to the age at hand.
In the early eighteenth century, as both empiricism and the philosophy of feel-
ing give priority to the operations of reason rather than supernatural forces of
transcendence and authority, poetry also has an empirical, descriptive cast. The
loco-descriptive poets of the eighteenth century, with their underlying moral
and social arguments, depart from the meditations of earlier theological poetry
by looking outward to nature as teacher. At the same time, they carry forward
aspects of the meditative tradition by continuing the perspective of the Petrarchan
or Franciscan solitary alone in nature; and, as they so often contrast their view to
the cynicism and frivolity of the courts, this solitude is largely moral. Seventeenth-
and early eighteenth-century poetry also revives classical satire, criticizing the
lyric 57
particular with the universal weapons of common sense and notions of what is
“natural” to humankind.
Perhaps I spoke too soon earlier when I suggested that poetry has no quar-
rel with philosophy, for in many ways late Enlightenment and Romantic poetics
are a rebuke to philosophy’s claim of cognitive superiority—a rebuke in several
senses. At least since Thomas Aquinas’s account of beauty in the Summa Theo-
logica, the idea of seeing or insight via aesthetic form has a status commensurate
to that of other modes of cognition. Aquinas concludes (1981 I, q. 39, art. 8) that
beauty involves integrity or perfection, due proportion or harmony (not merely
between its parts, but between the object and the viewer), and brightness, clarity,
or brilliance. This last quality ties Neoplatonic notions of light as both truth and
divine perfection to clarity of thought. The apophatic dimension of Neoplatonic
thought is carried over into an interest in the supersensible that includes both that
which cannot be said and that which is expressed by silence.
The most prominent proponent of the priority of poiesis over other systems
of thought was the early eighteenth-century Neapolitan jurist, rhetorician, and
philosopher of history Giambattista Vico. Vico’s major treatise, The New Science
(1744), is rooted in a retrospective myth about the origins of poetry that also links
poiesis to an originary anxiety about the absence of form. Here is the story as
Vico tells it:
[W]hen . . . at last the sky fearfully rolled with thunder and flashed with
lightning, as could not but follow from the bursting upon the air for the first
time of an impression so violent. Thereupon a few giants, who must have been
the most robust, and who were dispersed through the forests on the mountain
heights where the strongest beasts have their dens, were frightened and
astonished by the great effect whose cause they did not know, and raised their
eyes and became aware of the sky. And because in such a case the nature of the
human mind leads it to attribute its own nature to the effect and because in
that state their nature was that of men all robust bodily strength, who expressed
their very violent passions by shouting and grumbling, they pictured the sky
to themselves as a great animated body, which in that aspect they called Jove,
the first god of the so-called greater gentes [peoples], who meant to tell them
something by the hiss of his bolts and the clap of his thunder. And thus they
began to exercise that natural curiosity which is the daughter of ignorance and
the mother of knowledge, and which, opening the mind of man, gives birth to
wonder. (1970: 75–76)
In this account, Vico describes how the earliest humans, living naked in the forest,
invented a figure by means of which they could bear their fear of the most power-
ful forces of nature. He adds, “[T]hey, in their robust ignorance, did it by virtue
of a wholly corporeal imagination. And because it was quite corporeal, they did
it with marvelous sublimity; a sublimity such and so great that it excessively per-
turbed the very persons who by imagining did the creating, for which they were
called ‘poet,’ which is Greek for ‘creators’ ” (75). Vico explains that the imagination
is moved to represent itself, via onomatopoeia, personification, and other modes
58 genres
of projection, by anthropomorphizing nature and thus giving being to inanimate

things. Fashioned from nature as Jove is fashioned by the first humans from their
experience of lightning, these “inventions” eventually become narratives (74). And
as narratives harden into ideologies, Vico contends that authorization and legiti-
mation give such ideologies ethical force.
Following Vico, we could claim that poetry can be the subject of neither his-
tory nor philosophy, for poetry is necessarily prior to these two forms of discourse.
Poetry expresses the passage from not-knowing to knowing through which we
represent the world, including the perspectives of others, to ourselves and those
around us. What is given birth, as “the daughter of ignorance” becomes “the
mother of knowledge,” is the continuity of a continuously transforming human
culture. Language here is pressured to be in some way commensurate to percep-
tion and at the same time to be intelligible to others, for, from Vico’s viewpoint,
the speaking subject as the recipient of the recognition of others is not prior to
language: language is the forum within which such a speaking subject emerges.
Only when poetic metaphors make available to others the experience of the cor-
poreal senses can the corporeal senses truly appear as integral experiences. The
self is compelled to make forms and thereby is transformed into the person of
volition and consequence—necessarily a person articulated by speaking and being
spoken to. Vico thereby describes the situation of the emergence of subjectivity
both ontologically, that is, in general, and historically, that is, in particular. But the
reconciliation of this model as a structural problem and a historical practice is not
a simple one. Like Hegel’s account of the ontology of self-consciousness in his Phe-
nomenology of Mind (Hegel 1967: 228–40), Vico’s narrative of the origins of poetry
and subjectivity is a retrospective fable about our capacity for the fabular. Poetry is
both the repetition of an ontological moment and the ongoing process or work of
enunciation by which that moment is recursively known and carried forward.
This line of thinking about the founding power of poetry is not merely a
critique of the divisions of metaphysics; it is also a critique of a far more perva-
sive division between matter, including the body, and mind. Many early Greek
philosophers practiced an attributive monism wherein one substance, such as
Heraclitus’s fire and Epicurus’s atoms, underlies all forms. Alternatively, philoso-
phers of substantival monism linked mind and matter as the manifestation of a
single substance in different states—a single substance variously described as life
or nature. For Aristotle, an activity of life joined the soul and body as the uni-
verse strives toward perfection; Aristotle thereby promotes an aspiring variety of
hylozoism. Spinoza is the most important descendent of this substantival monism.
He contended God, who is Nature, is the immanent cause of all things. The con-
temporary philosopher of action Stuart Hampshire writes of Spinoza’s philoso-
phy, “[E]verything must be explained as belonging to the single and all-inclusive
system which is nature, and no cause (not even a First Cause) can be conceived as
somehow outside or independent of the order of Nature” (2005: 45).
As the Augustinian legacy of elevating human creation as a mirror of divine
creation is transposed in Romanticism, poets and philosophers alike take up
lyric 59
a monistic view of human creation as one of many powerful creative forces in

nature. Through his friendship with Friedrich Jacobi (1743–1819), who had been
drawn to Spinoza’s philosophy as he also rejected its mathematical rationalism,
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) adopted certain aspects of this variety
of monism, especially the idea that the universe contains and expresses a creative
force that appears as a duality, but is in truth one. Goethe pursued a philosophy
of life wherein “the pursuit of the ideal” is preferable to the ideal itself, and,
following Aristotle and Spinoza, he envisions a philosophy of experience and
immanence, wherein our powers of representation approach the universal, hence
the open-endedness, or episodic quality, of the project of his art (see Santayana
1910: 142).
German Romanticism as a philosophy and artistic practice was a lively forum
for discussions of the value of poetry, and perhaps at no other time in history has
the practice of philosophy and the practice of an art form been so closely allied
and debated. Another friend of Jacobi, J. G. Hamann (1730–1788), claimed “the
whole world is the language of God and poetry is therefore nothing but the imita-
tion of this language.” Such poetic language archetypally exemplified in myth was
for Hamann the paradigm of all knowledge. Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803),
however, claimed in conversations with Goethe in 1770, and in his subsequent
writings on language, that the paradigm for poetry was not myth, but lyric, for
the function of lyric is to forge the imagery that is the basic form of language and
hence the foundation of all thought. Herder’s position regarding the priority of
metaphorical poiesis is therefore much like Vico’s, though there is no evidence of
a direct line of influence. In Herder we find lyric apotheosized as the form that
unites all reasoning, perceiving, desiring, and feeling and so best expresses the
totality of human life. Those physiological dimensions of lyric expression con-
demned by Plato are here inseparably bound to psychology and the possibilities of
self-knowledge.
Prompting many of these debates about the unity of human experience and
the interrelations of sensation, imagination, cognition, and reasoning was the
monumental philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Born in 1724, Kant did not publish
his Critique of Judgment until he was 66, and his writings on aesthetics both drew
on, and attempted to resolve, earlier eighteenth-century arguments about beauty,
taste, and sublimity—particularly the problems of generalizing from bodily
experience to universals. He also sought to reconcile aesthetic judgments with
his prior work in epistemology and ethics, setting out a noncognitive and non-
practical basis for the apprehension of beauty in and for itself. In considering the
place of poetry in his arguments about aesthetic experience, we can attend to his
passing comments on works of art per se and on the relations between composi-
tion and sublimity. Kant held that “genius gives the rule to art.” Responding to
Aristotle’s notion that essences are produced within and emerge from the natural
world, natura naturata, Kant claims that the artist/creator, as opposed to the mere
copyist or imitator, uncovers creative principles already hidden in nature, natura
naturans.
60 genres
As Kant ranks the various forms of art in his “Analytic of the Sublime,” he
elevates poetry over music. Here is perhaps the culmination of the discourses on
individual originality that can be traced from Longinus’s first-century treatise on
rhetorical genius to the victory of the moderns over the ancients:
Among all the arts poetry holds the highest rank. (It owes its origin almost
entirely to genius and is least open to guidance by precept or examples.) It
expands the mind: for it sets the imagination free, and offers us, from among
the unlimited variety of possible forms that harmonize with a given concept,
though within that concept’s limits, that form which links the exhibition of the
concept with a wealth of thought to which no linguistic expression is completely
adequate, and so poetry rises aesthetically to ideas. Poetry fortifies the mind: for
it lets the mind feel its ability—free, spontaneous, and independent of natural
determination—to contemplate and judge phenomenal nature as having aspects
that nature does not on its own offer in experience either to sense or to the
understanding, and hence poetry lets the mind feel its ability to use nature on
behalf of and, as it were, as a schema of the supersensible. (Kant 1987: 196–97)
In contrast, music, as an art of tone, “speaks through nothing but sensations with-
out concepts, so that unlike poetry it leaves us with nothing to meditate about.”
Kant does emphasize, however, that the transience of music makes it “agitate the
mind more diversely and intensely” (198).
Central to Kant’s concerns in these passages is “the unlimited variety of pos-
sible forms that harmonize with a given concept.” The concept is limited, but
its “exhibition” opens a “wealth of thought to which no linguistic expression
is completely adequate, and so poetry rises aesthetically to ideas [of the Rea-
son].” In Kant’s system, concepts belong to the understanding. In reflective, as
opposed to deliberative thought, as the material of sense intuition is presented
by the imagination, the understanding must either create new concepts (as in
scientific judgments) or hold concepts either in an unresolved harmony with
the imagination (as in the aesthetic judgment of beauty) or in a blocked relation
that gives us intuition of the supersensible, indicating the unlimited power of
reason itself. Kant fi nds in poetry a use of symbols that, fi nite as they are as terms
or words, produce a “wealth” of “aesthetical ideas,” as he calls them, and thus
evoke something like the intuition of reason he fi nds at work in the experience
of sublimity.
It is technically impossible to provide an “example” of Kant’s notion of sub-
limity, as it is technically impossible to provide an “example” of his notion of
beauty, since we break the spell of beauty and sublimity once we bring those expe-
riences under concepts, including the concept “poem” and the concept “work of
art.” Nevertheless, the impact of Kant’s philosophy, and of the often-misguided
reception of Kant’s philosophy by figures such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, is evi-
dent as Romantic poets strive to create sublime effects. The abstract emotions and
chanting of Schiller’s “Ode to Joy,” those “thoughts that do often lie too deep for
tears” in the work of Wordsworth, the strings of self-canceling similes in Shelley’s
“Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” are only a few examples of such efforts. And we
lyric 61
might conversely argue that it is from lyric recursivity, that intended progress of
speech not brought under the a priori forms of plot teleology, that Kant derives his
fundamental notion of art as “purposiveness without a purpose.”
In later work by Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805), the tensions and interrela-
tions between the senses and abstraction, or what he called the “formal” drive,
achieved their most harmonious balance in the making of art and in the capacity
we have for play more generally (1954: 64–65). In the twelfth of his “Letters on the
Aesthetic Education of Man,” Schiller suggests that through art we are able both
to give reality to the necessity of sensuous experience and to bring a diversity of
manifestations into harmony. The creation of form is linked to the affirmation of
the individual person in his or her whole humanity:
When therefore the formal impulse holds sway and the pure object acts within
us, there is the highest expansion of being, all barriers disappear, and from
being the unit of magnitude to which the needy sense confined him, Man
has risen to a unit of idea embracing the whole realm of phenomena. By this
operation we are no more in time, but time, with its complete and infinite
succession, is in us. We are no longer individuals, but species. (1954: 67)
For Schiller, the experience of aesthetic beauty is in this way constantly renewing
for individuals and for human life as a whole. Describing how man’s humanity is
limited or reduced by entering into determinate conditions—conditions of limit
posed by our meetings with forces of nature and history, Schiller writes in his
“Twenty-first Letter” of the aesthetic as a replenishing counterforce to such deter-
minations: “[Man] possesses this humanity as a predisposition, before any definite
condition into which he may come; but in actual practice he loses it with every
definite condition into which he comes, and it must, if he is to be able to make
the transition to an opposite condition, be newly restored to him every time by
means of the aesthetic life.” Schiller concludes, “It is, then, no mere poetic licence,
but also philosophical truth, to call Beauty our second creator” (1954: 102). The
Platonic idea that we saw in Sidney’s Apology, that the poet has an opportunity to
make another nature, is inverted as the creation of beauty endows human makers
with new life. The Enlightenment goal of self-overcoming and self-making is not
accomplished by reason alone, but is a matter of reconciling the sensual and specu-
lative aspects of the human condition. Poetry, as the abstract art form most closely
propelled by somatic forces, has a particular cachet for such a project.
Hegel’s 1823–1826 lectures on aesthetics promote a similar view of the relation
between the sensible and the thought in poetry:
[T]he proper element of poetical representation is the poetical imagination and
the illustration of spirit itself, and since this element is common to all the
art-forms, poetry runs through them all and develops itself independently in
each of them. Poetry is the universal art of the spirit which has become free
in itself and which is not tied down for its realization to external sensuous
material: instead, it launches out exclusively in the inner space and the inner
time of ideas and feelings. (Hegel 1975, 1: 89)17
62 genres
Yet as Kant’s position gives us a clue that the intensity of affect in music might
lend something of its emotional force to the sonorous dimension of the poetic,
so does Hegel’s position stray so far from the reception of particular instances of
the poetic that poetry threatens to disappear entirely on its trajectory toward the
universal.
An acknowledgment of the material, often agonistic, labor of composition
runs as a refrain through Romantic aesthetics and often rescues such theory from
overconceptualization. August Wilhelm von Schlegel (1765–1832) claimed that the
practice of poetry reenacts on a higher level the creation of language itself, a theory
that cannot account for the social and rhetorical demands placed on the reception
of poetry, but that nevertheless gives some sense of the sheer effort required to
meet Romantic demands for originality and genius. Vico similarly had mentioned
the “extremely disturbed passions” at the root of the production of metaphor, and
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s theory of the origins of language roots the production of
language in contingent emotion (Rousseau 1966).18
A similar approach can be found in Coleridge’s position on metric as an act of
will: in a passage in the Biographia Literaria, Coleridge explains that meter arises as
an act of mastery or pleasure in the face of an onslaught of passion (i.e., pain):
This [meter] I would trace to the balance in the mind effected by that
spontaneous effort which strives to hold in check the workings of passion. It
might be easily explained likewise in what manner this salutary antagonism
is assisted by the very state which it counteracts; and how this balance of
antagonists became organized into meter . . . by a supervening act of the will and
judgement, consciously and for the foreseen purpose of pleasure. . . . [There must
be] an interpenetration of passion and of will. (Coleridge 1907, I: 50)
His description in this passage should be juxtaposed to Wordsworth’s thoughts in

his preface to Lyrical Ballads on metric and the representation of emotion. Words-
worth contends that “there can be little doubt but that more pathetic situations and
sentiments, that is, those which have a greater proportion of pain connected with
them, may be endured in metrical composition, especially in rhyme, than in prose”
(Wordsworth 1850: 296). And he describes a particular process of composition:
[P]oetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin
from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by
a species of re-action, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion,
kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually
produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. (297–98)
At first glance, just as emotion contradicts tranquility, so does spontaneity seem

to contradict recollection. Yet we can see here, and in many of Wordsworth’s lyr-
ics of emotional perception—for example, his Lucy poems or a brief work like
“Surprised by Joy”—a continuation of a practice of spiritual exercise, a medita-
tion on emotion, that allows for the imaginative contemplation of conflicting emo-
tional states and for their representation in the compelling rhythmic movement of
lyric form.19
lyric 63
After the nineteenth century, poetic theory remains closely tied to Romantic
ideas of organic or autotelic form, particularly in the vein of T. S. Eliot and the
American New Critics. The Romantic model of lyric sincerity and originality is
both perpetuated and overturned by various efforts to ironize and invert it. Begin-
ning with Charles Baudelaire’s 1861 Les Fleurs du Mal, with its attack on the piety
of romantic natural symbolism and celebration of the artificial, poets have sought
fuller accounts of reality, particularly fuller accounts of a modern reality of rapid
change and speed. As we can see in the epigraph to this essay, Baudelaire promoted
a sense of lyric epiphany in the experience of everyday life. His prose poems led the
way for the twentieth-century lyric novel as practiced by Virginia Woolf, Samuel
Beckett, and others, just as the long history of lyric interiorization had cleared the
path for the appearance of “stream of consciousness” in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina
and the prose experiments of James Joyce. “To break the pentameter, that was the
first heave,” Ezra Pound wrote in his Canto LXXXI. The practitioners of free verse
and prose poetry split themselves from the rhythms and forms of all previous gen-
erations of poets/thinkers. Yet by defining their lines against those practices, they
also artifactualized the history of poetry, opening it to what Eliot described as a
“simultaneity” of all previous traditions.20
While twentieth-century philosophy pulls away from philosophy’s previous
history and refines its field of study to consist of the logical analysis of meaning,
both within and independent of contexts of natural language, twentieth-century
poetry follows a widely syncretic path. Nowhere is this perhaps more evident than
in the ways modern and contemporary poets have incorporated elements of non-
Western and archaic traditions into their practices while Western philosophy has
split itself entirely from the sage traditions that characterize its own deep past and
the concurrent philosophies of other cultures. As science came to claim, from the
seventeenth century forward, the sphere of reference and replicability, philosophy
became a means of clarifying thought, determining the bounds of thought as the
bounds of language. Philosophy continues to see ambiguity as a problem to be
overcome rather than a resource for symbolic forms, yet in the early twentieth
century, the practice of poetry also comes closer to the practice of philosophy as a
concern with sentences, utterances, and speech acts in general begins to dominate
analytical philosophy. Gertrude Stein’s 1932 “Stanzas in Meditation,” for example,
can be read as exercises in semantics with a focus quite close to those of Ludwig
Wittgenstein’s writings on rule following and the impossibility of a private lan-
guage. Romantic poetry had been preoccupied with the notion of the fragment,
but much modernist poetry has an open, unfinished dimension that is close to a
Wittgensteinian practice of philosophy as contingent, everyday meditation. Witt-
genstein and other twentieth-century philosophers make much of the “thought
experiment,” and this practice, too, is taken up by poets from the great philosophi-
cal modernist Wallace Stevens to living contemporary poets such as John Ashbery
and the poet-philosopher John Koethe who use poetry to create “a new reality”
(Stevens 1954: 534).21 For poets of this line, lyrics are fleeting practices that model
the passage toward understanding in experience, providing a freedom to reflect
64 genres
upon language beyond the expression of emotion and beyond the disappearance of
speech into time and purpose. There is something of the spiritual exercise in this
work, since it admits at once of fiction and meditation. And in such a contingent
practice, the problem of imitation is put aside—the worlds created in such poems
are in and for themselves.
A counter to this analytic tradition is the phenomenological work of Mar-
tin Heidegger, whose writing on thinking in particular moves closer and closer
to a practice of meditating upon, and eventually emulating, the path of lyric. In
his lectures at the University of Freiburg in the winter and summer of 1952, col-
lected in What Is Called Thinking? (1968), Heidegger wrote of the inseparability
of poetry and thought in the initial, and final, gesture of speaking—that gesture
both sensual and requiring hermeneusis. He wrote: “[T]he common view is that
both thought and poesy use language merely as their medium and a means of
expression as sculpture, painting, and music operate and express themselves in the
medium of stone and wood and color and tone.” Instead, he suggests that we “get
over” regarding art as expression or impression:
[L]anguage is neither merely the field of expression nor merely the means
of expression, nor merely the two jointly. Thought and poesy never just use
language to express themselves with its help; rather, thought and poesy are in
themselves the originary, the essential, and therefore also the final speech that
language speaks through the mouth of man. (1968: 128)
Heidegger is here drawing on certain legacies, or threads, of earlier philosophy,

among them the distinction between purposeful and contemplative thought in
Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Kant’s vision of the freedom of subjects in the open-
ness of aesthetic judgments, and Friedrich Nietzsche’s sense of the calling of the
poet/maker. Heidegger is also rejecting all forms of dualism, returning in much of
his work to a presocratic monism of flux and transformation. Of all philosophers,
Vico and Heidegger are perhaps the most deeply committed to something like a
practice of poetics: poetry is the epitome and outcome at once of the originary,
founding power of words.22
As we explore the historical interrelation of philosophy and poetry, there are
certain conclusions we can begin to draw. The “ancient quarrel” between poetry
and philosophy, regardless of Plato’s motives in claiming it, has some genuine
basis in the very means of production of each form. Metaphysics particularly must
remove itself from the constraints of individual voice if its claims are to be uni-
versal, yet the central tenets of metaphysics remain authored and achieve much
of their authority from institutional recognition. Even so, the central questions
of metaphysics—questions of knowing, the problem of an exterior world, the
question of materiality, the nature of life, the relation between the soul and the
body, the possibility of liberty, the question of other minds, the origin of Being,
the existence of God—have as well been central not only to the themes of poetry,
but also to its methods. We could reframe this list readily from the perspective of
poets, for poets, too, have been preoccupied with the subject/object problem, the
lyric 65
representation of nature, the materiality of language, the organic sources of form,

the therapeutic and spiritual benefits of a practice of poetry, the bounds of tradi-
tions and the possibilities of free creation, the intelligibility of poetry for those who
receive it, and a sense of ultimate purpose in creation.
Yet in the end, poets and philosophers alike must take a stance against the
drawing of conclusions or they will betray what is made possible by their open
practices. Creating poems and pursuing truth are human activities that are insep-
arable from our humanity itself—these actions separate us from other species
that can make, but, as far as we know, cannot judge or contemplate their making.
Despite its roots in prophecy, lyric, throughout its long history, has rarely been
written in the future tense or concerned with the future as a theme. But perhaps
this persistent absence indicates something deeper about the free practice of lyric;
this very openness may indicate that futurity is nowhere in lyric deixis because it
is everywhere. What Baudelaire called “the spirit of the lyre” awakens us to our
relation to nature, and to our own natures, and calls us to remember and consider
and judge. The fact that our imaginations enable us to picture the future, and the
future of our species, roots us more particularly in the sources of life and the pos-
sibility of its continuity.
NOTES
1. “Therefore there necessarily exists a lyric mode of speech, a lyric world, a lyric
atmosphere, of landscapes, of men, of women, of animals who all delight in the spirit of
the lyre” (Baudelaire 1961: 736).
2. Note that “wisdom” in English does not quite convey the range of meanings that
sophia indicates. For Homer (Iliad XV: 412), the skill of a carpenter would be one form
of sophia. Herodotus (History I: 30) suggests that sophia is simply a desire to discover,
journey, or exercise an intellectual curiosity.
3. Those who suffer from global aphasia, for example, can lose propositional
speech (the intended production of context-bound utterances), and at the same time
retain an ability to hum previous learned melodies and sing their lyrics, to count, and to
recite nursery rhymes and structured bits of language like the days of the week (Damasio
1992: 535).
4. Early English poems demonstrating this connection include the gnomic verses
and 95 riddles in the thousand-year-old Exeter Book. Translations of some of these can
be found in Alexander 1977: 87–102. The direct line of proverbs can be followed in two of
Chaucer’s own in his “Proverbs”:
What shul these clothes thus manyfold,

Lo this hote somers day?
After grete hete cometh cold;
No man caste his pilche away.
Of al this world the large compas
66 genres
Yt wil not in myn armes tweyne;

Who so mochel wol embrace,
Litel thereof he shal distreyne.
5. This summary comes from Ernst Robert Curtius 1991: 203–04. Curtius himself
borrows from Stefan Weinstock 1926: 121 ff.
6. Nightingale 1995 also mentions an attack on poets, who lack “wit” and
“understanding” and “take the mob as their teacher,” in Heraclitus 64 n. 14, but otherwise
argues, following the notes to the 1902 edition of The Republic by J. Adam, that the
quarrel is largely Plato’s invention. Nightingale 1995 focuses on Plato’s contested relation
to tragedy. For further discussion, see Rosen 1988.
7. Gadamer 1980 attributes this shift toward hymns and deserved praise as
part of Plato’s educational plan for the guardians. Plato is interested in dispelling the
anthropomorphic representations of the gods found in Homer and other writers of a
poetry of legends.
8. Ferguson 1983 is the most sustained account of the pivotal defenses of Joachim
Du Bellay, Torquato Tasso, and Philip Sidney.
9. Underlying this argument, the etymology of teknē as having to do with the
bearing and bringing forth of children has a particular resonance. Diotima contrasts the
generation and creation of forms by organic means unfavorably to those made by reason,
and we see in this passage an important source for the often-oppressive Western division
of the labor of making between physical and mental activity.
10. For a précis of the relations between stitchic, melic, and couplet forms in ancient
Greek poetry, see Mulroy 1992: 9–11.
11. I discuss Snell’s work, and many other issues of lyric history, in Stewart 2003. The
discussion of Augustine and Vico that follows also borrows extensively from this work.
12. What he then hurries home to read, through the pagan practice of sortes
virgilianae applied to the Bible, is a passage from Paul’s epistles directing him to turn
against “nature’s appetites.”
13. Augustine 1961: 202 n. 2 provides an 1854 translation by J. D. Chambers:
Maker of all things! God most high!

Great Ruler of the starry sky!
Who, robing day with beauteous light,
Hast clothed in soft repose the night,
That sleep may wearied limbs restore,
And fit for toil and use once more;
May gently soothe the careworn breast,
And lull our anxious griefs to rest.
14. The Proslogium and Monologium are available in Anselm (1962).

15. This path-breaking study emphasizes Roman Catholic spiritual exercises; see
also Lewalski 1984.
16. The other side of this process of revision is a willingness to leave works
unfinished or suspended. See Robert Hollander 2001: 114 for a discussion of Dante’s
decision to leave the Convivio and De vulgari Eloquentia incomplete in order to begin the
Commedia, as he had left the Convivio incomplete while he began De vulgari Eloquentia
(Hollander 2001: 55). For a discussion of how De Monarchia clarifies Dante’s positions
on the relative power of the pope and emperor, see Hollander 2001: 161–63. Hollander
lyric 67
also discusses Dante’s shifts between various lyric modes, which he characterizes as “his
inclination to experiment” (2001: 9, 43).
17. Hegel’s lectures also discuss the particular subjectivity of lyric verse and the
relations between internal feeling, the artistic or universal sense of subjective states, and
the “external” support of musical accompaniment. See Hegel 1975, 2: 1111–57.
18. See especially chapter 2, “That the First Invention of Speech Is Due Not to Need
but Passion”:
Whence then this origin? From moral needs, passions. All the passions tend
to bring people back together again, but the necessity of seeking a livelihood
forces them apart. It is neither hunger nor thirst but love, hatred, pity, anger,
which drew from them the first words. . . . [T]he first languages were singable and
passionate before they became simple and methodical. (Rousseau 1966: 12)
19. The preface was first composed in 1798, then revised in 1836 and published in 1850.
20. In writing of “the historical sense,” Eliot wrote:
[T]he historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past,
but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his
own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of
Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country
has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. (1919: 4)
21. This phrase comes from “Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself,” the last
poem of Stevens’s last book, The Rock (1954). Here is the poem in its entirety:
At the earliest ending of winter,

In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.
He knew that he heard it,
A bird’s cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.
The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow . . .
It would have been outside.
It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep’s faded papier-mache . . .
The sun was coming from the outside.
That scrawny cry—It was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,
Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.
Though at first we might imagine it comes from our own minds, this
“scrawny cry” has its ultimate source in the sun, as do Plato’s ideas. Stevens’s
extraordinary evocation of the call toward truth arising from nature responds to
Paul Valéry’s remarks (1958: 52–81) regarding how words acquire a value at the
expense of their finite significance; like the opening sounds of music, they reveal
that “something of significance is beginning to declare itself.” For a discussion
68 genres
of Wittgenstein’s thought in relation to modernist and post-modern literature,

see Marjorie Perloff (1999). As Perloff acknowledges, Gertrude Stein in fact, did
not read the work of Wittgenstein, but Perloff sees his discussion of ordinary and
poetic language, and his practice of thinking about words, sentences, and utterances
in relation to their context-boundedness and independence as vital to a range of
“experimental” literature from the early twentieth-century to the present.
22. See Heidegger (1968: 130):
[W]ords are not terms, and thus are not like buckets and kegs from which we
scoop a content that is there. Words are wellsprings that are found and dug up
in the telling, wellsprings that must be found and dug up again and again, that
easily cave in, but that at times also well up when least expected. If we do not go
to the spring again and again, the bucket and kegs stay empty, and their content
stays stale.
Heidegger has a particular interest in the hymn or praise poem because of his
focus on the relations between “denken und danken” (“thinking and thanking”);
as expressed in his 1936 lecture on “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” it is the
Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin who epitomizes for him the fullest possibilities of
poetic thought.
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Language” (J. H. Moran and A. Gode, trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Russell, D. A. and Winterbottom, M. (eds). (1972). Ancient Literary Criticism. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Santayana, G. (1910). Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, Goethe. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press.
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Schiller, F. (1954). On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters (R. Snell, trans.).
New Haven: Yale University Press.
Sidney, Sir Philip (1970). Apologie for Poetrie (Lewis Soens, ed.). Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press.
Snell, B. (1982). The Discovery of the Mind (T. G. Rosenmeyer, trans.). Mineola, N.Y.:
Dover.
Stevens, W. (1990). “Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself.” In Stevens, The
Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, p. 534. New York: Knopf.
Stewart, S. (2003). Poetry and the Fate of the Senses. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Valéry, P. (1939). “Poetry and Abstract Thought” (Denise Folliot, trans.). In J. Matthews,
(ed.), The Collected Works of Paul Valéry Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958.
Vico, G. (1970). The New Science (T. Goddard and M. H. Fisch, trans.). Ithaca: Cornell
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 
TRAGEDY
j. m. bernstein
Plato’s Complaint
Tragedy matters to philosophy in part because philosophy at its inception attempts
to authorize itself, at least in part, by banishing the tragic poets. Something of
tragedy directly challenges philosophy’s original self-understanding; some con-
tent or manner of tragedy requires either refutation or acknowledgment, but can-
not be put aside. In analyzing the relation between tragedy and philosophy, it is
tragedy’s proximity to philosophy that requires interrogation, rather than, say, the
question of “What is tragedy?”—a topic best construed as belonging to poetics or
literary theory.
When Plato banishes the poets in book 10 of the Republic, it might be thought
that the banishment is aiming at all poetry or even all art, that the arts in general in
being mimetic and sensible are themselves the proper antagonists for philosophical
knowledge. In claiming that art is ontologically deficient, deceptive, and without
practical import, however, Plato is doing no more than defining what art is: pur-
poseful artifacts without a practical purpose. If there is a serious criticism of trag-
edy it must lie elsewhere. In part, art is an appropriate antagonist for philosophy
because, with its power of mirroring everything, it may possess a synoptic vision,
a vision of the world as a whole. This is also the premise for there being a clash
between tragic art and philosophy. What truly concerns Plato, however, “the chief
accusation” against the mimetic arts as corrupting and maiming, comes from the
contrast between the ultra-stoicism delivered by the deliberative part of the soul, as
taught by philosophy, and the lamentation that emerges from the mournful, pity-
ing part of the soul that is the response to tragic performances:
What is by nature best in us, because it hasn’t been adequately educated by
argument or habit, relaxes its guard over this mournful part because it sees
72 genres
another’s sufferings, and it isn’t shameful for it, if some other man who claims
to be good laments out of season, to praise and pity him; rather it believes that
it gains the pleasure and wouldn’t permit itself to be deprived of it by despising
the whole poem. I suppose that only a certain few men are capable of calculating
that the enjoyment of other people’s sufferings has a necessary effect on one’s
own. For the pitying part, fed strong on these examples, is not easily held down
in one’s own sufferings. (Plato 1968: 606a–b; see also 426–34)
The question as to whether the theatrical experience of feeling pity for the suffer-
ings of those who do not deserve to suffer weakens one’s own ability to endure suf-
fering can be set aside for the moment. What underlies Plato’s critique of tragedy
is more general: while the tragic (and comic) poets do not know nature in the way
science does, they do know what makes people weep (or laugh); they understand
the routine and systematic ways in which human action fails, and the multitude of
liabilities that all things human bear.
The poets know the causes of human misery, and the fragility of all human
goods and practices. Like the philosopher, the poet too has a synoptic vision: trag-
edy (and comedy) is a view of the world as a whole. The tragic world-view perceives
human life as inherently self-contradictory, as continually bound to opposing
goods and impossible differences, as bounded by irredeemable loss; what is self-
contradictory or seeped in loss cannot be cognitively mastered, but it can, and
should be, understood, felt, acknowledged, accepted. In tragedy we understand
through feeling, and what we feel, finally, is grief. Tragic knowledge is performative
and sensible as opposed to philosophical knowledge that is thetic and intelligible.
There is indeed an ancient quarrel between philosophy and tragedy: what Plato
finds truly intolerable about tragedy (and comedy) is the thought that such a view
of the world be ultimate and final, that human life be lamentable or absurd.
Let me generalize from Plato’s complaint. Tragedy is a form of attention best
exemplified by tragic dramas. What tragedy attends to are limit situations where
the paradigms of civil reason that philosophy seeks to authorize are undone. To
borrow a trope from Stanley Cavell, tragedy is not a form of skepticism, but con-
cerns the truth of skepticism, that is, what the skeptical view reveals as requiring
acknowledgment: most simply the limits of knowledge and will. Tragedy reveals
that life is aporetic, that life is not unconditionally or self-sufficiently rational,
consistent, orderly, lovable, intelligible, safe, lawful, or moral. Consider this list of
items as collectively comprising what we think of as the achievements of culture
and civilization. Tragedy brings into view what the triumphs of civilization—what
philosophy rationally celebrates—have sought to repress, dominate, discount,
deauthorize, and empty. Tragedy is the return of the repressed. For example, true
descriptions of the world are not unconditional: what Oedipus knows is true, but
there are other descriptions of the same phenomena. Ignorance shadows knowledge,
always. Tragedy reveals the limits of culture: the authority of nature we thought we
had left behind returns. Tragedy reveals the limits of freedom: we make the world,
but not under conditions of our own choosing. Free action is always subject to
interference: contingency and necessity are perpetual enemies of autonomy. So it
tragedy 73
goes: reason is shadowed by unreason, determinacy by indeterminacy, meaning by

the absolute loss of meaning, virtue by murderousness, happiness by suffering, life
by death. Tragedy reveals that the relation between the affirmative and its negative
shadow is internal, that there is an agonizing intimacy between what we hold dear-
est and what we most wish to avert.
From the thought that tragedy is a form of attention that brings into view
a limiting condition of cultural life, a number of things follow. First, tragedy is
relational, not skeptical. Again, what tragedy reveals is that the good at issue—
reason, order (cultural or legal or moral), freedom, meaning, authority, progress,
and so forth—is indeed good but not unconditionally so. Martha Nussbaum’s
phrase “the fragility of goodness” (1988) is about right. Fragility, vulnerability,
loss, death, irredeemable suffering cannot be outflanked or done away with. But
the goods those forces destroy are not less good thereby; for tragedy, the world
attains the worth proper to it only through a vision of its transience. Second,
what returns in tragedy will depend on what is repressed; this is why tragedy is
historical and changing. Third, because tragedy concerns limits, it appears as
an interruption of rational culture. Fourth, because tragedy appears as return
and interruption, it cannot be held in a steady, fi rm, unchanging, fully coherent
view. Because tragedy grieves it pulls at philosophy, even so-called tragic phi-
losophies. Fifth, the form of attention required is that of a reminder, a ritual, a
drama, not a thesis or doctrine. Tragic understanding can be performed, but not
stated. The limits that tragic attention focuses on are revealed or disclosed, not
demonstrated or proven. Sixth—the ultimate rebuke to philosophy—because
tragedy concerns the aporetic and indigestible, it makes philosophy’s theodi-
cies appear naive, its harmonizing gestures overblown and absolutist. And when
philosophy tones down its ambitions by becoming modest and pragmatic, trag-
edy shows its ameliorations to be self-deceived: the hard truths of human suf-
fering remain.
Arguably, the best philosophical meditations on tragedy know these truths
about tragedy, just as Plato knew them, perfectly well, but rather than attempting
to disqualify tragedy, each, in its own way, seeks to accommodate tragic thought.
In order to gain the measure of these accommodations, I will set in place a dia-
logue between our two greatest philosophical meditations on tragedy—Aristotle’s
Poetics and Hegel’s historicized, modern version of it in his Lectures on Fine Art—
and three tragic narratives: Oedipus the King, Hamlet, and the emergent tragic nar-
ration of the Holocaust.
Aristotle’s Pity?
Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of
whatsoever is grave and constant in human suffering and
74 genres
unites it with the human sufferer. Terror is the feeling which

arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and
constant in human suffering and unites it with the secret
cause.
—James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
At the beginning of chapter 6 of the Poetics, Aristotle states that a tragedy is the
imitative representation (mimesis) of an action that has weighty and far-reaching
consequences, is of a certain magnitude, and is complete and self-contained; it is
presented through language that has been made sensuously attractive; the mode of
the presentation is through dramatic enactment by agents rather than report; and
through the arousal of pity and fear in the spectators it brings about a catharsis,
an affective working through of experiences of that kind. Equally central to Aris-
totle’s definition of tragedy is the claim that protagonists of a tragic drama should
be admirable persons, better versions of ourselves rather than either demigods or
lowlifes; and in being like ourselves, their character makes them susceptible to act-
ing in untoward ways, the consequences of which are (potentially) disastrous for
themselves and those around them.
Aristotle’s definition subtly and powerfully connects an account of the inter-
nal logic of tragic dramas with a normative construal of their effects on the viewer.
The formal ingenuity of the account is deepened by the content: the internal logic
of tragedies provides a partial categorical interpretation of the nature and condi-
tions of human action, while its affective impact elicits the constitutive emotions
of the social bonds connecting us to our fellow citizens.
As Hegel will after him, Aristotle conceives of tragedy as an interrogation
of human action: both the form and the content of tragedies are determined by
the nature of action. Aristotle directly tailors the shape of a drama to the unity
of action: a drama is an action that is whole and complete. By “whole” Aristotle
means possessing a beginning, middle, and end. A beginning is an action that does
not presuppose any antecedent events for its intelligibility, but itself gives rise to
further events. An “end,” conversely, is something that naturally—all but inevita-
bly—follows from what preceded it but does not have consequential effects. The
“middle” is composed of the ramifying events connecting beginning with end in
a broadly causally coherent manner. Aristotle calls the causal structure binding
beginning to end “plot”; plot, he contends, is the soul of tragedy.
Plots have cognitive and affective force because their shape recapitulates the
unity of a life. In life, of course, there are no absolute beginnings, so the idea of a
dramatic beginning borrows its structural and metaphorical authority from the
fact that each agent is a new beginning, the possibility of there being a new route
through a shared world. Every beginning refers back to an agent’s being born, to a
natural birth and a second birth into a particular social world. Equally, in life there
are no significant events that do not lead to further events; hence, every tragic
tragedy 75
end gestures toward our final end, our death. And routinely tragedies end with
more than a figurative gesture toward death, but with the actual death of their
protagonists.
For Aristotle, what binds the intelligibility of action to the unitary arc inscrib-
ing a human life is that it is through action that agents achieve, or fail to achieve,
happiness. Happiness here refers to the ideal end of human activity, that for the
sake of which we pursue any ends whatsoever. It is because happiness and unhap-
piness, in this strong sense, depend on action that Aristotle urges that dramas be
about action and have the unity of action as their norm, rather than being about
an individual and having the persistence of that individual through a series of
events be the source of unity. Analogously, Aristotle contends that character in
drama is for the sake of determining the quality or meaning of an action, and
the thought present in speeches for showing the deliberative process leading to a
course of action. In drama, all thought and character are for the sake of action, and
all action is for the sake of friendship.1
It is friendship, philia, love in its familial, civic, and romantic forms, that medi-
ates between the structure of a dramatic plot and the feelings of fear and pity that it
is to arouse. Plot structures have three components: reversal, recognition, and suf-
fering (pathos). Reversal is a change into the contrary of things being done—either
a change from good fortune to bad, or from bad fortune to good—in conformity
to probability or necessity. Reversals relate to expectations, both the hero’s and the
spectator’s; reversals reveal the true causal chain that has been unfolding. Hence,
in tragedy there is a doubleness to all action: on the one hand, action relates to
the intentions of the agents; on the other hand, actions are conditioned by forces
or have unintended consequences that only slowly emerge and affect the lives
of the agents. The power of plotting depends on showing precisely how the two
aspects of action are connected, how, for example, the unintended consequences
of an action belong to that action, complete it. This is how reversals of fortune are
connected to recognition: hero and spectator come to understand the forces and
relations that have been forming and deforming their actions all along. But recog-
nition has another aspect: not only does it bring about “a change from ignorance
to knowledge,” but in so doing it simultaneously brings “the characters into either
friendship (philia) or enmity, and concerning matters which bear on prosperity
or affliction” (Aristotle 1987: 1452a29–32). Finally, by suffering Aristotle intends
destructive or painful actions, such as those that cause visible deaths, or excessive
torments or woundings.
Aristotle’s account of recognition already makes clear that what makes pass-
ing from ignorance to knowledge tragic is partially determined by its revealing
who is truly a friend (a kin or loved one) and who truly an enemy, so recognition
bears upon our happiness or misery through bearing on the fate of our consti-
tutive bonds with others. This argument is pressed further in chapter 14, where
Aristotle urges that sufferings are most terrible and hence most pitiable when
they concern philia relations: when brother kills or intends to kill brother, son
76 genres
kills father, mother kills son, son kills mother, and so on. While the breadth of
Aristotle’s account of tragedy turns on his attaching tragic form to the contours
of human action—and the contours of human action to the shape of a human
life stretching out between birth and death—its depth turns on binding the
reversals, recognitions, and sufferings that compose a plot to the basis of society
and civilization: our philia relations (Belfiore 1992: 364–67). This is why in trag-
edy private misery so irresistibly topples into social chaos, even without kings
and queens and the like: in Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House, as Nora slams the door
behind her, we can hear a whole society tremble. In tragedy, it is as if what truly
binds beginnings and ends are the bonds that hold us together and the forces
within each of us and within the nature of the bonds themselves that are bent on
destroying them. Tragic ends are deaths that are too soon; their interruption of
life is the fact and the sign that the bonds constituting our lives with others have
been terribly severed.
In this light, it appears right to say that pity and fear are fundamentally social
emotions. Aristotle defines pity as a painful emotion whose object is the unde-
served suffering of another. In identifying with the sufferer, we draw close to her,
acknowledging that her fate could be our own, that together we “live in a world
of terrible reversals, in which the difference between pitier and pitied is a matter
far more of luck than of deliberate action” (Nussbaum 1992: 267). Pity is an affec-
tive form of recognition, but in recognizing the sufferer in this way, we are both
acknowledging and affirming the bond connecting us. In tragedy, pity is a stand-
in for the social bond. Conversely, then, fear always speaks to the anticipation of
sufferings that token the collapse of the social bond. All this has been beautifully
elaborated by Amélie Rorty:
Just whom do we pity and what do we fear? The tragic hero? Ourselves?
Humanity? All three, and all three in one. . . . Since we are also essentially social
and political beings, connected to others by civic philia, we treat the welfare of
our friends and family as essential to our own welfare. Our philoi form a series
of expanding circles starting from the closest family and friends, to partners
in a common civic project (koinonia), and to those who—like members of the
human species—share a common form of life. (1992: 13)
If tragedy speaks to the necessity and the terrible vulnerability of the social bond,
then Plato’s complaint is not altogether wrong: no life is immune to disaster, to the
utter destruction of what matters most. These are grounds indeed for repudiating
transient, vulnerable life, for seeking stoic self-sufficiency and community with
unchanging ideas, for hoping that some god or some therapy or some medical cure
will permanently insulate us from such suffering and such loss. For the tragedian,
however, to respond stoically to disaster is to deny the depth of its significance: in
grief, we howl and lament the loss of what matters most. In The Trojan Women, we
know Hecuba first as the mother maddened with grief at the murder of her son,
set for revenge; at the conclusion, in contrast, we hear an unbearable two-voiced
lamentation between Hecuba and the chorus at the final destruction of Troy:
tragedy 77
O gods’ house, city beloved // alas // you are given the red flame and the spear’s
iron. // You will collapse to the dear ground and be nameless. // Ash as the
skyward smoke wing / piled will blot from my sight the house where I lived
once. // Lost shall be the name on the land, / all gone, perished. Troy, city of
sorrow, / is there no longer. // Did you see, did you hear? // The crash of the
citadel. // The earth shook, riven // to engulf the city. (Euripides 1958: lines
1317–27).
One “of the dark lessons of tragedy is that there are no lessons to be learnt in order
to avoid tragedy”(Rorty 1992: 18). But this fact bears on what we are to make of
Aristotle’s notion of catharsis. In fact, Aristotle would have little time for either
Hecuba’s maddened vengefulness or her lamentation at the ruin of Troy: the latter
is concerned with those who are victims only, not agents, while the former is a col-
lapse into vicious immorality. Aristotle’s conception of tragic action normatively
demands that the reversals to which tragic heroes and heroines are subject should
be a probable consequence of their own doing: it is their error that both explains
and rationalizes their fall. And in chapters 13 and 14, where Aristotle schematizes
and evaluates types of tragic plot, he praises as best those dramas in which the
agent either acts from ignorance and learns the awfulness of his deed afterward
(Oedipus the King) or, even better, where the recognition of the bonded relation
comes in time to prevent the deed being done (Iphigenia in Tauris). But this is to
say that Aristotle aims to answer Plato, at least in part, by demonstrating how trag-
edies, as the interrogation of the structures of human action, yield moral insight
and promote moral truth.2 Aristotle harmonizes tragedy with philosophy by pro-
viding a normative scheme that promotes tragedies that refine moral understand-
ing and insight, and devalues tragedies in which, as Plato complained, either grief
turns into immorality or there is nothing left to be done but lament. Ideally, in
accordance with his preferred moral image of the world, Aristotle seeks to appor-
tion pity in proportion to virtue.
But this cannot be quite the whole story since catharsis is not purely cognitive,
and it is intimately connected with the experiences of fear and pity. Although it is
evident that Aristotle intended his normative scheme to clarify whom we should
pity and why, which misfortunes are deserved and which not, the truth is that
pity and fear are more generous, expansive, and even promiscuous than Aristo-
tle’s moral scheme permits. However horrifying is Hecuba’s killing of the sons
of Polymestor, we understand how her grief at the murder of her own son might
madden her so, driving her to revenge. We understand, too, that revenge is not
utterly opposed to morality; on the contrary, revenge “is a desire to keep faith with
the dead . . . the violence it engenders is a ritual form of respect for the commu-
nity’s dead—therein lies its legitimacy” (Ignatieff 1997: 188). We might never act as
Hecuba does, but the murder in our hearts is mimetically attuned to the murder
in hers. So it is that we pity and grieve for her.
A more generous sense of pity entails a less moralized and less cognitive con-
ception of catharsis. The enduring quality of the pity-fear-catharsis formula, what
keeps that formula part of our critical present, is that it captures something of the
78 genres
emotional force of tragedy beyond the confines of Aristotle’s moralism. As Jona-

than Lear explains, “normal educated people in normal circumstances and out-
side of the theater seem to have certain beliefs that they do not feel” (1992: 332).3
Because tragic mythos can only be understood through mimetic participation,
then tragedy enables us to unify our darkest beliefs with the feelings appropri-
ate to those beliefs, a unification that if continuously present would make ordi-
nary life impossible. Because those beliefs go to the bases of human existence, it
is important that at least sometimes we be able to have the feelings appropriate to
them without having to suffer the full range of consequences the objects of those
beliefs would involve outside the theater. Part of the relief signified by the notion
of catharsis is that we are able to feel the truth of our deepest existential beliefs
without either moral monitoring or having to suffer their empirical consequences.
If the objects of our pity and fear are, also, of irredeemable losses, wild desires, and
the power of unassuagable misery, then it becomes necessary to sense in catharsis
something akin to the experience of mourning. Does not the experience of tragedy
initiate us into the language and work of grief, teach us to count our losses and
acknowledge our wounds beyond healing? Is not tragedy a series of fragmented
lessons in the acknowledgment of our finitude? We know that the division of labor
between the chorus and the protagonists in Greek tragedy refers to the differences
between the poetry of the past and the prose of the present, between ancient reli-
gion and present politics, between choral lamentation and heroic action (see Ver-
nant and Vidal-Naquet 1988; Loraux 2002). In a sense, Aristotle focuses on action
at the expense of lamentation. But the pity-fear-catharsis formula speaks beyond
this bias, reminding us of what Aristotle, following Plato, was at pains to repudiate:
mournful life.
Oedipus the King

Many the wonders but nothing walks stranger than man . . .
Language, and thought like the wind
And the feelings that make the town,
He has taught himself, and shelter against the cold,
Refuge from rain. He can always help himself.
He faces no future helpless. There’s only death
That he cannot find an escape from.
—Sophocles, Antigone
Aristotle appears to have written the Poetics with both eyes on Sophocles, and
especially on Oedipus the King. It is thus a constant surprise that the Poetics so
deftly ignores the theology and piety structuring so much tragic literature. How
tragedy 79
does Aristotle manage the deflection? How do we? At least in part by hearing gods-
talk as primitive, sublimed talk about the forces of chance, history, society, and
nature that lie outside the power of intentional action—the very topic that Sopho-
cles is beginning to broach in the ode to man. Again, it is the doubleness of human
action—what is within in contrast to what is outside the command of the agent—
that tragic plots reveal.4
Part of the disturbing power of Oedipus the King is how it deploys the simplest
and most unavoidable version of the doubleness of action: present provinciality
as opposed to retrospective insight. The play is structured around the duality
between knowledge and ignorance: Oedipus is driven by the conceits that human
suffering is ultimately caused by human ignorance and that he can save the city
a second time by discovering the truth behind the curse destroying it. Formally,
the forward movement of the play is from ignorance to knowledge, but here, as
opposed to the allegory of the cave, each step closer to knowledge is equally a
step closer to (private) disaster. It so happens that disaster and saving the city
are not separable; hence, what is most awful and what is most precious are not
opposites—which is at least one of Sophocles’ repudiations of the ambitions of
civic enlightenment.5
Oedipus does not know the deep facts about his identity, facts that are also
integral to the curse plaguing the city. Each episode brings a new epistemic
helper—Creon, Teiresias, Jocasta, the messenger, the herdsman—who contrib-
utes a clue. But the difference between ignorance and knowledge structuring
the plot is also the relation between Oedipus and the audience. Like Teiresias,
we already know the truth of Oedipus’s identity, yet our godly retrospective
knowledge of the whole is useless to us—the stage, like the past, is another
(ontological) country. Part of the uncanniness of the play turns on how its
movement—the progressive, futural unlocking of the past that allows the play’s
end to reveal the truth of Oedipus’s beginning, hence the truth connecting
(every) beginning to (every) end—not only reveals something about the tempo-
ral and epistemic provinciality governing action, but does so in a manner that
precisely mirrors the relation between play and audience. Because the knowl-
edge necessary for action is routinely unavailable, because we are all temporally
provincial, then routinely the knowledge that matters comes too late: we know
what we need to know to prevent disaster only through the disaster that arrives.
Oedipus suffers his temporal provinciality, but that provinciality is constitutive
of human agency.
Exactly what it is that Oedipus knows and does not know is complex. Oedi-
pus is known and knows himself fully in his public, political role; Oedipus as
king appears as free from the entanglements of past and family, his rule a con-
sequence of knowledge and leadership. Conversely, as mere man, in his maternal
and paternal identity, he knows less than he supposes, and we onlookers know that
he is unknown to himself. The standard reading of this situation is backward. For
example, Charles Segal opens his account thus: “[Oedipus] lacks the basic infor-
mation about his origins that gives man his human identity and sets him apart
80 genres
from the undifferentiated realm of nature and the anonymous, unindividuated

realm of beasts” (1999: 207).6 This cannot be correct as stated since Oedipus does
know who he is as citizen, which is to say, as formed by civilization. What he does
not know is not his proper, civil name, but his improper name, his nameless name,
his animal nameless belonging to the natural realm. And even were he to know
these facts, it is not clear he would or could know fully what they mean; all this is to
say that we do not know what our forever past natural belonging means. And that
must matter because it entails that civilization can never know or therefore never
fully overcome its past as nature: the authority of nature is forever surpassed by
but continues to haunt civilization: “[P]arricide and incest are poetic metaphors
for what human nature does to itself (logically) when it becomes political” (Harris
1997: 217).
All this is perspicuous in the play: nature as the gift of life and the power of
death conditions the city; it remains an authority, beyond the grasp of meaning
and law, which must be acknowledged but can never be mastered—known. So
the hubris of Oedipus the knower is the hubris of civilization in its departure
from the authority of nature. Oedipus becomes king by solving the riddle of the
animal with its changing—four, two, three—number of legs, but does not rec-
ognize that it applies to himself, or that it inscribes the natural arc of a human
life. He supposes that his solving of the riddle is his mastery over nature. It is
thus no accident that the pollution destroying the city is failed birth: the hor-
rendous and terrifying eruption of the absence of the gift of life. It is this gift that
we cannot master and on which civilization depends, absolutely. By coming to
know his maternity and paternity, his birth, Oedipus will give birth back to the
city. The truth is that every death, every stillborn, every infant mortality, but also
every sickness and undeserved pain is pollution: unmasterable nature haunting
civilization.
Oedipus the knower is the image of the presumption of a synoptic phi-
losophy, self-sufficient and untroubled by the limitations of time and place.
Oedipus at the end is blind because he possesses impossible knowledge: utterly
natural and utterly political at the same time. The overcoming of the difference
between nature and civilization is somehow inhuman: we cannot have synoptic
knowledge of the identity in difference of nature and civilization as agents, as
participants in a civil world. Only in our removal from praxis can we prop-
erly acknowledge the connection between civil law and natural law, nomos and
physis. In being blind, lame Oedipus, three-footed Oedipus who was born old,
loses even the remnant of uprightness: sight. He is like a hobbling parable of the
riddle he solved. In one day a story unfolds that allows Oedipus to attach his
end to his beginning: the unity of the plot and the shape of a life are one. The
parabola of the story is the emergence out of and return to nature of a being
who is constitutively unnatural, civil. The tragic knowledge the play offers is
the necessity and instrumental uselessness of the knowledge provided. As tragic
knowers we too are blind.
tragedy 81
Hegel’s Tragic Dialectic?

Everything tragic is based upon an irreconcilable opposition.
As soon as a reconciliation sets in or becomes possible, the
tragic disappears.
—Goethe, Remark, June 6, 1824, reported by
Chancellor von Müller
With its long backward glance to ancient Greece as a model for overcoming what
it took to be the shallow rationalism (or skepticism) of epistemology-dominated
modern philosophy and the equally shallow instrumental rationality of modern
civil society, German Idealism had Greek tragedy in view even more than ancient
philosophy. Recognizing that tragedy elaborated a synoptic vision of its own, the
idealists essayed the idea of producing a philosophical analogue of tragedy. Hegel’s
emphases are those of this tradition: employing, almost always, Antigone as his
paradigm, Hegel displaces the idea of a tragic flaw, the waywardness of human
action, hamartia, with opposition, collision, conflict, contradiction, and transgres-
sion. Like Aristotle, Hegel thought suffering counted as tragic only if it was the
result of an objective obstruction (an objective pathos): individuals discover that
they can realize a fundamental end (ideal, value, law, orientation) only through
transgressing an opposing but equally fundamental end. Antigone can obey the
absolute obligation to bury her brother only through breaking the law of the state
denying the right of burial to its enemies; in defying the state, she asserts the right
of individuality (and the right of the dead) against the ethical demand sacrific-
ing the individual to universal law. (Antigone’s clash with Creon thus rehearses
another version of the clash between tragedy and philosophy.) Transgressive action
actualizes the conflict, manifesting the irreconcilability of the two powers and
thus causing the downfall of, at least, the original transgressor, as well as the origi-
nal harmony between the competing powers.7 Suffering is the existential reality of
social opposition: because we suffer, we acknowledge we have erred.
Conflict is no longer seen as a sign of bias, irrationality, or subjective error;
on the contrary, conflict is now accorded the dignity of belonging to the fabric of
the world: it reveals either a perpetual surd in the order of human existence (e.g.,
between the desires of culture and the limits of nature; between the competing
demands for universality and generality as opposed to individuality and singular-
ity; between love and law; among essentially incommensurable goods or spheres
of culture), and/or becomes the fundamental mechanism through which social
learning and historical progress occur. When these conflicts are seen as a self-
division bringing destruction to its component elements that therefore demand a
resolution, reconciliation, then the tragic and the dialectic coincide.8 Hegel supple-
ments or refines Aristotelian catharsis with the demand for reconciliation. Once
82 genres
the tragic and the dialectic are identified, it follows that tragedies become liter-
ary expressions of an existential modality—a modality that nonetheless transpires
through action alone, hence the dual treatment of tragedy within the Phenomenol-
ogy of Spirit: on the one hand, Hegel uses Antigone as a clue to unlock the funda-
mental structures governing Greek ethical life and, through Greek ethicality, the
logic of the historical processes emerging from its self-incurred collapse; on the
other hand, Hegel reads tragedy as the poetic genre proper to Greek ethical life
through which it becomes self-conscious about the irreconcilability of the deep
structures constituting it.9
It is this dual understanding of tragedy—as the intrinsic dialectical movement
of society, history, and thought, as opposed to being just one poetic genre among
others—that underlies Hegel’s contention that, finally, tragedy as a literary genre,
like all art and religion, must give way to philosophy as the adequate repository of
our collective self-understanding. His Lectures on Fine Art provide a perspicuous
aesthetic account of the death of tragedy. Hegel conceives of art, religion, and phi-
losophy as the three social forms through which societies become self-conscious
about their founding values and commitments; analogously, different forms of art
come to dominate under different historical circumstances. In general, art can be
the fulcrum for collective self-consciousness only when, for that society as a whole,
conceptual understanding and its sensuous realization, meaning and configura-
tion, remain indissolubly bound together. Two specific conditions are necessary for
tragedy proper. It must be the case that the standing and fate of morals and justice
“should throughout keep an individual shape in the sense that they depend exclu-
sively on individuals and reach life and actuality only in and through them” (Hegel
1975, 1: 184); that is, the heroic individual must appear as the “living instrument
and animating sustainer” (1975, 2: 1162) of the universal powers that transcend her.
Conversely, it must also be the case that such individuals be incapable of separating
themselves from the ethical whole to which they belong. In brief, tragedy can be
formative for collective self-understanding when the fundamental forces operative
in a society can be represented through the actions of individual agents (however
lofty); this is the thought that allows Hegel’s historicist aesthetic account of tragedy
to rework Aristotle’s ahistorical poetics. Conversely, when, owing to its complex-
ity, the rationality of a state can be validated through rational reflection alone,
through philosophy rather than aesthetic representation, then tragedy is no longer
formative for culture as a whole.
It is precisely in line with these conditions that Hegel distinguishes ancient
from modern tragedy, Sophocles from Shakespeare. Because Hegel argues that all
art forms have their time of emergence, flourishing, and decay, it is plausible for
him to regard modern tragedy as the decay of tragedy. But this cannot be quite cor-
rect since Hegel also regards modernity, with its unconditional acknowledgment
of the rights of individuality and subjectivity, as breaking from all previous social
forms. One might then suppose that Shakespeare, rather than being the degener-
ated outcome of Greek tragedy (the neoclassical view), would be the initiator of
a new, perhaps nondialectical, conception of tragedy. What Hegel cannot quite
tragedy 83
determine is what the relation is between individuals and universal powers in

modern tragedy. He first insists that such a relation is never missing, but because
individuals are no longer the charismatic bearers of the universal, their animat-
ing source, he must loosen the form of relation. Here is the moment in which the
architecture of his argument wobbles and then collapses: “But since now it is not
the substantial element in these [real world] spheres which engrosses the interest
of individuals, their aims are broadly and variously particularized and in such
detail that what is truly substantial can often glimmer through them in only a very
dim way; and, apart from this, these aims acquire an altogether different form”
(Hegel 1975, 2: 1223). Somehow, dim glimmerings of universal forms seems a wild
misdescription of what King Lear, for example, has to say about love. Something of
tragedy has died for us, but neither the fate of tragic art nor the fate of tragic expe-
rience is adequately thought by Hegel. Philosophy’s serene overcoming of tragedy
cannot go unchallenged.
Hamlet
Shakespeare “seems to write without any moral purpose.”
—Samuel Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare
Before examining the death of tragedy issue, Shakespeare’s modernity requires

outlining if we are to gauge the fate of tragic art. There is a close analogy between
Hegel’s reading of Descartes and his interpretation of Hamlet.10 While Descartes’s
method of doubt terminating in the cogito frees philosophy from theology, uncov-
ering the founding role of self-conscious subjectivity, for Hegel the Cartesian
subject nonetheless remains isolated, homeless, alienated from the world. Hegel
reads Shakespeare as, in a sense, elaborating nothing but the tragedy of this new
subjectivity: “the progress of a great soul, its inner development, the picture of its
self-destructive struggle against circumstances, events, and their consequences”
(Hegel 1975, 2: 1230).11 But precisely because it is only subjectivity—its passions and
doubts—that is at stake, and not the founding universals of the society in general,
Hegel perceives only alienation. On Hamlet: “But death lay from the beginning
in the background of Hamlet’s mind. The sands of time do not content him. In
his melancholy and weakness, his worry, his disgust at all the affairs of life, we
sense from the start that in all his terrible surroundings he is a lost man, almost
consumed already by inner disgust before death comes to him from the outside”
(Hegel 1975, 2: 1231–32). Hamlet is more antihero than hero; his death is that of a
man of doubt, not the founder of a new culture.
Writing nearly 50 years before Hegel, J. G. Herder, replying to classicist cri-
tiques of Shakespeare, sees in Hamlet a new aesthetic paradigm in which every
84 genres
work, rather than following formal rules, is required to solve for itself the ques-
tion of what it is to be a work of art in an original, nonimitative way—each work
depicting its own drama, its own way of being a tragedy. In reflecting a world that
is fragmented and divided, the new tragedy displaces the unity of action with event
and history—history with all its diversity, complexity, and fragmentariness. In
this diverse world, the distinction between genres—comedy, tragedy, pastoral, his-
torical drama—collapses. Speaking of Shakespeare as the educator of “us northern
men,” Herder writes:
When I read him, it seems to me as if theatre, actors, scenery, all vanish! Single
leaves from the book of events, providence, the world, blowing in the storm of
history. Individual impressions of nations, classes, souls, all the most various
and disparate machines, all the ignorant blind instruments . . . which combine
to form a whole theatrical image, a grand event whose totality only the poet can
survey. (1985: 168–69)
In a Herderesque vein, let me briefly think through the Descartes-Hamlet con-

nection. Hamlet concerns the loss of metaphysical morality, the loss of a world of
authoritative conventions and norms beyond the will, thought, desire, and actions
of individuals. In the same way in which modern philosophical self-consciousness
emerges through violence—the threat of the evil demon (Descartes), the state of
nature with its threat of sudden and violent death (Hobbes), the battle for recogni-
tion between master and slave (Hegel) (see Hoffman 1987)—so Hamlet becomes
self-conscious through the violent destruction of his gods: Claudius’s killing of
King Hamlet and sexing Queen Gertrude. Claudius is the evil demon of Hamlet’s
world; the death of his father and sexing of his mother produce Hamlet’s melan-
cholic doubt: how act in a world in which the very models for coherent action have
been destroyed and only further violence on offer? So Shakespeare’s play begins
with the end of action in its Aristotelian sense, with the overriding sense that pas-
sions without the binding of social forms are useless grounds for action: “Purpose
is but the slave to memory / Of violent birth but poor validity. . . . What to ourselves
in passion we propose, / The passion ending, doth the purpose lose” (act 3, scene 2,
lines 183–190). But this moves too quickly, for in a sense what Hamlet is working
through throughout the play is precisely the loss of the father-king and the queen-
mother as the last representatives of transcendent ideals that are also, of course,
the source from which all our idealizations spring, the source of the very idea of
transcendent authority. The father-king and the queen-mother must be destroyed
as idealities and as authorities in order to become wholly human, and only if they
can be regarded as human can Hamlet claim his humanity, find a way of living it.
He never does quite manage the feat.
Arguably, the work of destruction occurs through sexual disgust. Routinely
in Shakespeare, woman is represented as a divided creature: the virgin mother
and the rapacious whore, goddess and beast. Gertrude’s becoming a traitorous
whore in Hamlet’s eyes does no more than release what is already implicit in the
overidealized vision of the mother goddess. Hamlet’s raging disgust with his
tragedy 85
mother’s overt sexuality becomes the ground for his disgust at women in gen-
eral; it is that disgust that is then projected onto Ophelia. If the original images
of father, mother, and Ophelia represented for Hamlet his binding to the world,
the world being lovable, then in losing them as objects of love, he loses the world
as lovable; hence, he loses the world. Hamlet’s melancholy is for the ideality of a
world now forever lost: this world no longer lovable, or terrible, in the way it once,
perhaps, was.
Cavell perspicuously states the upshot of this dilemma:
Shakespeare’s Hamlet interprets the double staging of human birth—which
means the necessity of accepting one’s individuality or individuation or
difference, say one’s separateness—as the necessity of a double acceptance: an
acceptance of one’s mother as an independent sexual being whose life desire
survives the birth of a son and the death of a husband, a life that may present
itself to her son as having been abandoned by her; and an acceptance of one’s
father as a dependent sexual being whose incapacity to sustain desire you
cannot revive, which may present itself to his son as having to abandon him.
Hence the play interprets the taking of one’s place in the world as a process of
mourning, as if there is a taking up of the world that is humanly a question of
giving it up. (2003: 188–89)12
We might think of this work of mourning, with the perpetual work of memory
that is its consequence—Hamlet’s last injunction to Laertes “to tell my story”
(act 5, scene 2, line 354)—as making explicit the voice of lamentation implicit
in Greek tragedy that Aristotelian catharsis and Hegelian reconciliation attempt
to suppress.13 With Shakespeare, tragedy becomes self-consciously the mode
in which human spirituality is gathered fundamentally through memory and
mourning.
In a sense, Hamlet’s dilemma of how to act and Shakespeare’s of how to write
tragedies are the same: how to continue in the absence of authoritative norms for
continuing. What does it mean to say, for tragedy, that each work provides its own
accounting of what it is for it to be a work, a tragedy? At least, in part, it involves
answering the question of what constitutes the terms of an individual life now
that lives are no longer governed by given social roles. Part of what is at stake here
involves seeing how external conflicts now become essentially internal, the self for
itself now composed of many gods. Shakespeare internalizes the self as emphati-
cally as but more profoundly than Descartes: the conflicts raging within the self
are now permanent, regulating the contest between the warring gods within the
perpetual work involved in being a self. However, acknowledging and measur-
ing these gods nonetheless requires action, but action of a new kind: each action
is now a testing of the meaning of the thought or passion underlying it, and so
a staging or dramatizing or theatricalizing of it. We come to know the meaning
of our passions and beliefs not through reflective ordering—philosophy’s deep-
est conceit—but through seeing how they play out in the world. Hamlet’s “antic
disposition,” his soliloquizing, his putting on of a play, his bantering with Ophe-
lia, his pretense and his sincerity, are the mechanisms through which he might
86 genres
figure himself in relation to himself and the world he inhabits. Hegel eloquently
claims that Shakespeare equips his characters with a wealth of poetry, but also
he “actually gives them spirit and imagination, and by the picture in which they
can contemplate and see themselves objectively like a work of art, he makes them
free artists of their own selves, and thereby . . . can interest us not only in crimi-
nals but even in the most downright and vulgar clouts and fools” (Hegel 1975, 2:
1229–30). We might say that it is this new sense of the self and self-fashioning that
enjoins Shakespeare’s kind of tragic art with its emphasis on scenes, rapid move-
ments from scene to scene, its subplots and minor characters, its continual sense
of being improvised, its gripping lifelikeness combined with its great artificiality.
Or is it Shakespeare’s kind of theater that first gives us the terms for this new
conception of the self? Either way, as Cavell states it, Hamlet’s extreme sense of
theater involves “his ceaseless perception of theater, say show, as an inescapable
or metaphysical mark of the human condition, together with his endless sense of
debarment from accepting the human condition as his (which is terribly human
of him)” (2003: 187–88).
One further issue needs accounting for here. If it is the case that the limit situ-
ations of modern tragedy do not directly address the universals governing society
as a whole, but only at most their deflection into individual lives, and sometimes
not even that, then what are the normative terms of this new art? How do we
measure tragic characters, our continuing pity and fear for them, if not through
either morality or their connection to universal powers? What now, but really
always, governs the breadth of pity? Seeing that Shakespeare’s art does not match
the terms of Hegel’s aesthetic theory, A. C. Bradley offers a compelling response.
Tragic art, he avers, provides us with a sense of meaning and significance inde-
pendent of explicitly moral meaning and significance through providing a hor-
rendous feeling of waste; through that sense of waste, we experience the value of
all that has been wasted, abandoned, and ruined (1974: 16ff). Hamlet, Lear, Mac-
beth, Othello, and so on, are neither virtuous nor noble, nor often even decent:
Hamlet shows not a drop of remorse for killing Polonius (only disappointment
that the wrong person was killed) or for sending Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to
their deaths; even in his most empathic moments, Lear sees the suffering of oth-
ers as only a reflection of his own. Still, in our engrossed, nonjudgmental sense of
waste, we sense that their lives matter and that human lives mattering and mean-
ing extends beyond their being simply good or simply evil, virtuous or vicious,
that there are terms of meaningfulness and loss that are not explicitly ethical or
moral.14 Bradley goes on to insist that beyond this fact it is equally the case that
such mattering is often akin to the moral: because they suffer, we know they have
erred, and hence we know that evil, say, “violently disturbs the order of the world”
(1992: 25), even if it is a world in which the good perish and the evil flourish. In a
sense, this thought extends Bradley’s notion of waste, of what appreciating a life as
wasted means. What he is thus pointing toward, however obliquely, is what might
be called a “negative” morality, our sense of the uprising of the meaning of the
tragedy 87
moral through the experience of its emphatic absence. This matters to the fate of
tragic thought.
The Death of Tragedy?

After its ceasing to be the repository of our collective self-understanding, tragic art
continues in the mode of the ordinary, in the mode of recording how all individual
lives suffer the collision and conflicts of culture that they feel powerless to trans-
form but must nonetheless find a way through, not just how the existential features
of our lives—love, death, friendship, isolation, children, parents—are encountered
but even how we as individuals register the absence of connection to the major
institutions governing our lives: war and peace. Perhaps we can say that tragic art,
on the stage or in novels or films, presents exemplary but not ideal or transfor-
mative encounters with the limit situations of everyday life. This is why such art
can feel both all important—it goes to the essence of the life we actually lead—
and simultaneously marginal, minor, since the terms of society as a whole are not
directly engaged or sensed as directly engageable: they continue above or beyond
us, behind our backs, and worse, our sufferings and hopes fail to register in its wide
counting of what does and does not matter. What is true of tragedy here—private
depth and public futility—might be said of culture as a whole.
However, if tragedy is a form of attention to limit situations, then even if it
is true that tragic art is no longer the bearer of our collective self-understanding,
it seems implausible to believe that the constitutive forms of modern society
can avoid encountering their limit situations, and hence that we can manage
to address our world fully without tragic knowledge. While art may no longer
be formative for society as a whole, might tragic understanding still be? From
Georg Büchner’s Danton’s Death, with its bruised tracking of the tragedy of the
French Revolution, to the account of tragedy and experience in Raymond Wil-
liams’s Modern Tragedy, through Cavell’s Vietnam-inspired lament at the end of
his great essay on King Lear, the thought has reverberated that tragedy has moved
into the world.
Tragedy moves into the world in multiple ways: in the shift from closed world
to infinite universe, the fracture or destruction of philia relations leading to tragic
isolation becomes a constant of ordinary lives; ecstatic efforts of national libera-
tion succeed by installing new forms of tyranny; and nations unsure of their stand-
ing or their capacity to join their citizens together dramatize their sense of their
mortality through violent acts of aggression that repress it altogether. But there
is one case in which Bradley’s negative morality joins the experience of attending
to a limit situation that seems exemplary for the moral and political present. If
anything looks like a limit situation in twentieth-century political experience, it
88 genres
was the policy, construction, and operation of the Nazi death camps in which the
extermination of the Jewish people was attempted.
One of the great difficulties involved in thinking about evil is thinking about
what it means to suffer evil, what responses to such extreme suffering typically are
like, and what responses are open to us. To suffer a great evil is a devastation, and
even if people survive such devastation physically, it is common for them not to
survive spiritually. The term that has become the most common for talking about
the effect of great suffering on those who survive is “trauma.” Victims of great evil
have been traumatized. Typically, we think that it is individuals who suffer from a
trauma, but we are beginning to learn that collectivities, too, can be traumatized,
that apart from individual trauma there is also what might be called cultural or
social trauma.
Coming to experience an event as culturally traumatic need not mean coming to
experience it as utterly paralyzing and debilitating for collective self-understanding.
On the contrary—and this is the key argument of Jeffrey Alexander’s remarkable
essay “On the Social Construction of Moral Universals: The Holocaust from War
Crime to Trauma Drama”—coming to experience and recognize an event as an
immense evil that has been perpetrated upon our collective social body can be the
first step in coming to code that event symbolically as evil, indeed, as the para-
digm or archetype of evil. Once we have symbolically interpreted a historical event
as a or the paradigm of evil, then in effect we have given ourselves a new moral
universal, a new moral understanding of the world since now we have before our
hearts and minds a model or emblem of what must not be done, what must never
be done to others, what forever is impermissible and morally wrong. In coming to
recognize an event as a paradigm of evil, we create or construct a new moral uni-
versal, we construct a new baseline for social morality, we construct a pivot upon
which our life together now turns. Analyzing how such a recognition takes places
is the crux of Alexander’s essay; such an analysis is also what draws together the
question of the meaning of the Holocaust with the question of the fate of tragedy
in our time.
There is one significant difference between individual and collective trauma:
collective traumas become traumas. In the period immediately follow the Second
World War, what we today call the Holocaust did not exist under that description.
Rather, from the end of the war through well into the 1960s, the German extermi-
nation of the Jews was considered to be an unspeakable atrocity committed upon
the Jewish people by a perverse, politically reactionary movement in a nation that
was predisposed to extreme anti-Semitism and to following orders. The end of the
war was seen as a moment of triumph within a developing history of progress in
which the forces of liberal, enlightened modernity were triumphing over pre- or
antimodern forms of reaction.
To acknowledge that collective trauma “becomes” is to insist that its coming
to be is socially mediated and need not have happened: there would have been no
“Holocaust” if either Germany had won the war or, more interesting, if the camps
had been liberated by the Russians. Sociologically, the fact that the Holocaust
tragedy 89
becomes traumatic and thereby becomes an event of exemplary evil means that
the question of collective evil is not ontological—not a question of what—but epis-
temological: a question of understanding and knowledge and experience.15 To say
the question is epistemological is equivalent to saying that it is a question of how
the events of the Nazi extermination of the Jews are narrated.
For an event to be narrated as a transformative traumatic evil, it must be
understood as attacking the very fabric of a society’s collective life. Hence, things
construed as exemplarily traumatically evil are not only things thought to be
excessively bad or wicked and therefore to be avoided, not done; more radically,
they are conceived of as sources of horror and pollution that must be contained
at all costs. In order for the Holocaust to become an exemplary traumatic evil, it
must be coded as evil (and not just a war crime or an atrocity to anonymous peo-
ple): it must be weighed as far worse than everyday evils; it must be narrated in a
way that makes clear what the traumatizing actions were, who was responsible for
them, who were the victims, what were the long-term implications, and what can
be done to prevent the same again; and it must make both victims and perpetra-
tors appear as like ourselves. In order to be conceived as an exemplary traumatic
evil, the mass killings of the Jews first needed to be regarded as a singular event,
wholly unlike any event that had ever happened, to be seen as unique. (For some
this meant, erroneously, to become mysterious and inexplicable, beyond moral
understanding, and hence outside the normal course of history: standing alone,
interrupting history.) The coming of this redescription was prepared for in part
by the invention, shortly after the war, of the term “genocide” and of the Nurem-
berg trials coming up with the new idea of crimes against humanity. These two
concepts begin to open up the idea that a new, and therefore unknown, type of
crime was committed by the Nazis, since it appears not to have been done for
any of the traditional reasons: securing political power, or more land, or more
wealth, or as a component of a political project to secure these ends in ways that
made it a necessary means. The Nazis appeared to want to eliminate all the Jews
from the face of the earth for its own sake, and for no external reason. It was in
light of this claimed inexplicability that mass murder was renamed “Holocaust”
or “Shoah.”
Eventually—through the popularity of The Diary of Anne Frank, the worldwide
reception of the Eichmann trial and Hannah Arendt’s account of it, the tarnishing
of the image of the United States through its terrible involvement in Vietnam, the
massive work of historiography, memorial building, fictional representation, and
so forth, of the extermination of the Jews—the Holocaust began to be narrated
differently. What replaced the ascending Enlightenment narrative of progress and
improvement was now a tragic narration.
Again, a tragic dialectic is one in which contraries are united. What acknowl-
edging the Holocaust as a transformative traumatic event has involved is coming
to see modernity itself as tragic, as a movement of enlightenment and progress
that simultaneously contains the horrendous powers of destruction displayed
by the Holocaust as its own inverted image. Coming to see Nazism itself in the
90 genres
wider framework of modernity means seeing it in the context of the nationalist

and imperialist dislocations of the nation-state, through the weakening of moral
community and the rise of abstract morality, through the bureaucracy that orga-
nized the camps, through the efficiency and technological means through which
the exterminations were carried out. Death as a system of production is the black
inner lining of modernity itself. Hence, the great atrocities of the twentieth cen-
tury, from colonialism and its exterminations, through the Holocaust, to the fire-
bombing of Dresden and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki all belong to
the possibilities of modernity. Seeing them in this way is seeing them in the light of
the Holocaust as the paradigm trauma drama of modernity.
Once modernity is understood as Janus-faced—like the hero of a tragedy who
is noble but has a tragic flaw—then the way is opened to perceiving the events of
the Holocaust as terrible but exemplary of modernity at its worst, and thereby to
identifying with its Jewish victims as vulnerable and defenseless beings like our-
selves. It is just this identification that transforms the moral meaning of moder-
nity: in place of understanding the human through its powers of reason, speech,
and free will—collectively the emblems of civil reason—we have come to identify
with others through their capacity to suffer, to undergo torment and humiliation;
and thus in place of the universality of rational humanity, emerging is the uni-
versalism of a solidarity among vulnerable humanity. Tragic solidarity is coming
to displace the universalism of reason. What, then, is significant in the account
of the emergence of the Holocaust as a moral universal is that it displaces norma-
tive justice by exemplary injustice, a progressive narration of modernity with a
tragic metanarrative, and a displacement of the Enlightenment paradigm of the
rational, autonomous subject with a tragic universalism premised upon fragility
and vulnerability. By becoming exemplary, the Holocaust hence becomes a bridg-
ing metaphor for understanding major historical events—the extermination of
the Herero people, the evil of Stalin’s gulags, the Armenian, Cambodian, and
Rwandan genocides, and on. The Holocaust’s presumed uniqueness is, precisely,
what engenders new terms of moral comparability, and so its nonuniqueness. The
functioning of this new moral universal is, of course, erratic: it helped generate
new international law about genocide, and it was the backdrop to the eventual
intervention in Bosnia; too often, however, as in the case of Darfur, it remains
like the old voice of conscience—well-meaning, serious, but without effect. It has
too often remained as idle in the politics of the present as Euripides’ The Trojan
Women did in his.
Hegel’s philosophical program, of which the political philosophy of the present
is an echo, was to discover the rose in the cross of the present, that is, to demonstrate
the rational authority of the dominant institutions of modernity in abstraction from
the slaughter-bench of history producing them and the wreckage of the human sur-
rounding them. The very idea of such a program, like the philosophical programs
of Plato and Aristotle, involves a marginalizing and denial of tragedy—only thus
is this kind of political thought possible. And I would argue that this philosophi-
cal task is necessary and unavoidable if we are to take full rational responsibility
tragedy 91
for the practices through which we reproduce our life together, in which we ask
how we might remove unnecessary suffering, reward virtue with happiness, pro-
vide a system of justice fair to all. Philosophy could only begin its authorizing of a
rational world by excluding tragedy, or by following the magnificent examples of
Aristotle and Hegel, who saw clearly the claim of tragedy and sought to include it
within philosophy’s serene rational reconstruction of the world. But tragedy—the
slaughter-bench and human wreckage—cannot be excluded or included because
our disasters and sufferings are not external accretions to our triumphs; as Walter
Benjamin puts it, “There is no document of civilization that is not at the same a
document of barbarism” (1970: 258). Hence, taking full rational responsibility for
our life together demands tragedy’s implacable backward look, the acknowledg-
ment of intolerable loss, participation in communal grief. Through the Holocaust
we have learned that the paradigms of civil reason require tragic solidarity for
their effectiveness and that moral universality must borrow some of its authority
from the tragic recognition of evil. Tragic darkness is the necessary complement to
the light of reason; tragic lamentation, the constant companion of philosophical
hope. As Plato saw, the contest between philosophy and tragedy arises because the
vision of each requires an account of the whole. It is neither exactly a philosophi-
cal thought nor a tragic one that these two necessary synoptic perspectives on the
human are, finally, incommensurable one with the other.
NOTES
My gratitude to the New School for Social Research students in my “Tragedy and
Philosophy” seminar in the fall of 2006, and even more to my colleague Paul Kottman,
whose Shakespeare made mine possible.
1. The phrase “all action is for the sake of friendship” is the motto for John
MacMurray’s undervalued 1953 Gifford Lectures, The Self as Agent, and Persons in
Relation.
2. For a pointed critique of Aristotle in this regard, see Freeland 1992.
3. Lear, surprisingly, concludes by urging that undergoing tragic catharsis is coming
to realize that the world remains “a rational, meaningful place in which a person can
conduct himself with dignity” (1992: 335). I would have thought that tragedy enjoins the
thought that with luck we can conduct ourselves with dignity despite the fact that the
world is finally groundless, chaotic, etc. Tragic consolation, when it comes, is far tougher
and chillier than Lear’s sunny conclusion images.
4. In her very fine essay, Nancy Sherman 1992 argues that intelligibility and
avoidance are separate for Aristotle. Insofar we can have regret for what we could not
have avoided doing, then on this reading Aristotle’s scheme is not morally framed in the
way I have been arguing against.
5. See Rocco 1997, chaps. 2 and 6, in which Sophocles’ critique is shown to be
a version of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s conception of the dialectic of
enlightenment (and vice versa).
92 genres
6. I should say that I regard Segal as our best reader of Sophocles, and this his finest book.
7. This is how to understand the notion of a dramatic beginning: it is the deed
that makes manifest the underlying complexity of the situation in which it occurs. How
Aristotelian Hegel is can be seen from the fact that his general account of art beauty
turns on an account of tragic action. See Hegel 1975.
8. For an elegant tracking of this thesis see Peter Szondi 2002. While Szondi argues
that tragedy is dialectic, he acknowledges that not all dialectic is tragic; irony, comedy, and
humor are also dialectical forms. The test case for his thesis about tragedy, discussed below,
is Hamlet. For a pointed reading of Hegel as thinker of the tragic, see Beistegui 2000: 11–37.
9. In Hegel’s technical jargon, in the first instance tragedy represents the “in-itself”
movement of Greek ethical life, while in the latter case tragedy represents Greek ethicality
“for-itself.” This technical language has a commonsense translation: what is seen as
“in-itself” is perceived as essentially from a third-person, objective perspective, while
what is “for-itself” is understood from a first-person perspective. Hegelian speculative
knowledge means to join those two perspectives, to track their necessary internal
connections; in brief, Hegelian dialectic is structured around the doubleness of action.
10. The argument of this and the following paragraph follows Gjesdal 2004. I should
add here that, on the whole, Hegel does not so much misread Hamlet as misconstrue the
significance of his reading.
11. The “sands of time” thought is central for all of Shakespearean tragedy. Northrop
Frye opens Fools of Time thus:
The basis of the tragic vision is being in time, the sense of the one-directional quality
of life, where everything happens once and for all, where every act brings unavoidable
and fateful consequences, and where all experience vanishes, not simply into the past,
but into nothingness, annihilation. In the tragic vision death is, not an incident in
life, not even the inevitable end of life, but the essential event that gives shape and
form to life. (1967: 3)
12. At the conclusion of his pointed critique of deconstructive readings of The Birth
of Tragedy, Henry Staten eloquently questions:
Isn’t all of The Birth of Tragedy concerned with the problem of giving a face and a
voice, or faces and voices, to an absent, deceased, or voiceless entity called Dionysus,
who is a figure not of any particular deceased being but decease in general, of all that
is already dead or all that lives as already affected by its future death, and thus a sort
of transcendental elegy whose figure is prosopopeia? (1990: 216)
No matter what else I would have wanted to say about The Birth of Tragedy here, I would
have concluded with this idea of it being a transcendental elegy.
13. Unless one regards, as I do, Hegel’s notion of reconciliation in the Phenomenology
as itself a cultural form of mourning, what it means to regard the process of history as
tragic dialectic.
14. See Frye 1967: 4. Frye thinks this existential feature of tragedy is the one that
makes it incapable of being absorbed by philosophy.
15. What is an epistemological issue is not that the events of the Holocaust were evil
or even radically evil—the Holocaust was a foreseeable intolerable harm produced by
culpable wrongdoing—but that their evility was a collective trauma formative of a new
moral universal. Even plainly evil events—the massacre of 300,000 Chinese civilians
in Nanking by Japanese soldiers in 1938—can fail to become coded as traumatically
evil, and hence fail to become radically reformative (refigurative)of prevailing moral
tragedy 93
universals. For an interpretation of the “rape of Nanking” along these lines see Alexander
2003: 106–7.
REFERENCES
Alexander, J. (2003). “On the Social Construction of Moral Universals: The Holocaust
from War Crime to Trauma Drama.” In Alexander, The Meanings of Social Life. New
York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Aristotle. (1987). The Poetics (S. Halliwell, ed. and trans.). Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press.
Beistegui, M. de. (2000). “Hegel: or the Tragedy of Thinking.” In M. de Beistegui and
S. Sparks (eds.), Philosophy and Tragedy. London: Routledge.
Belfiore, E. (1992). Aristotle and Iphigenia. In A. O. Rorty (ed.), Essays on Aristotle’s
Benjamin, W. (1970). “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (H. Zohn, trans.). In
Benjamin, Illuminations. London: Fontana Books.
Bradley, A. C. (1974). Shakespearean Tragedy. London: Macmillan Press.
Cavell, S. (2003). Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare. Cambridge:
Euripides. (1958). The Trojan Women (R. Lattimore, trans.). In D. Green and R. Lattimore
(eds.), Euripides III. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Freeland, C. A. (1992). “Plot Imitates Action: Aesthetic Evaluation and Moral Realism
in Aristotle’s Poetics.” In A. O. Rorty (ed.), Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Frye, N. (1967). Fools of Time. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Gjesdal, K. (2004). “Reading Shakespeare—Reading Modernity.” Angelaki 9(3), 17–31.
Harris, H. S. (1997). Hegel’s Ladder II: The Odyssey of Spirit. Indianapolis: Hackett.
Hegel, G. W. F. (1975). Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art (T. M. Knox, trans.). Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Herder, J. G. (1985). “Shakespeare” (J. P. Crick, trans.). In H. B. Nisbet (ed.), German
Aesthetic and Literary Criciticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hoffman, P. (1987). Doubt, Time, Violence. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ignatieff, M. (1997). The Warrior’s Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience. New
York: Henry Holt.
Lear, J. (1992). “Katharsis.” In A. O. Rorty (ed.), Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Loraux, N. (2002). The Mourning Voice (E. Rawlings, trans.). Ithaca: Cornell University
Press.
Nussbaum, M. (1988). The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and
Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nussbaum, M. (1992). “Tragedy and Self-Sufficiency.” In A. O. Rorty (ed.), Essays on
Aristotle’s Poetics. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Plato. (1968). The Republic (A. Bloom, trans.). New York: Basic Books.
Rocco, C. (1997). Tragedy and Enlightenment: Athenian Political Thought and the
Dilemmas of Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press.
94 genres
Rorty, A. O. (1992). “The Psychology of Aristotelian Tragedy.” In A. O. Rorty (ed.), Essays

on Aristotle’s Poetics. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Segal, C. (1999). Tragedy and Civilization: An Interpretation of Sophocles. University of
Oklahoma Press.
Sherman, N. (1992). “Hamartia and Virtue.” In A. O. Rorty (ed.), Essays on Aristotle’s
Staten, H. (1990). Nietzsche’s Voice. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Szondi, P. (2002). An Essay on the Tragic (P. Fleming, trans.). Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
Vernant, J., and P. Vidal-Naquet. (1988). Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece (J. Lloyd,
trans.). Cambridge, Mass.: Zone Books.
 
COMEDY
timothy gould
That comedy is a serious business is—and probably ought to be—mostly over-

shadowed by the fact that comedy is fun. Or at least we suppose it is meant to be fun
and meant to make us laugh. That comedy is fun, and that it makes fun of things,
has tended to keep philosophers at a distance, as if something funny could not,
at the same time, yield an insight into something serious, or at any rate, chronic.
Another problem endemic to writing about comedy is that, unlike tragedy, comedy
quickly lost the definite shapes that it apparently once possessed, having overrun
its generic boundaries already in its Greek beginnings. Roman satire, medieval
romances, Renaissance anatomies, “The Rape of the Lock,” and Pamela are further
recognizable versions of the comic impulse and modifications of the impulse to
drama. By dramatic, I mean nothing more technical than a kind of representation
of action occurring on something we now call a stage. The dramatic impulse to
comedy can even be taken as helping to create new genres over the centuries. For
instance, while the novel is not perhaps essentially bound up with comedy, there
are surprisingly few novels possessing utterly no elements of comedy. One need
not argue that Anna Karenina is full of laughs to see the bitter comedy in the bad
timing of Anna’s change of heart. In general, the comic impulse seems bound up in
forms of narration that grew up around class, sex, money, adultery, and marriage.
Perhaps because of this tendency to infiltrate other genres and even to cre-
ate new ones (like new families of jokes), philosophers have tended to ignore the
roots of comedy in drama. When they do pay attention to these roots, as in John
Morreall’s useful article in the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (1998), they soon convert
the topic into the comic as a species alongside the species of humor and wit. The
thought seems to be that we might be able to define comedy as a major portion—
perhaps the major portion—of the sum of all the things and types of things that
make us laugh or smile. Though I have begun with the idea of fun, and of making
fun, this essay concerns comedy as a dramatic form, And, risking the charge of
96 genres
committing the genetic fallacy, I continue to imagine that the origin of comedy
has something to do with the essence of comedy or, better yet, its grammar. But
as in Nietzsche’s account of tragedy, there is room for developments and modifica-
tions. The idea that both comedy and tragedy begin in something like a religious
festival—perhaps even the same festival—is only one clue among several. This clue
should be treated with care.
While the roots of the festive and the festival may account for some forms
of comedy (as well as tragedy), it is not the case that all forms of humor are fes-
tive, and it is also not the case that all forms of the festive become embodied in
forms of drama or the dramatic. The topic spreads out even further if, along with
the established literary genres of comedy proper, satire, romantic comedy, the
comic novel, and so on, we include those harder to classify literary types of spoof,
burlesque, parody, pastiche, and vaudeville, as well as an impulse and a form
that are harder to name and to characterize that ranges from Tristram Shandy to
Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett. From Joyce and Beckett and
the clowns they admired, it is not hard to fi nd a transition to Buster Keaton, for
whom Beckett once wrote a script. And if we include the genres that grew up
around Keaton, then we are already next door to Charlie Chaplin’s unbeliev-
ably inventive genius. Nor should we omit Disney’s cartoon Steamboat Willie
and its homage to Keaton’s fi lm Steamboat Bill Jr. Of course, we cannot leave
out the more sophisticated clowning (among their other forms of comedy) of
Mae West, Marilyn Monroe, Rosalind Russell, and Katherine Hepburn—to go
no further—and, on the male side, Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, William Powell,
Tony Curtis, Bert Lahr, and Tom Hanks. Who will fi nd a way to restrict this topic
without distorting it? It is inevitable, therefore, to acknowledge at the outset that
it is more than a mildly comic task to write about a topic as broad and deep—if
sometimes also as shallow and silly—as mannered and sometimes as scatologi-
cal, as Comedy with a capital C.
I take my bearings therefore not only from a sample of representative cases but
from several writers and thinkers and playwrights whose interests intersect with
literary or dramatic reflection and by whom I have gained, I trust, some access
to the questions of comedy. Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy (1872, 1886), surprisingly,
contains a series of clues about the transition from Old Comedy to New.1 It was
much less surprising that Plato’s powers of comedy yielded insights into the nature
of comedy, most especially as enacted in the Symposium. Among modern crit-
ics, I have made use of Northrop Frye’s A Natural Perspective (1995) and Stanley
Cavell’s Pursuits of Happiness (1981), centered on what he characterizes as the Hol-
lywood comedy of remarriage, along with W. K. Wimsatt’s (1969) introduction
and conclusion to his collection of documents on comedy from Ben Jonson to
George Meredith and James Thurber. In the background of this essay is C. L. Bar-
ber’s Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy (1959) and its progeny.
It is one of the circumstances under which philosophy makes its tentative
contacts with the literary work and its world that literary critics will find this
list a laughably small sample of the immense amount of useful work on comedy.
comedy 97
On the other hand, most philosophers will wonder why there is so much liter-
ary criticism in the fi rst place. Aristotle’s few surviving remarks on comedy do
cast their shadow on what follows, but I am less interested than others in flesh-
ing out the bones of structure that he has left to us. The most influential of his
thoughts about comedy provides an instructive example. In tragedy, we are told,
the protagonist is in some sense higher (more spoudaios [serious]) than we are.
In comedy he or she is “lower” (less spoudaios [serious], more phauloi [lazy and
good for nothing]). This may fit well enough for Aristophanic and New Comedy,
but it is not really adequate to Renaissance comedies, both romantic and the
so-called comedy of manners. Taking into account also Rex Harrison or Wendy
Hiller or Maggie Smith, or, more generally, the movies, it is certainly hard to
think of Cary Grant as someone we look down on, someone whose extrications
we fi nd a “lower” version than our own. Within the Shakespearean comedies
of Romance, it is hard to think of Helena, Olivia, or even Cressida as someone
whose travails we have an obviously higher perspective on. Nevertheless, it is
something of a commonplace that comedy can exist in “low” and “high” forms
sometimes thought to coincide with the popular (Punch and Judy shows, puppet
shows, mime, and vaudeville) and the more literary (e.g., George Bernard Shaw
and William Congreve). It is not clear how this is related to Aristotle’s point,
but some difference between comedy and tragedy is evident in this perception.
Hamlet can clown around and put on his antic show, but he cannot actually
become a clown.
To begin with the Greeks (where according to legend so much of human cul-
ture begins) is not merely a literary convenience. Not quite arbitrarily, my other
points of reference are Shakespeare (especially All’s Well That Ends Well) and some
Hollywood movies. To connect these points of reference, I note here that the fi lm
It Happened One Night is a kind of Midsummer Night’s Dream, a disruptive idyll
of hitchhiking among the mechanized forms of transportation, within a strictly
enforced class society. The idyll is a test that pits the hunger of lovers, the tem-
porary hunger of the hitchhiker, and the hunger of the jobless against prevailing
social convention, with no end to the adventure. This future, unpredictable and
peregrine, cannot be captured on film. The film Lone Star is not quite a tragedy or
a comedy, but it is about the beginnings of the new that comedy has aimed for. It
reminds us that one of the conditions of festivity—and perhaps of the renewal of
our cities and our politics—is the now unfestive ability to forget the past. We are to
move on, adventurously, into a world without publicly recognizable adventure or
festivity. Dramatic comedy is not sheerly the pleasure of laughter at the deformity
of our inferiors. Its structure includes the recognition of our own deformities and
of our complicity in the pain of others. True laughter is rarely the response to our
recognitions and much more often the relief we are granted in the struggle for
recognition. Either laughter is on the way to something better, or it is cold comfort
indeed.
Since at least the time of Athenian drama, it has seemed natural enough
to contrast comedy and tragedy. It is as least as natural as contrasting a happy
98 genres
ending with a sad one, or the solemnity of a death that amounts to a sacrifice with
the hilarity and savagery and sheer pleasure that come from transgressing the
boundaries of order. Tragedy, we might say, pits the high-born individual against
the law of the city, the polis, and its relation to eternal justice: both the individual
and the city may be shattered, so that the polis can be renewed or somehow sur-
vive and the memory of the hero seared into the memory of the people, who will
gather to reenact this death and this renewal. Comedy pits the tricky slave, the
eiron, and the yearning couple, with whom the masses side, against the customs
and lesser laws of decorum, so that sexual and political transgression can have
their day.
Preliminary Remarks: Of the Genres

of Laughter
I follow several procedures in Cavell’s Pursuits of Happiness in order to untangle a
skein of threads, thinking of them not so much as a set of properties as a series of
features. One difference from my project is that Cavell’s is working out the prob-
lematic of the specific genre he characterizes as the genre of remarriage, and I have
just been implicitly denying that comedy is or could any longer be considered as
such a genre or even as a totality of such genres. Cavell thinks of the genre in
question as inheriting certain conditions and as in conversation with the other
members of the genre (1981: 28–30). The conditions that the types of comedy I am
considering have in common most are that they have some kind of audience and
that they present a structure of human incidents as some kind of narrative. The
audience may be the audience of a stage, or a movie house, or perhaps the solitary
audience of the comic novel. Some comedians—those with a certain flair for sto-
rytelling, such as Robin Williams, Whoopi Goldberg, or Richard Pryor—might
fit this definition by turning the room they are “working” into a kind of theatrical
space. Other comics just as funny—Henny Youngman, Mort Sahl—build their
anecdotes to set up their punch lines, and they might not fit this idea of comedy
as drama.2 Here is another reason I cannot, without modification, simply deploy
Cavell’s notion of compensation as occurring among these features. But if a par-
ticular work does not possess the particular features or threads or clues that I am
pursuing, there will be consequences in the structure of the work that are unpre-
dictable from the mere inspection of the feature.
I use the term “features” as opposed to properties, but we must grant that
the terminology is somewhat arbitrary. It is designed, as Cavell says in the Intro-
duction to Pursuits of Happiness, to overcome the idea of the members of a genre
(e.g., screwball comedy, Restoration comedy, Old Comedy) as recognizable by, so
to speak, inspection, where the idea of inspection is just made to be a companion
comedy 99
to the idea of “possessing a property.” I have not defined “property” or “genre” any
more than I have defined “thing.” But if the idea is to oppose the methodologi-
cal sense that a certain number of comic properties will just add up (so to speak,
visibly) to a comic drama, then what are we looking for?
To adumbrate Cavell’s use of the idea of feature, I add the ideas of thread and
clue. Having no single Ariadne’s thread to follow out the mysterious origins of
such comedies as The Clouds, The Birds, The Wasps, Lysistrata, and Ecclesiazusae.
I take it as simply worth pondering that comedy was placed by Athenian tradition
as following a production of (generally) three tragedies, and that proximity of this
kind—in a time of festival—suggests at least some kind of connection between
comedy and tragedy. There are elements of oral tradition, cited by Wimsatt, that
suggest that, in the beginning, tragedy and comedy were the same. If the connection
does not exactly follow from the festivities, then surely there are contrasts and con-
nections that lie close to the nature of the festive. Here is one place where Barber’s
Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, though little noted by philosophers, helped shape
the consciousness of at least a generation of American critics. He seems to excavate
something about dramatic comedy as such, and not just about Shakespeare’s.3
Another feature that begins with the Greeks brings us forward to Shakespeare
and takes us back to the Greeks. Both in Shakespeare and the Greeks, comedy is
at once sexual (or, more broadly, instinctual) and political. The “political” has its
roots in the polis. If this is not its immediate origin—or if sex is the wrong word
to describe the Dionysian sense of the turmoil of origins—then it soon becomes
much closer to being the right word. “Sex” is here not the name for genital activi-
ties or for the consummation or corruption of the human or political realm by
such activities. Sex is the name for one essential condition of the political, or for
one realm in which the conditions of human sexuality and its discontents make
politics possible—and also necessary.
Comedy’s attachment to politics and instinct also speaks to the possibility
of language. This means language both in the direction that distinguishes the
instinctive cries of animals, human and otherwise, civilized and barbarian, and,
finally, those apparently less dramatic distinctions between nations, tribes, sexes,
generations, and social classes. Finally, there is the condition of the spectator, or
rather, since Nietzsche makes an issue of the spectator as (mere) spectator, let us
say rather the“audience”—those out there in the seats, not moving around on the
stage. And within this problematic, there is precisely the question of how the audi-
ence is related to its presumed status as citizens, as opposed to the status of a mere
individual swimming in a sea of nonindividuation or in more modern terms in
a kind of dissolution into the mob of human beings and the yet deeper mob of
instinct and its conflicts and pains. Within this notion of the audience, we have
issues of time, ranging from the freedom to participate in the festival days (a privi-
lege not granted to all) to the time that is created, or secreted, from within the
transformative power of the festive spectacle.
The recurrent sense of isolation at the end of a Chaplin movie (though com-
patible with the presence of a companion) should not be thought of as simply
100 genres
contrary to this feature. Without denying the importance of the drive to unity in
comedy, we may notice, for example, that the eloquent stasis—like the masque that
Frye speaks of in Shakespearean comedy—gives way to our sense of the impor-
tance of Chaplin’s walk, and especially the walk down the boulevard at the end of
the movie. Surely it is related to the dandy’s assertion of individual style. But it is
also important that he becomes fully visible in his departure and in his discovery
of a kind of pastoral exit from the oppressiveness of the city. The visibility of the
little man, the tramp, modifies the bragging that always lies just beneath his pres-
ence to us. These moments exist in counterpoint to the discovery that Cavell’s
pairs make, that living together is a kind of adventure rather than a state to be
achieved once and for all: Chaplin’s exits discover that mere survival is a form of
adventure. This speaks not merely of his ability to eat a shoe with something like
civility and elegance. It is one way of taking the jauntiness in his less drastic sur-
vivals, his sense of accomplishment in just walking away, often alone. This sense
of survival as an accomplishment of adventurousness will become important to
the features of Cavell’s remarriage comedies (especially prominent in It Happened
One Night). But it is already completely explicit in certain passages granted to
Shakespeare’s powerful types of the unheroic, from Falstaff, with his “Who hath
honor?”, to Parolles, with his unforgettable declaration: “Simply the thing I am
shall make me live.”
Nietzsche and Comedy’s Spectators

Nietzsche tied the death of tragedy to the birth of what would soon be christened
the New Comedy. Greek tragedy, “unlike her older sister arts,” committed suicide,
most visibly in the work of Euripides:
What Euripides claims credit for in Aristophanes’ Frogs, namely, that his
nostrums have liberated tragic art from its pompous corpulency, is apparent
above all in his tragic heroes. The spectator now actually saw and heard
his double on the Euripidean stage, and rejoiced that he could talk so well.
But this joy was not all: one could even learn from Euripides how to speak
oneself. He prides himself upon this in his contest with Aeschylus: from
him the people have learned how to observe, debate, and draw conclusions
according to the rules of art and with the cleverest sophistries. Through this
revolution in ordinary language, he made the New Comedy possible. For
henceforth it was no longer a secret how—and with what maxims—everyday
life [Alltäglichkeit] could be represented on the stage. Civic mediocrity, on
which Euripides built all his political hopes, was now given a voice, while
heretofore the demigod in tragedy and the drunken satyr, or demiman, in
comedy, had determined the character of the language. (Nietzsche 1967:
77–78, emphasis added)
comedy 101
For Nietzsche, this transformation of the height that a character is capable of into
the depths of sexuality and conflict and politics into which he or she reaches is
reflected first in speech. But this quickly turns out to be a feature of the fact that,
whereas tragedy did not originally consist of an audience of spectators, Euripides
brought the spectator onto the stage itself. This move brought mere spectatorship
into the realm of the represented, and giving spectatorship speech then extended
the dramatic realm out into the audience, thus covering over the possibility of
access to the Dionysian and creating a new politics for a new polis.
Some of these facts are now taken as well established, and some have been
controversial since the opening battles between Nietzsche and Ulrich von Wil-
amowitz-Moellendorff. I am pursuing Nietzsche’s use of history to excavate such
concepts as the stage and the spectator, comedy and tragedy, language and instinct
that might otherwise drop out of the discussion. I am not concerned to discover
an empirical way of determining the history of Athenian drama as a history of
degeneration. I am trying to follow such Nietzschean concepts as “degeneration”
and the self-reflection of the spectator in the drama as intrinsic to the new forms of
comic drama, which have simultaneously displaced the old forms. Nietzsche sees
the triumph of the New Comedy as explicitly related to the end of a certain kind
of tragedy and to a change in the relation of spectator to what is seen, ultimately in
the relation of spectator to citizen, and citizen to spectator.
As a starting point for my potential list of the features of comedy, I want to
keep alive the themes of language, politics, spectatorship, sex and sexual instinct,
and the ranking and conceiving of the human being in relation to the more and
less than human. Within this perhaps itself chaotic set of themes lies the very mark
of chaos, the barrier of incest, the boundary marking the realm of family and polis,
of sex and the social realm, apart from which there is apparently no solution to the
question of chaos and order. To invoke these themes is not necessarily to endorse
Nietzsche’s image of Greek history, but it does suggest the need for some sort of
genealogy of comedy, faithful at once to some sense of its origins and of its devel-
opment over time. When Barber and Frye and Cavell come back to the side of
Shakespeare’s comedy that Barber calls festive and Frye characterizes as calling for
a green world, some kind of problematic can be seen to be working itself out. Cavell
makes explicit that the green world may contain some darker forests.
Plato’s Symposium and the Unity

of Comedy and Tragedy
What do we imagine that Plato had in mind when he called for an artist who is
capable equally of tragedy and comedy? At the conclusion of Plato’s Symposium, in
the final throes of the drunken party into which the more decorous symposium
102 genres
has degenerated, Socrates is left “trying to prove that authors should be able to
write both comedies and tragedies” (223d). That is to say, given Socrates’ under-
standing of workmanship and production, the essence of tragedy and of comedy
is either the same or not so far apart as to elude the soul of the artist or workman
in both cases.
Plato seems to lack Nietzsche’s wish to construct a historical narrative, to enact
a portion of that history, and then to dodge its apparently inescapable final act.
He remains the first and perhaps the greatest philosopher to enact the kind of
thinking he is simultaneously writing out. Here he has clearly constructed a plot
that rises like a tragedy and sinks into a chaos of drunkenness and sex. He leaves
us with one voice of the conversation still at it, a solitary postlude of a one-man
festival of daily life. He leaves us with Socrates, with no one left to talk to, ready to
go about his daily business.
What is specifically comic about Plato’s vision? If we grant the comedy in the
image of dailiness in Socrates’ going about his business, then it seems we actually
have two images of the comic. We have the comedy of convulsiveness and chaos—
precipitated by the intervention of Alcibiades and his unruly love for Socrates—
and the comedy of the hero’s daily life, seen from the perspective of Diotima’s
immortal timelessness and the time of the spectator/reader. The other spectators
are falling asleep and we are presumably still eager to stay awake, to know the end-
ing that has no real end—none short of Socrates’ mortality. That the end is in the
future, well off stage, means that the Symposium does not possess exactly the shape
of Greek tragedy or comedy. We know where Socrates will end up: at the dock of
Athenian law. If the fate of Socrates is surely at the back of these comic (and philo-
sophical) tours de force, the Symposium gestures toward something of the genius
or essence of tragedy within these scenes of comedy and daily triumph.
Let us look first at the speech Plato assigns to Aristophanes, the famous speech
that returns in its somewhat repressed Hollywood version as the story of the “split-
apart” in the Demi Moore film The Butcher’s Wife. It is there literally presented
as a grandmother’s story—perhaps you might call it a tale of springtime, told in
winter. The ancient grandmother presents the origin of her knowledge as a critique
of the idea that the story came from Plato. In fact, deliberately or not, the grand-
mother’s claim supports the claim of (the fictional) Aristophanes to be speaking
a truth so primordial that it can only be spoken in a myth as deep as the grand-
mother’s folk wisdom. That she passes on her knowledge as one who is out of the
sexual game and, moreover, grants this knowledge to her granddaughter out of
love demonstrates the power of love to preserve our knowledge of love, beyond the
possession of a particular thinker.
The myth of the “split-aparts” requires as its antidote the magic and the phi-
losophy of Diotima—a woman neither young nor old, neither goddess, nor house-
wife, both a kind of friend and a kind of lover, which is perhaps to say a kind of
teacher.
I single out four elements from Aristophanes’ story, in order to compare the fea-
tures of comedy and tragedy, in terms of what Cavell calls their compensations:
comedy 103
1. In the Symposium (189d–92b), we are to recognize the physical absurdi-

ties or, at any rate, the extreme awkwardness of the original compound humans
(man/man, man/woman, woman/woman), and the confidence that these doubled
human beings were stronger, and more full of excess or hubris, than we are. This
physical impediment to satisfaction makes graphic Zeus’s mercy in giving us fron-
tal genitality (and hence the possibility of a less haphazard sexual position). As
much to Plato’s point, if not Aristophanes’, is the possibility of seeing the one we
yearn for, or perhaps a greater coordination of seeing and yearning. More than one
comedy is based precisely on the blindness of sexual yearning to generational dif-
ferences and the sameness and difference of genders and families. (Tom Jones is a
more recent example.)
2. The fact of generations carries us further into tragedy, comedy, and indeed,
the historical question of royal succession, so incessantly pursued in Shakespeare.
In Plato we can be understood as living our lives split apart from the source of our
being, our wholeness. After the first generation of (literal) split-aparts, what we
are split from is mythically presented as the same “other” half. But comically it is
actually some other kind of other half that we are yearning for, the result of some
other wound, no doubt related to the one that we are striving all our lives to heal.
In tragedy, the question of generations is often absorbed into the sheer Greek fact
that specific families bear curses, plagues, wishes, or destinies that become the root
of the tragic.
3. In Aristophanes’ vision, humans are originally more deinon (190b: more
strange or frightful or, in Heidegger’s version, more uncanny and less at home).
In the first choral ode of Antigone, they are the most uncanny: ta deinotaton. The
fact that they are more deinon than we are now does not suggest that to be deinon
is merely one human attribute among many but that we are to be characterized,
essentially, as deinon. Whether more or less uncanny at a given moment, our being
not at home exceeds the homeliness of the world, its welcome. For the character of
being deinon is always to outstrip the rest of the world and to be, in essence, over-
reachers. It is not merely that we were once stronger because of our power of move-
ment and multilimbed capacity for attack. It is from this condition, before we took
on our recognizably human form, that we were already subject to a level of hubris,
itself defined as overreaching, a kind of constantly increasing velocity of excessive-
ness. Our very being is to drive ourselves forward, upward, but always away from
ourselves, away from anything we could call home.
Zeus’s splitting us down the middle is less a punishment than a stratagem,
making us at once weaker and more profitable (190d). Aristophanes’ Zeus presents
us with a weaker and more comical human body. Apollo’s function is then to let our
bodies shine forth, but comically, reminding us, in a kind of parody of philosophi-
cal or Oedipal self-knowledge, of our weakness and our previous transgressions.
The absence of the law in this vision—the presence of the sheer power of Zeus
to shape our bodies and our destinies, as it were, physically—is the most tangible
mode of direct intervention in our lives and our capacity for love. The power of
the gods in this dialogue is a comic version of lightning striking, or seas parting,
104 genres
or bushes burning, and it heightens our sense of its presence in Greek tragedy—
notably in Oedipus and Antigone. We are prepared to discern its presence in other
comedies, perhaps especially in those of Shakespeare, as seen most unforgettably
in Frye’s vision of his “problem” comedies and romances. We will return to this.
4. These remarks modify and, I hope, deepen the old idea that tragedy has to
do with the destruction or expulsion of the hero. In Coriolanus, one right is driven
out by another; fire destroys fire. This tragedy’s idea of tragedy—part of its idea
of itself—is paralleled in Hegel’s account of Antigone’s loyalty to the family, in
the person of her brother, but conceived as the most earthbound source of right.
Where the eternal laws that govern the temporal polis meet the earthbound polis,
there will be force. We still sense the idea of tragedy as an idea in which the fractur-
ing of the polis will allow it somehow to be preserved.
Comedy, in contrast, tends to unify and tends toward a unity most often sym-
bolized by marriage. This unity, on the one hand, represents the lawful union of
human drives but, on the other hand, one might say also represents the unity of
body and soul that comes out of a unification with another. This points both to
the idea of the other as the “other half,” but also as a bringing to intermittent
peace of what already in Aristophanes is called something like restlessness (polu-
pragmosune). Achieving this unity among different persons and parts of the self is
perhaps more immediately an opposite of the single-mindedness, the wholeness
of the tragic hero’s mission, which here carries the price of being unable to see the
meaning of what he or she opposes until their meanings collide.
A Closer Look at Aristophanes:

The Birds, Love, and Language
Within the aggressiveness of Aristophanes’ The Birds, human beings are, at several
critical moments, characterized by love. Most of this language is probably ironic. Nev-
ertheless, the love in question seems to go beyond the need for some ironic opposite to
selfishness and pettiness: it is said to be a love that would share in the kingdom of the
birds. Here love means sharing with the birds but also refers to a parodic sharing that
implies conquering the shared realm. This doubleness of love haunts many of the more
interesting comedies of the age. William Arrowsmith’s readable (but admittedly not
strictly literal) translation provides a line that is not explicitly present in the Greek:
Their motive is love.

Love is the burden of their words . . .
Love of your life and love of you. (Aristophanes 1961: 47)
The anonymous translator in the Oates and O’Neill translation is closer to the
original: “Their love for you and their wish to share your kind of life; to dwell and
comedy 105
remain with you always” (1938: 751). This is a pretty fair sketch of what Plato’s Aris-
tophanes means by sharing.
Plato’s version (192d–93a) tells us that it would take a god to interpret what we
want from one another. This suggests that even when we speak the same language,
we don’t really speak the same language. In particular, as words emerge from the
chirps and groans of instinct, they do not, in becoming words, tell anyone (not even
ourselves) what we desire. They indicate the traces of where we have come from,
not what we are striving to find. The doubleness of language is here portrayed as
rooted in the fact that it faces backward to its origins in cries and shouts and for-
ward to the whispers of desire and the apparent unambiguity of our demands. But
nothing is unambiguous or beyond the need of interpretation and hermeneutics.
Language moves away from its origin in nature and instinct and toward something
apparently in its future. It is constructed out of a lost past, something with which
we desire to merge and be filled with and something that is out of reach. There is,
perhaps, an internal relation between the polysemy of language and the human
creature’s fatedness to time, to individuation, and to the wish to merge with its
own origins, obliterating its own identity.
Let us continue these investigations with a plainer thought: if laughter were
not close to an instinctual response, it would not be much of a response to the
comic. If laughter were not close to language, articulate speech, something that
could be part of a message or of a conversation, or the end of one, it also would not
be much of a response to the comic.
Once language becomes full-blown, with all its countless ways of making mean-
ing, blaming, sneering, and putting down, as well as making puns, riddles, jokes, and
prophecies, the impenetrability and transparency of names and naming are all part
of the comedic, as they are part of language. One could try to trace all language to its
instinctual roots or to its more developed lawful, transgressive cousin, Desire, Wun-
sch. But it won’t work, or rather it won’t play. There is an irreducible element of law-
fulness, sense, and exemplarity at the heart of speech, hence of comedy. It can be seen
as enacting the function of comedy to test the polis and the hearth, from the side of
instinct, of language breaking down or breaking up. In short, comedy tests the com-
munity of words from below, from the underside that all language must possess.
From Shakespeare to the Movies:

The Transformation of Women,
the Trial of Words, and the Oracle
of the Everyday
Whatever the historical imbalance in leaping from the Greeks to Shakespeare, there
is some kind of critical justice to be found in the maneuver. After all, if a vision of
106 genres
comedy could not account for these figures, it would be seriously lacking. And my
aim, as I said, is not to arrive at a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for the
genre of comedy, but a series of features modifying and replacing each other, whose
motions we might regard as the work of the continual (re-)creation of the comic.
Frye pointed out one feature of late Shakespearean comedy and romance that
governs the following reflections, albeit in different guises. It is clear enough that
at least in some comedies there is an initial problem or perplexity, often a harsh or
irrational law, and later a social or sexual tension that does admit of comic resolu-
tion, but is not perhaps reducible to something funny. This ranges from the law
against fornication in Measure for Measure, to the rule of brutishness and retaliation
as the news that the newspapers deliver to the bedroom of the film Adam’s Rib.
Taking off from this insight of Frye’s and to the pages that he devotes to All’s
Well That Ends Well, I allow myself to pick up thoughts from a range of Frye’s
material in A Natural Perspective. Frye’s lines about this play are a kind of leit-
motif throughout the book. To give them an initial summary: In Shakespeare’s
romances, when the dream of action and time resumes, it is in a different key.
Having slipped the bounds of action and time, into the time of trances, spells, and
rebirths, the action returns to our time. The drama seems willing to renounce
magic and resume the ordinary time in which events occur and babies are born,
lost and found, and the time in which audiences sit still for such stuff. But it is not
the same audience that first sat down, any more than it is the same characters: both
have been transformed, not by magic but by a faith “lawful as eating.”
In All’s Well That Ends Well, while Dionysian chaos and Aristophanic wound-
ing of the human are not quite visible, there is nonetheless a political connection
in the shaming of Parolles: as the First Soldier says (after a platoon of Parolles’ own
camp pretends to take him captive, actually placing him in a captivity deeper than
the captivity of weapons):
If you could find out a country where but women

Were that had received so much shame, you might begin
An impudent nation. . . . (act 4, scene 3, lines 341–44).
I suggest that the idea of an impudent nation is not just a nation composed of
shameless people. I hear impudence and shame not only as an idea built on the
bodies of ill-treated women and cowardly men, but also as the idea of a nation
built over the abyss of shame that underlies all human action and growth. This
nation would start where the Greek sense of virtue as the overcoming of shame and
dishonor left off—as if the issue forced on us now is that comedy (and tragedy?)
begins not from instinctual chaos, sex, and aggression, but rather from repres-
sion and rectitude and the concomitant absence of cakes and ale. The resulting
disorder, and our ability to get used to it, to live with it, is actually more promising
material for the building or rebuilding of community. If this sounds too much like
Norman Brown’s Love’s Body, with an Episcopalian overtone, give Frye a moment
to expound the consequences and the context.
comedy 107
Frye begins, in a chapter titled “The Triumph of Time,” with the relatively
mirthless clown Lavache, speaking of the narrow gate to heaven and the broad
wide path to fire.
I am a woodland fellow, sir, that always loved a great fire; and the master I speak
of ever keeps a good fire. But since he is the prince of the world: let the nobility
remain in’s court. I am for the house with the narrow gate. Which I take to be
too little for pomp to enter: Some that humble themselves may, but the many
will be too chill and tender, and they’ll be for the flow’ry way that leads to the
broad gate and the great fire. (act 4, scene v, lines 48–56)
What seems remarkable is that these Christian commonplaces contain allusions

and associations that would set orthodox Christianity on its head. For example,
fire is first of all—at least to a man of the woods—a source of warmth, comfort,
and perhaps danger, but not pain and damnation. Thus, the fire that is kept burn-
ing by the prince of this world may be part of the temptation of the devil, but it is
not yet portrayed as part of our fears of him. The theme of gates too narrow for the
proud but accessible to the humble is certainly Christian. But consider that “the
many will be too chill and tender,” that is, at once too cold to yield to the need for
humility and apparently too cold to give up the warmth of the devil’s fire, which
is still not presented as a thing of pain. And then, after all it is a “flowery way”—as
if toward marriage or in a kind of triumphal procession—that leads to “the broad
gate and the great fire.”
Compare this with the savage truth telling of clowns and fools from Lear to
Twelfth Night: “Who is it will tell me who I am?” “Lear’s shadow.” “Because thou
art virtuous thou thinkst there will be no more cakes and ale.” Lavache says next
to nothing new, but then salvation is a small thing, too, and Lavache’s tropes on
these commonplaces suggest how close we are to understanding, and also, as we
stand, how far.
Frye puts it this way: “Lavache is simply an old clown with nothing left to him
but the privilege of uninhibited speech” (1995: 105). Frye continues: “Uninhibited
speech ought to be witty, on Freudian principles, but if it fails to be that it may still
be oracular, a quality close to wit, and often used by Shakespeare instead of it”
(105). It is part of Frye’s irony to describe the oracular as a kind of failed wit: where
wit condenses and is barbed enough to penetrate the nature of things, the oracular
merely speaks forth the nature of things and hence of the things that lie around us,
unseen, the things of our world and the things of which we are composed. What is
oracular is not so much Bertram dragged kicking and screaming into a marriage
that may yet save him, as Lavache’s more encompassing image of human beings
rushing toward their own annihilation.
That substitution—like the yoking of wit and the oracular—is Frye’s and per-
haps Shakespeare’s. I cannot find any explicit link in Freud’s work between wit
and the lack of inhibition. In fact, I would be more likely to suggest that wit is
that which breaks through the repressions and inhibitions of civilization, which is
not the same as the genuinely uninhibited. The less a child has succumbed to the
108 genres
inhibitions, the less witty is the child’s humor likely to be—indeed, the less con-
sciously humorous the child is likely to be. Or put it this way: the humor of chil-
dren is not likely to be wit. Wit, in our time, does not so much break through the
rigidity of repression as momentarily puncture it or subvert it. The child’s mind, if
it is given over to what attracts it and what repels it, for example, to love and hate
or to interest and boredom, is not so much a model of wit as a exemplar of a being
who does not need wit.
What Frye finds in this play is not primarily the shameful disorder of Eros,
but the blind rush of self-destruction that is the twin of Eros. It is this battle, as
Freud put it, of Eros and destructiveness that must be transformed into a dialectic,
or drama, of Eros and civilization that is the framework for this most fantastic of
Shakespeare’s late plays. Finding this, we also find that as the play—that is, the
various actions—recede, what emerges into visibility is the drama of Bertram and
Helena, hence, after all, the drama of a kind of individual action writ large. The
“movement” of the action that Frye finds essential to comedy (perhaps more so
than in tragedy) ends by sweeping the high-born but slimy Bertram into the arms
of a worthy and immeasurably magical Helena. Unaccountably, she still wants
him. And she prepares us for this conclusion with a speech that promises us noth-
ing more than the conditions of life.
But it will not be praise of her man that concludes the play. It is rather the
oracular speech—as Frye calls it—near the end, where Helena says this:
But with the word, the time will bring on summer,

When briars shall have leaves as well as thorns
And be as sweet as sharp. We must away;
Our waggen is prepared, and time revives us.
All’s well that ends well: still the fine’s the crown. (act 4, scene 1,
lines 38–42)
It would be a mistake to think of this as one more celebration of the “end” crown-
ing the work, a kind of happier version of the “end” justifying what was necessary
to achieve it. This is, of course, not an irrelevant reading for a play in which the
magical or theatrical strokes are always likely to overwhelm the particulars of the
forward motion. In fact, Shakespeare provides his own commentary on these lines,
a scant two scenes later at the beginning of act 5. Helena returns to the same for-
mulation, almost the same formula. In counterpoint to The Widow’s: “Lord, how
we lose our pains” (act 5, scene 1, line 29), Helena finds: “ All’s well that ends well
yet, / Though time seems so adverse and means unfit. / I do beseech you whither
has he gone” (act 5, scene 1, lines 24–28). As Frye is constantly reminding us, the
musical structure of these late plays is not merely some effect of rhyme, repeti-
tion, and leitmotif. The echo of sound is inextricably an echo of sense, and we are
encouraged to take this echo as a repetition of a climactic theme and also as a
comment on that theme. The idea of “time” as “so adverse” seems to be touched
on very lightly.
comedy 109
But if the struggle is between the triumph of time and the adversity of time,
this is not merely a slight modification of her original thought, for what “ends” well
is not something out of time, something to which human means are irrelevant, if
momentarily they seem insufficient. It is not just that this time is unpropitious or
out of joint, these means too weak. It is two forms of time that struggle for the play’s
conclusion, both bound up in language, both partaking of divinity and struggle,
both struggling for an ending we can live with. We are partly transformed by the
spectacle, and partly untransformed by our participation, with insufficient means,
in the struggles of virginity and virtue, language and shame, nobility (hence class)
and grace.
My intuition is that both Frye and Cavell are leaning heavily on the idea of
transformation itself. We are back, after all, at Nietzsche’s few remarks, according
to which the depths of human and half-human being turn out to be transforma-
tive. Moreover, they are transformative not only concerning the characters—above
all, in the later versions, the death and transformation of the woman—but in the
power of transformation that the willing audience brings to the powerful enact-
ments. It is the power of ritual, only one step away from magic and religious frenzy,
that brings the individual characters face to face with something like identity. In
its fragility, its need to be transformed and reborn, identity and its dissolutions are
the ground of the transfiguration we aspire to.
Frye singles out the heroine “disguised as a boy”—and especially her trans-
formed possibilities of activity and passivity—as a means of symbolizing the
transformations of Romance and its new possibilities of human relationship: “For
it is usually the activity of the heroine, or, in some cases her passivity that brings
about the birth of the new society and the reconciliation of the old society with it.
This activity takes the form of a disappearance and return” (1995: 83).
In Cavell, the woman is not so much disguised from the other characters or
from the audience as she is from herself. Cavell is less interested in the possibilities
of her physical disguise than in the possibilities of her political and spiritual—
her human—transformation, as revealed by the camera. Radical transformation
often takes the dramatic form of death and revival, or it comes as close to such a
revival as credibility will permit. “It is required of you that you awake your faith,”
as Paulina says in The Winter’s Tale, as if the birth, or rebirth, or resurrection of the
woman participates fully only in the realm of faith, a passion beyond mortal life
and beyond the habits of belief and behavior current in the civilized expectations
in the world of men.
This is either a theatricalization of faith, or rediscovery of something like
divine possibilities of transformations within the theater. For Frye, the transfor-
mation of the woman, her death and reappearance, is the reinsertion of her life
into a cycle of birth and death, which participates in a larger circle, neither quite
Christian nor Greek, but all Shakespeare.
The spectator is transformed by the willingness to witness and hence to par-
ticipate in this cycle, which eventually grows to be so all encompassing as to trans-
form heaven and hell into the end foreseen in the knowledge of good and evil.
110 genres
That is, we are now capable of knowing the tree of life, though we are now barred
from it. Comedy is a foretaste of this knowledge of life, achieved not by the sight of
angels, standing guard, but within the living of this life.
Walking Away in Time

Cavell engages Frye in a quiet dispute about the nature of time and, for that mat-
ter, of the force of Nietzsche’s work. For Cavell, Nietzsche is not some avatar of the
Greeks or the author of some modern version of a cyclical cosmology. Or at least
in Cavell’s version, Nietzsche’s vision must contain the moment at which the two
eternities, or what I called the two modes of time, can meet. And it is the figure
of the woman (the new Eve) that replaces the replacement of the old Adam by
the new. But Cavell is only rarely interested in the changing of boy actor to girl to
boy to girl (as in Shakespeare). Cavell plays on Katherine Hepburn’s boyishness
(see, e.g., Alice Adams), and he provides a revealing discussion of director George
Cukor’s treatment of gender reversal in Adam’s Rib. What critics have neglected
is the way that Cavell’s explorations of comedy continue his explorations of the
willingness of (natural) language to repudiate itself, transgress itself. Something
in our possession of language makes skepticism possible, from within the fact of
our attunement in speech. And something in our need to voice our desires makes
comedy possible within the attunements of society.
While this idea tracks the perversity that threatens the couple that has grown
up together—forming the threat that corresponds to the inability, especially of the
male, to bring together the currents of tenderness and the stream of passion—the
parallel of this perversity of language and the threat of incest has not been followed
out. Only rarely in Cavell’s work does he make it explicit that the sound of quar-
reling, the happy banter, the silences, and in general the sense that the two streams
of drama (of the comedy of comedy and the comedy of philosophy) can rejoin
each other naturally because they are the solution to the problem of perversity, in
language and in love. What feels natural in comedy is not merely our habituation
to the realities around us, portrayed on stage or in film. It is these partial and tem-
porary resolutions of the discord of unnaturalness that show us the path of nature,
within our unnatural origins.
This issue of the unnatural naturalness of language—and what this represents
in comedy—is one reason, I think, that Cavell spends pages of criticism on Shaw’s
Pygmalion and its revealing failure to achieve the status of a remarriage comedy.
Cavell reads it as a kind of positive version of Cukor’s fi lm Gaslight, where Eliza
comes to “proper” speech and to her “proper” self in time to stand up to Higgins
and preserve her sanity. But she is not quite in time to resolve the antagonism of
speech and the fact that she and Higgins share a mother, so to speak, and must
find such resolution as they can consistently live with. Her life with him will be
comedy 111
intermittent, a conversation constantly starting and stopping again, whether with

his lecturing or her return to silence and thought. In general, in the remarriage
comedies, the man does not teach the woman how to speak. (Especially in the fi lm
His Girl Friday, the one with the riskiest title and the amoralism it might seem to
share with Shaw, it is established from the beginning, that she is the better writer,
or at least that, while he writes a mean telegram, her words fit the space the news-
paper has to print them in. That is: he can write a kind of plea, but she can write
the story that makes the plea make sense.) If the man is involved in the woman’s
education, as Cavell insists, it is because he is the audience of her effectiveness,
the survivor of her rejection, and the sometimes hapless object and source of her
desire, including her desire for effectiveness.
For Cavell, the visibility of time, the palpability of our struggles in time, and
the engagement of the spectator in the spectacle all circle around the death and
transformation of the woman. Cavell finds the key to these reeditions of Old Com-
edy in the rearrangement of emphasis on the heroine (as opposed to New Com-
edy’s emphasis on the man or the tricky slave); what draws Cavell’s attention is the
transformation of the leading woman into the “new woman.” This transformation
is a kind of birth, for the woman who now appears before our eyes has never previ-
ously been visible or effective in the world we know. The leading woman in these
fi lms is born, by the grace of film and the struggles of politics, into the world that
she must learn to live in and, by living in it, change it. The first sign of her existence
is the camera’s assertion of her physical existence, the kind of visibility that the
camera cherishes.
But this very visibility, so easily confused with the idolizing or fetishizing of
the woman’s bodily presence, gives way to her wish to be effective in the world
(despite the adverseness of time and the insufficiency of her means). That is, she
wants to become real. She wishes to insert herself not only in the order of society
that has been denied her, but also in the order of desire and time, which has been
waiting for her, waiting for her willingness to be born again.
Frye, on the other hand, ends where we began, with something close to Nietz-
sche’s powerful surmise that “an audience of spectators was unknown to the
Greeks” (1872, 1886: 62–63). On the last page of his book, Frye has this to say about
what I called the antagonisms of time:
In the nonexistent world below, time is the universal devourer that has finally
nothing to swallow but itself. Prospero’s great speech at the end of the masque
tells us that everything we perceive disappears in this time. That is, the world of
the spectator is ultimately abolished. What is presented to us must be possessed
by us, as Prospero tells us. (1995: 159)
To keep this from being simply a struggle of the metaphysics of timelessness

against the ordinary time of the spectator requires something like the overcom-
ing of the metaphysics of revenge, of time as the devourer. In turn, what keeps this
from being simply a more decorous version of the repetition of the same is that we
remain to be transformed, suspended between faith and action. This is something
112 genres
like the state where we made our entrance. Only now the conflict of Apollonian
dream world and Dionysian chaos is resolved in a more complex idea of dream-
ing. “We are such stuff as dreams are made on” now means that we are produced
as beings in time, both malleable and inexorable, by the same forces that produce
our dreams, beyond time, and must learn to live with the doubleness that makes
us up. Our dreams and selves tend back to the medium of that nourishment: our
little lives are rounded with a sleep. Sleep is not an emblem of death so much as a
mode of experiencing time and desire and image, which is opposed to our normal
sense of death as a violent ending and which composes us anew.
In Cavell’s vision of film, the movies do not transform the spectators so much
as displace them. We are displaced from the stream of action and people by what
Cavell first called the “projection” of reality, a projection that leaves the time of
these events in some kind of past. (If the stories movies tell had a tense, Cavell once
said, it would be the past tense.) This double displacement of place and time leaves
room for the kind of absorption we are only rarely likely to know in the other arts.
The ground of seriousness in film has had much to gain from this absorption.
But perhaps even more powerfully, comedies have still another story to tell and to
show: it is the comedy not of moments but of hours and days, the comedy of plea-
sures light enough to hold the screen, and nourishing enough to keep us coming
back for more.
But since there is no happily ever after, no single grand laugh to keep us unap-
peased and hungry, we are to learn to let go of those human luminaries, those
tellers of time, able now and then to tell time for ourselves, and for once to call
it quits.
Early in All’s Well That End’s Well, we are presented with a real abhorrence of
an imagined incest. But Helena’s imagination shows not only the power of her own
love for Bertram but the power of his mother’s love for Helena at once to create and
to annihilate the civilized connections and prohibitions that love must find itself
within. The Countess, thinking that Helena is worried about her lowly station in
life, insists that she is Helena’s mother. Helena shrinks back, saying: “But, I your
daughter, he must be my brother?” (act 1, scene 3, line 82). This gives the Count-
ess room to force from her a confession of love and to support her project to go to
France. The mother’s love has the power to make Helena her own (and to advance
the plot) by supporting her projects and her love. But as we shall see, even in a
modern age, such powers vie with the power of the law and hence are dangerous.
The sense that love can overcome political boundaries but not the boundary of
incest, not even a sort of fictional incest, engendered by a quasi-maternal love may
not be exactly funny, but it is the magic of Romance. It is not so much the magic
of magic, but the magic of mothers—their humor, as one might say. The mothers’
power to support the actions of the young enables them to complete their projects.
The mother cherishes these projects as she cherishes her young, uncaring how the
world will see it, knowing, however, that a mother’s love “hath in it a bond/whereof
the world takes note” (act 1, scene 3, lines 172–73). This is a vision of a mother’s
love that marks our actions as successful, despite what the world calls success, for
comedy 113
we are their successors. Using Cavell’s terms, we may say that in Shakespeare’s
romances the couple cannot have grown up together, that the man’s particular
overcoming of class shows the heroine’s ability to solve the puzzlement of our will
by the law, by class, by birth.
I close with a glance at a fi lm just outside the scope of Cavell’s investiga-
tions—though not outside the conceptual frame that he and Frye provide. Lone
Star, written and directed by John Sayles, is not a comedy, but it walks us up to
so many boundaries and taboos that it is hard to see what kind of drama it is.
Cavell speaks of the genre of the End of Romance, from which he backtracked
into thinking through the structure of the great Romances. If there were a genre
in which we learn to survive the end of Romance, the end of tragedy and myth, of
the Western, of the army outpost and the drama of generations, that would be a
template of Sayles’s ambition. The closing of the army base, explicitly an emblem
of opportunity for black soldiers and a black colonel (who also figures in one of
the “private” generational conflicts), will affect the town’s economy. Its Mexican-
descended majority is about to assume a more equitable share of the town’s power.
Various private dramas are played out, adding up to a collective memory, a col-
lective secret or repression of memory, which enables a collective and relatively
stable present.
The quest by the sheriff, the son of a legendary sheriff (a quest recalling Destry
Rides Again), for the truth within his father’s legend is matched by the daughter’s
wish to understand and to evade the fate of her mother, the respectable immigrant
owner of a successful Mexican restaurant. The mother’s refrain to her workers,
“Speak English!!” is an emblem of the pathos of denying your own expressive past
and also, finally, a warning to the audience that it does not know the force of its
own words and has lost touch with its capacity for making sense. Both mother and
daughter represent versions of ethnic political power, the daughter searching for a
deeper past of shifting borders and illusory identities, made real by music, politics,
and love.
What is brought to an end most graphically is the romance of the drive-in
movie in a small town: a small thing, it may seem, compared to those issues of class,
race, and sex. But the movie leaves us in front of a boarded-up drive-in screen, after
the last of the last picture shows has ended, after a childhood, which is now not the
source of their intimacy, but the fulfi llment of their actual if unknown incest.
The hero, having given up the search for his father’s mythically guilty past,
having perhaps hoped to find his own genuine present in the overcoming of that
guilty past, stumbles on his father’s actual guilt. He discovers a more everyday,
more mundane collection of sins, something more in keeping with the structure
and the hidden aggressions of class and race: his father took a mistress of a sub-
ordinated race. It is a shoddier, less romantic misdeed, but it casts its shadow far-
ther than murder, making the son incestuous after the fact. That this is discovered
through letters (“our daughter”) and pictures of recreation suggests that the words
and pictures of the defunct motion picture theater live on in the motion picture
before our eyes. This movie forbids nostalgia, forcing us to decide what to make of
114 genres
our queasiness or our romanticism—should we find ourselves simply on the side

of the couple’s desires.
In Lone Star, the mysteries of birth and power reinstate the boundaries of
incest. Love had thought to conquer language and politics and the man’s past,
and the iciness and “Spanish” hauteur of the woman’s mother, the illegitimacy not
of their own love but of their parents’. In the end, they are suddenly confronted
with the past transgression made palpable as the question of whether they have a
future. The man answers her explicit question: “That’s it?” after a moment’s pause.
“If I met you today for the first time, I’d feel exactly the same way.” Cavell sees the
threat to the principal couple as the tinge of incest in “having grown up together.”
Lone Star pictures a couple that literally grew up together, having to imagine them-
selves as starting from scratch, as if the purity of their feeling is one condition for
starting over with each other, in a new time and a new place.
Hence, the question of their unlawful knowledge of each other is subverted
by the possibility of the renewal of time. And the woman—this woman of politics
and pride in her history and her race—confirms him: “And forget the Alamo.” It
is something of a question, whether the Alamo can be forever forgotten, for this
woman and this man. But for the moment, they move on together, as the camera
moves back, in jump cuts that show them alone, still in front of a blank screen.
This screen can mean either that we are done with those movies and that past, or
that the true movie, the movie of their life in a new present, has yet to begin.
As this particular scene of incest fades to black, along with the past of that pol-
itics of race, violence, money, sex, parents, and pain, the questions of politics and
color remain off screen, just out of the reach of love. But this love, here and now,
withdrawing from the drive-in movie screen, letting go, for once, of the pain of the
Alamo (with the echo of its legendary line in the sand; with the exacerbated rep-
etition, in movies and classrooms, of the battle now become the battle cry) settles
something: the future is still open. What we are fated to is what we allow ourselves
to accept as fate. Both this couple and the mythical place called America are still
undefined, still as metaphysical as they are physical or materialistic. If the movie
cannot resolve the pain of the politics of race once and for all, as comedy cannot
show the unity of a marriage, the politics and the comedy of this movie could show
us the willingness for mutual love outside the law. And, given that the man has
come from a line of sheriffs increasingly renouncing violence for subtler forms of
aggression, his lone star stands for the kind of honor that is willing to renounce
aggression, and the office of the legitimized uses of aggression.
The woman knows her mother’s choice between sexuality and respectability
is not her choice. The man chooses the woman’s knowledge—and her willing-
ness to forget. He lets go of the legendary murder, and he chooses the everyday
misadventures of their lives. This may not be comedy and may not be a laugh-
ing matter. But it is a form of art that represents a genuine successor to comedy,
choosing the status of love outside the law over the status of aggression under the
cover of the law. Choosing to resign the badge of the law for the power of love, it
solves the “problem” posed by Frye’s concept of the harsh law that shadows the
comedy 115
progress of Shakespeare’s romance. Like Huck Finn, they light out for the ter-
ritories, where freedom perhaps still lives. But this time, a couple goes together,
presumably where the American polis still has a chance to escape from the surveil-
lance of the past and its all too omnipresent parental discontent. So the impulse
to comedy and to transgression has returned to one of the oldest stories in our
books. The not-so-young couple must evade the strictures of the world of the par-
ents, and the incestuous bond that the parents enabled, if only to forbid it. What
is tragic is our politics, where each act of heroism is the grounds for a sacrifice,
and no race or tribe or class is left unscathed by the past. What is comic is still the
old eros, the old comedian of our lives. It breaks down barriers, but only at the
cost of our willingness to leave behind the parental repressions and the shadows
of the institutions they created. We leave behind their restaurants and their jails,
as well as their badges and their legends, the body as well as the spirit of heroism.
And we must leave it for the sake of nothing more—but nothing less—than our
transgressive love.
NOTES
1. Coming to terms with this surprise was helped by conversations with Nickolas
Pappas and by Pappas 2005: 194ff. Unattributed translations and commentary on the
translations should be attributed to Pappas.
2. The drama of ordinary joke telling is part of the drama of ordinary conversation
and involves the tension of taking over, momentarily, the attention of the group, singling
oneself out. Naturally enough, more attention has been given to the various genres of
jokes and stories that more or less naturally command our attention, perhaps even across
long intervals of time (compare with Cohen 1999). Joke telling and its genres are perhaps
more episodic in nature than other forms of comedy, hence closer to a narrative oral
tradition than they are commonly credited with.
3. Here one must also mention Mikhail Bakhtin’s influential idea of the
carnivalesque, as developed, e.g., in Bakhtin 1984. But it must also be said that while
carnivals tend to be festive, not all days of festivity share in the carnivalesque.
REFERENCES
Aristophanes. (1961). The Birds (W. Arrowsmith, trans.). New York: New American
Library.
Bakhtin, M. (1984). Rabelais and His World (H. Iswolsky, trans.). Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Barber, C. L. (1959). Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its
Relation to Social Custom. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
116 genres
Cavell, S. (1981). Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. Cambridge:

Harvard University Press.
Cohen, T. (1999). Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Frye, N. (1995). A Natural Perspective. New York: Columbia University Press.
Morreall, J. (1998). “Comedy”. In M. Kelly (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. Vol 1:
401–405. New York: Oxford University Press.
Nietzsche, F. (1967). The Birth of Tragedy and the Case of Wagner (W. Kaufmann, trans.).
New York: Random House. Original publication 1872; second edition 1886.
Oates, W. J., and O’Neill, E., Jr., eds. (1938). The Complete Greek Drama. New York:
Random House.
Pappas, N. (2005). The Nietzsche Disappointment: Reckoning with Nietzsche’s Unkept
Promises on Origins and Outcomes. Lanham: Roman and Littlefield.
Plato. (1989). Symposium. (A. Nehamas and P. Woodruff, trans.). Indianapolis: Hackett.
Wimsatt, W. K. (1969). The Idea of Comedy: Essays in Prose and Verse; Ben Jonson to
George Meredith. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.
 
PASTORAL
mark payne
S, in book 10 of Plato’s Republic, argues that tragedy allows the faculty of
pity to grow strong by feeding on the sorrows of others and that comedy, in simi-
lar fashion, strengthens the part of a person that enjoys the ridiculous (606b–c).
From the perspective of literary history, what Socrates suggests is that the exis-
tence of the various genres can be explained by appeal to human nature. They
exist to give pleasure and satisfaction to the parts of the soul that take delight in
the kinds of actions they portray, and they do so by producing in their audience
the same kind of emotional and cognitive events as occur in the world of the
representation.
Aristotle takes the hint. Tragedy, he argues, achieves a catharsis of pity and fear
in its audience, while the characteristic pleasure of comedy is the amusement of
witnessing some act of error or shame that is painless and not harmful (Poetics 5–6,
1448a31–49b28). The association of the genres with basic psychic functions goes
hand in hand with Aristotle’s assertion that their origins are to be located in a dim
prehistory. He argues that tragedy’s evolution from archaic religious festivals has
been documented and that comedy developed in a similar fashion, although the
stages in its development can no longer be recovered. While both genres perfected
the satisfactions that they offer their audience in the classical polis, their origins lie
in the tentative efforts of village life to cater to these same needs.
In this respect, these genres differ from pastoral, which comes into being
in the Hellenistic period with the handful of poems about shepherds written by
Theocritus, a Sicilian Greek, in the first half of the third century b.c.e. Some ques-
tions that suggest themselves, then, are these: If the legibility and persistence of
genres is to be explained by their association with fundamental psychic functions,
what are these functions in the case of pastoral? How was it that these few poems
could found a tradition that came to have the solidity and permanence of genres
like tragedy and comedy? What satisfactions did they offer that earlier literature
118 genres
had not, and what did later authors do with them as they refashioned the genre for
their own purposes?
In attempting to answer these questions here, I do not offer an exhaustive his-
tory. Instead, I examine some decisive moments in the growth and decline of pas-
toral in the hope that I can identify the characteristic attractions of a genre that
was once a canonical element of the Western literary tradition and also suggest
some reasons why it eventually fell out of favor.1
Spring: The Idylls of Theocritus

The bucolic poems of Theocritus have their origin in the reinvention of Greek
literature in the Hellenistic period that saw, in addition to bucolic poetry, the cre-
ation of the epyllion, or short, highly crafted poem on an epic subject; the emer-
gence of what has been called “literary drama,” brief dramatic poems for reading,
that, unlike the dramatic monologues of the later Western tradition—Robert
Browning’s “My Last Duchess” is a familiar example—feature more than one
speaker; and the spectacular growth of the epigram as a vehicle of self-expression
(see Payne 2007).
In the poetry of Callimachus, in particular, there is a new and explicit concern
for the ways in which a writer’s work can be understood as a manifestation of the
self that produced it. Poets no longer present themselves as caretakers of an actual
past that shows itself again through their poems, but as creators of the fictional
worlds that their poems bring into existence. Aristotle adumbrates the new poetics
of the Hellenistic period in the Nicomachean Ethics (9.7.3–4, 1167b34–68a4), where
he argues that poets are to their works as parents are to their children in that both
have conferred upon them the supreme benefit: existence.2
It is, then, in a literary and philosophical culture interested in the relationship
between fictionality and selfhood that the bucolic poetry of Theocritus makes its
appearance. The new genre celebrates its embrace of fictionality in various ways.
The herdsmen that give the poems their distinctive protagonists come and go as
they please, without masters to answer to or flocks with pressing needs. They spend
their time singing, and their surroundings are a pleasure zone of trees, streams,
springs, and breezes. Nothing obliges them to act, and the poems they inhabit
are largely plotless as a result. The genre in no sense offers a realistic portrait of
rural labor, and its characters are not rustic counterparts to the slaves of urban
comedy.
At its most aggressive, the manifest fictionality of the poems playfully severs
the connective tissue that binds them to earlier literature. In Idyll 11, Theocritus
refashions the Cyclops of the Odyssey as a love-sick herdsman, pining for the sea
nymph Galatea. His Cyclops is noncompossible with his Homeric antecedent, and
the only way to link the two is by imagining a fiction of our own in which the erotic
pastoral 119
disappointment that Polyphemus suffers in Theocritus’s poem somehow produces

the monster of Homer’s.
What Theocritus does with Homer in Idyll 11, he does with his own creation
in Idyll 6. Here we find a herdsman by the name of Damoetas pretending to be
Polyphemus, but a Polyphemus who now shuns the infatuated nymph who pur-
sues him relentlessly. The revision is carried through to the smallest details: the
single eye and hairy brow that in Idyll 11 are acknowledged as reasons for his repul-
siveness to the nymph have, in Idyll 6, become a source of pride for the reimagined
Cyclops.
The poem points both to the lability of the bucolic character and to imperson-
ation as the action that defines it. In poem after poem, what it means to be bucolic
is to imagine oneself as another bucolic character. The performance by which
Thyrsis proves his exemplary status as bucolic singer in Idyll 1 is a reenactment
of the herdsman Daphnis. The goatherd of Idyll 3 introduces a series of legend-
ary bucolic predecessors with whom he endeavors to identify. Comatas in Idyll 5
juggles positive and negative models of the herdsman in Daphnis and Melantheus.
Lycidas, the exemplary herdsman singer in Idyll 7, wishes he could have heard the
voice of the famous Comatas.
To have heard bucolic song is to have been inspired with a desire to emulate
its leading characters, and dramatic impersonation is one way in which this desire
expresses itself. By imagining themselves as others, the herdsmen try out roles from
the bucolic repertory, and so stage their own imaginative involvement with the
pastoral world of which they are a part. As a result, the characters seldom match up
from one poem to the next: the Polyphemus of Idyll 6 is constructed point by point
for contrast with the Cyclops of Idyll 11; the idealized Comatas for whom Lycidas
longs in Idyll 7 bears no resemblance to the foul mouthed and aggressive Comatas
of Idyll 5. The more strongly the character is reimagined and appropriated, the
happier the impersonator is likely to be. Daphnis and Damoetas in Idyll 6 end their
songs surrounded by skipping calves; Lycidas, in Idyll 7, is able to cure himself of
erotic yearning by projecting an idealized Comatas to himself; even Polyphemus,
in Idyll 11, is able to get remission from his cravings by imagining a strong image of
himself as the proprietor of a pastoral paradise.
In occasions of distress, then, the bucolic poems propose mimetic desire
as the most effective therapy.3 Rather than, in Plato’s phrase, making lamenta-
tion vanish with the medicine of self-examination (Republic 604d), the bucolic
characters achieve contentment by turning away from themselves through willed
identification with their imaginary counterparts. They become bucolic not by dis-
covering a certain kind of self but by imagining and projecting one: this is the
characteristic action around which the new genre centers and that takes the place
of the unfolding of character in action that for Aristotle is the chief attraction of
narrative literature.
The herdsmen’s extension of selfhood through identification with imaginary
counterparts thematizes the allure of the newly won concept of fictionality of
which they themselves are a preeminent example and prepares the ground for the
120 genres
identification of poet with herdsman that will be of decisive importance for the
future of the genre. For it is this identification that makes the pastoral world an
explicit image of imaginative activity expressed as literary invention.
The relationship between the author and his own pastoral creation is first
broached in Theocritus’s Idyll 7. In this poem, a young poet by the name of Simichi-
das tells of his meeting with a shepherd by the name of Lycidas. Unlike the other
bucolic Idylls, which are enacted in a dramatic present, this poem is a retrospective
narration with a precise real-world location. It reads like autobiography and was
understood as such by ancient readers who identified the young poet with Theocri-
tus. Lycidas, on the other hand, is clearly a bucolic character—he looks like one
and sings like one, and his gift of a staff to Simichidas parallels the scene of poetic
initiation between Hesiod and the Muses in the Theogony.
Inspiration narratives are fairly frequent in Hellenistic poetry, although the
encounter with the inspiring being is elsewhere deferred to dreams by the poets
of this period. By employing the heteronym Simichidas in Idyll 7, Theocritus
allows a version of himself to meet his invention Lycidas in a fictional inspi-
ration scene in which this youthful self-representation is inspired by his own
creation. By fashioning a poem in which the fictionalized author emulates his
own fictional character, Theocritus creates an autobiographical narrative that,
elusive as it is, remains faithful to the message of the other bucolic Idylls, that
we free ourselves to change by identifying with the products of the fictionalizing
imagination.
The presence of the author in a fictional world of his own invention, encoun-
tering there what is recognizably one of his own fictional creations, is an inno-
vation in literary world building that will be vitally significant to the future of
bucolic poetry. For if Simichidas is Theocritus, and Simichidas can meet Lycidas,
the poet can be located in his poems in all kinds of guises and disguises. Traces of
the interpretive questions this possibility raises can be found in ancient commen-
tary on the poems, and Theocritus’s poetic successors respond to the opportunity
to place themselves in their poems with imaginative verve.
Most notably, the Epitaph for Bion presents a scene in which the historical poet
Bion was known to, associated with, and continues to be lamented by his own
bucolic characters: “Galatea too weeps for your song, whom you used to delight as
she sat beside you on the shore . . . . Now she sits upon the lonely sands, and tends
your flocks till this hour” (lines 58–63). The poem does not merely call a historical
poet a herdsman explicitly for the first time (Van Sickle 1976: 27; Alpers 1996: 153).
More ambitiously, it posits a bucolic world in which beings from different onto-
logical domains can mingle freely.
The unknown author of the Lament for Bion emphasizes his own, and the
dead Bion’s, allegiance to the bucolic poetry of Theocritus. However, in making
the bucolic poem a world in which ontologically problematic content between the
realms of myth, bucolic literature, and historical reality can be staged, he goes well
beyond the model that authorizes his experiments in this regard. In doing so, he
foregrounds the power of the bucolic poet as fiction maker to appropriate entities
pastoral 121
from all of these realms to create the world of his poems. In the actual world, it
is impossible for a poet to meet a character he has invented, although, as the pro-
logue to Hesiod’s Theogony reveals, he may record his encounters with gods in a
way that eludes definitive redescription as either literary trope or autobiographical
testimony. For it is widely believed that some kind of interaction between human
beings and gods is possible.
Contact between actual and fictional entities is not, however, conventionally
accepted, although in bucolic poetry it can be shown. Theocritus, in Idyll 7, masks
its ontological and cognitive difficulties by inventing the heteronym Simichidas
to stage his meeting with the fictional being Lycidas. The author of the Lament for
Bion is far less reticent. He quite unabashedly asserts Bion’s coexistence with his
fictional creations and leaves his readers to work out the consequences.
Summer: The Eclogues of Virgil

As the Idylls imagine the transformation of the herdsmen in the image of their own
songs, the Lament for Bion, like the autobiographical Idyll 7, imagines the transfor-
mation of a historical poet in the image of his own fiction. The emulation that is
characteristic of bucolic poetry is not just poem-internal. Rather, the problematic
contact between historical and fictional worlds makes bucolic poetry the genre
in which the recursive relationship between literary fiction and historical reality
is most clearly staged and investigated: if the dead poet of the Lament is repre-
sented as a herdsman, this is because he has experienced the same transformation
as Theocritus’s fictional characters—by singing of bucolic singers he became one
himself.
The ease of such transformations is taken for granted in the bucolic poems
of Theocritus; the majority of the herdsmen blend without difficulty into their
imagined doubles, Thyrsis with Daphnis, Lycidas with Comatas, Damoetas and
Daphnis with Polyphemus and his friend. While the goatherd of Idyll 3 has some
difficulty in convincing himself (and us) of his resemblance to his self-elected
models, his inability to have the kind of imaginative life he desires lies simply in
his failure to imagine this life with sufficient conviction.
Virgil’s shepherds, by contrast, are circumscribed by a history and a politics
that have the power to suspend this freedom indefinitely. Tityrus, in Eclogue 1,
may “meditate his woodland Muse on slender reed,” but Meliboeus, his interloc-
utor, is an exile from his country and so incapable of bucolic song. Under such
circumstances, continuing commitment to a poetics of fictionality looks like
self-deception or willful ignorance. As Meliboeus tells us that Tityrus makes the
woods echo the name of Amaryllis, attentive readers will recall that Amaryllis is
the beloved of the goatherd of Idyll 3, the one Theocritean singer whose grasp of his
own genre is manifestly lacking.
122 genres
As the poem progresses, more details about the exile of Meliboeus emerge.
While Tityrus has a protector in Rome who has preserved the tenure of his land
for him, Meliboeus’s fields are to become the property of an “impious soldier,” his
dispossession a result of discord among “the wretched citizens” (lines 70–72). The
threat that hovered around the opening of the poem takes on a recognizable his-
torical shape: what threatens the herdsmen is expulsion from their land so that this
property may be awarded to military veterans, just as land was in fact expropriated
for such veterans in the aftermath of the civil wars.
The poem offers a series of analogues between its pastoral fiction and the
world in which that fiction is published that cannot easily be worked into a single
equation. If Tityrus is an emulator of Theocritus whose land was preserved for
him through the agency of a powerful figure at Rome, the suggestion of the ancient
commentator Servius that Tityrus is a figure of the poet, whose own land was pre-
served for him by some such person, seems natural enough. Yet modern scholars
have pointed to the impossibility of this identification in other respects—Tityrus is
a white-haired ex-slave, and, more tellingly, his conception of bucolic song falls far
short of the complex mediation of historical reality and bucolic fiction in Eclogue 1
itself (Putnam 1970: 64–75).
In addition to these puzzling coincidences of fictional and historical content,
the formal organization of the collection at times conflates historical author with
fictional character and at times suspends this conflation. The order of the poems
that is consistently observed in the manuscript tradition, and that is generally held
to reflect an edition made by the poet himself, shows a clear alternation in mode
of presentation: the odd-numbered poems are dramatic, and the even-numbered
poems not. While there is considerable variety of both types, Virgil gives a consis-
tent pattern to the diversity of form that characterizes Theocritus’s bucolic poetry
(Coleman 1977: 20–21; Van Sickle 1978: 19–20).
According to ancient literary theory, the alternation between narrative and
dramatic poems ought to correspond to an alternation between poet’s speech
and character speech. This distinction disappears, however, as the book unfolds.
Eclogue 2 begins with narrative: “The shepherd Corydon loved the fair Alexis.”
Eclogue 3 opens with unframed dialogue between Menalcas and Damoetas: “Tell
me, Damoetas, whose flock is this? Is it that of Meliboeus?” The reader naturally
assumes that since Eclogue 2 is narration, the speaker who introduces the long
speech by Corydon in Eclogue 2 is the poet, and that the dialogue between the char-
acters in Eclogue 3 is a dramatic fiction from which the poet has absented himself.
In Eclogue 5, however, the character Menalcas offers to give to Mopsus the reed
pipe “which taught me ‘Corydon loved the fair Alexis,’ and ‘Whose flock is this? Is
it that of Meliboeus?’ ” Either the narrator of Eclogue 2 was not in fact Virgil, but
the shepherd Menalcas, and the dramatic fiction of Eclogue 3 was authored by this
same character, or Virgil himself has been an inhabitant of his own pastoral world
and while within it gave his pipe to Menalcas, who is now giving it to Mopsus
(Hardie 2002: 21; Breed 2006: 354–57).4 As we wonder about these questions, we
face the same dilemma that we face in Eclogue 1. Rather than the option to see the
pastoral 123
bucolic characters as instances of authorial self-projection, a possibility we may

freely accept or reject in Theocritus’s Idylls, Virgil confronts us simultaneously
with both the necessity and the impossibility of this identification.
The relationship between Menalcas and the poet is explored at greater length
in Eclogue 9, a dialogue between the herdsmen Moeris and Lycidas that is care-
fully patterned on Theocritus’s Idyll 7. In response to Moeris’s eviction from his
land, Lycidas recalls his erroneous belief that “Menalcas had saved everything
with his songs.” Having been corrected by Moeris, the two exchange fragments of
Menalcas’s works that look back over the Eclogues as a whole and trace their resem-
blance to, and divergence from, the bucolic poetry of Theocritus. Having com-
pleted half their journey—they reach the very point at which the Lycidas of Idyll 7
makes his appearance as the inspirational genius of bucolic song—they postpone
further singing and resolve to go on in silence. Menalcas never appears. Historical
reality trumps poetic fiction and the character who is credited with songs that mir-
ror Virgil’s achievement in the collection as a whole apparently cannot save Moeris
from the same fate as Meliboeus in Eclogue 1.
The prospectus of bucolic poetry in the figure of Menalcas is a prelude to the
renunciation of the genre in the last poem of the book. Here Menalcas does make a
brief appearance among the herdsmen and pastoral divinities that visit the suffer-
ing Gallus. Yet this Menalcas is kept at arm’s length by the strong authorial voice
that tells us at the end of the poem that the poet is hanging up his pipes. The Menal-
cas of Eclogue 5 could hardly be more strongly identified with the poet himself; the
Menalcas of Eclogue 9 is an echo of the author, his songs a tenebrous double of the
Eclogues themselves; the Menalcas of Eclogue 10, by contrast, is a minor character
who is distant from the narrative voice of the poem in which he appears.
The possibility and the degree of identification between Virgil and his herds-
men shift as we make our way through the Eclogues. For Servius, Virgil’s self-
representation as Tityrus is an accommodation to the necessities of patronage at
a difficult moment in Roman history. Theocritus, he claims, is always straight-
forwardly mimetic (his herdsmen are herdsmen and nothing more), but Virgil
needed to thank the patrons who had saved his land and so there are moments
in his poems when this character stands for the poet. We should not look for
such moments everywhere, Servius suggests, but only in passages that deal with
this issue. Nevertheless, the presence of allegory is not to be deplored, since it is a
sophistication (urbanitas) that distinguishes his poems from those of his predeces-
sor (Thilo 1887: 2–3, 33).
We would, of course, prefer to ascribe more ambitious intentions to Virgil’s
transformation of his models. The poet did not introduce biographical allegory
into his poems because his particular situation left him no choice but to vitiate the
pure fictionality of his pastoral world with historical references. Rather he chose
to do so in order to reveal the ultimate dependence of all literary fictions on the
social and political circumstance in which they emerge. Nonetheless, as defend-
ers of Servius have argued, his “principle of discontinuous allegory” recognizes
that Virgil does, at moments, identify himself with his characters in a way that
124 genres
Theocritus does not, and that these moments make art’s social and political com-
mitments explicit. While Servius does not explore the more complicated relation-
ship between Virgil and Menalcas, his reading anticipates modern comparisons
of the two poets insofar as it is recognizes, and praises, in the Eclogues a depar-
ture from the “semantic transparency and innocence” of mimetic representation
in Theocritus, as a result of which bucolic poetry, for the first time, “becomes a
metaphor for something other than itself” (Patterson 1987: 34).5
Such a contrast ignores the fundamental role of impersonation and mimetic
desire in the bucolic poetry of Theocritus. The doubleness of his herdsmen allows
them to be read as figures of authorial self-projection, and it is only by treating the
Idylls as a foil to the Eclogues that this complexity disappears. What is different
about Theocritus’s herdsmen is neither their simplicity nor their realism, but the
fact that, with the exception of Idyll 7, their legibility as authorial self-projection is
not connected to particular historical circumstances as it is in the Eclogues. Read-
ing the self-fictionalizing songs of the characters of the Idylls as analogous to those
of their author is thus a possibility rather than a requirement, though the emula-
tion of the fictional herdsman Lycidas in the autobiography of the bucolic poet
Simichidas in Idyll 7 nudges us in this direction.
The Eclogues, by contrast, make inescapable, though fleeting, identifications
between poet and character, so that we have no alternative at these moments but to
read the pastoral world as a figure of the poet’s own circumstances. As the Aeneid
fuses myth with annalistic history, so the Eclogues fuse contemporary reality with
pastoral fiction, drastically increasing both the number and the transparency of the
connections between the pastoral world and the history of the poet’s own times. In
particular, when real historical events explain the presence or absence of a charac-
ter within the pastoral world, this world looks inescapably like a way of thinking
about the tragedies of history through a darkening of the pastoral fiction.
The overt, robust, and cheerful fictionality of Theocritean pastoral has the form
of an invitation. Apart from the problem of unsatisfied desire—not really a problem in
any case since it is the membership pass to bucolic society—the only cloud that hangs
over the Idylls is the poet’s melancholy wish, at the end of Idyll 7, that he might once
again enjoy the experiences we have just heard about. The exclusion that motivates
this wish is unexplained, but its effect is to present the world of the poem as effectively
closed to its author at the moment of writing. In Virgil such exclusions loom large and
make the pastoral world an object of nostalgia even for those within it.
Autumn: Spenser’s The Shepheardes

Calender
Virgil’s prestige ensured that the Eclogues became an object of emulation in Latin
literary culture. Particularly noteworthy are the Bucolica of Calpurnius Siculus
pastoral 125
(first century) and Nemesianus (third century). Although these poems have not
received the critical attention devoted to Virgil, both develop the pastoral genre in
innovative ways that repay comparison with Theocritus’s Greek successors.
Calpurnius’s pastoral double, Corydon, is a rustic praise poet who remains
stable as a figure of the author throughout the collection. His changing fortunes
allow Calpurnius to develop a subtle account of poetry’s dependence upon courtly
patronage and the operations of the pastoral fiction in which such dependency is
figured (Newlands 1987: 218–31). Ambivalence about the countryside also appears
in his extravagant praise of the amphitheater at Rome even as this wide-eyed won-
der reveals the panegyric value of the genre: the rustic’s innocent eye allows his
sophisticated readers to experience their city once again for the marvel it truly is.
The four poems of Nemesianus transmitted with the text of Calpurnius exhibit
a formal variety that ranges among the familiar types of pastoral poem, and so, at
the end of the tradition, give its salient forms in miniature. All four are beautifully
written and display an imaginative handling of the genre’s conventions. In addi-
tion, the second shows a kind of desperate physical eroticism on the part of its shep-
herd boys that issues in violence against the love object and differs markedly from
the experience of desire in the earlier tradition. Nemesianus, however, eschews
the ambitions of the book-length projects of Virgil and Calpurnius; his poems are
discrete compositions like those of Theocritus; they make no reference to contem-
porary history, and their poet does not appear in them in bucolic disguise.
It is, by contrast, the ambition of the pastoral collection and its claims as a
cipher of contemporary reality that will particularly appeal to Renaissance pasto-
ralists, and these give characteristic expression to what has been called the “mas-
sive incursion of shepherds” into the literature of the period (Iser 1989: 75). While it
may seem strange to refer to the first canonical manifestation of such ambitions in
English under the rubric of “Autumn,” Edmund Spenser (c. 1552–1599) is both heir
to the medieval pastoral tradition (Cooper 1976) and a conscious emulator of con-
temporary continental models (Burrow 2001: 220; Greene 2001: 238). His project
strives for a condition of maximum ripeness at a time when the genre attains its
greatest prestige.
Three features of The Shepheardes Calender are immediately striking in com-
parison with the pastoral poetry of antiquity: the clear organization of the col-
lection according to the calendar theme, the enormous amount of paratextual
material with which Spenser has surrounded his poems, and their extraordinary
metrical variety (Alpers 1996: 182; Berger 1988: 319, 327).
Each month of the calendar consists not only of the poem by that name but
of a woodcut, an argument, an emblem, a gloss, and a gloss of the emblem. The
interpretive efforts of E.K., Spenser’s self-inflicted commentator, include, but are
not limited to, the identification of rhetorical and poetic figures, notes on literary
imitation, revelations concerning the disguised identity of the pastoral characters,
and reminders of the mimetic decorum that informs the depiction of rustics. In
addition to this line-by-line commentary, there is, at the outset, a synoptic divi-
sion of the collection as a whole into “three forms or rankes”: plaintive, recreative,
126 genres
and moral poems. The hovering interpreter seeks to guide affective as well as
cognitive responses, and the world of the work is tightly ringed by hermeneutic
imperatives that challenge us to make sense of it even as we are trying to read and
imagine it.
The circumscription of the pastoral world by an external interpretive appa-
ratus would of course have been familiar to Spenser from his ancient texts, but
it is worth pondering the consequences of his choice to emulate this presentation
in the appearance of his own work. In “February,” E.K. notes the virtuosity of the
poet’s description of winter that “may bee indifferently taken, eyther for old Age,
or for Winter season.” Likewise, in the tale of the oak and the briar, the semantic
transparency of the allegorical fable is constantly occluded by the richness of the
fabulistic description, as the pathos of the farmer’s assault on the oak, and the
death of the briar as a result, are given with an animistic empathy worthy of Ovid’s
Metamorphoses:
The byting frost nipt his stalke dead,

The watrie wette weighed downe his head,
And heaped snowe burdned him so sore,
That nowe upright he can stand no more. (lines 230–33)
Cuddie cuts Thenot off after a couple more lines with a complaint that his long
tale contains little of value, and his gesture seems to thematize the reader’s likely
reaction: the more storylike Thenot’s tale becomes, the further it drifts from the
hermeneutics of allegory toward the pleasures (or frustrations) of fiction. So, too,
in “May,” Palinodie responds to Piers’s tale of the fox and the goat with the claim
that it lacks point—which he promises to supply in his own forthcoming version—
and E.K.’s comments on the figure of fictio make the gap between the pleasures of
invention and the didactic uses to which it may be put all the more apparent.
In “March,” Thomalin gives a detailed account of the winged Cupid he has seen
entangled in a thicket, and Willye reports that his father, too, once saw him caught
in a fowling net “which he for Carrion crowes had set.” E.K.’s gloss, that Cupid’s
appearance is an allegorical representation of the properties of love that should
be compared with similar representations in ancient poets, manifestly fails to do
justice to the wild blend of the real and the fantastic in the poem itself. Such mani-
festations of the marvelous in the ordinary English countryside are not so easily
assimilated to higher interpretive goals. Likewise, in “July,” Morrell’s account of the
hills of Kent as the resort of “holy Faunes” and “Sylvanes” is not easily reconciled
with Thomalin’s reverence for these same hills as the home of long dead Christian
saints. While E.K. asserts that the former are mere poetic feigning, in the world of
the poem no such decision is possible.
To speak, then, of a tension between the represented world and its interpreta-
tion hardly does justice to the deliberateness with which Spenser underlines the
difference between engaging with his fiction as an imaginative event and interpret-
ing it as a discourse about the world. The emblem to “September” even figures the
pastoral 127
observer as interpreter in the person of Narcissus and so warns against the dangers
of seeing only what we want to see in the world of the poem. For in the case of Nar-
cissus, we learn, “much gazing had bereft him of sence.”
So, too, if we pause to marvel at Spenser’s metrical virtuosity, we will find
ourselves enacting the difference between engaging with the poems as autono-
mous fictional worlds and appreciating them as artifacts created by their poet. All
ancient pastoral, Greek and Latin, is written in the same meter (the dactylic hex-
ameter), and, with a single exception (a later Greek imitation of Theocritus), there
are no changes of meter within the poems. Indeed, both Theocritus and Virgil
exploit the fact that what within the world of the poems is song, is, at the level of
the text, metrically indistinguishable from the dialogue that surrounds it. Nonper-
formativity is another marker of fictionality and invites the reader to imagine the
material difference of the singer’s voice that the text does not instantiate.
By contrast, Spenser’s metrical variety is palpable and impressive. In addition
to differences in meter from one poem to the next, many individual poems feature
changes of meter within them that reflect transitions between dialogue and song or
between dialogue and fable. The most elaborate is “August,” which contains three
distinct metrical schemes, one for the framing dialogue, one for the verse-capping
song contest, and one for Cuddie’s reperformance of a song by Colin Clout, which,
not accidentally, happens to be the first English sestina.
The representation of song in this poem’s song contest is a closer imitation of
actual singing—in its use of nonsemantic vocalization, for example—than any-
thing found in ancient pastorals. In addition, E.K. offers no comment on Colin’s
sestina, which is lauded by the characters within the poem as the culmination of
pastoral song. Is Spenser playing a similar game to the ancient poets here, staging
the reader’s inability to access the actual sound of vocal performance that, within
the world of the poem, sets one singer apart from another? Or should we under-
stand the sestina’s complexity as an analogue to the pleasures of the performance,
offering a formal satisfaction to the reader that is equivalent to the delight the
shepherds take in it as song and that contrasts with the attempt to capture singing
mimetically in the song contest that precedes it?
In either case, Spenser’s virtuosity is a kind of poetic signature that marks his
poems as their author’s creation and so in some measure blocks their inhabitabil-
ity by both his characters and his readers.6 Reperformance of another character’s
song is common in pastoral and enables the mimetic emulation at its heart: the
herdsmen identify with the singers they imagine in their songs, and these acts of
impersonation allow the genre itself to be read as a figure of the imaginative life of
its author. However, when Cuddie performs Colin’s sestina, there is no sense that
he inhabits the imaginary space it offers in this way. Perigot expresses his admi-
ration of Colin’s verses and the way in which Cuddie “dolefully his [i.e., Colin’s]
doole… didst reherse” (lines 190–93).
In addition, we are frequently reminded by E.K. that in the person of Colin
“the Authors selfe is shadowed.” If Colin is Spenser, then Cuddie would be enact-
ing not Colin’s, but Spenser’s, virtuosity here and the repeated identification of
128 genres
Colin with the poet makes E.K.’s lack of comment on the sestina all the more sur-
prising. Once again, the function of the commentator seems to be to underline the
possibility of approaching the fiction in different ways: we may regard the songs as
authored by characters in the poems, or we may read them as transparent demon-
strations of their author’s prowess.7
E.K. presses his identification of Spenser confidently elsewhere, sifting “poeti-
cal fiction” from what is “unfeignedly spoken of the Poete selfe” (“June”; compare
with “September”). Yet this identification can no longer be sustained when his dis-
tinctive contribution to the pastoral book, its organization according to a calendar
scheme, is fully realized. For in “December,” Colin dies. Indeed, not only does he
die, but he dies with a disavowal of the pastoral project that we are witnessing come
to completion with his death.
What Colin realizes is that human life is not made up of months and seasons.
Looking about him for analogies between his life and nature, he finds he has gone
from spring to winter without the harvest his early years had promised:
My boughes with blosmes that crowned were at firste,

And promised of timely fruit such store,
Are left both bare and barrein now at erst. (lines 103–5)
The failure of the pastoral flowers to bear the fruit of wisdom is further marked by
the absence of an emblem for “December” that would give its character’s ethical
aspirations in miniature as the other months do for theirs. Instead, “December”
ends with an epilogue in which the author asserts his distance from his work, now
considered in Horatian mode as a monument of art rather than a projection of
selfhood. “Carefull Colinet” is no longer one with his author.
While renunciation of pastoral for higher forms is a conventional way to end
the pastoral book, Spenser’s decision to kill off, rather than simply abandon, his
alter ego is striking—there is no such act of violence in the Eclogues—and makes
it all the more remarkable that he should have chosen to bring him back to life
some years later in Colin Clout’s Come Home Again. Much has been made of pas-
toral’s ability to figure the realities of courtly life under the guise of a protective
fiction (Montrose 1983), and Spenser’s second venture into the genre is a splendid
example of these possibilities, as he handles the persons of the court, their accom-
plishments and charms, and even the relative merits of court and country, in a
graceful poème à clef.
The Shepheardes Calender is a very different kind of work, however, and the
sort of fiction at which the later work excels operates at best only intermittently
in it (Iser 2006: 78–79). It has none of the knowing, intimate insinuations of the
court insider, and the ecclesiastical controversies of “May,” “July,” and “Septem-
ber,” while unresolved, are as explicit as a writer can be while maintaining any illu-
sion of fictionality. Conversely, Colin’s song of “Elisa, Queene of Shepheardes All”
is announced in the Argument to “Aprill” as intended “to the honor and prayse” of
Queen Elizabeth and is, as announced, a fair advertisement of Spenser’s promise
pastoral 129
as a writer of pastoral panegyric. Yet this song advances Spenser’s cause simply by
being a “proofe of his more excellencie and skill in poetrie,” rather than by reflect-
ing, or reflecting on, anything specific in the world outside the fiction. It is on
the perfection of the pastoral achievement itself that Spenser stakes his hopes (see
Cullen 1970: 118–19).
Winter: Arnold, Mallarmé, Pessoa

One of the ambitions of this collection of essays is to consider for what reasons and
under what circumstances a genre ceases to be viable. In the case of pastoral, it is
important to note that the genre’s exhaustion predates the disappearance of shep-
herds as familiar figures in everyday life,8 although this disappearance may make
the reemergence of the genre unlikely. To what factors, then, should we ascribe its
discontinuation?
It is crucial to pastoral that the poet be able to understand and appropriate
the herdsman as a figure of his own imaginative experience and of the prac-
tice and potential of imaginative self-projection in human life more generally.
Unwillingness to engage in such appropriation is therefore likely to impede the
functioning of the genre, as is a more dynamic understanding of the role of the
natural world in human development, as an active participant in human for-
mation rather than the “green cabinet” that frames the shepherd’s song. Too
deep a concern for shepherds as shepherds, and too strong a feeling for nature
as such, are, paradoxical as it may at fi rst seem, obstacles to pastoral fiction, and
William Wordsworth’s preface to the Lyrical Ballads contains all the information
one needs to understand the obvious antipathy of the Romantics to the genre in
its stricter forms.
Wordsworth famously claims to have used “the real language of men” in his
poems, avoiding consciously poetic diction,9 and to have endeavored to illustrate
in them “the essential passions of the heart” in the rural circumstances in which
they survive uncorrupted by urban culture. He understands his role as poet as
“a man speaking to men,” communicating his own and others’ feelings for the
sake of a sympathetic understanding of human life as it really is. Nothing could
be further from Wordsworth’s intentions than a labyrinth of recreational artifacts
that express the poet’s capacity for unlimited invention. His is a poetics of service
and self-imposed restraint.
“Resolution and Independence” is a powerful manifestation of this antipas-
toral poetic. Wordsworth describes a walk upon the moors in which he becomes
involved in unhappy brooding over the consequences of poets’ self-absorption. At
this moment of despondency and self-absorption of his own, he comes upon an
old man of impressively aged appearance peering into a mountain pool, and he
asks him what he is doing in the lonely spot. The man replies that he is gathering
130 genres
leeches, but as he explains his occupation, the poet experiences a kind of sublime
alienation from his speech:
But now his voice to me was like a stream

Scarce heard; nor word from word could I divide;
And the whole body of the Man did seem
Like one whom I had met with in a dream;
Or like a man from some far region sent,
To give me human strength, by apt admonishment. (lines 107–12)
Unable to process what is happening to him, the poet recurs to his former fears
about poets’ self-inflicted isolation and simply repeats his question—“How is it
that you live, and what is it you do?”—reenacting in miniature the progress of the
poem to this point. The leech gatherer repeats his tale, the poet calms down, and
Wordsworth promises himself and us that the man’s image will henceforth func-
tion as a kind of consolation and self-reproach when he is tempted to feel sorry for
himself. The leech gatherer’s uncomplaining independence of spirit, we are given
to understand, is the opposite of poets’ solipsistic tendencies to self-pity.
What in another age might have seemed a promising opportunity for the expan-
sion of the pastoral genre—one can imagine a “Leech-Gatherer Eclogue” alongside
other attempts to expand the genre by occupation—here follows an opposite tra-
jectory. Rather than offering himself to the poet for fictionalizing appropriation,
the leech gatherer’s value to Wordsworth is that, in his lived reality, he rebuffs
such efforts at assimilation. His role in the poem is not to be an icon of Words-
worth’s imaginative activity as poet, but to enable his imaginative sympathies as
an ordinary person, offering a proof of sociality’s power to break through the crip-
pling self-absorption that haunts the vocation of poet (see Eldridge 1989: 116–22).
It is against Wordsworth’s double disavowal of artifice and fictionality that
I want to consider a few last examples of the pastoral impulse, for while the ambition
of the pastoral book is no longer to be met with, there are impressive individual
efforts to revive the imaginative potential of the bucolic singer, and these last fruits
from the old tree are particularly sweet.
Matthew Arnold’s most famous statement of his poetics is a declaration of his
admiration for Sophocles, who “saw life steadily and saw it whole” (“To a Friend”).
The Greek’s “even-balanced soul,” he claims, “business could not make dull, nor
passion wild.” So, too, in the preface to the second edition of his Poems, Arnold
identifies the task of his own poetry as the recovery of sanity: “[T]hat is the great
virtue of the ancient literature; the want of which is the great defect of the mod-
ern.” The literature of his own times, he argues, is characterized by a relentless
pursuit of variety and the general intellectual vice of modernity—its addiction to
the fantastic.
Arnold’s own most successful poetic works are, however, I think it is fair to
argue, a brilliant expression of the very emotional and imaginative impulses that
he decries in the culture of his age. This is particularly true of his experiments in
pastoral 131
pastoral poetry, “The Scholar-Gipsy” and “Thyrsis,” which are modeled not on the
sober classicism of Sophocles (as Arnold saw it), but on the fantastically inventive
and emotionally fraught bucolic laments of the later Hellenistic period.
The first of the two, “The Scholar-Gipsy,” is a poem of fantasized escape.
Addressing his fellow poet and college friend Arthur Hugh Clough as “shepherd,”
Arnold recalls their walks in the Oxford countryside and the story they shared of a
poor scholar who, in an earlier age, fled the university and civic ambition to roam
the countryside in self-elected spiritual quest. The pure of heart may still catch a
glimpse of him as he haunts the fields and woods, but he shuns all efforts to engage
him in conversation. He is above all a figure of flight from the “this strange disease
of modern life,”10 and at the end of the poem he is identified with the refusal of the
ancient cultures of the Near East to traffic with the upstart Greeks. In “Thyrsis,”
the scholar-gipsy is identified with Clough himself, who had died in the meantime,
a victim, Arnold suggests, of modernity’s enervating and dispiriting dispersal of
the self.
In both poems, the richly described landscape is emptied of its human users,
not just urban intruders in pursuit of leisure, but also the rural laborers who work
its fields, so that the figure of the imagined and imaginary wanderer becomes its
sole authentic inhabitant. In “Thyrsis,” Arnold himself is tempted by dreams of
escape, and his rediscovery of the tree that, in their youth, he and Clough had
imagined to be a pledge of the scholar-gipsy’s continuing presence in the landscape
is enabled by his flight from a party of hunters, which suggests the flight of the
gipsy and of Clough himself, who had left England for Italy, disheartened, Arnold
claims, by certain egregious social injustices he had encountered in his own coun-
try (lines 46–47).
By the end of the poem, however, Arnold has relinquished his claims upon the
tree since the possibility of escape it represents properly belongs to Thyrsis/Clough
alone and not to himself. He is willing to settle instead for the mere possibility that
in the future his friend’s voice may yet remind him on occasions of the spiritual
ambitions they shared when they were young:
’Mid city-noise, not, as with thee of yore,

Thyrsis! in reach of sheep-bells is my home.
—Then through the great town’s harsh, heart-wearying roar,
Let in thy voice a whisper often come,
To chase fatigue and fear:
Why faintest thou? I wander’d till I died.
Roam on! The light we sought is shining still.
Dost thou ask proof? Our tree yet crowns the hill,
Our Scholar travels yet the loved hill-side. (lines 231–40)
Though Arnold feared he had not said enough about Clough in the poem, he has,
by its end, become a figure of reproach as effective as Wordsworth’s leech gatherer.
His power as such derives, however, not from the reality of his life but from the
132 genres
compelling fantasy that Arnold constructs upon it, for the poem is pure fantasy:
Arnold believes neither in the mythology of the pastoral and its antique divini-
ties, nor in the scholar-gipsy and the tree that symbolizes his survival. Youth, the
countryside, and Clough—all these are really lost to Arnold. But so are the pasto-
ral conventions with which he attempts to console himself for their loss, and it is
the very obvious fictitiousness of the reanimated tropology that gives the poem so
much of its pathos.
Arnold wills consolation, but his poem is fantastic to its last detail—the whis-
pered voice of the ghostly revenant—and manifests the same inability “to see life
steadily and to see it whole” that he laments in the culture of his age. Moreover,
the emulation of antiquity that he asserts in his preface as its cure can do noth-
ing to staunch the wound of raw feeling when the beliefs that underpin its literary
achievements are presented as manifestly unbelievable. Clough is not “wandering
with great Mother’s train divine,” he is not hearing “the Lityerses-song again,”
and “Daphnis with his silver voice” is not singing for him. He is simply dead, and
modernity, as Arnold understands it and expresses it in his poem, is a condition of
nostalgia composed of the desire that it should not be so and the inability to make
it otherwise (Lerner 1972: 234–36).11 This is the limbo of “we” of the “The Scholar
Gipsy,” we “who never deeply felt, nor clearly will’d, / Whose insight never has
borne fruit in deeds” (lines 173–74). It is the condition of those whose imaginative
powers are unable to fashion a satisfying solution to their emotional needs. Under
such circumstances, the pastoral conventions, and the art language that voices
them, can be no more than fictions, which is to say, falsehoods.
The artifice and fictionality that collapse Arnold’s pastoral poetry in nostal-
gia are, in Stéphane Mallarmé’s nearly contemporary L’Après-Midi d’un Faune, the
values that sustain the work and its sylvan protagonist. Mallarmé’s faun begins
with the question that haunts Arnold’s efforts to make use of antiquity: “Aimai-je
un rêve?” The faun asserts his desire to “perpetuate” the nymphs that peopled his
pastoral vision but wonders if their “incarnat léger” was not perhaps illusory, as it
seems to resolve itself into the landscape that surrounds him. He calls for reflec-
tion, and wonders to himself, “[S]i les femmes dont tu gloses / Figurent un souhait
de tes sens fabuleux.”12
What the faun learns is that it is the imaginative presence of his visions that
matters and not their ontological status (Landy 1994: 60–66). Having calmed the
erotic crisis that precipitated his initial outburst, he returns, at the end of the poem,
to a state of pastoral lethargy, as he bids farewell to the nymphs and embraces the
possibility that they were, in all likelihood, figments of the landscape as he had
initially feared: “Couple, adieu; je vais voir l’ombre que tu devins.”
The faun’s imaginative trajectory exactly parallels that of Theocritus’s success-
ful bucolic singers, such as Lycidas and Polyphemus, who are able to quiet their
erotic distress by projecting to themselves a vividly imagined version of their own
pastoral existence (Walker 1978: 109–12). Likewise, the success of the faun’s imagi-
native exercise is immediately legible as an image of his author’s: “[D]roit et seul,
sous un flot antique de lumière,” the faun is a brilliantly persuasive evocation of
pastoral 133
antiquity, and the poem asks no more of this vision than that it be fully present
to the imagination. Its enactment of fictional presence points toward the famous
sonnet that celebrates just this process of self-satisfaction through the willful evo-
cation of an antique landscape:
Mes bouquins refermés sur le nom de Paphos

Il m’amuse d’élire avec le seul génie
Une ruine, par mille écumes bénie
Sous l’hyacinthe, au loin, de ses jours triomphaux.
Mallarmé’s first version of L’Après-Midi d’un Faune was intended for the stage, but
his desire for performance came to be replaced by an understanding of his literary
drama as a kind of ideal theater that gave verbal realization to the multiplicity of
selfhood: “A la rigueur un papier suffit pour évoquer toute pièce: aidé de sa person-
nalité multiple chacun pouvant se la jouer en dedans” (cited in Howe 1990: 100).
At this point we have come full circle: the importance of pastoral is understood to
lie not in its ability to represent the world in fictional cipher but in its ability, as
dramatic poetry, to allow a fictionalizing self-projection on the part of its author.
Drama merges with lyric in “le seul théâtre de notre esprit.”
So, too, in the work of Fernando Pessoa, pastoral is the sign under which a
fusion of dramatic and lyric impulses is enacted. Pessoa spoke of himself as “sev-
eral different poets at once, a dramatic poet who writes lyrical poems” (cited in
Hamburger 1969: 139, 146), and the refusal of the distinction between drama and
lyric that resulted in the invention of his heteronymic poets was enabled by his
interest in pastoral. He describes the emergence of the heteronyms in a letter to
Adolfo Casias Monteiro, a younger contemporary:
It one day occurred to me to play a joke on Sá-Carneiro—to invent a rather
complicated bucolic poet whom I would present in some guise of reality that
I’ve since forgotten. I spent a few days trying in vain to envision this poet.
One day when I’d finally given up—it was March 8th, 1914—I walked over to
a high chest of drawers, took a sheet of paper, and began to write standing up,
as I do whenever I can. And I wrote thirty-some poems at once, in a kind of
ecstasy I’m unable to describe. It was the triumphal day of my life, and I can
never have another one like it. I began with a title, The Keeper of Sheep. This
was followed by the appearance in me of someone whom I instantly named
Alberto Caeiro. Excuse the absurdity of this statement: my master had appeared
in me. That was what I immediately felt, and so strong was the feeling that, as
soon as those thirty-odd poems were written, I grabbed a fresh sheet of paper
and wrote, again all at once, the six poems that constitute “Slanting Rain,” by
Fernando Pessoa. All at once and with total concentration . . . . It was the return
of Fernando Pessoa as Alberto Caeiro to Fernando Pessoa himself. Or rather, it
was the reaction of Fernando Pessoa against his nonexistence as Alberto Caeiro.
(Pessoa 2001: 256; compare the discussion in Paz 1995: 7–8)
What begins as play for Pessoa, a prank upon a younger poet, becomes an unset-
tling experience of the self-alienation inseparable from fictional invention: this
134 genres
master who has appeared in him is an independent being, such that he can hardly
speak of himself as his creator. Caeiro is the sun around whom, in Octavio Paz’s
metaphor, the other heteronyms and Pessoa himself keep their courses (1995:
10), and he is a pastoral poet, the author of The Keeper of Sheep and The Amorous
Shepherd. His discovery by Pessoa, and his dramatization of this discovery as an
inspiration for himself and his poetic work, reenacts two foundational claims of
the genre—the advancement of selfhood through willed self-fictionalization and
the recursive effect of literary fiction on lived reality—in a disquieting contempo-
rary form.
For Pessoa’s heteronyms are not the many modes of a single poet, temporary
disguises that can be put on and off at will. There is no one behind the masks, no
author behind the personae.13 Nor is this multiplicity a Whitmanesque abundance
of actionable possible selves; it is rather the ontological tragedy of a copresence
that somehow falls short of full selfhood: “My dramas, instead of being divided
into acts full of action, are divided into souls. That’s what this apparently baffling
phenomenon comes down to . . . . I subsist as a medium of myself, but I’m less real
than the others, less substantial, less personal, and easily influenced by them all.
I too am a disciple of Caeiro” (Pessoa 2001: 262).
Plato’s division of literature into kinds in the Republic according to its nar-
rative mode is coeval with the philosophical project of understanding the self
and expressing the results of this inquiry as knowledge. By presenting the speech
of literary characters as an illegitimate and untruthful impersonation of actual
beings, Plato is able to treat the self’s desire for imaginative experience as a
craving for falsehood that has no place in authentic projects of self-knowledge and
self-development (book 3, 395c–d, 401b–c; book 10, 605c–6b). Through Aristotle’s
Poetics, Plato bequeathed this schema to literary criticism as a strong separation
between fictional and nonfictional discourses regardless of how these discourses
are valued—Aristotle himself famously prizes successful narrative literature of all
kinds as more serious and more philosophical than history because of its ability to
image in its plots basic truths about human character that receive full conceptual
exposition in philosophy (Poetics 9, 1451a36–b32).
On this account, lyric belongs with properly scientific discourses insofar as
it is understood as the authentic speech of a poet making genuine claims in his
own person, however much these claims may fall short of the conceptual rigor of
philosophy. By contrast, fictional discourses—drama and the character speech of
epic—however much we may value them for the insights into lived reality they dis-
close, belong to a special category of simulated or inauthentic speech: “feigning” as
Spenser’s commentator calls it, in the language of his time.
Pastoral is the genre that challenges this distinction most explicitly. From
Theocritus to Pessoa, pastoral asserts the inseparability of fiction from the project
of selfhood, conflating dramatic and lyric impulses and dramatizing the role of
imaginary experience in the development of the self (see Iser 1993: 22–86). Much
energy has been expended on demonstrating the difference between fictional and
possible worlds (see esp. Ronen 1994). A crucial difference, we might think, is that
pastoral 135
the former are unrealized and unrealizable, whereas modal imagining posits out-
comes that can be or could have been actualized. Pastoral’s charter has been to
explore the liminal territory that borders these two kinds of thinking. Its instantia-
tion of a poetics of pure fictionality made it the genre best equipped to investigate
the effects of such purified fictions on the self that chooses to espouse them as its
project, and it is no accident that Quixote, having failed to become a knight, turns
to pastoral as a genre that offers better hopes of success:
As they pursued their journey talking in this way they came to the very same
spot where they had been trampled on by the bulls. Don Quixote recognised
it, and said he to Sancho, “This is the meadow where we came upon those gay
shepherdesses and gallant shepherds who were trying to revive and imitate the
pastoral Arcadia there, an idea as novel as it was happy, in emulation whereof,
if so be thou dost approve of it, Sancho, I would have ourselves turn shepherds,
at any rate for the time I have to live in retirement. I will buy some ewes and
everything else requisite for the pastoral calling; and, I under the name of
the shepherd Quixotize and thou as the shepherd Panzino, we will roam the
woods and groves and meadows singing songs here, lamenting in elegies there,
drinking of the crystal waters of the springs or limpid brooks or flowing rivers.
The oaks will yield us their sweet fruit with bountiful hand, the trunks of the
hard cork trees a seat, the willows shade, the roses perfume, the widespread
meadows carpets tinted with a thousand dyes; the clear pure air will give us
breath, the moon and stars lighten the darkness of the night for us, song shall be
our delight, lamenting our joy, Apollo will supply us with verses, and love with
conceits whereby we shall make ourselves famed for ever, not only in this but in
ages to come. (1901: IV, 174)
NOTES
1. For the purposes of this chapter, I consider pastoral as a genre and not a mode,
that is to say, in Aristotelian terms, as a literary kind that consists in, and perpetuates
itself by, a sustained relationship between form and content. The most adventurous
treatment of pastoral as a mode or “process,” namely, that of “putting the complex into
the simple,” is Empson 1935. While there is much to be said for (and still more against)
this idea, I look at examples of pastoral whose generic features are readily identifiable.
2. This idea is continuous with Aristotle’s position in Poetics (9, 1451a36–b32), where
he argues that the mythological characters of tragedy are just as much their author’s
creation as those of comedy, which are universally acknowledged as such. See Ford 2002:
231 and Halliwell 2002: 166–68 on fictionality in the Poetics and Vernant 1991: 151–64 and
Bakker 2005: ix–xiii on the poetics of Homeric composition and performance.
3. By this I mean the more limited model of mimetic desire as emulation of a
literary character advanced at Girard 1978: 3, rather than the generalized model of all
desire as essentially mimetic that Girard developed from it.
4. Compare Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy: in Malone Dies, Malone, the narrator of
this, its second book, claims to have been the author of the first, Molloy, while in the
136 genres
final volume, The Unnamable, the anonymous narrator claims to be responsible for all
Beckett’s characters from Murphy to Malone.
5. Patterson 1987: 34 does not perpetuate the comparison between the two poets
in these terms. Compare Alpers 1979: 204–9, which notes how often comparisons of
Theocritus and Virgil replicate, with various degrees of explicitness and sophistication,
Friedrich Schiller’s antithesis of naive and sentimental poetry.
6. See Grundy 1969: 26: “The world The Shepheardes Calender creates exists to be
contemplated rather than entered; it presents to us a pure art-image, graceful and remote.”
7. I owe this thought to some oral reflections on speeches in Shakespeare by my
colleague Richard Strier.
8. An online search for One Man and His Dog in fact reveals that, according to
Wikipedia, televised sheep dog trials such as this could still attract prime time audiences
of more eight million in England in the 1980s.
9. Spenser’s early readers already criticize the artificiality of his language in The
Shepheardes Calender for its failure to accurately represent rural people. For a recent
discussion of Ben Jonson’s famous claim that Spenser “writ no language,” see Maley
(2001: 162–79). Artificiality of diction is also a part of Samuel Johnson’s well-known
dispraise of the genre’s mimetic shortcomings: “Surely, at the same time that a shepherd
learns theology, he may gain some acquaintance with his native language” (cited in van
Es 2006: 121).
10. “Dis-ease,” is Arnold’s telling rendering of the neg-otium that opposes pastoral
quiet.
11. An excellent discussion of the relationship between Arnold’s nostalgic poetic
language and his attitude to scientific modernity is in Riede 1988: 1–29 and (with
reference to these poems) 134–56.
12. I will make no attempt to translate Mallarmé’s French. See Mallarmé 2006 for
English translations.
13. So Hamburger 1969: 138–47 and De Sena 1982: 19–32 distinguish Pessoa’s aims
and achievement from the persona poetry of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot.
REFERENCES
Alpers, P. (1979). Singer of the Eclogues: A Study of Virgilian Pastoral. Berkeley: University
of California Press.
—— . (1996). What Is Pastoral? Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bakker, E. J. (2005). Pointing at the Past: From Formula to Performance in Homeric Poetics.
Washington, D.C.: Center for Hellenic Studies.
Berger, H., Jr. (1988). Revisionary Play: Studies in the Spenserian Dynamics. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Breed, B. W. (2006). “Time and Textuality in the Book of the Eclogues.” In M. Fantuzzi
and T. D. Papanghelis (eds.), Brill’s Companion to Greek and Latin Pastoral,
pp. 333–68. Leiden: Brill.
Burrow, C. (2001). “Spenser and Classical Traditions.” In A. Hadfield (ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to Spenser, pp. 217–36. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
pastoral 137
Cervantes, M. de (1901). Don Quixote, 4 Vols. Trans. John Ormsby: Glasgow: Gowans
& Gray.
Coleman, R. (1977). Virgil: Eclogues. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cooper, H. (1976). Pastoral: Mediaeval into Renaissance. Totowa, N.J.: Boydell &
Brewer.
Cullen, P. (1970). Spenser, Marvell, and Renaissance Pastoral. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press.
De Sena, J. (1982). “Fernando Pessoa: The Man Who Never Was.” In G. Monteiro (ed.),
The Man Who Never Was: Essays on Fernando Pessoa, pp. 19–32. Providence:
Gavea-Brown.
Eldridge, R. (1989). On Moral Personhood. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Empson, W. (1935). Some Versions of Pastoral. London: Chatto and Windus.
Ford, A. (2002). The Origins of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Girard, R. (1978). To Double Business Bound: Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and
Anthropology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Greene, R. (2001). “Spenser and Contemporary Vernacular Poetry.” In A. Hadfield (ed.),
The Cambridge Companion to Spenser, pp. 237–51. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Grundy, J. (1969). The Spenserian Poets. London: Edward Arnold.
Halliwell, S. (2002). The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems.
Hamburger, M. (1969). The Truth of Poetry: Tensions in Modern Poetry from Baudelaire to
the 1960s. New York: Harcourt.
Hardie, P. (2002). Ovid’s Poetics of Illusion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Howe, E. A. (1990). Stages of Self. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press.
Iser, W. (1989). Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press.
—— . (1993). The Fictive and the Imaginary. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
—— . (2006). How to Do Theory. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell.
Landy, J. (1994). “Music, Letters, Truth and Lies: ‘L’Après-Midi d’un Faune’ as an Ars
Poetica.” Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 42, 57–69.
Lerner, L. (1972). The Uses of Nostalgia. London: Chatto and Windus.
Maley, W. (2001). “Spenser’s Languages: Writing in the Ruins of English.” In A. Hadfield
(ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Spenser, pp. 162–79. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Mallarmé, S. (2006). Collected Poems and Other Verse. Trans. E. H. Blackmore and
A. M. Blackmore. New York: Oxford University Press.
Montrose, L. A. (1983). “Of Gentlemen and Shepherds: The Politics of Elizabethan
Pastoral Form.” English Literary History 50, 415–59.
Newlands, C. (1987). “Urban Pastoral: The Seventh Eclogue of Calpurnius Siculus.”
Classical Antiquity 6, 218–31.
Patterson, A. (1987). Pastoral and Ideology. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Payne, M. (2007). Theocritus and the Invention of Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Paz, O. (1995). “Unknown to Himself.” In E. Lisboa and L. C. Taylor (eds.), A Centenary
Pessoa, pp. 3–20. Manchester: Carcanet Press.
Pessoa, F. (2001). The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa. New York: Grove Press.
Putnam, M. C. J. (1970). Virgil’s Pastoral Art: Studies in the Eclogues. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
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Riede, D. G. (1988). Matthew Arnold and the Betrayal of Language. Charlottesville,

Va.: University of Virginia Press.
Ronen, R. (1994). Possible Worlds in Literary Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Thilo, G. (ed.) (1887). Servii grammatici qui feruntur in Vergilii Bucolica et Georgica.
Leipzig: Tevbneri.
Van Es, B. (2006). “Introduction.” In Bart van Es (ed.), A Critical Companion to Spenser
Studies, pp. 1–17. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Van Sickle, J. (1976). “Theocritus and the Development of the Conception of Bucolic
Genre.” Ramus 5, 18–44.
—— . (1978). The Design of Virgil’s Bucolics. Filologia e Critica No. 24. Rome: Edizioni
dellAteneo & Bizzarri.
Vernant, J.-P. (1991). “From the ‘Presentification’ of the Invisible to the Imitation of
Appearance.” In F. Zeitlin (ed.), Mortals and Immortals: Collected Essays, pp. 151–63.
Walker, S. F. (1978). “Mallarmé’s Symbolist Eclogue: The ‘Faune’ as Pastoral.” Proceedings
of the Modern Language Association 93, 106–17.
 
SATIRE
r. bracht branham
When we do philosophy we are like savages, primitive

people, who hear the expressions of civilized men, put a
false interpretation on them, and then draw the queerest
conclusions from it.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
Upon the whole, I am inclined to think that the far greater

part, if not all, of those difficulties which have hitherto
amused philosophers, and blocked up the way to knowledge,
are entirely owing to ourselves. That we have first raised a
dust, and then complain, we cannot see.
—George Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles
of Human Knowledge
To ridicule philosophy is really to philosophize.

—Blaise Pascal, Pensées
What a satirist does is look at a situation, find the

inconsistencies, hypocrisies, absurdities and cut through all
the baloney and get to the truth.
—Al Franken, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them:
A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right
140 genres
While satire and philosophy may seem at fi rst glance to be fundamentally distinct
forms of discourse, they are in fact fratricidal siblings; like Eteocles and Polyneices,
they are destined to be forever at odds but ultimately inseparable. Philosophy and
satire claim the same high ground: the right to determine what is to be taken seri-
ously and what is to be laughed out of court, to say just who is the truth teller
and who is the buffoon without shame. From Aristophanes and Plato’s Socrates
to Diogenes, Lucian, Rabelais, Swift, Voltaire, Diderot, Schopenhauer, and
Nietzsche—not to mention Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Woody Allen, Lenny
Bruce, and Monty Python—the ancient rivalry between satire and philosophy as
to who will have the last word and the last laugh has been profoundly productive
not only of satire but also of philosophy. For, as Aristotle reportedly argued in
his lost apologia for philosophy, the Protrepticus, to reject philosophy is to take
up a philosophical position. Hence, the competition is not simply between but
also within both discourses. When Jonathan Swift imagines life among serenely
rational quadrupeds or Voltaire subjects Leibnizian cosmic optimism to the vicis-
situdes of picaresque narrative, the satire of philosophy becomes the philosophy of
satire. Like the sorcerer’s apprentice—who first appears in Lucian—the harder the
satirist tries to clean up the mess, to rid us of the fraudulent and mystifying phan-
toms of philosophers, the more philosophical he becomes. Likewise, the harder the
philosopher tries to be an authentic truth teller, to distinguish the honest-to-god
philosopher from the legion of imposters to the title, the more he sounds like a true
satirist, as do my epigraphs from Wittengenstein, Berkeley, and Pascal. Is there no
way out?
Of course there is: we can follow Plato and outlaw satire along with the rest
of literature—excluding, of course, Platonic literature! After all, satire, like phi-
losophy, has always been only one step ahead of the law. Consider the facts: don’t
Rome’s most ancient laws, the Twelve Tablets, make malum carmen, a satiric
incantation or malediction in verse, a capital offense? Didn’t the Archbishop of
Canterbury ban and burn books of satire (1599), just as Elizabethan poets such
as John Donne and Joseph Hall were learning to curse in verse of liars in public
places? And didn’t Cleon use the laws of Athens to try to silence Aristophanes, as
later guardians of public virtue would Lenny Bruce? Is it just an accident that the
founding drama of philosophy in the West, the trial and death of Socrates, reveals
a similar tension between philosophy and the law? But what do philosophers and
satirists have in common? Evidently, the willingness to offend, provoke, and out-
rage, all in the name of calling a spade a bloody shovel, of telling the awful truth.
As Swift observed: “[A] nice man is a man of nasty ideas” (Swift 1727: 654).
Philosophy and satire also share a common cultural genealogy. The literary
system of the ancient Greeks was articulated over the centuries through a series
of dialogic oppositions between heroic epic and mock epic (Homer’s Iliad and
Odyssey vs. Homer’s Margites), praise poetry and blame poetry (Pindar’s epinician
odes vs. Archilochus’s iambic poetry), tragedy and satyr play, or tragedy and com-
edy. Underlying all these contrasting but complementary generic pairings is the
perennial dynamic of the serious and the comic word. The confrontation between
satire 141
satire and philosophy needs to be seen as another such pairing in the agonistic
arena of literary performance, in which each genre stakes its claim to the authority
of the word whether “winged” (i.e., voiced) or written. Satire and philosophy may
really be opposites, but the kind of opposites that converge. As a way of exploring
their dialogic dance, I consider a few defining episodes when their long struggle for
identity and self-definition bring them face to face.
Since the terms in my original title1—“philosophy” and “satire”—are in conten-

tion in this essay, several distinct conceptions of philosophy in its relation to satire
emerge. I have been using “satire” in its general, modern sense that goes back at
least to John Dryden’s classic essay, “The Original and Progress of Satire” (1682).2
And while the Greeks used a different vocabulary, they produced a wide variety
of satiric/comic forms such as mock epic, iambic poetry, the satyr play, the mime,
and Old and New Comedy. What all these genres share is a rhetoric designed to
produce various forms of to geloion—the sources of laughter and the quieter plea-
sures associated with it.
Distinguishing specifically satiric forms, techniques, or functions from the
spectrum of comic arts is a dubious enterprise, since satire is often expressed as
a tendency or tone or parodic combination of forms. And it is ultimately how
the humor—or to geloion—works rhetorically and philosophically that makes
an effect, whether of a joke or a literary work, satiric. As one critic has observed,
“[C]omedy always has a satiric potential,” and “when comedy becomes more pur-
poseful than playful, then it is satire” (Levin 1987: 195). Moreover, the Greek idea
of comedy centers squarely on its satiric force: komoidein means to lampoon, ridi-
cule, make fun of, put in a comedy—or satirize.
While it may be impossible to segregate the satiric neatly from the comic inso-
far as both are funny or aim at laughter, only the former is regularly taken to have
extralinguistic implications for its audience.3 Be that as it may, we can say precisely
what makes either funny (i.e., to geloion), at least in Plato’s view, since he gives a
concise account of it in his late dialogue on pleasure, the Philebus. The burden of
the dialogue is to convince us that pleasure almost always entails pain. To under-
stand pleasure in general is to recognize that it is a function of pain—the release
from pain. To grasp the nature of a particular pleasure is to identify the pain that
precedes it and forms the condition of its existence.4 To illustrate this theory of
pleasure, Plato takes our response to comedy as an example and offers an analysis
of to geloion as the object and cause of laughter.
A funny character or person, argues Socrates, is one who exemplifies the very
opposite of the Delphic motto—that is, one who does not know himself, who
blithely entertains flattering, inflated ideas of his own virtues. In a word, what
makes him funny is the self-ignorance involved in vanity and conceit. The comic
figure is a natural alazōn, a fraud malgré lui. And of all the virtues’ that one most
often falsely assumed, maintains Socrates, is that of wisdom, sophia. Since vanity
implies self-ignorance, when we laugh at anyone, according to Plato, we are tak-
ing pleasure in his manifest ignorance, and, Plato insists, such ignorance is clearly
142 genres
a bad thing (kakon), a misfortune. And while Socrates affirms the conventional
Greek view that there is nothing wrong in rejoicing in the misfortunes of our ene-
mies, the envy (phthonos) implicit in laughing at our friends’ misfortune—their
vanity exposed—makes our response to comedy (to geloion) a mixture of pleasure
(laughter) and pain (phthonos/envy) that is ethically suspect. To put Plato’s point
more positively and plausibly than Plato does, the pleasure of laughter evoked by
satire or comedy acts as an antidote to envy (endemic in an egalitarian democ-
racy); the involuntary pain incurred by the thought of others’ success (i.e., phtho-
nos/envy) is relieved by revealing them to be deficient in the very qualities they
most pride themselves on.5
As so often in Plato, his brilliant analysis is inextricably tied to his moral (or
political) evaluation of what is being analyzed, making the results tendentious.
Plato’s moral critique of the pleasures of laughter in the Philebus depends on a
deliberate conflation of the idea of laughing at characters in a comedy with that
of laughing at our friends’ misfortunes: he begins his discussion with an explicit
reference to comedy and tragedy (48a) but concludes by describing our response
to comedy as laughing at our friends’ misfortunes (49d–50a), as if there were no
difference! Yet if we strip away the Plato’s moralizing, his analysis of the source of
laughter (to geloion) gets at something fundamental: what makes us funny is the
firm but mistaken belief that we are better and wiser than we are.
The idea that vanity so understood is the wellspring of comic and satiric
laughter illuminates many a character from Aristophanes’ Socrates to Don
Quixote to P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster.6 It is surprising, therefore, that
while the Platonic account of to geloion is specifically offered as a theory of laugh-
ter applicable to the stage, it doesn’t actually fit the heroes of Aristophanic or
Old Comedy very well: their willful disregard of real-world limitations, espe-
cially their own, is celebrated and typically ends in a kōmos or drunken revel,
but it is arguably descriptive of the blocking figures, the comic alazones, fakes or
frauds, who try to obstruct or exploit the hero’s comic fantasy, as Socrates does
in Aristophanes’ Clouds. Be that as it may, Clouds is markedly atypical of Old
Comedy as a genre insofar as it has a dark ending, in which Socrates’ school is set
on fi re by the father of his pupil. In place of the usual rowdy party, we get arson.
(Socrates barely escapes.)7 But whatever value Plato’s account of why we laugh
has as a theory of Old Comedy,8 it fits like a glove Socrates’ practice of philosophy
as he presents it in the Apology.
Before he describes that practice (at his trial on charges of impiety in 399
b.c.e.), Socrates claims to have been a victim of slander and satire and refers to “a
comic poet” (i.e., Aristophanes) as one of his old “dangerous accusers” (18c–d).
Yet he spends only a paragraph disavowing Aristophanes’ caricature, which does
seem designed to confound him with pre-Socratics who “study things in the sky
and below the earth” and sophists who make “the worse into the stronger argu-
ment” (19b). And if we actually turn to the Clouds (produced in 423 b.c.e, 24 years
before the trial!) expecting a devastating satire of the philosopher Socrates (as we
know him), we will be disappointed. Aristophanes’ caricature of Socrates seems
satire 143
too broad, silly, and generic to be life threatening. Such eminent targets for satiric
treatment as Socrates’ divine voice (daimonion) and the oracle about him are not
even mentioned, nor is his characteristic method of refutation by question and
answer—the elegkhos—parodied. Yet Aristophanes’ Socrates doesn’t believe in the
gods and does corrupt the young, the very charges Socrates faces in court.
If Socrates does not spend long repudiating Aristophanes’ caricature of him,
it is because he knows perfectly well that the real source of his remarkable unpop-
ularity is his own relentless and idiosyncratic pursuit of something he ends up
calling philosophy (Apology 23c, 29c–d)—an activity no less mysterious then than
now. To justify this pursuit, he tells a story that a comic or tragic poet could have
made up: once upon a time, a friend of Socrates, Chaerephon—who is now dead—
asked Apollo’s oracle at Delphi if anyone was wiser than Socrates, and the oracle
reportedly said that “no one was wiser” (Apology 21a). Of course, the utterances
of oracles are notoriously ambiguous and deliberately enigmatic. They often serve
as a test for the recipient and actually invite misinterpretation: consider how the
stories of Oedipus in Sophocles or of Croesus in Herodotus hinge on their mis-
interpreting an oracle from Apollo at Delphi. The oracle could have meant many
things by the answer it gave to Chaerephon: that “no one is wiser” than Socrates
need mean no more than that we are all equally ignorant as mortals. It would then
resonate with the famous injunction inscribed on Apollo’s temple: “know thyself,”
which is conventionally taken to mean “know your place” as a mortal (not a god)
and think mortal thoughts.
Socrates’ response is, therefore, astonishing: he assumes he knows what the
oracle means—always a rash thing to do—and then attempts to refute it by finding
someone else who is demonstrably wiser than himself. He begins by questioning a
politician—whom he refrains from naming—who was considered wise by many
and “especially by himself.” But what he discovers is that “he thought himself
wise but he was not”—like a character in a comedy according to Plato. The results
of this exchange are inauspicious: “[H]e came to dislike me and so did many of
the bystanders” (Apology 21c). But Socrates is not easily deterred. Evidently, over
many years—he gives no dates—Socrates repeats this performance with the lead-
ing politicians, poets, and finally, the craftsmen. Even at the age of 70, he has still
not stopped: “I go around seeking out anyone, citizen or stranger, whom I think
wise . . . and show him that he is not wise” (Apology 23b).9
Socrates could not be clearer: to practice philosophy as he did is to satirize in
public anyone with a reputation for wisdom, to show that reputation to be base-
less by revealing through question and answer the comic gap (to geloion) between
self-conception and public performance. Now, we might not call what Socrates did
a form of satire if there was no audience responding to it as such, taking pleasure
in the unmasking of the supposedly wise. But there was such an audience: “[T]he
young men who follow me around of their own free will, who have the most leisure,
the sons of the very rich, take pleasure (khairousin)10 hearing people questioned;
they themselves often imitate me and try to question others. I think they find a
great abundance of people who believe they know something but know little or
144 genres
nothing” (Apology 21c). Like any true artist, Socrates inspires imitation. But what
exactly are his followers imitating? It is important to remember that the Socratic
method of refutation (or elegkhos) is purely negative: it does not aim or claim to
produce knowledge of any kind, only to rebut a claim to authority by getting the
interlocutor to contradict himself on a subject he is supposed to know something
about (see Frede 1992). Socrates’ development of this method has earned him a
reputation as one of the inventors of philosophy, but it would be no less accurate to
see him, in Plato’s own terms, as the inventor of a form of satire every bit as offen-
sive as the fictions of Old Comedy, one devoted to unmasking in public all those
considered wise for the amusement and edification of their fellow citizens.
While the significance of the satiric (or seriocomic) dimension of Socrates—
including his satyric appearance and homely arguments—has sometimes been
acknowledged as fundamental and is central to Alcibiades’ encomium of him in
the Symposium, it is more typically reduced to “Socratic irony” or to an aspect
of Plato’s literary representation of him not essential to his philosophy.11 But the
implications of the perfect fit between Plato’s account of why we laugh at satire or
comedy in the Philebus and Socrates’ own detailed description of how he conceived
and performed his philosophical mission in the Apology suggests otherwise. Plato’s
theory of laughter even helps to explain why Socrates was convicted: perhaps from
reflection on Socrates’ fate, Plato stipulates in the Philebus that such self-ignorance
is really only funny in the weak, defined as “those unable to avenge themselves
when laughed at”; the same quality in those “with strength and power” is positively
scary—“hateful and ugly” (49e). That is why Chaplin has such difficulty making
Hitler funny in The Great Dictator (1940) and why no form of joking or satire about
George Bush ever seems to do justice to the enormity of his folly.12 Socrates’ relent-
less exposure of the comic self-ignorance of leading Athenians observed no such
distinction, landing him in court where he was convicted and sentenced to death.
Implicit in the pairing of serious and comic genres such as tragedy and satyr play
or heroic epic and mock epic is the idea that neither the serious nor the comic
word can encompass the whole truth on its own. While Plato’s satyric Socrates is
clearly an attempt to transcend such traditional generic dichotomies, the ancient
tradition that acknowledges and embraces this paradoxical notion of truth most
explicitly is that of the spoudogeloios (or seriocomic) figure invented by the Cynics,
whose strategy is to practice philosophy as satire and satire as philosophy.13 If we
ask where the history of philosophy intersects with that of satire to greatest effect,
Cynicism must be the answer. The resemblance of philosophic practice to satiric
scrutiny persists in Diogenes to such an extent that it is even more difficult than
in the case of Socrates to say where philosophy begins or satire ends. If the dialec-
tic of satire and philosophy expresses itself in philosophers who are masters of sat-
ire and parody, such as Plato and Nietzsche, and satirists who engage philosophy
in the spirit of Pascal’s pensées, as do Lucian, Rabelais, Swift, and Diderot, no one
embodies the terms of the dialectic more paradigmatically than does Diogenes
the dog.
satire 145
It would be a mistake, however, to suggest that Cynicism is simply a further

development of the Platonic Socrates, one that happens to give greater scope to
humor or satire. Diogenes was not a Socratic and belonged to no school. Indeed, he
was not even a citizen but a beggar living in exile in Athens (and Corinth). While it
is true that Socrates is capable of comparing himself to Achilles at one moment and
to a horsefly the next in the Apology—conceding his lowly status as a pest to his
fellow Athenians only after making a daring claim to heroic stature—his attempt
at persuasive self-definition contrasts sharply with that of the Cynic. Diogenes not
only accepts the dismissive and degrading epithet of “dog” but makes it his own
by turning it around and comparing himself to various breeds (in one set of anec-
dotes), which does not stop him from casting himself as a tragic hero elsewhere.
But unlike Socrates’ comparison of himself to the greatest hero, Achilles about to
reenter battle to avenge Patroclos’s death (Apology 28c-d), Diogenes’ comparandus
is an unknown hero reduced to the pitiful status of a suppliant: “Without a city,
without a house, without a fatherland / A beggar, a wanderer with a single day’s
bread.”14 It is impossible to imagine Socrates as a beggar; in fact, he is convicted
precisely because he is too proud to supplicate the jury and beg them to take pity
on him, as a defendant on trial for his life was expected to do in ancient Athens
(Apology 34–35). Socrates says it is beneath his dignity—and that of Athens.
As manifestly different as they were, some ancient traditions nevertheless try
to assimilate Diogenes to the Socratic model—and thereby highlight what sets
them apart. Since Socrates got his “mission from god” at Delphi, Diogenes too
must receive an oracle from Apollo—and so he does: he is told not that “no one
is wiser” but that he ought “to deface the currency” (parakharattein to nomisma).
The wording of the oracle carefully exploits an ambiguity in the word nomisma,
which can mean “metal currency” (i.e., coinage) or “whatever is sanctioned by cur-
rent or established usage” (i.e., custom or law); it thereby affirms both Diogenes’
original transgression or crime—defacing the coinage of his native Sinope15 —
that effectively launched his career as a philosopher by propelling him into exile,
and the philosophical mission he discovered as a result of exile. “To deface the
currency” became a proverbial metaphor for the practice of Cynicism: to drive
out of circulation or replace conventional thinking sanctioned by tradition, with
the unshakeable and un-Socratic belief that nature is the sole authority on how to
live—not the gods and laws bequeathed by society. Diogenes would have agreed
wholeheartedly with J. S. Mill’s observation in On Liberty: “[B]y dint of not fol-
lowing [our] own nature [we] have no nature to follow.”16 The determination to
reject the authority of custom or tradition (to nomisma) in the name of nature is
the founding act of Cynicism, as basic to it as Socrates’ decision to test the wis-
dom (sophia) of his contemporaries is to his—and Plato’s—idea of philosophy. It
is expressed by Diogenes’ adopting a stance of satiric scrutiny toward all forms of
received wisdom.
This radical premise sets the stage for the Cynic critique of the prevailing con-
ceptions of the good life, both popular and philosophical, and serves as charter for
their active resistance to the “social control of cognition” through fearless acts of
146 genres
truth telling (parrhēsia) addressed to those in power (e.g., Alexander the Great)
and the improvisation of a seriocomic literature17 and performance art designed to
deface the idols of the tribe: myth, religion, law/custom and, not least, philosophy
itself. Diogenes’ practice serves to reverse the key terms of Plato’s analysis of satire/
comedy (to geloion) in the Philebus: it is society mindlessly enslaved to inherited
conventions and unnatural values that does not know itself. Diogenes’ quixotic and
comical attempt to demonstrate this truth by living out his heterodox philosophy
of “life according to nature” in full public view—eating, urinating, masturbating,
sleeping, teaching, and begging on the streets of Athens and Corinth—made him
both an intellectual scandal and a touchstone of philosophic authenticity rivaled
only by Socrates. Indeed, when asked what sort of person Diogenes was, Plato
responded famously: “a Socrates—gone mad!” (Diogenes Laertius, 1925: Book 6,
Chapter 54).18
It is no accident that Plato occurs far more frequently than any other philoso-
pher in the anecdotes about Diogenes. The tradition designates him, the paradig-
matic metaphysician and plutocrat, as a kind of antitype to the Cynic. As such,
he is a useful tool for defining the Cynic stance by contrast and juxtaposition.
Once, after the father of metaphysics had expounded his theory of forms using
neologisms such as “tablehood” and “cuphood,” Diogenes responded: “Plato, table
and cup I see, but your ‘tablehood’ and ‘cuphood’—no way” (oudamōs; Diogenes
Laertius, 1925: 6.53). This story resembles the occasion when Plato deployed his
vaunted method of collection and division to define man as “a featherless biped,”
and Diogenes produced a plucked chicken as a counterexample, saying, “Here is
Plato’s man!” (Diogenes Laertius 1925: 6.40). Elsewhere, he dismisses Plato’s lec-
tures (diatribē) as a waste of time (katatribē; Diogenes Laertius, 1925: 6.24) and rid-
icules the philosopher for paying court to the tyrant Dionysius (Diogenes Laertius,
1925: 6.58), for his aristocratic generosity (in sending him a whole jar of figs when
he had asked for a few), and for the vanity of his expensive possessions (Diogenes
Laertius, 1925: 6.26). A pivotal theme emerges from this group of anecdotes: the
Cynic’s distrust of abstract argument is merely the other side of his belief that the
test of truth is less a matter of logical finesse than of the philosopher’s ability to
practice persuasively what he teaches. Plato stands satirized on both counts.
Given that no other figure embodies so clearly the ways in which philosophy
and satire can converge in a single discourse, it is worth considering how Diogenes
deploys the performance art of satiric provocation as a tool of philosophy. Probably
the single best-known story about Diogenes is the one (adapted by Nietzsche in
The Gay Science in his parable on the death of god)19 in which he “takes a lamp
in broad daylight and walks around saying he is looking for a human being”20
(anthrōpos; Diogenes Laertius, 1925: 6.41): the story comically dramatizes the radi-
cal nature of the Cynic attempt to reconceive the human, challenging the traditional
hierarchy that defines mankind by placing it in the middle, between gods and
animals; it is one of a series of anecdotes in which Diogenes refuses even to
acknowledge the conventional application of the word anthrōpos, implying that his
contemporaries do not warrant the epithet “human,” having failed to realize their
satire 147
nature. Far from being midway between gods and animals, the Cynic sees his con-
temporaries as inferior to both in the respects that matter most—self-sufficiency
and happiness.21
More notorious—if less often represented in the visual arts—is Diogenes’
defense of his habit of masturbating in public: “I only wish I could be rid of hunger
as easily by rubbing my belly” (D.L. 6.69). The humor here derives from the fact that
Diogenes tacitly rejects the premise of his audience according to which he is violat-
ing well-known rules segregating private and public activities; in its place, he has
inserted a Cynic premise, the principle of “using any place for any purpose” (D.L.
6.22): natural desires are best satisfied in the easiest, most practical way possible.
As far as the body or nature is concerned, one appetite is in principle no different
from any other. It is culture that creates a hierarchy of desires and the proprieties
governing their tendance. Diogenes’ response blandly asserts the claims of nature
without even acknowledging the restraints of culture. If he had acknowledged them
explicitly, his response would not have been a joke—it would not have been funny.
As Umberto Eco has argued, the tacit suppression of the violated norm—the social
frame—is essential to the comic (1986: 269–78). Knowledge of it must be supplied
by the audience. It is the fact that the audience must simultaneously impose the
relevant social frame—the prohibition—and supply the tacit Cynic premise that
makes many of Diogenes’ jokes work like enthymemes or rhetorical syllogisms. To
get their point requires that we collaborate in a process of logical inference from
Cynic premises (see Cohen 1983: 120–36). The Cynic premise does not merely vio-
late but contradicts the social frame; hence, the laughter it elicits is tendentious.
Indeed, virtually every witticism of Diogenes is tendentious in Freud’s sense—
hostile, argumentative, and subversive of authority.22
Diogenes’ deliberate violations of social taboos in the masturbation
anecdote—comically enacting the denial of the sacred already explicit in the doc-
trine of “using any place for any purpose”—is one of a series that exemplify the way
he uses humor as a heuristic device, to provoke Cynical thinking from outside the
inherited categories. In her classic study of jokes and joking, “The Social Control
of Cognition: Some Factors in Joke Perception” (1968), Mary Douglas develops
the argument that “the peculiar expressive character of the joke stands in contrast
to ritual as such” (368–69),23 for if we consider the joke “as a symbol of social,
physical, or mental experience,” we are already treating it as a kind of rite. But what
kind? As a spontaneous symbol, Douglas says a joke “expresses something that is
happening, but that is all”; it stands in contrast, therefore, to the standardized rite
or ritual, “which expresses what ought to happen” and thus, unlike spontaneous
joking, is “not morally neutral.” Douglas spells out the opposition between joking
and ritual as follows:
A joke has in common with a rite that both connect widely differing concepts.
But the kind of connection of pattern A with pattern B in a rite is such that
A and B support each other in a unified system. The rite imposes order and
harmony, while the joke disorganizes. From the physical to the personal,
to the social, to the cosmic, great rituals create unity in experience. They
148 genres
assert hierarchy and order. In doing so, they affirm the value of the symbolic
patterning of the universe. Each level of patterning is validated and enriched
by association with the rest. But jokes have the opposite effect. They connect
widely differing fields, but the connection destroys hierarchy and order. They
do not affirm the dominant values, but denigrate and devalue. Essentially a joke
is an anti-rite . . . . The message of a standard rite is that the ordained patterns of
social life are inescapable. The message of a joke is that they are escapable . . . for
a joke implies that anything is possible. (369–70, 373)
If this argument is correct, joking in a traditional society organized by myth and

ritual tends to set itself in opposition to the prime embodiments of social reason
or ideology. The methods of professional philosophers would be one example of
such reason; ritual would be a far more important one. If formal philosophical
reasoning is the most convention-governed form of thought, ritual is the most
convention-governed form of activity.24 Insofar as Diogenes is an uninhibited
opponent of nomos—unlike Antisthenes, for example, he never refers even to
a nomos of aretē —we would expect him to be averse to ritual per se (since it
embodies and reinforces nomos), and he does not disappoint us. Every single
reference to ritual activity—sacrifice, prayer, or purification rites—in the chre-
iai is derisive (see Diogenes Laertius, 1925: 6.37, 42, 47, 59–62, 73). Several anec-
dotes suggest that Diogenes did not believe in the gods of tradition; indeed, it is
hard to see how he could have. His ironic response to someone impressed by the
quantity of votive offerings in Samothrace comes to mind: “There would have
been far more if those whose were not saved had made offerings!” (Diogenes
Laertius, 1925: 6.59). The opposition between Cynic jesting and traditional reli-
gion continues down to Demonax (Lucian’s teacher, second century a.d.), who
is put on trial in Athens for not joining the Mysteries, but refuses to take the
charges seriously.25 Where ritual is socially consolidating and conservative, the
Cynic parrhesiast (frank and candid truthteller) is antiritualistic and disrup-
tive. That Diogenes defends stealing from temples and denies the validity of such
fundamental dietary and sexual taboos as those against cannibalism and incest
coheres with this antiritualistic stance.26 The contrast with a philosopher like
Socrates is striking and significant. The Cynic’s rejection of inherited patterns
of conduct makes room for his own improvisations, but where do they derive
their authority if, as Douglas also argues, joking “merely affords opportunity for
realizing that an accepted pattern has no necessity . . . [but] is frivolous in that it
produces no real alternative, only an exhilarating sense of freedom from form in
general” (1968: 365)?
The usual answer to this question would be “nature,” but I would argue that
Diogenes’ authority is conferred by the very mastery of discourse his joking and
satiric provocations repeatedly demonstrate in the anecdotal tradition. Even
Diogenes Laertius observes that “the man’s gift for persuasion was so remarkable
that he could easily win over [or defeat] anyone he liked with words [or argu-
ments]” (Diogenes Laertius, 1925: 6.75). If this makes him sound too much like a
Socratic or sophistic know-it-all, we need to remember the following anecdote: to
satire 149
someone who reproached him, saying “although you don’t know anything, you
practice philosophy,” Diogenes responded disarmingly, “Even if I do pretend to
wisdom (sophia), that is to philosophize” (Diogenes Laertius, 1925: 6.64).
If this sounds pointedly un-Socratic, it is. Philosophy for Diogenes, as for
Nietzsche, means “living in contradiction to the present,”27 which now includes
the Socratic model of philosophy according to which the opposite of the true phi-
losopher is the pretender to wisdom whose exposure constitutes the Socratic mis-
sion. In acknowledging the pretense to wisdom involved in the very attempt to
philosophize in his sense—to embody sophia—Diogenes refuses to exempt the
philosopher from the satiric scrutiny Socrates’ mission inspired (in Aristophanes
among others)—and failed to refute.28 Diogenes knows perfectly well that as a
talking dog he is socially marginal and the butt of jokes, even as the jesting phi-
losopher is symbolically central and feared for his bite: cave canem! When told, on
more than one occasion, that most people laugh at him, he does not deny it: “But
I am not laughed down!” (Diogenes Laertius, 1925: 6.54).
If the formative moments in the ancient dialectic of satire and philosophy are the
trial of Socrates and Diogenes’ encounter with Plato and Athens, its final act unfolds
in the Menippean satires of Lucian—such as Philosophers for Sale! and Menippus or
the Descent to Hades—in which he renews the Socratic inquest into sophia focus-
ing, as had Socrates, on those with a reputation for wisdom, which now means
the ancient philosophical schools, more than 500 years old and supported by the
state.29 Writing in the second century a.d., when Greek culture, swallowed up by
the Roman empire, appeared to itself as a pale imitation of the greatness of its clas-
sical past, the issue of fraudulent or imitation philosophers is symptomatic of a
deeper anxiety addressed from many angles in Lucian’s satires—the derivative and
imitative nature of what passed for high culture in the age of the Second Sophistic
(as it is known from Philostratus’s Lives of the Sophists, second century a.d.). As
an interloper from the East, a Syrian writing and performing for Hellenes, Lucian
developed a perspective on the Greeks of his day and their obsessive concern with
their own cultural origins that only an outsider could acquire. Like Diogenes, he
was living a kind of volunteer exile dependent on those he mocked, but unlike
Diogenes, he was not even Greek and yet in his work he consistently manages to
turn his alien status and standpoint to satiric advantage. The dialectic of satire
and philosophy, encapsulated in the idea of the spoudogeloios, is translated to the
Renaissance almost entirely by means of Lucian’s satiric response to postclassical
Greek culture.
As Stanley Cavell observes: “[T]he problem of imitation haunts philosophy’s
establishment in Plato” (2004: 209), and the difficulty of distinguishing the true
from the fake philosopher—the pretenders to wisdom exposed by Socrates—only
grew as competing philosophical schools emerged and classical traditions calcified
into imitations of themselves. In this self-consciously classical culture one ques-
tion could not be avoided: what makes a tradition—of philosophy or literature or
art—authentic and not a mere imitation or quotation or parody of itself? If it is
150 genres
just a copy, what value does it really possess? How can this value be measured or
assessed in a publicly persuasive way?
Lucian decided to take up the question of value as it bears on philosophy itself
by writing a Menippean satire that asks repeatedly in the most brutal, commercial
terms: what is this philosopher worth? Today, when the “free market” is treated
much as the Delphic oracle was in Socrates’ Athens—as having all the answers
however inscrutable—Lucian’s premise sounds remarkably contemporary. It is all
too easy to imagine a recent secretary of education or an ambitious dean asking
the same question, quite literally and seriously, which is exactly how it is posed in
Philosophers for Sale! 30 in which the founding fathers of the major philosophical
traditions of antiquity are put on the auction block for sale as slaves, with Zeus and
Hermes presiding as the auctioneers.
It is clearly a work that every student of philosophy should know but probably
doesn’t. Lucian uses the founder of each tradition to personify what his philosophy
had come to represent, for better or worse, in the mind of educated Greeks. The
attributes he extracts for each parody serve as seriocomic abbreviations or abstracts
of the philosophical preoccupations considered characteristic of a given tradition.
In this way, he seems to dodge the question of imitation and focus instead on the
nature of the exemplars imitated, but since parody as comic imitation is premised
on something already known independently, the truth of the parody is always at
issue: does what makes it funny also make it true? This is precisely the question a
seriocomic text is designed to pose. If the philosophers’ responses are found want-
ing or patently ridiculous when asked what a slave would be asked when put up
for sale—“what do you know best?”—the reader, like the buyer, can draw his own
conclusions.
The fictional framework itself—of selling philosophers as slaves—does not
mean that the portraits, however parodic, are uniformly unflattering or simply
used to deflate the authority of the philosopher in question. When Diogenes is put
up for sale in a lost work by Menippus (The Sale of Diogenes) and asked what he
could do, he replied simply: “Rule men” (Diogenes Laertius, 1925: 6.29). Menippus’s
aphorism is true to the image of Diogenes as conveyed by the anecdotal tradition,
as, for example, when asked what good he had gotten out of philosophy, he replied:
“to be prepared for every kind of luck” (tukhē; Diogenes Laertius, 1925: 6.68).
Lucian’s Diogenes, by contrast, satirizes himself by commending the Cynic way of
life in revolting terms few could embrace. As the buyer responds, “it’s disgusting
and not even human” (11). Of course, this is Lucian’s point: it’s canine. Yet when
Lucian has Diogenes describe himself as a “liberator of men” and “an advocate for
truth and freedom of speech,” he is echoing the very terms he uses to legitimize his
own practice as a satirist. Nevertheless, it is fair to infer from the treatment given
Epicurus—who does not actually have to submit to questioning and is bought
for two minas by someone who promises to feed him such delicacies as Carian
figs—that Lucian prefers him to the dirty doglike Diogenes who fetches the low-
est price—two obols. (Some legendary philosophers go unsold.) Thus, while each
parodied philosopher is funny for different reasons—Pyrrho, for example, cannot
satire 151
but doubt that he has actually been sold, much to his owner’s consternation—one
theme that recurs is the gap between the buyers’ needs and the kinds of things that
the philosophers claim to know best.
Here for future reference are the results of the sale:
In order of appearance Ranked by price

Pythagoras Socrates: 2 talents
Diogenes Aristotle: 20 minas
Aristippus Chrysippus: 12 minas
Democritus and Heraclitus Pythagoras: 10 minas
Socrates Epicurus: 2 minas
Chrysippus Pyrrho: 1 mina
Aristotle Aristippus: unsold (too drunk to respond)
Pyrrho Democritus and Heraclitus: unsold (too
difficult to understand)
Menippus: notably absent
Evidently not everyone in Lucian’s audience found Philosophers for Sale! funny or,
if so, knew how to take the joking, which shows that it succeeded as satiric provo-
cation. Just as Socrates’ search for sophia among his contemporaries landed him
in court, so Lucian’s satiric representation of the sophia of the sages of old leaves
him facing an angry jury of those very philosophers led back from the dead by
Socrates looking for justice—in his apologetic dialogue The Dead Come to Life or
the Fisherman. Unlike Socrates at his trial, Lucian does not invoke the Delphic ora-
cle and defend his way of life, but appeals to Philosophy herself and defends his way
of writing, casting himself as the personification of verbal license, Parrhesiades
or “Freespeaker, son of Truthful, grandson of Exposure,” thus identifying him-
self with a value long associated with Athenian democracy, Old Comedy and the
original Cynics. Presenting himself as Parrhesiades allows Lucian to dramatize his
underlying affinity with the angry sages who have risen from their graves to stone
him to death for his affront to philosophy. Donning this mask, Lucian counters his
critics form two traditional angles by implying that he is not really antiphilosophi-
cal, since parrhēsia is a celebrated Cynic value, and that he is authorized to attack
fakes anyway as the heir apparent of Aristophanic or Old Comedy.
This implicit claim is reflected explicitly both in Parrhesiade’ protests of soli-
darity with his assailants and, more important, in the Old Comic structure of the
plot: from the attack with stones to Parrhesiades’ acquittal, The Dead Come to Life
is patterned after the famous confrontation between Dicaeopolis and the angry
patriots in Aristophanes’ Acharnians (204–571), who, like the sages, are initially
outraged at the hero’s treasonous conduct but are ultimately persuaded of his loy-
alty to their cause.
The Dead Come to Life is allegorical and agonistic like most Old Comedy: it
progresses rapidly through a sequence of wildly contrasting parodic structures
152 genres
moving from a paratragic suppliant scene in which Parrhesiades begs for his life
by quoting famous bits of Homer and Euripedes, to a trial scene played out before
Philosophy and Truth, “the shadowy creature with the indefinite complexion”
(Lucian, 1905: Vol. 1, 213). In his formal defense, Lucian/Parrhesiades defines his
literary innovation—the satiric-philosophical dialogue—as closer to the pursuit of
truth than is contemporary philosophy, which by contrast is a tired imitation of its
legendary past. Insofar as Parrhesiades is willing to speak his mind in the old style,
to censure the fakery of professional thinkers, he is reasserting the truth teller’s
role, which is the point of having Diogenes, the most free-speaking philosopher,
prosecute him unsuccessfully. Parrhesiades’ acquittal by a jury of fabled sages des-
ignates Lucianic dialogue as the vehicle for unflattering exposure (elegkhos) that
Socratic dialogue, Old Comedy, and Cynic diatribe once were. This claim is given
Aristophanic confirmation in the closing scene, in which Parrhesiades fishes for
fake philosophers off the side of the Acropolis—using gold and figs for bait! By
putting his satiric innovation on trial, Lucian manages to sidestep the fact that in
Philosophers for Sale! he satirizes not contemporary fakes, as his defense implies,
but the leading philosophical schools as personified by their founders. His dramatic
vindication of his satiric art as authentically classical and, therefore, authorita-
tive, artfully displaces the problem of contemporary philosophy as anemic imita-
tion, since its truth-telling mission now falls to the satirist on trial, just as it had
to Socrates. Too bad that Lucian could not have quoted Goethe in defense of his
satiric personification of the philosophical schools: “[A] school of thought is to be
viewed as a single individual who talks to himself for a hundred years and is quite
extraordinarily pleased with himself, however silly he may be” (1821: 12).
We are now in a position to trace the modern trajectory of the dialectic of satire
and philosophy, or the art of the spoudogeloios, from its reintroduction to Europe
by Erasmus and Thomas More—whose Latin translations of Lucian, Compulurima
opuscula festivissima (1506), initiated a literary vogue that made him one of the
most emulated authors in Renaissance Europe31—to the remarkable transforma-
tions of the Cynic-Lucianic tradition at the hands of Rabelais, Swift, Voltaire, and
Diderot.32 Instead, I jump to one pinnacle of the modern tradition—Friedrich
Nietzsche—who reflected throughout his career on the value to the philosopher
of satire and laughter.
Once when Diogenes was reproached for having been exiled from home
(Sinope), he replied: “[Y]ou miserable fool, that’s how I became a philosopher!”
(Diogenes Laertius, 1925: 6.49). Nietzsche could have said the same thing: he went
into voluntary exile, to wander and write philosophy, when he resigned his posi-
tion as professor of classical philology at Basel University. Exile, then, becomes
one of his themes: he dedicates The Gay Science “to those who have a right to call
themselves homeless” (2001a: §377). Not surprisingly, the best way to approach
Nietzsche’s philosophical response to satire is by way of Cynicism.33 Cynicism at
its core consists of two moments, perhaps induced by the experience of exile: fi rst,
the discovery of “the comedy of existence,” that is, that the accepted patterns of
satire 153
social life, hallowed by ritual and embodied in nomos (“custom” or “law”), “have
no necessity,” as Douglas puts it; and second, a literary expression of this discov-
ery through the seriocomic forms of philosophical jesting and performance (or
exhibitionism), parodic mockery, satiric scorn, and shameless honesty (or speech
[parrhēsia]) that extends even to the speaker himself, making the Cynic philoso-
pher, as Nietzsche puts it in Beyond Good and Evil, a “buffoon without shame”
(2001b: §26). The word and the concept of the spoudogeloios, or seriocomic voice,
speaking from outside the inherited generic dichotomies, as his oxymoronic name
suggests, are, as I have noted, a Cynic invention; it is also a philosophic role in
which Nietzsche would cast himself increasingly as his thought matured, and as he
undertook to speak from outside the confines of those dubious dichotomies that
underwrite such conventional value judgments as Good versus Evil.
Let me begin, therefore, with the “comedy of existence.” The most famous
instance of this insight in Nietzsche is, of course, at the very beginning of The Gay
Science: it is this recognition that makes scienza gaya,34 that is, that makes the Gay
Science possible:
You will never find anyone who could wholly mock you as an individual,
even in your best qualities, bringing home to you to the limits of truth your
boundless fly-like, frog-like wretchedness! To laugh at oneself, as one would
have to in order to laugh out of the whole truth—to do that even the best so far
lacked sufficient sense for the truth, and the most gifted had too little genius
for that. Even laughter may yet have a future. I mean, when the proposition
“the species is everything and the individual is always nothing” has become
part of humanity and this ultimate liberation and irresponsibility has become
accessible to all at all times. Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance
with wisdom, perhaps only “gay science” will then be left. For the present,
things are still quite different. For the present, the comedy of existence has not
yet become conscious of itself. For the present we still live in the age of tragedy,
the age of moralities and religions. (2001a: §1)
It is strange, to say the least, that Nietzsche claims that wisdom and laughter have
never formed an alliance, that the “teachers of the purpose of existence” (2001a:
§1)—the tragic poets, philosophers, and moralists—have never been mocked in
toto, laughed at “out of the whole truth,” since there is a locus classicus in the Cynic
tradition, namely, Lucian’s parodic fantasy Menippus or the Descent to Hades, where
precisely this is done: it is in the encounter of the Cynic philosopher Menippus
the only philosopher expressly called spoudogeloios in antiquity, with the Theban
prophet Tiresias in Hades. Menippus goes to Hades in search of wisdom, to consult
Tiresias on the best kind of life for a man, after realizing that the laws contradict
the poets and that the philosophers contradict each other and themselves. While
crossing the Acherusian plain in search of Tiresias, he discovers that “the individ-
ual is always nothing,” as Nietzsche put it; all individuality is so completely effaced
at death that the legendarily ugly Thersites is indistinguishable from the famously
handsome Nireus: “Their naked bones were all alike—ill-defined, unnamed,
unrecognizable to anyone” (Menippus 15). When Menippus locates Tiresias, the
154 genres
prophet of tragic wisdom, who sees the same things as Apollo in Sophocles, he
has been converted to a Cynic perspective: he is laughing and tells the bewildered
Cynic to forget the wise men—the teachers of the purpose of existence—and “to
go on his way laughing a great deal and taking nothing seriously” (gelōn ta polla kai
peri mēden espoudakōs) are Tiresias’s last words of advice to the philosopher. Only
laughter, it seems, has a future: an idea echoed near the conclusion of Beyond Good
and Evil, where Nietzsche proposes that philosophers be ranked according to their
laughter and speaks of a “new and superhuman way of laughing—at the expense
of everything serious!” (2001b: §294).
Now Nietzsche had both these voices in him in their original potent forms: the
shameless honesty of the Cynic jester unmasking the idols of the tribe with glee,
and the prophet of tragic wisdom who would surpass all the other teachers of the
purpose of existence, “all earthly seriousness heretofore,” announcing “dreadful”
truths. His mature work is an unceasing dialogue between his comic and tragic
voices. In the end, I think the laughter and shameless honesty of the seriocomic
jester prevails, or is it the vatic Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s version of “the teachers
of the purpose of existence?” Or did he succeed in synthesizing them both into
a dialogic version of himself?
However we answer that question, it is clear that the art of the spoudogelo-
ios becomes even more important for Nietzsche, beginning with The Gay Science,
which has all the hallmarks of Cynic literature: it is a mischievous combination
of the obscene and the prophetic, parodic verse and soaring prose, the personal
and the transhistorical, logical analysis and ad hominem caricatures—a comically
complex medley of many voices. Its seriocomic qualities are emphatically fore-
grounded in the second edition: Nietzsche seems to distance himself from his own
portentousness when he rewrites the phrase incipit tragoedia, used to introduce
Zarathustra in the last book of the first edition, to read incipit parodia in the pref-
ace, and when he imagines in the last section of book 5 the spirits of his own books
saying “with malicious, cheerful, hobgoblin-like laughter” of his “great serious-
ness,” of his operatic talk in the preceding section of the “destiny of the soul”
and “tragedy”: “[W]e can’t stand it anymore . . . stop, stop this raven-black music!”
(2001a: §383). Their laughter signals a shift in tone in preparation for the ludic
“Songs of Prince Vogelfrei,” a sort of satyr play appended to the incipient tragedy.
Among the poems that frame the five books of prose, at least two can be read as
Cynic parodies, most notably §34, “Seneca et hoc genus omne,” and the song titled
“Fool in Despair.” Thus, the very structure of The Gay Science registers a serio-
comic ambivalence: poems “in which a poet makes fun of all poets in a manner
which is hard to forgive” (2001a: preface, §1), framing and inevitably qualifying the
effect of five books of virtuoso prose on a huge range of subjects. It thereby raises
one of Nietzsche’s thematic questions: what can or should be taken seriously? And
by whom?
Nietzsche’s identification with the Cynics goes a step further in Beyond Good
and Evil. In section 26 of part 2, “The Free Spirit,” to which I have been alluding
throughout, he writes:
satire 155
If he is lucky, as befits a favorite child of knowledge, the philosopher will find

real shortcuts and aids to make his work easier. I mean he will find so-called
Cynics—people who easily recognize the animal, the commonplace, the “norm”
within themselves, and yet still have a degree of spiritedness and an urge to talk
about themselves and their peers in front of witnesses:—sometimes they even
wallow in books as if in their own fi lth. Cynicism is the only form in which
common souls come close to honesty [Redlichkeit]; and the higher man must
open his ears to every Cynicism, whether coarse or refined, and congratulate
himself whenever a buffoon [Possenreisser] without shame or a scientific satyr
speaks out in his presence.
He concludes this reflection by choosing “the laughing self-satisfied satyr” (i.e.,

the Cynic) over the angry moralist as the more instructive and the more honest.
Later, in part 7, “Our Virtues,” he comments at the end of one section that “there
is a drop of cruelty in every will-to-know” (§229). He expands on this idea in the
next section as follows:
The sublime tendency of the knower who treats and wants to treat things
in a profound, multiple, thorough manner. This is a type of cruelty on
the part of the intellectual conscience and taste, and one that every brave
thinker will acknowledge in himself, assuming that he has spent as long as he
should in hardening and sharpening his eye for himself, and that he is used
to strict discipline as well as strict words. He will say “There is something
cruel in the tendency of my spirit”;—just let kind and virtuous people try
to talk him out of it! In fact, it would sound more polite [artiger] if, instead
of cruelty, people were to accuse, mutter about and praise us as having a
sort of “wild (or extravagant) honesty [ausschweifende Redlichkeit]”—we
free, very free spirits—and perhaps this is what our reputation really will
be—posthumously. (§230)
The term Redlichkeit, translated “honesty” in both these passages, specifically

suggests speech, frank and honest speech. Surely Nietzsche knew from Diogenes
Laertius that when Diogenes was asked what to kalliston, the finest thing in the
world, is, he replied with one word: parrhēsia. Parrhēsia means to say everything or
anything on a topic and could be translated as “wild,” “reckless,” or “extravagantly
honest speech,” the kind that could, and did, get Cynics flogged, exiled, and even
executed. Parrhēsia was the “right” of the aristocrat or of a citizen in a democratic
state. Anyone else who laid claim to it did so at his peril. That is the point of the
stories about Diogenes confronting Alexander and other power brokers—his cour-
age for parrhēsia, which in his hands was nothing less than a license to satirize,
insult, and unmask.
Nietzsche’s seriocomic art reaches its zenith in the works of his last active year,
particularly in Twilight of the Idols: or How to Philosophize with a Hammer, a book
brimming with laughter, malice, and insight, as its witty title, parodying Wagner’s
apocalyptic Götterdämmerung, aptly suggests. To give only one famous example,
in a single section titled “How the Real World at Last Became a Myth,” Nietzsche
manages to give us a Menippean overview of the history of Western metaphysics,
156 genres
which is, as Michael Tanner observes, both “hilarious and unnervingly accurate”
(1992: x). Here, humor has clearly become instrumental—and indispensable—to
Nietzsche’s mode of argument. In The Case of Wagner, the last work he would see
through publication, Nietzsche actually characterizes his method as seriocomic,
or, more accurately, “severo-comic,” in his epigraph, adapted from Horace, in
which Nietzsche has substituted the word severum for verum, yielding the phrase
ridendo dicere severum: “to say something severe with laughter” (2005: 138). In its
original form, ridendo dicere verum quid vetat (Sermones 1.24), Horace was defend-
ing his own literary methods in his sermones (or satires), asking rhetorically why
he could not tell the truth with laughter, thereby invoking the essential Cynic (or
seriocomic) idea that laughter (or humor) is a means of perception, an indispens-
able way of getting at the truth. Or as Wittgenstein observed, “Humor ist keine
Stimmung sondern eine Weltanschauung” [“Humor is not a mood but a way of
looking at the world”] (1977: 78, 78e). Finally, Nietzsche identifies himself as a
Cynic still more explicitly in the postscript when he writes of Wagner’s Parsifal:
“One has to be a Cynic not to be seduced here; one has to be able to bite in order
not to worship here. Well then, you old seducer, the Cynic warns you—cave canem”
(2005: 257). Thus, Nietzsche’s interest in Cynicism as a philosophical option, which
begins, surprisingly, with its practical ascetic dimension (in the preface to vol-
ume 2 of Human All Too Human), leads him to embrace the shamelessness of the
Cynic parrhesiast as a model of enlightened truth telling about the animal nature
of man, and ultimately to identify himself literally with the biting laughter of the
dog-philosopher—making this paradigmatic Cynic stance all that saves him from
the seductions of Wagnerian decadence.
All this leads us to our ultimate question: what did Nietzsche mean when he
wrote in his late autobiographical work Ecce Homo that his books attain here and
there “the highest that can be attained on earth—Cynicism” (2005: 103)?35 Exactly
what he says. Specifically, this refers to his unmasking of the “higher swindle”:
“Have I been understood? What defines me, what sets me apart from all the rest of
mankind, is that I have unmasked Christian morality” (2005: 148). Therefore, both
his end—the supplanting of traditional morality—and this means, the shame-
less honesty and seriocomic stance of the buffoon who speaks truths, are delib-
erately and self-consciously Cynic—with a capital C. This is why he calls himself
in Ecce Homo, just as he had the Cynic parrhesiast in Beyond Good and Evil, “a
buffoon . . . and nonetheless . . . the truth speaks out of me” (2005: 144)—a buffoon
because his ausschweifende Redlichkeit is applied even to himself. What other kind
of philosopher would have admitted in print that the two people he knows best
in all the world are also the most serious objection to his most significant idea?
“I confess that the deepest objection to the Eternal Recurrence, my real idea from
the abyss, is always my mother and sister” (2005: 78)—it’s enough to make one
a Cynic! If we follow Nietzsche’s lead, and rank philosophers by their talent for
laughter (2001b: §294, 175), who—aside from Diogenes or Menippus—competes
with Nietzsche at this “Olympian vice”?
satire 157
NOTES
1. This essay was originally titled “Philosophy as Satire/Satire as Philosophy.”

2. Our word “satire” comes from the Roman word satura, which designates a
poetic genre written only by Romans (Freudenberg 2005: 1–30). For Roman satire and
philosophy, see Mayer 2005.
3. For the distinction between satire and comedy and related dichotomies (such
as psogos vs. to geloion in Aristotle or “tendentious” vs. “innocent” jokes in Freud),
see Branham 1989: 233 n. 70; compare Purdie 1993: 115. For a survey of attempts to
distinguish satire and comedy, see Heilman 1978: appendix 6, 270–71; see also Knight
2004.
4. The only exception to this generalization are the pure pleasure that Plato approves
of—perceiving pure shapes, colors, notes, or smells—“with no inevitable pain mixed with
them” (Philebus [1993] 51e). But these are found neither in art nor in nature (“not . . . of
a living being or a picture”; 51a). Plato gives no examples but describes the objects of
such perception as if they were forms: “[N]ot beautiful in a relative sense, as others are,
but . . . by their very nature forever beautiful by themselves” (51c). In other words, except
for the “pleasures of learning” (51e), all conventional sources of pleasure involve pain.
5. For envy, see Konstan 2006: chap 5.
6. Plato’s theory has lived on in many iterations, most notably that of Henry
Fielding, who argues in the preface to Joseph Andrews that “affectation” is the ultimate
source of the “true Ridiculous,” (1999: 6) which he traces to two causes, vanity or
hypocrisy, extending Plato’s insight to his own practice as a novelist.
7. The text of the Clouds we have is a revised version, and we don’t know how the
original ended.
8. Plato’s conception of to geloion is arguably more applicable to the New Comedy of
Menander, which appears in the late fourth century b.c.e.
9. It is true that Socrates concludes from his failure to refute the oracle that it must
have meant that he is the wisest of men in that he alone knows that “he is truly worthless
in respect to wisdom” (23b). But that does not mean he has relinquished the claim to
be uniquely wise. And despite his famous profession of ignorance, he makes dogmatic
claims to moral knowledge later in the Apology (30b).
10. This is the same word used to characterize the pleasure we take in satire or
comedy in the Philebus: 49e.
11. Nietzsche is the exception:
Socrates was the clown who made himself be taken seriously: what really
happened here? . . . As a dialectician you have a merciless tool in your hands;
dialectics let you act like a tyrant; you humiliate the people you defeat. The
dialectician puts the onus on his opponent to show that he is not an idiot; the
dialectician infuriates people and makes them feel helpless at the same time.
(Twilight of the Idols, secs. 5–7; Nietzsche 2005: 164)
12. Or, as Swift observed:
Satire is reckoned the easiest of all wit; but I take it to be otherwise in very bad
times. For it is as hard to satirize well a man of distinguished vices, as to praise
well a man of distinguished virtues. It is easy enough to do either to people of
moderate characters. (1727: 653)
158 genres
13. For the concept, see Branham 1989: chap. 1; for the word, see Branham 1989:
227 n. 31; compare Kurke 2006, who argues ingeniously that the carnivalesque figure of
Aesop—the ugly, mute, blind slave-savant—lurks behind the Platonic Socrates.
14. Fragment of an unidentified tragedy.
15. This part of the legend is, surprisingly, based on fact: see Branham and Goulet-
Cazé 1996: 90 n. 30.
16. Cited and discussed by Cavell 2004: chap. 5.
17. The Cynic classics of the third and fourth centuries b.c.e. by or about Diogenes
(or Crates or Menippus) survive only in an anecdotal tradition in which literary
fragments are treated biographically, as in our primary source, Diogenes Laertius’s Lives
and Opinions of Famous Philosophers (third century a.d.).
18. Insofar as Diogenes’ performance denies the correctness of proper language,
he has to be either joking or mad from Plato’s perspective (see Purdie 1993: 84). To
understand Plato’s aphorism (“a Socrates—gone mad!”), it is important to remember
that Socrates argues in the Phaedrus that some forms of mania (“madness”) are a source
of inspiration and insight not accountable to philosophy. It should also be remembered
that ancient tradition records elsewhere that when Diogenes was asked the same
question—what he thought of Plato—he responded in kind: “[H]e’s out of his mind.”
And, indeed, from a Cynic perspective, he was.
19. For a brilliant analysis of Nietzsche’s adaptation of the anecdote, see Niehues-
Pröbsting 1996: 361–62.
20. The more familiar version according to which Diogenes is looking for “an honest
man” is not ancient.
21. On this point, see Goulet-Cazé 1996.
22. Compare these two passages from Freud (1960):
Tendentious jokes are especially favored in order to make aggression or criticism
possible against persons in exalted positions who claim to exercise authority.
The joke then represents a rebellion against authority, a liberation from its
pressure. The charm of caricature lies in the same factor: we laugh at them even
if they are unsuccessful simply because we count rebellion against authority as a
merit. (125)
In the service of cynical or skeptical tendencies [the joke] shatters respect
for institutions and truths in which the hearer has believed, on the one hand by
reinforcing the argument, but on the other by practicing a new species of attack.
Where argument tries to draw the hearer’s criticism over to its side, the joke
endeavors to push the criticism out of sight. There is no doubt that the joker has
chosen the method which is psychologically more effective. (163)
23. Orwell expressed a similar idea in fewer words: “[A] joke worth laughing at has
an idea behind it, and usually a subversive idea” (1954: 100).
24. For Diogenes’ parody of syllogistic reasoning, see Branham 1996.
25. See Branham 1989: 57–63; for Diogenes’ dismissal of the mysteries, see Diogenes
Laertius, 1925: 6.39.
26. See Diogenes Laertius, 1925: 6.73; Dio Chrysostom, Or. 10.30. There is, of
course, a difference between questioning the validity of a taboo and advocating the
tabooed activity. Diogenes has sometimes been misinterpreted as engaging in the latter.
27. Once, when entering a theater just as everyone else was leaving, Diogenes was
asked why he was doing this. He replied, “[T]his is what I practice doing all of my life”
(Diogenes Laertius, 1925: 6.64). Nietzsche as cited in Cavell 2004: 211.
satire 159
28. For a more complete analysis of Diogene’ rhetoric and the role of the body in his
performance, see Branham 1996.
29. For Menippean satire, see Branham 1989 and Relihan 1993.
30. The Greek title biōn prasis means “sale of lives,” i.e., “ways of life” and therefore
recalls the question that prompts Menippus’s trip to Hades in the Menippus or the Descent
to Hades: “[W]hat is the best kind of life?”
31. No less important were the fruits of their collaboration on Lucian; they
were the first to discover how his essential ingredients—the fantastical journey, the
satiric-philosophic dialogue, the paradoxical encomium, and the subtleties of his
seriocomic manner—could be made into vehicles of the most original philosophical
satires written since antiquity: More’s Utopia (1516) and Erasmus’s Praise of Folly (or
Moriae encomium; 1509–22), the only neo-Latin works to become part of the European
canon.
32. The satiric-philosophic tradition receives its most profound expression in
dialogue form from Denis Diderot (1713–84) in Rameau’s Nephew, which he called a
satire. Goethe writing to Schiller (December 21, 1804) called it “a bomb that exploded
right in the middle of French Literature.” (cited in Niehues-Pröbsting 1996: 352).
33. Nietzsche did philological work on our primary source, Diogenes Laertius, and
lectured on Lucian in his course on ancient rhetoric at Basel. My understanding of the
modern reception of Cynicism is squarely based on the groundbreaking work of Heinrich
Niehues-Pröbsting (1980, 1988, 1996).
34. Gaya scienza is an oxymoron analogous to spoudogeloios, adapted by Nietzsche
from the troubadours.
35. “That Nietzsche still used one word, Cynicism, and did not distinguish between
Kynismus (i.e., ancient Cynicism) and Zynismus (i.e., modern cynicism) demonstrates
the unity [of the history of Cynicism] until the end of the nineteenth century” (Niehues-
Pröbsting 1996: 354). See also Branham 2004.
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Press.
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 
THE NOVEL
anthony j. cascardi
I is a matter of consensus among literary critics that what we call the “novel”
possesses no unified generic profile. In a notorious phrase, Henry James said that
the novel was like a “loose, baggy monster.” The novel is by all accounts a remark-
ably capacious genre, and it seems able to embrace just about every other liter-
ary form within its bounds. Among contemporary genres, only film has a similar
capacity, and there are reasons to regard narrative film as the novel’s sole legitimate
heir. The form of the novel can admit tremendous variation, and even contradic-
tion, sometimes to the point where it can seem maddeningly formless (take Tris-
tram Shandy as a case in point). A taxonomy of its subgenres would seem to be
limitless. Novelistic subtypes include the stream of consciousness novel, the detec-
tive novel, the sentimental novel, and the historical novel, as well as the epistolary
novel, the picaresque novel, the science fiction novel, the pastoral novel, the novel
in verse, and the spy novel. To these one must add the realist novel, the novel of
education and development or Bildungsroman, the roman à clef, the philosophical
novel, the gothic novel, the thriller, and the novel of ideas. The list could well be
expanded. (Should the graphic novel, which is wordless in form, be included?) The
novel is at one moment starkly authoritative and documentary (In Cold Blood), and
in the next instance playful and self-conscious (Rameau’s Nephew, Pale Fire). It can
be engrossed in the inner psychic life of its characters (Crime and Punishment,
Lord Jim), but can also be digressive and errant (Don Quixote, Joseph Andrews); it
can be realistic (Bleak House, Old Goriot), and also magical-realist (One Hundred
Years of Solitude). But as the account of novelistic types grows longer, the identity
of the genre seems only to become less clear. Structural features of the novel such
as the presence of a governing narrative voice, or markers of content and style
such as the development of seemingly lifelike characters, do not hold universally
consistent or true of the genre. This is in part because the novel never fully broke
the novel 163
with its ties to the literary past, which was itself remarkably diverse. In its more
developed stages, the novel begins by reflecting on the very forms that comprise it.
Just as the hero of Don Quixote reads the romances of chivalry and attempts to act
by them, David Copperfield describes his affinity for the books that his father left
in a small home library: “ ‘Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker,
Tom Jones, The Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas, and Robinson Crusoe,
came out, a glorious host, to keep me company . . . . [T]hey, and the Arabian Nights,
and the Tales of the Genjii—did me no harm” (Dickens 1999: 53). The novel is
an omnivorous, multivalent, and often self-reflective genre. It has continued to
incorporate a panoply of preexisting literary forms, including epiclike adventures,
letters, popular songs, dramatic dialogue, philosophical monologues, puzzles,
culinary recipes, poetry, and journalistic prose.
There is scarcely greater consensus about the circumstances surrounding the
novel’s historical origins. While some the literary critics (most notably, Ian Watt
in The Rise of the Novel [1957]) would locate its beginnings in England in the early
modern period and would associate its surge in popularity with the rise of indi-
vidualism in the eighteenth century, others—including Milan Kundera (1988) and
Carlos Fuentes (1976)—have claimed that its full range of possibilities was already
present in the two volumes of Don Quixote (1605, 1615) and that the further devel-
opment of the genre has amounted mostly to an exploration of the possibilities
that Cervantes seemed intuitively to have found. But still others would plead that
the origins of the novel are remote, and lie in classical antiquity, and that its roots
are to be found either in ancient satire—some forms of which, including so-called
Menippean satire, bear little resemblance to what we recognize as the modern
novel1—or in forms of adventure romance that demonstrate affinities with the
novel principally as far as its plot structure is concerned. The novel has also been
described as a continuation of the ancient epic, albeit transformed in response to
the conditions of the modern world. György Lukács urges this basic point, which
is taken over from Hegel, in the Theory of the Novel. (I discuss Lukács’s theory at
somewhat greater length below.)
While I would argue that what is often referred to as the “ancient novel” is in
fact a form of Byzantine romance (see Heiserman 1977), it is nonetheless true that
the modern novel depends heavily upon its connections to the past. Despite the
fact that its name in English indicates something “new,” the novel bears witness
to the fact that we moderns have arrived late on the historical scene and are, as
a consequence, continuously sifting through the accumulated discourses of the
past. While the novel may be an artifact of modern culture, it is also an index of
modernity’s outstanding literary and historical debts. Thus, while the novel may
well concentrate on the reality of experience in the present, its engagement with
“reality” is invariably tinged with an awareness that the forms of experience are
hardly invented anew with the advent of the modern age. Novels are built around
the realization that all experience is historically formed, and that our consciousness
of experience is inseparable from the forms through which it is told. Novelistic
narratives may rely on techniques of realistic representation in order to create what
164 genres
Roland Barthes famously called “reality effects,” but they hardly offer direct access
to the “real” or an unmediated portrayal of the past (1984: 179–80). Novels that
take as their topic the remembrance of the past, such as Proust’s À la Recherche du
Temps Perdu, serve ultimately to show that the past in itself remains irrecuperable.
Our access to what we call the “past” of personal memory may be dependent on
something as circumstantial as the smell of a madeleine dunked in a cup of tea.
The novels of writers like Fenimore Cooper and Sir Walter Scott amply demon-
strate that our interpretation of the historical past depends directly upon the story-
like forms in which it is retold.
Disagreements about the generic identity and historical origins of the novel
may well be unresolvable, but they nonetheless register something important for
an understanding of its relationship to philosophy.2 The novel results from a mix-
ing of literary forms within a historical context that is specifically and not unprob-
lematically modern in nature. It emerged from a set of circumstances in which
many different types of discourse came to contend with one another for legitimacy
and influence: prose epic, dramatic tragedy, comedy, romance, and a number of
nonliterary genres, including history writing and philosophy. The novel is a genre
whose component forms remain strikingly visible and in contention; it is a species
of literature in which a final synthesis of forms remains fundamentally difficult, if
not impossible, to achieve. This is in part because the novel shares in the modern
belief that the world is composed not of fundamental “essences” but of incom-
mensurable particulars and of sometimes divergent constellations of language and
experience. Unlike philosophy, which imagines itself as a form of discourse with
privileged access to the truth, the novel recognizes that there are many forms of
speech that can lay claim to the truth, and that the “truth” scarcely exists outside
of the languages through which it is formed. Whereas the predominant modern
philosophical conception of the truth carries with it an adherence to an accurate
account of “the way the world is” and a commitment to telling the “whole story”
about the self or the world, the novel operates in a field of obliquely angled frag-
ments and partial accounts; it cultivates a palpable sense of anxiety about the
demand for any “true” account to be authoritative and complete.3
In The Theory of the Novel (1971), Lukács described the novel’s refusal to pro-
duce a synthesis of forms as involving an internal dismantling of everything from
which the genre is constructed. “The composition of the novel,” he proposed, “is
the paradoxical fusion of heterogeneous and discrete components into an organic
whole which is then abolished over and over again” (84). The form of the novel
thus counterbalances the propensity to fix its own truth-claims, whether by speak-
ing in many voices or by refusing to commit itself to a whole and complete account
of the facts. By virtue of its form, the novel stands in opposition to any genre
(including philosophy) that is built on the premise that there ought to be only
one privileged way of speaking the truth. True, Schopenhauer described philoso-
phy as “a monster with many heads, each of which speaks a different language”
(1995: 25), and Descartes drew quite liberally on narrative forms, including travel
narratives and autobiography. Indeed, the quest for certainty in his Meditations is
the novel 165
inconceivable without the invention of a persona whose quasi-autobiographical

narration is elaborated in the accompanying Discourse on Method. As Descartes
himself acknowledges of the Discourse, “I am proposing this work as, so to speak,
a history—or if you prefer a fable” (1984, 1: 112). In this seminal modern case, the
creation of philosophy as a discourse of truth depends upon the invention of an “I”
that narrates the process of its awakening from illusions. But even while the Dis-
course is a quasi-autobiography, the project of its subject is to establish itself as the
foundation for all possible truths. As for Schopenhauer, neither the admission of
the discursive multiplicity of philosophy nor his overarching commitment to the
significance of will and idea in determining the world detracts from the view that
there is, in the end, “an object which constitutes the basis of the idea, and which,
although different in its whole being and nature from the idea is in all points as
similar to it as one egg is to another” (1995: 27–28).
As may be apparent from what I have said thus far, my subject here is not
philosophy in the novel—the ways in which character and plot reflect the issues
and ideas that we have come to recognize as falling within the province of phi-
losophy proper (truth, morality, etc.)—but rather the philosophical implications
of novelistic form. The subject of philosophy in the novel has been treated else-
where at substantial length (see Cascardi 1986; Jones 1975; Nussbaum 1990). Some
recent thinkers have also made the case that the narrative style associated with
novels affords a richness of insight and a complexity of understanding about top-
ics that professional philosophy tends to view only in schematic terms. Martha
Nussbaum’s essays in Love’s Knowledge (1990) are among the best examples of this
work. The crux of this argument is that “only the style of a certain sort of narrative
artist (and not, for example, the style associated with the abstract theoretical trea-
tise) can adequately state certain important truths about the world, embodying
them in its shape and setting up in the reader the activities that are appropriate for
grasping them” (6).4 But whereas Nussbaum concentrates on style (“style makes,
itself, a statement . . . about what is important and what is not, about what faculties
of the reader are important for knowing and what not” [7]), my concern is with
novelistic form and with the contrasting ways in which philosophy and the novel
respond to the underlying conditions that we identify with modern culture. As
I explain in more detail below, philosophy and the novel construct that response
through different configurations of subjectivity. Philosophy sustains the view that
the “subject” is the monological subject of truth: that truth is what matters most to
the subject and that it is only from the position of the subject that matters of truth
can be adjudicated at all. The novel, for its part, reveals that the position of the
subject is discursively and historically formed.
Radiating out from these very different commitments to the matter of truth
are a wider set of implications about what subjectivity entails. As Robert Pippin has
cogently explained, the issues at stake in the question of subjectivity range from
“questions of self-knowledge, epistemological incorrigibility, first-person author-
ity, and action theory to the nature of autonomy, [to] the scope and basis of rights
claims, [and] to phenomenological issues (what it is ‘like’ to be the subject of one’s
166 genres
experiences and deeds, if it is anything at all)” (2005: 10). While the “subject” may
coincide with the sociological category of the modern “individual” (indeed, some
writers have characterized the invention of subjectivity as a function of “bourgeois
philosophy,” e.g., Pippin 2005) and may include the affective and reflective registers
of consciousness that we associate with romantic “inwardness” (sincerity, authen-
ticity, etc.), subjectivity is premised first and foremost on a posture of skepticism
with respect to the preconceptions inherited from the past and of independence
with respect to the pursuit of truth. (Descartes’s objective in rejecting the wisdom
of the ancients is nothing less than to build a new philosophy “upon a foundation
which is all my own” [1984, 1: 118].) In philosophical discourse, the posture of
the modern subject is determined by a stance in which all dogmatic orthodoxies
have been placed in doubt. As exemplified in the Meditations and the Discourse on
Method, the turn away from the beliefs of the past is the prephilosophical basis for
modern rationalism. Descartes writes: “I had . . . given enough time to languages
and likewise to reading the works of the ancients, both their histories and their
fables . . . I thought that I could do no better than undertake to get rid of them, all
at one go, in order to replace them afterwards with better ones, or with the same
ones once I had squared them with the standards of reason” (1984, 1: 113, 117). Of
course, Descartes is aware of the need for deferential treatment of those who had
continued to hold the formal authority over the truth—most notably, the faculty
of theology of the Sorbonne. In the preface to the Meditations, Descartes shrewdly
attempts to appease “those most learned and distinguished men, the Dean and
Doctors of the sacred Faculty of Theology at Paris” (2: 3). But these concessions
hardly impede the quest for truth as a form of autonomously established episte-
mological certainty. Moreover, Descartes’s claims to autonomy and his faith in
rational certainty serve to reinforce his opposition to the forms of prose fiction
that were prevalent in his day. Indeed, Descartes seems to be responding directly
to Cervantes when he cautions that fables make us imagine many events as pos-
sible when they are not. And even the most accurate histories, while not altering or
exaggerating the importance of matters to make them more worthy of being read,
at any rate almost always omit the baser and less memorable events; as a result,
the other events appear in a false light, and those who regulate their conduct by
examples drawn from these works are liable to fall into the excesses of the knights
errant in our tales of chivalry, and conceive plans beyond their powers (1: 114). He
imagines that his own plan of inquiry will be far more disciplined and methodical
than what fictions provide.
Descartes’s critique of fiction, including fables and adventure romances, sug-
gests that he was wary of the perspectival refractions generated by the novel’s
constituent discourses (see Toulmin 1990). By contrast, Cervantes embraced per-
spectivism as a response to the possibility of skepticism, and he saw that it could
lead to compromises generated by pragmatic necessity and to agreements to live
in asymmetrical and inchoate worlds (see Cascardi 2000). If perspectivism is a
philosophy, then the philosophy of the novel is inseparable from the discourse-
intensive realms of the social and the political. Indeed, the novel takes “discourse”
the novel 167
as fully able to compete with “thought” and with theoretical views about what is
true, what is good, and what is just. And because the novel is generated continu-
ously out of many different forms of discourse, it is compelled to regard matters of
truth, morality, and justice as resistant to any common measure. Don Quixote is
exemplary of a genre that draws profound philosophical consequences from the
fact that none of these discourses is recognized as superior to the others.
The novel thus readily embraces the modern idea that the world is not com-
posed of fundamental, intelligible essences. To this extent, it is consistent with
the varieties of modern empiricism that flourished after Descartes. As Roberto
Mangabeira Unger explained in his study of British empiricist writing,
it is possible to divide the world in an indefinite number of ways. No one way

of dividing it describes what the world is really like . . . . The modern conception
of nature and of the relation of thought to nature . . . denies the existence of a
chain of essences or essential qualities that we could either infer from particular
things in the world or perceive face to face in their abstract forms. And it
therefore insists that there are numberless ways in which objects and events in
the world might be classified. (1975: 31–32)
Likewise, the modern conception of personality dispenses with the myth of the
“given” self; the self is recognized as formed by, among other things, its context.
What is formed may also be transformed. The result is a view of the self as open
to change within the context of a world that can itself be transformed by virtue of
human action. Not surprisingly, such ethical and existential interests are coincident
with the formation and development of character in the novel. Novelistic charac-
ters do not have the appearance of being prefabricated entities, but struggle to fash-
ion themselves as individuals who make value for and of themselves.5 Indeed, the
novel raises the “subject” to the level of a value-question, whether in connection
with underlying assumptions about the truth, the demand to synthesize forms, or
the striving after cohesive teleologies at the level of character and action.
Although modern philosophy takes up many of these questions explicitly, the
novel generally provides a critical counterpoint to what philosophy has to say about
them. This is largely because the novel sheds light on the formation (discursive and
otherwise) of the insights that philosophy regards as achieved and, with that, artic-
ulates those things that philosophy tends to leave largely unspoken. To take but one
example, it is not just that the European Bildungsroman shares some of the aims of
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit or even, as Josiah Royce suggested, that the shape
of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit resembles that of a Bildungsroman (see Abrams
1971), but that the Bildungsroman imagines character development as fundamen-
tally problematic, as requiring the invention of a form that cannot be presupposed
in advance. As Lukács explained, the novel reflects the need to bind “form” and
“life.” There are passages in the writings of Locke and Hume that demonstrate a
bewildering sense of the precariousness of the epistemological claims they hope
to establish, but it is only in the novel that the vertiginous world of facts is made
problematical in a way that bears on the process and purpose of self-fashioning.
168 genres
The larger points behind these examples are twofold: first, that philosophy and the
novel play contrasting roles with respect to the discursive conditions that underlie
the subject and its preoccupations with truth, morality, and meaningful action;
and second, that these conditions are historical and discursive. To understand the
form of the novel thus requires something other than a “philosophical interpreta-
tion.” It requires an interpretation that is historicophilosophical.
The call for a historicophilosophical understanding of the novel is hardly new.
It was in fact a prominent element of one of the central texts of literary-philosophi-
cal writing in the twentieth century, Lukács’s Theory of the Novel (1914–15). Writing
in reaction to what he characterized as the petty two-dimensionality of neo-Kan-
tianism and other varieties of positivist thought, Lukács attempted to map large-
scale changes in literary form against a broad range of theoretical and historical
factors. For this, Lukács took up the Hegelian belief that all aesthetic forms have an
a priori ground or “home,” and that changes in these forms can be traced accord-
ing to shifts in the metaphysical beliefs or “transcendental points of orientation”
of a given age: “As a result of such a change in the transcendental points of orienta-
tion, art forms become subject to a historico-philosophical dialectic; the course of
this dialectic will depend, however, on the a priori ‘home’ of each genre” (Lukács
1971: 40). While Lukács later cast a skeptical eye on some of the methods employed
in the Theory of the Novel, the fact remains that the work was widely influential;
it was read by such figures as Thomas Mann and Max Weber and helped create a
space for a historically informed set of philosophical reflections on the novel. Luc-
ien Goldmann’s 1965 Marxist work, Pour une Sociologie du Roman, depends heav-
ily on it, as does Kundera’s account of the historical shifts in fundamental beliefs
around which the novel took shape. Here is Kundera in The Art of the Novel (1986)
in one of his most Lukácsean moments:
As God slowly departed from the seat whence he had directed the universe and
its order of values, distinguished good from evil, and endowed each thing with
meaning, Don Quixote set forth from his house into a world he could no longer
recognize. In the absence of the Supreme Judge, the world suddenly appeared in
its fearsome ambiguity; the single divine Truth decomposed into myriad relative
truths parceled out by men. Thus was born the world of the Modern Era, and
with it the novel, the image and model of that world. (1988: 6)
What The Theory of the Novel was trying to achieve, by Lukács’s own lights, was
an understanding of the homology between large-scale transformations in history
and changes in literary forms. Indeed, in his own later reflections on the Theory of
the Novel, Lukács said that he was hoping to arrive at an even “more intimate con-
nection between category and history than he found in Hegel himself ” (1971: 16).6
And yet Lukács reached conclusions that are quite different from Hegel’s. In Hegel’s
view, the world of prose is one in which “spirit” has reached a relatively high level
of stasis, not only in reflection (thought), but in society and politics, as well. In
this world, “art becomes problematic precisely because reality has become non-
problematic” (17). The central thesis of The Theory of the Novel, while formally
the novel 169
similar to Hegel’s view, in fact argues the opposite of this. For Lukács, the form of
the novel is the reflection of a world out of joint, in which everything is rendered
problematic, including art itself:
[T]he “prose” of life is here only a symptom, among many others, of the fact
that reality no longer constitutes a favourable soil for art; that is why the central
problem of the novel is the fact that art has to write off the closed and total
forms which stem from a rounded totality of being—that art has nothing more
to do with any world of forms that is immanently complete in itself . . . . And this
is not for artistic but for historico-philosophical reasons. (17)
For Lukács, the novel is defined by the disintegration of the “rounded totality” of
life associated with the epic and by the disappearance of the transcendental cer-
tainties that gave such a world its immediate security. So seen, the novel is not just
a modern form but, in its active reflection on literature’s response to these matters,
a modernist genre. Its sustaining energy derives from the fact that it is the product
of a world in which the “rounded totality” of forms is no longer immediately acces-
sible, but is refracted in an oblique fashion.
Whether Lukács’s view is historically accurate or is itself a “novelistic” recon-
struction of the past is a question well worth pursuing, in part because of what
Lukács himself says in a cautionary way about post-epic cultures in relationship to
the ancient world: “Henceforth,” he writes,
any resurrection of the Greek world is a more or less conscious hypostasy of
aesthetics into metaphysics—a violence done to the essence of everything that
lies outside the sphere of art, and a desire to destroy it; an attempt to forget
that art is only one sphere among many, and that the very disintegration and
inadequacy of the world is the precondition for the existence of art and its
becoming conscious (1971: 38).
Following this lead, Jay Bernstein has characterized the relationship between the
world of the ancient epic and that of the novel as the result of a process of historical
reflection: “The terms ‘epic’ and ‘novel’ do not signify for Lukács two unproblem-
atical empirical items which may be illuminated through a contrastive analysis;
rather, those terms mark the poles of an act of historical reflection by which the
novel can be brought into consciousness in its historical specificity and antinomic
complexity” (1984: 48).7 But the situation may well be more complicated than
this account suggests, for in the course of constructing its modern identity the
novel participates in the re-creation of the ancient epic as an historical phenom-
enon, which in turn helps generate the historical distance that our notion of the
epic requires. The novel is not merely a “belated” form of epic literature but also,
because of its self-conscious modernity, a self-aware form that helps create the epic
(as) past.
To grasp the relationship between novel and epic also requires understand-
ing how the historical distance between novel and epic is reflected in the novel’s
peculiar “inwardness.” The novel cultivates inwardness not so much because it is
introspective and nostalgic but because it depends, in Hegel’s conception, on the
170 genres
recentering of truth within a field that is defined by the subject. By contrast, the
epic world can be regarded as “subjectless” because the epic presents “not the poet’s
own inner world but the objective events . . . . This is why the great epic style consists
in the work’s seeming to be its own minstrel and appearing independently without
having any author to conduct it or be as its head” (Hegel 1975, 2: 1048–49, emphasis
added). In Lukácsean terms, the epic world is one in which there is no distinction
between “form” and “life.” The novel, by contrast, has lost this immediacy and
integrity and so must struggle to find ways to bind form and life together. It does
so just as modern philosophy attempts to come to terms with the division between
the empirical and transcendental worlds and with all the dualities that accompany
this division.
For Hegel, Don Quixote was an exemplary novel because Cervantes’ main
character demonstrates the “representation of absolute subjectivity as the whole of
truth” (1975, 2: 530). In Don Quixote, the form of “absolute subjectivity” emerges
from the contradictions between “an intelligible self-ordered world” and “an iso-
lated mind which proposes to create this order and stability solely by himself and
by chivalry, whereby it could only be overturned” (591). As Hegel went on to sug-
gest, “Don Quixote is a heart completely sure of itself and its business, or rather
this only is his lunacy that he is and remains so sure of himself and his business.
Without this peaceful lack of reflection in regard to the object and outcome of his
actions, he would not be genuinely romantic ” (591–92). The spiritual form that cor-
responds most closely to this form of certainty, with its grasp of its independence
and freedom, is not just inwardness, but “absolute inwardness.” Indeed, “absolute
inwardness” is characteristic of a world where all gods external to the subject have
disappeared: “In this Pantheon all the gods are dethroned, the flame of subjectiv-
ity has destroyed them, and instead of plastic polytheism art knows now only one
God, one spirit, one absolute independence which, as the absolute knowing and
willing of itself, remains in free unity with itself” (519).8 Such “inwardness” also
corresponds to a world in which characters often turn their attention from the
pursuit of great deeds to the trials and tribulations of love. To devote oneself to love
and to be open to its fortunes and misfortunes seems to be the fate of many char-
acters who try to act as heroes in a postheroic age.9 As Leo Bersani wrote of Racine
in A Future for Astyanax, “Agamemnon, Helen, Achilles: the parents of Racine’s
characters made history while their children try—unsuccessfully at that—to make
love” (1984: 47). The decline that is implicit in the transition from the exalted status
of hero to that of lover is already true of the aristocratic world portrayed in a novel
like Madame de Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves. In the novels of Stendhal it is all
the more valid because the main character of Le Rouge et le Noir and La Chartreuse
de Parme, Julien Sorel, was never anything more than the son of a carpenter. Julien
Sorel may spend his time in dreams about taking part in Napoleon’s army, but his
only worldly resources are deception and hypocrisy. He finds himself in love, and
there he is betrayed by his own passions.
The novelistic impulse toward self-fashioning may thus be quite powerful, but
there is hardly any guarantee that the self will be successful in any of the projects it
the novel 171
undertakes. On the contrary, the form that Lukács described as the “romanticism
of disillusionment” seems to be of the essence of novelistic subjectivity as regards
both character and novelistic form. As Bernstein has acutely observed, this par-
ticular form of “disillusionment” lodges itself in the narrative irony through which
the characters and their actions are presented, even while the characters them-
selves may remain wedded to their illusions.10 Flaubert’s L’Education Sentimentale
is a case in point. To cite Bernstein,
[W]e know Frédéric [Moreau] will not be a painter not by our foreknowledge
of his abilities, but by the circumstances and manner in which Flaubert has
Frédéric make his decision . . . . Similarly, we know from the following account
that Frédéric will fail in his plans to be a statesman . . . . Frédéric does not know
that all his dreams must succumb; nor does he attempt to fashion his own life
by making it a work of literature. That is for Flaubert. Frédéric is a mediocre
man; the content of his mediocrity is the ironic style which permeates the
generation of his projects. (1984: 121–22)
In sum, “truth” in the novel is inevitably a function of how the value-laden
choices of characters are framed by a narrator, who makes implicit value choices
in the process. As Nussbaum has written, “a view of life is told. The telling
itself—the selection of genre, formal structures, sentences, vocabulary . . . all of
this expresses a sense of life and of value, a sense of what matters and what does
not, of what learning and communicating are, of life’s relations and connections.
Life is never simply presented by a text; it is always represented as something”
(1990: 5). Truth in the novel is always framed; it is contingent on the value-
laden speech and actions of characters and also on the narrative voice through
which those actions and assertions are represented. It emerges in the presenta-
tion of nuance and detail, and in shifting points of view—even to the point
where reflection and evaluation may seem to overwhelm the “facts.” A novelist
like James gives us worlds where every fact and every action, including narra-
tive description and observation, is charged with some value. As epitomized
earlier in Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls (1841–46), this leads to the awareness that
the voice of the “truth” is but one among many other such value-seeking voices
within the novelistic universe. The development of the style indirect libre in such
novelists as Stendhal and Flaubert—where the narrative voice is not defi nitively
bounded, but where the line between the voice of the narrator and those of the
characters is blurred—represents yet another way in which the locus of value
and authority circulates in a free and unprivileged way within the novel’s inner-
worldly domain.
Modern philosophy, for its part, established a new and not unproblematical
link to the inner-worldly realm of “experience,” which was conceived by empiricist
thinkers as coincident with the world of “facts.” In particular, the skeptical empiri-
cism of Locke and Hume brought with it a new interest in particulars, together with
a turn toward a detailed discourse of “facts” and a commitment to the importance
of verifiable “experience.” In the introduction to the Treatise on Human Nature, for
example, Hume writes that,
172 genres
tho’ we must endeavour to render all our principles as universal as possible, by

tracing up our experiments to the utmost, and explaining all effects from the
simplest and fewest causes, ‘tis certain we cannot go beyond experience; and any
hypothesis, that pretends to discover the ultimate original qualities of human
nature, ought at first to be rejected as a presumptuous and chimerical. (1969: 44,
emphasis added)
There is a related Lockean wish to delimit “experience” by suppressing all “fan-

tastical ideas” (which Locke also calls “chimerical ideas”) as having no basis in
nature:
Fantastical or chimerical [ideas] I call such as have no foundation in nature, nor
have any conformity with that reality of being to which they are tacitly referred,
as to their archetypes . . . . Those [ideas] are fantastical which are made up of
such collections of simple ideas as were never really united, never were found
together in any substance: e.g., a rational creature, consisting of a horse’s head,
joined to a body of human shape, or such as the centaurs are described; or a
body yellow, very malleable, fusible, and fi xed, but lighter than common water;
or an uniform, unorganized body, consisting, as to sense, all of similar parts,
with perception and voluntary motion joined to it. (1964: 234–35)
Locke thus continues the reaction against implausible fictions that began with
literary-theoretical reappropriations of Aristotle’s Poetics in the course of contro-
versies over the fantastical adventures of the romanzo in the Italian Renaissance.11
Indeed, the culture of Enlightened modernity drew liberally upon the Renaissance-
inspired desire to secure the truth-claims of philosophy by limiting the representa-
tion of fictions and fantasies.
But both Locke and Hume discover that the tenets of empiricism are far less
stable than they might have hoped. Certainly the philosophical “discourse” around
empiricism is far less simple than is often imagined. There are some breathtak-
ing statements of uncertainty in Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding,
and these are made all the more impressive by Locke’s attempts to reach as far as
possible to the essences of things. When we come to examine the stones we tread
on, or the iron we daily handle,” writes Locke,
we presently find we know not their make, and can give no reason of the
different qualities we find in them. It is evident the internal constitution, whereon
their properties depend, is unknown to us. Therefore we in vain pretend to range
things into sorts, and dispose them into certain classes under names, by their
real essences, that they are so far from our ordinary comprehension. (1964: 287,
emphasis added)
As regards the question of whether there can be any true predications, or any other
real connection between essences, the Essay makes a rather definitive statement:
[E]ach abstract idea being distinct so that of any two the one can never be
the other, the mind will, by its intuitive knowledge, perceive their difference,
and therefore in propositions no two whole ideas can ever be affirmed one of
another . . . . All our affirmations are only in concrete, which is the affirming,
the novel 173
not one abstract idea to be another, but one abstract idea to be joined to
another. (297)
The result is a far more precarious world than the standard view of empiricism
would suggest.
The rhetoric of empiricism nonetheless infi ltrates the novel insofar as it sup-
ports the desire for a realism of representation, along with forms that bear affini-
ties with history writing and testimonial reports. As empiricism gained cultural
prestige, the novelistic adherence to the “eyewitness account” likewise rose in stat-
ure and helped secure the novel’s claims to legitimacy. And yet to speak of the
novel’s form as deeply aligned with empiricism would be to misconstrue its inten-
tions. If anything, the novel shows that the very “facts” on which modern empiri-
cist culture came to rely are inseparable from the narrative forms that lend them
shape and value. Indeed, the very notion of a “fact” makes sense only in contradis-
tinction to a discourse about “values.” The two—“fact” and “value”—stand in an
antinomic relationship in much the same way that “form” and “life” do for Lukács.
The novel’s contribution to the culture of empiricism was to insist upon the narra-
tive value frameworks within which the “facts” could become meaningful.
Indeed, the novel does more than simply reflect or reinforce the antinomies
of “fact” and “value.” It also strives, through any available means, to give them
order—in Lukács’s terms, to bind “form” and “life.” A work like Robinson Crusoe
(1719) illustrates that narrative itself strives to be a value-laden form of discourse in
a culture that seems devoted to facts. To be sure, Robinson Crusoe incorporates var-
ious empiricist procedures into this project: direct observations and their record-
ing, the taking of inventories, and the accounting of materials expended and of
resources remaining. Daniel Defoe cultivates the practice of experimentation and
sustains a pretense of historical veracity. Indeed, the very premise of Robinson Cru-
soe can be taken as an “experiment” in which an ordinary man is placed in a radi-
cally unfamiliar context in order to discover, among other things, what is essential
about human nature and what is a product of culture. But Defoe’s quasi-empiricist
strategies, with their commitment to the recording of facts and a discovery of the
“truth,” are set within a narrative that ultimately casts the “facts” within many
different frames of value. The narrative that ostensibly experiments with Crusoe’s
shipwreck on a desert island can also be read as a spiritual autobiography, as an
adventure story, as a mythical account of the foundations of economic society,
as an unfi ltered personal diary, as an account of the workings of providence in
human affairs, and as a grand example of an Oedipal struggle, illustrating the
lengths to which sons may go in order to clear free of the authority of their fathers.
There is as much consistency among these narrative value frames (or as little) as
might be expected of a genre whose form was determined by a crisis in the belief in
any single, extraworldly source of authority.
That crisis determines what is sometimes characterized as a denial of the “myth
of the given.” It is central to the reorientation of transcendental beliefs that Lukács
describes in connection with the novel, and it is crucial for an understanding of
174 genres
what Lukács describes as the “productivity of spirit.” Empiricists like Locke and
Hume encountered the inaccessibility of essences, but Kant’s “Copernican turn”
reoriented philosophical thinking around the belief that the categories of the mind,
and not the world, were responsible for setting the parameters of experience. For
Kant, we can truly know only what we make. The mind (spirit) is “productive”
in this way: it supplies the categories of any possible experience. Not surprisingly,
the more or less local complications that empiricist procedures encountered in
attempting to arrive at the truth—the resistance of facts to the procedures of evi-
dentiary validation, for example—do not adequately characterize the role that the
“productive spirit” plays in shaping the culture of which the novel was a part.
In The Theory of the Novel, Lukács proposed that the cohesion among abstract
components of the novel is pure and formal, whereas the principle of “creative sub-
jectivity” implies an ethic that the novel best reveals at the level of content (1971: 84).
To invoke the “productivity of spirit” explains why the novel shows human beings
endlessly making up their minds, deliberating and deciding, assessing what they
can meaningfully take responsibility for, judging whether and how they can claim
the world as their own.12 In the world of the novel, the fundamental Aristotelian
question—“How should one live?”—is rendered essentially problematic.13 Little
wonder that philosophical existentialism found the novel such a congenial genre.
In the existentialist novel (e.g., La Nausée, L’Étrangère, L’Age de Raison), the act of
making up one’s mind takes place in a context where there are no preconceived
answers. (This is consistent with what Kant meant when he described the self in
terms of “spontaneity” [Selbsttätigkeit]). But even before existentialism, we have a
figure like Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, who is caught up terrible moral dilemmas,
trying to decide not just what to do but how to assess what he has done or failed
to do. Even the novels of Iris Murdoch, who was no existentialist sympathizer, are
fi lled with examples of characters who are absorbed in the process of making up
their minds. Moreover, her characters are able to change their minds, not just on
the basis of the “facts” but on the way in which they come to regard the facts. Her
own hope was for a relationship to the facts that mere observation of the world
would not allow. In some of her philosophical writings (e.g., The Sovereignty of
Good [1985]), she describes what it might mean to see beyond a way that is subject to
the principles of empirical observation. She describes a form of seeing that requires
attending to the values that are revealed by the ways in which characters act.
But Murdoch understands the activity of seeing not so much as a value-
producing enterprise as a source of insight into the way things truly are. She thus
strives to reconcile the modern novel with a premodern (Platonic) view of the
world. The idea that characters can move from a position of ignorance about the
world to one of true insight might even lend some plausibility to the view that
character development in the novel owes its greatest debts to Plato’s dialogues.
And yet there are historical differences between Plato’s world and the universe
of the novel that Murdoch seems to ignore. Novelistic characters can and indeed
do change, but they do so in a world that is not believed to be fi xed one way or
the novel 175
another. Indeed, the openness of the world-horizon is fundamental to the most

basic interests in telling stories in novelistic ways. If late adolescence and young
adulthood are of particular interest in the novel, this is because the novel tends to
construe life as having a form in which the full range of possibilities is not given to
anyone in advance, but is left up to the individual to produce as a result of matu-
ration. The Bildungsroman presents notably complex models of the development
of character. It takes seemingly isolated events, including those that mark begin-
nings and endings, and follows them through an arc that tries to trace meaningful
interconnections among them. Jane Austen’s novels are particularly illustrative of
the philosophical stakes involved in “character development.” Alasdair MacIntyre
(1981: 222–26) has suggested that Austen’s view of character offers one of the few
faithful modern interpretations of Aristotle’s understanding about the virtues. To
be sure, Austen preserves something essential about Aristotle’s views of character
despite (or in addition to) her inheritance of a non-Aristotelian, Christian outlook
on the virtues. And yet the fact remains that Austen is thoroughly modern in just
the ways that correspond to Lukács’s views about the “productivity of spirit.” Her
heroines achieve happiness to the degree that they find ways, through their powers
of insight, intelligence, and language, to break free from the constraints set by par-
ents or by economic and social contexts. This is the basis of any self-achievement
they might attain. The opportunities they have for self-realization are tied to the
hope that they can avoid the limiting forms of life that would likely have befallen
women in earlier times; in Austen’s world, there are new, and newly desired, life
outcomes. These are also reflected, a contrario, in characters who fail to mature—in
Elizabeth Bennet’s youngest sibling, for instance, who marries at far too young an
emotional age.
But the very reason that the novel concentrates on “creative subjectivity” is
that its historical world is neither Platonic nor Aristotelian, but modern. This is,
as Lukács argues, the very reason why its form is problematic. The novel is skepti-
cal about the existence of any necessary linkage of beginnings, middles, and ends.
Indeed, the novel sometimes flouts the very principle of goal-driven behavior,
either by subverting expected trajectories of achievement or by refusing to embrace
the value of goal-directed action altogether. Self-realization is but one possible
pursuit in a world “abandoned by god.” Other possibilities include errant behavior
(Don Quixote again) or forms of activity that are neither profitable nor productive.
Novels in this respect stand at an oblique angle to the pragmatic aims that much
of modern philosophy accepts. Indeed, Descartes’s central purpose in the Medita-
tions and the Discourse on Method was to find ways of making improvements in
very practical matters, to wit, in enabling advances in medical science. This is a far
cry from the novelistic awareness that causes and effects relate only contingently
to one another, and that “action” is a field that must include various forms of inac-
tion, as well. Consider James’s “The Spoils of Poynton” as a case in point. Though
technically a short story and not a novel, it is a novelistic fiction that makes a com-
pelling case about the significance of wasteful activity, as if to suggest that modern
176 genres
individuals cannot engage in value and production without also engaging in their
opposites.
Indeed, the structures of design and intention at work in the novel often seem
to operate in ways that directly contravene Aristotelian ideas about the relationship
between beings and the ends that they ought to pursue. In the Poetics, Aristotle’s
ethical and metaphysical views were reflected in a conception of plot that required
a coherent and goal-driven relationship between beginnings, middles, and end-
ings. The novel, for its part, seems closer to Sigmund Freud’s views in Beyond the
Pleasure Principle (1920), where the activity of the organism is not to achieve “per-
fection” but to return to an earlier state of affairs, often an inanimate one; it is
consistent with an ambition toward undoing rather than achieving, and it involves
a dissipation of the very sources of desire that would seem to impel character and
action forward. The paradigmatic case, treated by Peter Brooks in Reading for the
Plot (1984), is Honoré de Balzac’s Wild Ass’s Skin, where the protagonist comes into
the possession of a talisman. The conditions of the magical wild ass’s skin are that
it will fulfill its owner’s every desire, but each time at the cost of some remaining
portion of his life. The hero can thus do best to try to eliminate all desiring activity.
The “story” of the novel is produced as an act of reflection on this grand paradox.
To be sure, Balzac creates genuine suspense about what the outcome of the plot will
be and sustains a desire to know the end, but the narrative exists only because the
end can be delayed. In such circumstances, there is hardly an affirmative binding
of “form” and “life,” or even a wry reflection on their disjunction, but a higher
order production of narrative “movement” that derives from a complete inversion
of Aristotelian teleologies.
The further alignment of the novel with such a challenge to philosophy comes
from the fact that the novel itself provided a framework that was congenial to
Freud’s late-modern reappropriation of the ancient myths. Above all, the case his-
tories (“Wolf Man,” “Rat Man,” “Dora,” etc.) have a novelistic cast. They are all
instances in which some form of irony, which Lukács describes as the “norma-
tive mentality of the novel,” is adumbrated as true and strives to assert its validity
in light of the fact that the kernel of truth at issue may appear incomplete and
obscure, or that access to it is impeded by the subjects themselves. “I begin,” writes
Freud in “Dora,” “by asking the patient to give me the whole story of his life and
illness, but even so the information I receive is never enough to let me see my way
about the case.” And yet he concludes that “the patients’ inability to give me an
ordered history of their life in so far as it coincides with the history of their illness
is not merely characteristic of the neurosis. It also possesses great theoretical sig-
nificance” (1963: 10). The theoretical significance of this fact—that both conscious
and unconscious forgetting are at work—may help explain why “form” and “life”
could not possibly be bound together. Both in their theories and in their storylike
accounts, the “case histories” confirm something that the novel had already taken
to heart: that philosophy’s ethical and existential hopes were premised on a notion
of the truth that proved inadequate to the modes of discourse and forms of life in
which they had come to take root.
the novel 177
NOTES
1. When, in the fourth chapter of Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1984), Bakhtin

suggested that the novel had evolved from Menippean satire, this was because he
saw both as genres in which ceaseless upheavals of perspective and challenges to
authoritative standards of truth became established as normative. The principal strategy
of Menippean satire, which involves the juxtaposition of differing points of view or
syncrisis, is not unrelated to novelistic perspectivism. In the words of one recent critic,
Menippean satire “is a form that uses at least two other genres, languages, cultures, or
changes of voice to oppose a dangerous, false, or specious and threatening orthodoxy”
(Weinbrodt 2005: 8).
2. The “problematic” nature of the novel was not always acknowledged to be such.
Thus, in “The Art of Fiction” (2004), James could refer to the time when “there was
a comfortable, good-humored feeling abroad that a novel is a novel, as a pudding is a
pudding, and that our only business with it could be to swallow it.” As he goes on to
note, however, “within a year or two, for some reason or other, there have been signs of
returning to animation—the era of discussion would appear to have been to a certain
extent opened” (427). James ultimately presents the novel as a “magnificent” form that
offers “few restrictions and such innumerable opportunities” (446).
3. However, the novel may well mimic the kinds of truth-claims that pretend to tell
the whole truth. The anonymous, proto-novelistic picaresque Lazarillo de Tormes is an
early example of the novel’s invocation of the principle of narrative wholeness.
4. As Nussbaum further argues, in ways reminiscent of Iris Murdoch’s writings,
fine attention and good deliberation require a highly complex, nuanced perception of and
emotional responses to the concrete features of one’s own context, including particular
persons and relationships.
5. Indeed, when Stephen Greenblatt invoked the term “self-fashioning” in
connection with the development of a poetics of subjectivity in the Renaissance, it is
largely a novelistic sense of character that is created, regardless of the fact that self-
fashioning may have taken place in other genres (poetry, drama, etc.). See Greenblatt
1980.
6. Lukács’s complaint about the work, issued several intellectual turns away
from the conceptual framework within which it was written, was that the Theory of
the Novel was insufficiently historical and that its typology of novelistic forms was far
too schematic and abstract to be of use: “This method remains extremely abstract in
many respects,” he wrote; “it is cut off from concrete socio-historical realities. For that
reason . . . it leads only too often to arbitrary intellectual constructs . . . . The Theory of the
Novel remained at the level of an attempt which failed both in design and in execution,
but which in its intention came closer to the right solution than its contemporaries were
able to do” (1971: 17).
7. Bernstein further explains:
What controls Lukács’s use of the past is not a utopian philosophy of history,
but a methodology. And that methodology is, roughly, a dialectical (critical)
hermeneutics . . . . He denies any desire to proffer a philosophy of history; and he
explicitly criticises the idealist tradition for making the epic age into a Utopia.
None the less, he must return to Greece for his analysis because the historical
identity of the novel, an identity the novel provides for itself, is, in part,
constituted by its connection with the ancient epic. (1984: 64–65)
178 genres
8. It is not just that historical circumstances surrounding the subject are changing
and that these changes are reflected in the novel, but that the “novelistic” subject plays a
role in resisting belief in external “gods.” The matter is thus not just, as Lukács suggests,
that the world is abandoned by god, but that the subject has itself played a role in
banishing the “gods.” Hegel writes:
This inherently infi nite and absolute universal content [of subjectivity] is
the absolute negation of everything particular, the simple unity with itself
which has dissipated all external relations, all processes of nature and their
periodicity of birth, passing away, and rebirth, all the restrictedness in spiritual
existence, and dissolved all particular gods into a pure and infinite self-identity.
(1975, 2: 519)
9. The world of opera—take Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde as a case in point—is in
some important ways more novelistic than epic or dramatic.
10. Compare Michael McKeon’s (1987) account of the “theories” of enchantment and
enchanters that Don Quixote invents in order to explain his illusions.
11. The Cervantean critique of the excesses of romance in the romances of chivalry
was fueled by these earlier Renaissance reengagements with Aristotle. See Forcione 1970.
12. “A human subject is . . . a meaning-making subject (minimally always ‘making
up her mind’ in experiencing and so likewise responsible for what she claims to know), a
self-conscious subject, in this active, self-determining relation to itself in all experience as
well as in all action” (Pippin 2005: 2).
13. Compare Nussbaum (1990: 23–29), who regards the novel as consistent with this
question and as relatively little troubled by it.
REFERENCES
Abrams, M. H. (1971). Natural Supernaturalism. New York: Norton.

Barthes, R. (1984). “L’Effet du Réel.” In Barthes, Le Bruissement de la Langue; Essais
Critiques IV. Paris: Seuil.
Bernstein, J. M. (1984). The Philosophy of the Novel: Lukács, Marxism, and the Dialectics of
Form. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Bersani, L. (1984). A Future for Astyanax. New York: Columbia University Press.
Cascardi, A. J. (1986). The Bounds of Reason: Cervantes, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert. New York:
Columbia University Press.
——. (2000). “Two Kinds of Knowing in Plato, Cervantes, and Aristotle,” Philosophy and
Literature 24, 406–23.
Descartes, R. (1984). Philosophical Writings 3 vols.; J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, and
D. Murdoch, (trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dickens, C. (1999). David Copperfield. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Original work
published 1849–50.)
Forcione, A. (1970). Cervantes, Aristotle, and the “Persiles.” Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Freud, S. (1963). Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria. New York: Collier/Macmillan.
Fuentes, C. (1976). Cervantes o la Critica de la Lectura. Mexico City: Joaquín Moritz.
Greenblatt, S. (1980). Renaissance Self-Fashioning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
the novel 179
Hegel, G. W. F. (1975). Lectures on Aesthetics (T. M. Knox, trans.). Oxford: Oxford

Heiserman, H. (1977). The Novel before the Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hume, D. (1969). A Treatise of Human Nature (Ernest G. Mossner, ed.). London: Penguin.
(Original work published 1739.)
James, H. (2004). “The Art of Fiction.” In John Auchard (ed.), The Portable Henry James.
New York: Penguin. (Original work published 1884.)
Jones, P. (1975). Philosophy and the Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kundera, M. (1988). “The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes.” In L. Asher, (trans.). The Art
of the Novel. New York: Harper and Row. (Original work published 1986.)
Locke, J. (1964). An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, A. D. Woozley, (ed.). New
York: Meridian. (Original work published 1690.)
Lukács, G. (1971). The Theory of the Novel, Anna Bostock, (trans.). Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press. (Original work published 1920.)
MacIntyre, A. (1981). After Virtue. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press.
McKeon, M. (1987). The Origins of the English Novel: 1600–1740. Baltimore: Johns
Nussbaum, M. (1990). Love’s Knowledge. New York: Oxford University Press.
Pippin, R. B. (2005). The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath.
Schopenhauer, A. (1995). The World as Will and Idea. London: J. M. Dent/Everyman.
(Original work published 1819.)
Toulmin, S. (1990). Cosmopolis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Unger, R. M. (1975). Knowledge and Politics. New York: Free Press.
Weinbrodt, H. (2005). Menippean Satire Reconsidered: From Antiquity to the Eighteenth
Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
 
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
AND BIOGRAPHY
stephen mulhall
I seems clear that, of the two literary genres of the life story, autobiography has
been more central to the interests and the development of philosophy than biogra-
phy. It might even be argued that one could write an instructive (even if not exactly
exhaustive) history of Western philosophy by concentrating solely on examples of
philosophical autobiography; at the very least, such texts as Augustine’s Confessions,
Descartes’s Meditations, Rousseau’s Confessions, and Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo would
be pivotal to any attempt to narrate the story of the life of the mind in the West.
So the question arises: why should this be the case? Why should such a highly spe-
cific mode of writing play such a deeply influential role in philosophy’s unfolding
and contested conception of itself? And if philosophy can find clarity about itself
through a philosopher’s attempts to attain clarity about himself, is that in part
because any individual’s pursuit of self-understanding will fi nd itself drifting or
drawn toward philosophical modes of reflection? If philosophical autobiographies
are as central to the history and development of their genre as the illustriousness of
my examples suggests, perhaps that is because the impulse to take up certain spe-
cifically philosophical problems lies at the heart of autobiographical (and hence,
biographical) writing as such.
That some degree of philosophical concern for the autobiographical impulse
might be appropriate is not in itself controversial. After all, it is one of philoso-
phy’s defining characteristics that it seems capable of taking an interest in, even
presuming to adjudicate upon, pretty much any and every aspect of human life.
We have the philosophy of art and morality, of science and of history, of politics
and economics; we philosophize about the mind, the body, language, and logic,
about what there is and how we might come to know about it. So it is no surprise
autobiography and biography 181
that philosophers should take the human business of autobiography to be just as

much capable of generating philosophical questions as any other piece of human
business, and hence as capable of supporting what one might call “the philosophy
of autobiography”—within which one might expect to find a critical investigation
of the assumptions and concepts presupposed by any particular autobiographical
exercise. But why should these assumptions and concepts—as opposed to those
deployed by historian and scientists, or those informing our concerns with aes-
thetic and moral values—be of any particular, even of an obsessional, interest to
philosophers? And why should philosophy repeatedly feel the need to express and
to revolutionize itself through essentially autobiographical modes of writing?
An answer to this question might emerge if we reflect upon the peculiar kind of
authority that philosophy assigns to its pronouncements. Historians, philologists,
and molecular biologists are looked to as authorities concerning their respective
subject matters because they have acquired a certain kind of expertise; they know
a lot of things about the Second World War, or the vicissitudes of the Romance
languages, or the behavior of DNA that most of us do not know, and they have
mastered a range of investigative techniques or methods that can, in principle,
generate an endless further supply of such knowledge.
Philosophy isn’t like that—it has no distinctive subject matter; its peculiar
kinds of questions are essentially parasitic upon the existence of other disciplines
and domains of human life: they can arise with respect to any of those phenom-
ena, and there is no body of distinctively philosophical knowledge or technique
or method that must be mastered by anyone who wishes to try to answer those
questions (or at least nothing that is not itself essentially subject to philosophical
contestation and questioning). And yet, philosophers continue to claim sweeping
authority for their pronouncements; they variously think of the results of their
thinking as giving us access to the a priori, as speaking with necessity and univer-
sality, as deliverances of pure reason. How is this to be understood?
If we imagine the philosopher, at once gripped by her sense that her insights
truly penetrate to a realm of impersonal necessity and yet unable to deny that those
insights are unsupported by any impersonally authoritative expertise, I think that
we will naturally conjure up a picture of an exposed self, one whose claims to the
agreement of others necessarily place her individual existence on the line. In other
words, we can picture philosophy as a kind of exemplary self-reliance, a mode of
the self’s relation to itself in which the individual self is deemed representative of
selfhood as such. This does not give up on the philosophical claim to universal-
ity; it merely follows Aristotle in thinking that the universal can only be attained
through and made manifest in the particular. Without some such picture of one-
self as both particular and representative (even if representative only by virtue of
one’s particularity, which then at least exemplifies the human capacity for indi-
viduality—for differentiating oneself from every other human being), why would
anyone write an autobiography? And one might then ask whether having such a
picture of oneself is inherent to selfhood as such—a condition of being oriented as
a subject in (and of) human life.
182 genres
A picture of philosophical authority as essentially but impersonally autobio-

graphical is detectable throughout the history of the subject, from Socrates onward.
Even if we restrict ourselves to the modern period, we encounter Descartes’s pre-
sentation of himself as subjecting himself to the threat of madness in a search
for epistemological purity whose results he invites us to prove by enacting their
production ourselves; we find Locke, Berkeley, and Hume acting on the conviction
that one individual’s discovery of something about his own mind (the absence or
presence of an idea) is authoritative for all; and in more recent times, we find Aus-
tin and Wittgenstein speaking of what we say when, and thereby establishing how
things are in the world, on the basis of their own individual sense of the fitness of
words to their contexts of application. Each such inflection of the autobiographi-
cal impulse in philosophy obviously invites the charge of arrogance. Its inherent
humility may be less obvious, but it is no less real, for, given that the representa-
tiveness claimed for the philosopher’s individuality is such that any individual can
also claim it, it can always be contested or denied. Hence, such self-reliance actu-
ally constitutes an important counterexample to the often rather less humble and
self-aware modes in which philosophers have claimed authority over others.
If philosophy’s peculiar combination of arrogance and humility can in this
way be grounded in the self’s relation to itself, then philosophy has a particular
reason to preoccupy itself with the assumptions and resources of autobiographical
writing—that of attempting to achieve not only a clearer understanding of the self,
but also thereby a clearer self-understanding. It then becomes a matter of doubled
or reflexive significance for philosophy to ask what it betokens about the self that
it is capable of an autobiographical relation to itself. And since the idea of a biog-
raphy is one factor in the meaning of the idea of the autobiographical, we might
quickly conclude that this question is not one that we can properly address without
also addressing the question of what it betokens about the self that other selves are
capable of establishing a biographical relation to it.
Some philosophical accounts of this matter might be read as viewing any idea
of the autobiographical as dependent on the biographical as arrived at rather too
quickly. Does not Descartes’s stance in the Meditations discover that, while the real
existence of other minds is dubitable, the doubting self cannot doubt the reality
of its own existence? And does this not suggest that an autobiographical relation
to the self is possible in the absence of the possibility of any biographical relation
to that self? But what such an account overlooks is not just the fact that Descartes
himself appears to overlook certain constitutive dependencies of the self upon
others (in, for example, the meditating self’s need to inherit its capacity to articu-
late its train of thought in words of a common language), but also the fact that
Descartes’s textual enactment of his capacity to account for himself is addressed
to others. And if others can grasp his own account of the life of his mind, what is
to prevent them from offering an account of that life themselves (even one that
contests his own)?
Could one imagine a situation in which others are in a position to offer an
account of the life of an individual when that individual herself lacks any possibility
of so doing? The issue here is not best exemplified in cases where someone who
once had the capacity to offer an account of her own life comes to lose it (through
accident or injury, say); the issue is rather whether, with respect to a creature who is
essentially incapable of relating to itself as the possible object of an autobiography,
others could regard that creature as the possible object of a biography. In other
words, is it internal to our conception of what it is for someone to have or to live a
life of which there might be a biography that she be capable of taking an autobio-
graphical stance toward herself? Is our concept of the self such that its distinctive
mode of existence must be writable, articulable in thought or speech, from both
the first-person and the third-person perspectives?
A familiar line of thought, commonly based nowadays on more or less egre-
gious misreadings of structuralist and poststructuralist philosophers, but also
given expression by certain modernist writers, would reject this idea from the out-
set. To tell a story about oneself is, according to this suggestion, necessarily to fal-
sify oneself; it is to impose a form and structure upon that which, like any aspect
of the real, essentially transcends such constraints. Any application of language
to reality—being an attempt to confine the particularity of the particular within
necessarily general terms, and hence within the identity system of the concept—is
a misapplication; hence, any application of words to the human self necessarily
misses its target, even when it is the self itself that applies them to itself, even when
it simply tries to name itself. As Samuel Beckett’s narrator in The Unnamable puts
it: “I, say I. Unbelieving . . . I seem to speak, it is not I, about me, it is not about me”
(1979: 267).
A. S. Byatt’s novel The Biographer’s Tale (2000) pivots around these kinds of
anxiety. Its protagonist, Phineas Nanson, is driven to take a biographical interest
in the biographical work of one Scholes Destry-Scholes as a reaction to the ways
in which literary theory (in his view) reduces individual texts to mere instances of
general structures: “I must have things,” he wails. “Facts” his supervisor proclaims:
“The richness, the surprise, the shining solidity of a world full of facts. Every estab-
lished fact—taking its place in a constellation of glittering facts like planets in an
empty heaven, declaring here is matter, and there is vacancy—every established fact
illuminates the world” (4). But even Destry-Scholes is discovered to have recoiled
from or, rather, to have reoriented his biographical work in the direction of fictive
accounts of the lives of Carl Linnaeus, Francis Galton, and Henrik Ibsen—a tax-
onomist, a statistician, and a playwright who famously invokes the image of the
self as a centerless onion: three debunkers of the inspiring conception of genuinely
individual elements of reality, and hence of human individuality. And even here,
in these fragmentary, hybrid literary exercises, Destry-Scholes’s own self remains
absent, withdrawing from the biographer’s grasp.
Peter Conradi, invoking a passage from one of Iris Murdoch’s novels that
expresses an analogous suspicion, draws a moral from it for his own biographical
work on Murdoch: “In Under the Net, Hugo teaches Jake that ‘all stories are lies’
because truth is local and particular. This was the truth I sought. The biographer
must construct a story. I decided to tell a succession of short stories that might be
184 genres
mutually contradictory, but were each internally coherent, and (I felt) individually
truthful” (2002: 6).
But of course, if all stories are lies, then even a succession of internally coherent
but mutually contradictory short stories could not (even in principle) be individu-
ally truthful. If Hugo is right, then the biographer and the autobiographer alike
simply cannot achieve truth, and so cannot coherently seek it; but then we might
ask whether Hugo’s sense of the inherent particularity of truth really justifies the
conclusion that its articulation in language, and particularly in the language of
story, must fail. Perhaps truth is not lost the moment a story is constructed for its
inhabitation; perhaps its fate rather depends (as Conradi’s avowed moral and his
biographical practice both suggest) on how one constructs the story—with what
degree of particularity. The question of how a constructed story of an actual life
may be truthful, even true, could not then simply be shirked.
Pursuing such an alternative line of thought, the philosopher Alasdair MacIn-
tyre has argued in After Virtue (1981: 191–6) that the possibility of giving a narrative
account of the self is internal to what it is for the self to be a self. He claims that
selves are agents and that human actions are necessarily such that they are com-
prehensible in narrative terms. Actions are not just pieces of behavior, exhaustively
describable in terms of physical movements; they are intentional, and hence can
be comprehended only by relating them to the intentions, beliefs, and goals of the
person performing them, and those intentions can be understood only in terms
of the settings or contexts in which they are embedded. I am currently writing
an essay; I might also be said to be supporting a university press, furthering my
career, following a line of thought from earlier writing and teaching, repaying a
debt to one of my colleagues, avoiding domestic commitments, and so on. It is
therefore pertinent to ask what I am doing—in other words, to expect me to be
able to specify under which of these various descriptions I primarily take myself
to be doing what I am doing; and the answer I give will locate my action in a spe-
cific setting, which will in turn form part of a larger setting or context. If I am
primarily supporting a university press, I am relating my action to the history of
a particular publishing institution, and thereby to the particular history of aca-
demic philosophical discourse; if I am avoiding domestic commitment, the rel-
evant larger setting is the history not only of the institution of marriage but also of
my marriage and its entwinement in my own life as well as that of others. And, of
course, I might think of myself as doing both. But however I answer this question,
I must do so by implicitly or explicitly embedding my action in a narrative history.
I thereby render it comprehensible—that is, recountable as an episode in a set of
nested stories—not only to myself but also to others, and in the absence of such
embedding, there is nothing that might count as an action to be understood either
by myself or others, and so nothing of agency in what I do, only matter in motion.
As MacIntyre summarizes the matter:
I am presenting . . . human actions in general as enacted narratives. Narrative is

not the work of poets, dramatists and novelists reflecting upon events which had
no narrative order before one was imposed by the singer or the writer; narrative
form is neither disguise nor decoration . . . . It is because we all live out narratives
in our lives and because we understand our own lives in terms of the narratives
that we live out that the form of narrative is appropriate for understanding the
actions of others. Stories are lived before they are told—except in the case of
fiction. (1981: 197)
On this understanding of agency, the identity or unity of a self is the unity of a

narrative, a unity of exactly the kind to which autobiographical and biographical
stories typically give expression, and since the form such stories give to human
lives corresponds to the form that such lives actually have, it must in principle be
possible for such stories to capture the truth of a human life (even if practical dif-
ficulties of all kinds might prevent its attainment in any given case).
Such an understanding can allow for the possibility that calling a given event
or action a beginning or an end confers significance of a kind upon it, and hence
can be a matter of debate, since it claims only that the nature of the debate takes for
granted the constraints of a narrative tale. It can also acknowledge that individuals
are not entirely free to live out whatever story they please—that they are only coau-
thors of the narrative in which they are their own heroes, insofar as we enter upon
a stage that is not of our own design, into ongoing, interlocking narratives that
are not of our own making, playing subordinate parts in the dramas of others as
well as the central part in our own. It can even allow for the possibility of the most
thoroughgoing rejection of the terms in which one’s inherited settings inform the
narrative options one confronts in living out one’s life, for such rejection is simply
one extreme way in which one lives out the drama of one’s own existence in rela-
tion to the other dramatic narratives within which it is embedded. Most centrally,
however, it rebuts the charge that to give a narrative account of a human life is nec-
essarily to falsify it—to impose on it an order or form (a structure of beginnings,
unfoldings, reversals, achievements, triumphs, disasters, and endings) appropriate
to fiction but essentially lacking in reality.
Something like the contrary is in fact the case. Autobiography and biography
are motivated by the requirements of truthfulness toward a conception of human
life as possessed of narrative form and structure, and this is not because such forms
happen to coincide with the way human existence is objectively structured, but
rather because the distinctively human form of individual existence is constituted
by the exercise of our capacity to tell our own stories. The specific modes of that
narrativity may be historically and culturally specific, just as certain forms of self-
interpretation (say, those of the Homeric king or warrior) may recede beyond our
social grasp only to be replaced by others (say, those of president or spy), but that
there are modes or genres of narrative self-interpretation is constitutive of distinc-
tively human life.
MacIntyre’s basically Aristotelian approach thus rightly brings the techniques
of certain kinds of fiction and those of biography and autobiography into close
proximity. It is not clear, however, how well he handles his consequent obligation
to show how the two genres might be distinguished (given that they are not to be
186 genres
distinguished by reference to the narrative forms they assume or impose). As we

have just seen, he claims that, whereas with respect to real people, stories are lived
before they are told, with respect to fictional people it is otherwise; presumably, he
does not mean by this that fictional lives are told before they are lived, but rather
that they are not lived before they are told—even, perhaps, that the living of them
and the telling of them are in some sense one and the same thing. And later, he
remarks, “The difference between imaginary characters and real ones is not in the
narrative form of what they do; it is in the degree of their authorship of that form
and of their own deeds” (1981: 200). Both remarks, however, overlook the distinc-
tion between author and character in fictional narratives.
David Copperfield and Sherlock Holmes have exactly the same degree of
authorial control over their own actions, exactly the same need to accept the con-
straints of the settings of their actions and exactly the same responsibility for what
they do within those constraints, as did Charles Dickens and Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle or, indeed, any real human beings; if they did not, their authors would not
have produced a satisfying fictional depiction of human individuals. In particu-
lar, David Copperfield certainly lived those events of his life that he is recounting
before the event in his life that is his recounting of them: he is remembering his
childhood and youth. To be sure, Dickens and Doyle invented Copperfield and
Holmes, and hence might be said to be in this sense entirely in control of their
creations (although fiction writers are prone to articulate their experience of their
characters in precisely opposite terms—as beings who reveal their nature and des-
tiny to their authors, and as alive only insofar as their authors suffer this revelation
of their autonomy), but Dickens and Doyle are not characters or forces of any kind
in the world in which Copperfield and Holmes live out their lives, the world of the
novels in which they are characters.
What this reveals is, I think, an essential confusion in the attempt to illumi-
nate the nature of the real human self’s relation to itself by this kind of reference
to an author’s relation to the characters in a story he has written. For if we say
that a human being’s relation to itself is that of (part) author of a tale in which
she is the hero, then she must be regarded both as a character in the story told by
the author and as the author of that story, but these two kinds of relation to the
fictional character are not only radically different, but also not obviously combin-
able. An author of a fictional narrative is (at least according to the model we are
considering) at liberty to choose whom to write about, the nature of the world she
inhabits, and the events that will make up her life, but as MacIntyre acknowledges,
human individuals have no such absolute freedom in relation to the narratives of
their own lives. A character in a fictional narrative of the realistic kind (that is, a
fictional narrative of the real world) relates to the settings and circumstances in
which she finds herself, and to herself, in exactly the way a real human being does;
hence her position reiterates that of the real person, rather than contrasting illu-
minatingly with it.
None of this definitively undermines MacIntyre’s core claim that real human
lives necessarily have a narrative structure; indeed, insofar as this line of thought
depends upon seeing a correspondence between the narrative unity of fictional

and real characters as essential to the former’s ability to elicit our suspensions of
disbelief, it actually reinforces it. What he needs to get more accurately into focus
is not any spurious set of differences between a fictional character’s relations to her
existence and that of a real person, but rather a real and important set of differ-
ences between a real person’s relationship to another person, and her relationship
to a fictional character, for the techniques of realistic fiction can give its readers
modes of access to the inmost thoughts and feelings, the most subtle and fine-
grained details, of a fictional character’s consciousness that are simply unavailable
when one is trying to grasp the significance of a real person’s thoughts, sayings,
and doings. My point here is not that another’s most complex thoughts and feel-
ings are beyond expression by that other; if an author can articulate them in a
fictional case, there is no reason in principle why a real person cannot convey such
things. The point is rather that, with respect to another real person, the sincerity
of her self-expressions may be open to question at any given point, whereas when
certain fictional techniques are used to convey to us a fictional character’s stream
of consciousness, we cannot coherently question whether what is thereby conveyed
is true.
This point needs careful handling, of course. My claim is not that everything
we learn in a work of fiction about a character’s inner life—even when it is the
character that informs us of it—is trustworthy. The murderer who narrates Agatha
Christie’s The Mystery of Roger Ackroyd does not tell us everything he could, and he
certainly does not tell us everything he is thinking, but he never lies, and if he did,
his narrative would be unreadable; a completely unreliable narrator—as opposed
to one who gives himself away—would not be a narrator at all. Furthermore, the
shadow of unreliability in a fictional character’s autobiographical narrations is not
exactly equivalent to that which hangs over real journals and memoirs. Any biog-
rapher must certainly be sensitive to the possible inaccuracies, deceptions, and
self-deceptions embedded in her subject’s autobiographical writings, but these are
controlled or constrained for the reader of a fictional autobiography in ways that
the real biographer simply cannot take for granted. It would be essentially point-
less, even incoherent, for an author to write a work of fiction taking the form of an
autobiography that was largely fabricated by its fictional author, but whose status as
a fabrication was undetectable to its readers, whereas a real person’s autobiography
might well be written with the perfectly intelligible intention of meeting both con-
ditions, and could even succeed in doing so. And the deployment of other fictional
techniques similarly excludes certain possibilities of fabrication or deception; for
example, when Jane Austen reports Elizabeth Bennet’s interior responses to Dar-
cy’s letter, there is simply no room for her readers intelligibly to raise the question
of whether those responses are what they are reported to be (although they might
exhibit certain species of self-deception).
These are the kinds of painstaking comparison and contrast that will truly
clarify the differences between our relations to real people and our relations to
fictional characters, and the different ways in which these differences emerge in
188 genres
biographical and autobiographical genres. MacIntyre simply does not attend with
sufficient patience to these complexities, and as a result, his portrait of the essen-
tially narrative unity of the self can appear to be not only inaccurate but also symp-
tomatic—as if designed to repress something central to the issues with which he is
concerned—for his doomed attempt to cross or graft a picture of absolute autho-
rial freedom onto the more familiar, constrained kind encountered both in reality
and in realistic fiction strongly suggests that he is tempted to overlook or repress
some limit or condition inherent in the way in which human individuals relate to
their own existence (and to occlude thereby some limit or condition inherent in
attempts by others to narrate that existence from without—to write a biography of
the kind of existence that necessarily possesses that kind of relation to itself).
Some suggestions as to what this limit might be can be gleaned from Heide-
gger’s conception of the nature of distinctively human being—what in Being and
Time (1927) he calls Dasein. On the one hand, Heidegger presents a portrait of
human existence that appears to confirm many aspects of MacIntyre’s account.
For him, Dasein treats its own being as an issue—that is, every moment of its exis-
tence confronts it with the question of how to go on with its life, of which among
a given range of possibilities it should realize; it thereby projects itself into the
future, and does so from a present position that is the result of past such projec-
tions, and thereby partly constituted by individual and social factors that either
never were or, at the very least, are no longer within its control—a position into
which it has been thrown.
This vision of human existence as thrown projection suggests not only that
Dasein’s mode of being is temporal (more specifically historical), but also that its
every element is comprehensible only as a situated transition—a movement within
a nest of interlinked narratable structures, an episode in the story of a life. Heideg-
ger reinforces this image by recounting Dasein’s temporality in terms of fate and
destiny; an individual relates authentically to its life—relates to it as its own, as
expressive of its individuality, rather than disowning it—when it recovers from its
past a heritage of certain possibilities that it can project into the future as fateful
for it, thereby helping to realize (by coauthoring with other Dasein) the destiny of
a people.
On the other hand, there are ways in which Heidegger’s conception of human
historicality can be read as subverting rather than simply reinforcing MacIntyre’s
emphasis on the necessarily narrative unity of the self. The troublesome term
here is “unity,” for while Heidegger’s talk of Dasein as thrown projection can be
understood as emphasizing that Dasein’s existence has a necessarily temporal or
historical dimension, and hence that its unity is a matter of being a whole articu-
lated in time (as opposed, say, to a Cartesian conception of the self as having the
essentially punctual unity of an immaterial substance existing outside time), one
can also understand Dasein’s temporality as constitutively resisting any idea of
human existence as unified or whole.
Take, for example, the projective aspect of Dasein’s being—what Heidegger
calls its being-ahead-of-itself. This means that, for as long as Dasein exists, it
necessarily relates itself to existential possibilities; whenever one is actualized, it

is actualized as a situation within which (better, as which) Dasein relates to some
other, unactualized range of possibilities. This means that Dasein always already
relates itself to what is not yet; it stands out into the future, and so there is always
something outstanding, something essentially incomplete, in its mode of being.
And yet, of course, Dasein does have an end: there is necessarily a point at which
every individual life comes to an end—the point of one’s death. But, of course,
when that point of completion is reached, Dasein is not thereby made complete, for
it is no longer there. Dasein’s death is not an event in its life, even the last; the point
at which it can no longer be said to relate itself to what is not yet actual, and thus to
be essentially incomplete, is also the point at which it no longer exists.
MacIntyre seems to think that human mortality straightforwardly confirms
his conception of the narrative structure of the self, for when confronted with a
critic who claims that life has no endings, and that final partings occur only in
stories, he says: “[O]ne is tempted to reply “But have you never heard of death?”
(1981: 197). But Heidegger’s analysis makes it clear that the human subjection to
death in fact introduces an obstacle to narrative understandings of human life, for
if my death is necessarily not an event in my life, I cannot grasp it as an episode—
even as the final episode—in the story of my life; I may be the hero, as well as the
part author, of the story of my dying, but I am necessarily not the chief, or even
the sole, protagonist in my death. Hence, Heidegger concludes, I cannot relate to
my own death as simply one more possibility of my being, one more possible way
of existing that is bound to be actualized sooner or later, for its actualization is
my absence, and hence not a possibility of mine, although the life that is mine is
marked at every moment by my relation to that impossible possibility. My mortal-
ity is not a matter of my life’s necessarily having one and only one ending; it is a
matter of every moment of my existence possibly being the last such moment, and
of my being unable to grasp what that might mean—at least, in the sense in which
I can grasp (can understand or imaginatively inhabit) the realization of any other
existential possibility or narrative event in my life (such as getting married, or win-
ning the Booker Prize, or mowing the lawn). I cannot grasp it from the inside, as
it were (as something that will happen to me), and yet it (what?) looms over and
constitutively defines the character of every moment of the life that I do inhabit
from the inside, the life that is mine to own or to disown.
How is the self to capture this impossible but necessary knowledge of itself, to
articulate autobiographically the way in which its relation to itself in every moment
of its existence is marked by its relationship to its own mortality? On Heidegger’s
view, it is only through an acknowledgment of this relationship that any human
being can establish and maintain what he calls an authentic relationship to her
life. Grasping the fact that death threatens my existence as a whole, that it cannot
be outrun and that no one else can die my death for me, is what will allow me to
grasp that my life forms a whole (each choice forming and formed by the overall
narrative arc of my existence), that I am ultimately responsible for it, and that I can
either take on that responsibility or live in flight from it. Without understanding
190 genres
whether, and if so how, a given person has succeeded or failed in living a genuinely
individual life, how can we claim to have understood that person’s life, and so that
person? But on Heidegger’s account, the person herself cannot properly be said to
have access to a perspective upon herself from which her own mortality can make
narrative sense to her, so in struggling for authenticity, she confronts a constitutive
resistance to self-knowledge, a limit to the story of her life—better, to the idea of
her life as a story—beyond which her own understanding of herself cannot reach,
but it is only in relation to this disruption or dislocation of its narrative structure
that her life can attain (and be seen to attain) its individual narrative shape.
And if the self’s mortality threatens to subvert the possibility of autobiograph-
ical understanding, then how might another self articulate a biographical under-
standing of that individual? The biographer has the apparent advantage of being
able to grasp her subject’s death as an event in life—one greeted by mourning,
funeral rites, the reading of the will and the unfolding of its legacies (financial,
emotional, and cultural). But this is to grasp her subject’s death as an event or
episode in the lives of others, in the world that the subject no longer inhabits; it
is not to grasp her death as hers—in its mineness, as Heidegger would say. Fur-
ther narrative contexts and consequences come into view from this third-person
perspective and provide ways of understanding unavailable to the subject that
might expand or subvert certain aspects of her self-conception, but the pervasive
opacity—the internal relation to nothingness—that the first person encounters as
constitutive of its own mortal identity remains untouched, and to that degree so
does the person.1
Similar damage is done to the idea of the self as a narrative unity—or rather,
the same damaging difficulty appears from another angle—if one shifts empha-
sis from Heidegger’s sense of the self as projective, as being-ahead-of-itself, to his
sense of the self as thrown, or being-already (being-always-already). This aspect
of his analysis of Dasein’s being is in fact made rather more prominent in Sartre’s
rereading of Being and Time in conjunction with his rereading of Descartes, as pre-
sented in Being and Nothingness. Sartre’s starting point is to contest the Cartesian
declaration of Alain (Émile Chartrier) that to know is to know that one knows.
This is one aspect of Descartes’s conception of the self as essentially transparent
to itself; the Cartesian mind cannot be in a particular state—for example, that of
doubting—without simultaneously knowing that it is in such a state, and hence
knowing that it is (i.e., that it exists as doubting). To be thinking and to be aware
of oneself as thinking are two aspects of one and the same state of the self; hence,
each such state provides the basis for a cogito argument—for the self’s certainty
of itself, in every punctual moment of its existence, as existing and as existing in a
particular state, and ultimately for the self’s knowledge of itself as a self-identical
immaterial thinking substance.
But Sartre argues that Descartes conflates the self’s necessary potential for self-
awareness with its actualization, and does so because he occludes the temporality
of the self. Sartre stresses that all mental states are intentional—they are directed
at something other than themselves: to desire is to desire something in particular,
to perceive is to perceive something, and so on. Typically, the self is absorbed in

the object of its given state of consciousness; for example, when someone in war-
time (subjected to strict rationing) counts the number of cigarettes in his case,
he is entirely absorbed in the question of the case and its contents, and entirely
unaware of being so absorbed. He can, however, become aware of his absorption;
if someone sits down at his café table and asks what he is doing, he can activate
the capacity inherent in any genuine self to take any of its own conscious states as
the object of its conscious awareness. But in so doing, he actualizes a new state of
himself—one whose intentional object is no longer the cigarettes but rather his
state of absorption in the cigarettes—and in actualizing that self-conscious state,
he is necessarily no longer occupying that state of unself-conscious absorption. To
take oneself as one’s intentional object is to take up another state of oneself and to
relegate the state that is now one’s intentional object to one’s past. And if one now
takes one’s self-consciousness of that prior absorbed state as one’s new intentional
object, one will necessarily no longer exist in that self-conscious state, but in a new
state (whose intentional object is one’s previous awareness of oneself as having
been absorbed in the cigarettes).
In short, one can be conscious of oneself only as one was, not as one is; the self’s
necessary capacity to direct its attention to itself as well as to that which lies beyond
it is realized, and is only realizable, in time, and hence is essentially incapable of
bringing the whole of itself (including its present state) into self-consciousness. In
effect, then, the phenomenon of self-consciousness does not (as Descartes believed)
show that the self is essentially transparent to itself and identical with itself; it
rather condemns the self to non-self-identity, to a necessary inability to coincide
with itself, to gather itself up as a whole in its own awareness. Heidegger talks of
this as an aspect of the self’s being-guilty—its inability to have power over its own
being from the ground up. Sartre sees it as exemplifying the for-itself’s nature as
being what it is not, and not being what it is.
Once again, to a certain extent, this conception of the self is congenial to a
MacIntyrean analysis of selfhood as a narrative unity—despite MacIntyre’s
explicit conviction (evident throughout After Virtue) that the Sartrean self is the
absolute antithesis of his Aristotelian conception. After all, Sartre’s conception of
self-consciousness precisely allows the self to take up a perspective upon not just
its immediate past states, but also its past as a whole, without which the idea of it
understanding itself as the hero of an unfolding narrative would not be possible.
And further, on Sartre’s view, if the self really did coincide with itself, if what it
previously was entirely exhausted or determined what it is, then the self would
lack freedom; it would lack the ability to be part author of its own narrative as it
extends into the future.
Nevertheless, MacIntyre is right to detect a fundamental conflict between his
position and that of Heidegger and Sartre, for part of their point is that the self
necessarily transcends any narrative it might be in a position to tell about itself,
since any such narrative will always fail to include the moment of its own narrat-
ing, and the inclusion of that moment will necessarily fail to include the moment
192 genres
in or through which it is included, and so endlessly on. The narrative of David

Copperfield does not include David’s act of writing that narrative as an episode
within it, and if it did, what of his act of writing about that act of writing? This
may be what the fi lm director John Boorman is trying to get at when he remarks
at the conclusion of his recent autobiography that “I suppose the only completely
satisfactory ending to an autobiography would be a suicide note” (2003: 301). In
fact, however, such a note could not be completely satisfying, since it would remain
promissory; to write a suicide note and to commit suicide are two rather different
things. William Golding’s novel The Paper Men (1984), in which an English nov-
elist tells the story of his resistance to an American academic’s attempts to write
his biography, may actually get closer to Boorman’s ideal, although it too fails to
attain it, for it ends not so much in midword but in midphoneme, as the scribbling
novelist notices that his would-be biographer, frustrated and enraged to the point
of violence, is lurking in the woods outside his home: “How the devil did Rick
L. Tucker manage to get hold of a gu” (191).
Herbert McCabe makes it clear, in his book The Good Life (2005), that this is not
simply a point about the complications of being immersed in time; it is another way
of approaching my earlier point about the difference between authors of narratives
and the characters or personas in them, this time in an explicitly autobiographical
context:
These problems have to do with the fact that “I” cannot function as a proper
name. “I tell you” is not part of a story in which “I” is a character; it is the telling
of a story. It is a sign of authority, of authorship as such (it is, as Aquinas would
say, formal not material to the story). My life-story is not the story of “I” but the
story of Herbert McCabe, who has become a persona, a persona distinct from
I, the author. As Herbert McCabe in the story I have been made flesh and dwell
among the other characters. How, then, do we get beyond any story to meet the
ultimate author, the ultimate authority? (75)
Certainly not by telling any further story about the author, since that merely pres-
ents us with another author-as-character, beyond which again lies the author-as-
author, the formal condition for there being a story at all.
Consequently, even autobiography does not and cannot take us to the author
it is ostensibly about in the way that an ordinary story takes us to the character in
the story; even if the autobiographer’s last chapter concerns his writing of this very
autobiography, it cannot bridge the unbridgeable gap between author-as-author
and author-as-character. But this does not mean that we cannot meet the author;
it means that we meet him not in reading about him qua character, but just in the
form and the fact of the story itself, in the tale and the telling of it—in short, in its
authority (the authority it claims, and the authority we cede it).
McCabe illustrates this point by reference to the Bible, understood as the auto-
biography of God. On the one hand, no one has ever seen or grasped God, and
no one ever could; put otherwise, there can be no life story of the eternal God as
such, since “eternal life” means “nonnarrative life,” which is a contradiction in
terms. On the other hand, we are told that the Word has become flesh: God has
become incarnate in a narrative, in the character of the Son, over against those of
the Father and the Spirit. The Bible (the whole of the Bible, from Genesis to Apoca-
lypse) is the story of the Son; the historical life of Jesus is the Trinitarian life of God
played out as history. Hence, encountering God and participating in divine life are
possible, but not by directly encountering the author of this narrative as author;
it rather involves understanding the narrative as God’s story—that is, regarding
the historical narrative of the Son as authorized and so authored by God, reading
it as in form and fact the authoritative image of the unseen and unseeable Author
of all things. It means, in other words, belonging to the community of readers (the
Christian community) who acknowledge the Bible as God’s Word.
Heidegger and Sartre might baulk at the theological inflection of this example,
but they would not reject the fundamental point it registers about the ineliminable
difference between formal and material conditions of autobiographical author-
ship. In their less Thomist terms, it might be thought of as the way in which one’s
understanding of one’s life from the inside involves a sense that one always neces-
sarily comes to understand it belatedly; the self’s life is lived before it is under-
stood, and hence, even if it is then understood in narrative terms, the self must
also acknowledge that the reach of its story about itself encounters a constitutive
limit—a point from which its story as a whole, and each episode within it, must
simply be accepted as having begun, beyond any complete recounting (even one
that invokes the ongoing, conditioning narratives of other selves or institutional
contexts).
In one sense, MacIntyre actually makes this Sartrean point when he explicitly
claims that human lives are lived before they are told. But he does not seem to see
that this very point determines an internal limit to the cogency of his claim that
lives are enacted narratives, or at least to the thought that this fact about them
confers a certain kind of unity on those lives. For Sartre and for Heidegger, to exist
in time is not only a condition for the possibility of there being a narratable self, an
individual possessed of a life of which she can render an intelligible account; it is
also an ineliminable obstacle to the completeness or totality of that account.
If the self ’s autobiography will necessarily fail to include the whole story
about that self in this sense, could any biographer of the self do a better job? To
be sure, they would not be caught up in their subject’s structural inability to
catch up with herself; indeed, after the death of the subject, every episode in her
life will be available for investigation, as will the nest of other narratives (of other
selves, of institutions and cultures) that interlocked with the subject’s life, and
thereby—so one might think—a far more encompassing conception of her life
as a narrative whole. But that way of telling the story of the subject’s life avails
itself of a perspective essentially unavailable to the subject, and entirely occludes
the perspective on that life which the subject of it necessarily occupies, so such
a biography would to that extent be false to her subject’s relation to her life, and
hence false to an essential aspect of her subject’s life. One might say that present-
ing her life as such a narrative whole does not, and could not, tell the whole story
of that life.
194 genres
Suppose one accepts that offering more and more information of the kind
available to the biographer (and typically, even necessarily, unavailable to the bio-
graphical subject)—contextualizing the life ever more intensively and extensively,
in the manner of so many contemporary biographies—can never fill a gap engen-
dered by the constitutive difference between the first- and third-person perspec-
tives on a life. It would not improve matters to imagine that one should instead
attempt ever more systematically and penetratingly to adopt the first-person per-
spective upon that life—to dedicate one’s account to the task of imaginatively
inhabiting the subject’s relation to her own life, for this would be to assume that
the subject possesses an understanding of these aspects of her relation to her own
life that others lack, whereas the true point of Heidegger’s and Sartre’s exertions
is to show that the first-person perspective encounters a constitutive opacity here
just as much as does that of the third person. Neither, however, would it be appro-
priate to conclude from all this that the very idea of giving a narrative account of
the self, or even the idea that the self has a narrative unity, must be given up. The
true moral of these analyses is rather that we must reject a certain idea of what it
is to conceive of the self as having a narrative unity, and hence of what it might be
to articulate that unity in discourse, whether in autobiographical or biographical
form. In McCabe’s terms, we need to reconceive the way in which we think such
narratives acquire and manifest authority; for Heidegger and Sartre, it is a matter
of how they, and so we, achieve authenticity.
This is not essentially a matter of authenticating the deliverances of one’s
memory or the provenance of a document, or of claiming the authority that might
flow either from being the central character in a certain sequence of events or from
synthesizing the accounts of all involved in it—the familiar (and hardly unim-
portant) ways of acknowledging any individual’s privileged and yet contestable
capacity to determine the narrative of her life, and so the most obvious means of
securing autobiographical and biographical trustworthiness. What these philoso-
phers are rather trying to argue is that any truly authentic or authoritative exercise
in these genres will reflect a conception of the self as simultaneously demanding
and resisting subsumption in a unified narrative.
Heidegger’s conception of Dasein’s relation to its own end and its own begin-
ning as embodying an enigmatic resistance to comprehension precisely assumes
(rather than denying) that Dasein’s existence must be understood in terms of its
relation to beginnings and endings, and hence as having narratable (i. e., that dis-
tinctively human mode of temporal and historical) structure. What he wants to
avoid is any conception of that narrative structure as inappropriately transparent,
self-sufficient, and total—as if the kind of identity across time possessed by human
selves could be modeled on that possessed by physical objects or substances, with a
capacity for self-understanding in narrative terms simply added on. To exist as self-
conscious beings in time is indeed to be committed to understanding ourselves in
narrative terms, but it is also to be committed to understanding that our existence
simultaneously resists being understood in such terms. The very terms that allow
us to make sense of ourselves—terms like beginnings and endings—also disclose
dimensions of ourselves as beyond or before such ways of making sense, and it is

in this disclosure of their own limits that they disclose a fundamental aspect of
our own existence as limited or conditioned, as natal and mortal—in other words,
as finite.
A conception of the interrelated genres of biography and of autobiography that
acknowledged human finitude in such a way would therefore be one that acknowl-
edged that the individual human life that it was concerned to elucidate was neces-
sarily not such as to be wholly elucidatable, or elucidatable as a whole. It would
find ways of bringing its readers up against the enigma residing in any human life,
taken in all its individuality. Wittgenstein once remarked: “We say of some people
that they are transparent to us. It is, however, important as regards this observa-
tion that one human being can be a complete enigma to another . . . . We cannot
find our feet with them” (1997: II, xi, 223e). Heidegger aims to convince us that
no human being can be completely transparent, either to others or to itself; his
analysis of Dasein begins from the perception that there lies a priori an enigma
in the human mode of being, and hence he insists that we can never—whether in
philosophy, biography, or autobiography—entirely find our feet with one another,
or with ourselves.
Suppose we think of Heidegger and Sartre as concerned to register the enigma
of human individuality. Then their concern addresses itself to the heart of what
many would regard as the primary motivation for our interest in both autobiog-
raphy and biography—what Dinah Birch (2003) has described as a “simultaneous
hunger for the singularity of a life that has separated itself from the crowd, and
an eagerness to identify the values that make that life recognizably human.” After
all, if individuation is our name for the process whereby one human being distin-
guishes herself from others, then the capacity for individuation is what connects
her to all other human beings. It is to this capacity, and the obligations and oppor-
tunities it imposes, that Carlyle may be referring when he claims, “Every mortal
has a Problem of Existence set before him . . . to a certain extent original, unlike
every other; and yet, at the same time, so like every other; like our own, therefore;
instructive, moreover, since we also are indentured to live” (cited in Birch 2003).
The Sartrean perspective is also particularly helpful in bringing to promi-
nence another aspect of the interwoven genres of autobiography and biography
with which philosophy can and should be interested, and with which I propose
to conclude—the degree to which the writer’s relation to her subject is not only
epistemological (concerning how one might come to know, or fail to know, the
other) and metaphysical (concerning the nature of the kind of being to be known),
but ethical. Sartre is notorious for arguing in Being and Nothingness that being-
for-others—relating oneself, understood as a for-itself, to other creatures in one’s
world possessed of the same kind of being—enacts a power struggle: a struggle for
power over another, against another’s power over oneself, and against one’s desire
to have power over others and oneself. Imagining himself seated in a public park,
he further imagines seeing another human being pass by. What is it to see him as
another man?
196 genres
The Other is first the permanent flight of things towards a goal which I
apprehend as an object at a certain distance from me but which escapes me
inasmuch as it unfolds about itself its own distances . . . . [T]here is a regrouping
in which I take part but which escapes me, a regrouping of all the objects which
people my universe . . . . This green grass turns towards the Other a face which
escapes me. I apprehend the relation of the green to the Other as an objective
relation, but I can not apprehend the green as it appears to the Other. Thus
suddenly an object has appeared which has stolen the world from me . . . . The
appearance of the other in the world corresponds therefore to a fi xed sliding of
the whole universe, to a decentralization of the world which undermines the
centralization which I am simultaneously effecting . . . . [T]he world has a kind
of drainhole in the middle of its being and it is perpetually flowing off through
this hole. (1958: 256)
For Sartre, then, part of the problem of existence set for all individuals is to find
a way of acknowledging the otherness of other individuals. He sees us as prone
to adopt a variety of strategies to ensure that we deny that otherness, since its
acknowledgment entails denying that we are at the center of the universe, which we
equate with a denial of our own individual reality in the world. And, of course, our
otherness sets the same ethical problem for others. But since biographical writing
is one form of the way in which we encounter others in their individuality, it must
confront versions of exactly the same ethical problem, and display versions of the
same ways of failing to solve or resolve or dissolve it—as two ideas of self-denial
cross. Feeling able to ventriloquize one’s subject’s thoughts at vital moments of her
life, feeling compelled to accumulate heaping piles of factual information about
the subject’s life and circumstance without discrimination, feeling entirely unable
to make, or entirely unable to stop making, judgments about the other’s actions
and thoughts—these would all appear through Sartrean eyes to be not so much
technical or generic errors as signs of metaphysical and ethical difficulties—forms
of the general failure to find a way of accommodating the individuality of others
without seeming to sacrifice one’s own.
It is a matter of some controversy whether Sartre allows for the possibility
of ever overcoming these spiritual challenges, or whether he defi nes the human
condition as one of suffering the inevitable failure of such acknowledgment. As
Ray Monk (2001) has emphasized, Sartre’s own biographical practice—under-
stood as driven by, even perhaps driven by the need to validate, his theory of
the self—plainly counts as a failure in these terms; in contrast, Raimond Gaita’s
(1988) biography of his father (a biography that is also, necessarily, an autobiog-
raphy) exemplifies one way in which these spiritual challenges can be met, with
real philosophical profit.
The same difficulties emerge in the course of a fictional attempt to address
these problems, and thereby to contribute to what one might call the ethics of
biography (which once again appears impossible to separate from an ethics of
autobiography). It comes from Byatt’s The Biographer’s Tale, when Phineas Nan-
son is reflecting on his biographical pursuit of the biographer’s biographer, Scholes
Destry-Scholes:
I think I was so taken by Destry-Scholes’ biography of Elmer Bole precisely

because the over-determinism of Literary Theory, the meta-language of it,
threw into brilliant relief Destry-Scholes’ real achievement in describing a whole
individual, a multi-faceted single man, one life from birth to death. I appeared
to have failed to find Destry-Scholes himself. I have to respect him for his
scrupulous absence from my tale, my work. It will be clear that I too have wished
to be absent. I have resisted and evaded the idea that because of Destry-Scholes’
absence my narrative must become an account of my own presence, id est, an
autobiography, that most evasive and self-indulgent of forms. I have tried both
to use my own history, unselfconsciously, as a temporal thread to string my
story (my writing) on, and to avoid unnecessary dwelling on my own feelings,
or my own needs, or my own—oh dear—character. It will be clear to almost
any attentive reader, I think, that as I have gone along in this writing . . . . I have
become more and more involved in the act of writing itself, more and more
inclined to shift my attention from Destry-Scholes’ absence to my own style,
and thus, my own presence. I now wonder whether all writing has a tendency to
flow like a river towards the writer’s body and the writer’s own experience? (214)
Can the flow of that river be reversed, without flowing into the abyss of the other’s
existence beyond the writer’s grasp? Our exploration suggests that the key to these
difficulties lies in acknowledging the distinctive way in which the human subject’s
presence takes the form of a certain kind of absence: to grasp the reality of self-
hood, one must grasp that it is beyond the grasp of any narrative account that
might be given of it, whether by itself or by another. But if autobiographical and
biographical exercises can be genuinely authoritative or authentic only insofar as
they make present the self’s absence, and so enact a kind of self-abnegation (with
the narrating self absenting itself from its account of the narrated self’s beyondness
to itself), then biography, autobiography, and fiction must be forms of spiritual
exercise, and engaging in such exercises must be inherent to becoming, that is
being, a person.
NOTE
1. Lee 2005 is sensitive to the exemplary particularity of the difficulties and

temptations encountered by biographers when writing of the death of their subjects.
REFERENCES
Beckett, S. (1979). Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable. London: Picador.

Birch, D. (2003). “Narratives of Fact.” Times Literary Supplement, September 19, 7.
Boorman, J. (2003). Adventures of a Suburban Boy. London: Faber & Faber.
198 genres
Byatt, A. S. (2000). The Biographer’s Tale. London: Chatto and Windus.

Conradi, P. (2002). “Writing Iris Murdoch: A Life—Freud versus Multiplicity.” Iris
Murdoch Newsletter 16: 1–8.
Gaita, R. (1988). Romulus, My Father. Melbourne: Text Publishing.
Golding, W. (1984). The Paper Men. London: Faber.
Lee, H. (2005). “How to End It All.” In Lee, Body Parts: Essays on Life-Writing. Chatto and
Windus: London.
MacIntyre, A. (1981). After Virtue. London: Duckworth.
McCabe, H. (2005). The Good Life. London: Continuum.
Monk, R. (2001). “Philosophical Biography: The Very Idea.” In J. Klagge (ed.),
Wittgenstein: Biography and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sartre, J. (1958). Being and Nothingness (H. Barnes, trans). London: Routledge.
Wittgenstein, L. (1997). Philosophical Investigations (G. E. M. Anscombe, trans). Oxford:
Blackwell.
 
EXPERIMENTAL
WRITING
r. m. berry
When I began The Making of Americans I knew I really did

know that a complete description was a possible thing, and
certainly a complete description is a possible thing. But as it
is a possible thing one can stop continuing to describe this
everything. That is where philosophy comes in, it begins
when one stops continuing describing everything.
—Gertrude Stein, “The Gradual Making of
The Making of Americans”
Experimentation and the Limits

of Philosophy
A philosophical criticism of literature aims to disclose not merely the historically
diverse conditions under which literature has occurred, but those conditions we
might call necessary or, following Wittgenstein, grammatical. That is, to inquire
philosophically into experimental writing would mean to ask what is necessary to
anything counting at present as an instance of this concept, to someone’s calling
a given practice or text “experimental.” And this inquiry becomes more compli-
cated if, instead of treating the term “experimental” as descriptive only, we take it
to characterize writing that achieves, or seeks to achieve, the seriousness and value
200 genres
of art. Can criticism still be philosophical if it depends on judgments that can no

longer, as with Kant, look to a common human sensibility for their stabilization
and ground? Nothing would seem more obvious than that experimental writing
today appeals to no broad public. After the Second World War, the proliferation
of radically dissimilar, mutually contesting, and often short-lived versions of the
avant-garde, along with the absence of any widespread agreement about the artis-
tic achievements of these versions, makes a philosophical inquiry into their neces-
sities appear quixotic.
It is some such worry that Theodor Adorno expresses when he begins his Aes-
thetic Theory (1970) with the remark, “It is self-evident that nothing concerning art
is self-evident anymore, not its inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its
right to exist” (1997: 1). For Adorno, the history of aesthetic experimentation has
culminated in an impasse. Art’s long struggle for its autonomy, for freedom from
external constraints, was originally grounded on “the idea of humanity,” which
provided an alternative to tradition and state sponsorship. However, as Adorno’s
Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) recounts, the increasing tendency of modern
society to conflate reason, understood as essential to humanity, with mechanistic
rationality undermined this alternative. It then became “the idea of humanity”
from which artistic experimentation must free itself. This made the task of philo-
sophical aesthetics much more complicated. “Hegel and Kant were the last who, to
put it bluntly, were able to write major aesthetics without understanding anything
about art. That was possible so long as art itself was oriented to encompassing
norms that were not questioned in individual works” (Adorno 1997: 334). In other
words, artistic experimentation posed no serious challenge to philosophical reflec-
tion as long as it limited itself to “test[ing] unknown or unsanctioned technical
procedures” (23). Criticism could still look to established norms in assessing the
results: “Fundamental to this idea of experimentation was the latently tradition-
alistic belief that it would automatically become clear whether the results were
a match for what had already been established and could thus legitimate them-
selves.” However, with modernism, artistic experimentation meant “something
qualitatively different: that the artistic subject employs methods whose objective
results cannot be foreseen” (1997: 24). That is, not just the techniques but the aims
themselves became experimental. It then ceased to be clear whether anyone—
artists, critics, philosophers, museum curators, publishers, the public—was in a
position to determine success or failure.
Given such an anarchic predicament, how can we speak of necessity at all? For
Adorno, there is a deep bond between the topic of artistic experimentation, espe-
cially in literature, and the possibility of doing philosophy. If, as Adorno claims, the
modern tendency toward “aesthetic nominalism”—the belief that aesthetic con-
cepts are extraneous and only individual art works are real—is not an accidental
result of historical misunderstandings but “originates in a universal of art” (1997:
201), then experimental writing would seem to mark conceptualization’s limit. To
try to conceive its necessities, at least in any systematic way, might well mean to
repress it, making the crisis of art a crisis for thinking, too. Adorno’s famous way
experimental writing 201
out of this impasse was “negative dialectics,” a theoretical practice that replaces
the logical relations of identity and subsumption with a dynamic reciprocity of
concepts and their instances. For Adorno, the recognition “that objects do not go
into their concepts without leaving a remainder” (2000a: 57), instead of invalidat-
ing philosophical reflection, reveals its ongoing necessity. Only in art’s resistance
to every preconception—that is, only in uncompromisingly radical experimenta-
tion—is art’s universal structure disclosed. Aesthetic autonomy, art’s demand for
freedom from external constraint, simply represents the individual work’s refusal
to disappear into a prior understanding of it. Instead of a limit case of philosophical
reflection, artistic experimentation thus became Adorno’s paradigm: “The dialecti-
cal postulate that the particular is the universal has its model in art” (1997: 202).
Romanticism and the Philosophical

Experiment
How satisfactory one finds Adorno’s solution is likely to depend less on the lucid-
ity of his reasoning than on the accuracy and insightfulness of his descriptions of
particulars, especially of particular works of art, but regardless of his theory’s per-
suasiveness, Adorno’s case against philosophical aesthetics represents a recurrent
theme in the discourse about experimental writing. At least one impulse to radical
innovation seems bound up with a problem within philosophy itself. Or, to put
this more relevantly, the search for new forms of literary practice becomes a neces-
sity only at that moment, both historical and theoretical, when philosophy senses
its inability to know literature from any position outside it. According to Philippe
Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, this moment occurs in Kant’s third Cri-
tique. In their study of early German Romanticism, The Literary Absolute (1978),
they recount how Kant’s Copernican revolution, his reconceiving of knowledge as
the object’s conformity to the subject, rests on a paradoxical interpretation of the
human subject as simultaneously fundamental and insubstantial, a formal condi-
tion of all representation that remains itself unpresentable (1988: 30–31). This for-
malism secures science at the cost of philosophy: “The first and most fundamental
result is that there is no intuitus originarius. Whether it was situated as arche or as
telos, within the divine or within the human (as either pure intellectual conscious-
ness in Descartes or pure empirical sensibility in Hume), what had heretofore
ensured the philosophical itself disappears” (30). The idea is that, although Kant
characterized reason’s task in the first Critique as self-knowledge,1 the one who
thinks this self-knowledge seems strangely missing: “[A]ll that remains of the sub-
ject is the ‘I’ as an ‘empty form’ ” (30). What seems wanting is some account of the
knowing subject’s integrity, its relation to itself. Or, as A. W. Schlegel complained
in his Theory of Art (1798–1803), “[T]he basic defect of the Kantian system [is that
it] does not, as true philosophy must, separate in order to connect again, but fi xes
202 genres
the divisions of the understanding as insurmountable and posits original separa-

tion where there is, rather, unity” (1997: 201).
According to Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, this aporia of the subject inaugu-
rates a “crisis” (1988: 29), one that becomes resolvable only with the aestheticiz-
ing of philosophy. In early German Romanticism the resolution proceeds along
two paths, both of which are prefigured in the third Critique. The first, by way of
reflection, develops from Kant’s account of natural beauty. In his “Analytic of the
Beautiful,” Kant describes how, in an aesthetic judgment, the reflecting subject
apprehends in a beautiful object a formal agreement with the laws of the under-
standing independent of that object’s subsumption under a concept. That is, its
form appears right but not as an instance of anything. Although reflection for Kant
means comparing, not mirroring, his account already suggests that the subject’s
pleasure in natural beauty results from the apprehension of its own formal unity:
If pleasure is connected with the mere apprehension (apprehensio) of the form

of the object of intuition without a relation of this to a concept for a determinate
cognition, then the representation is thereby related not to the object, but solely
to the subject, and the pleasure can express nothing but its suitability to the
cognitive faculties that are in play in the reflecting power of judgment.
(2000: 75–76)
In the proto-Romantic manifesto, the “Earliest Program for a System of German

Idealism” (1796), this account of reflection makes beauty a new intuitus originarius.
As Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy point out, the crucial step here is the replacement of
Kant’s subject as “empty form” with “the idea of the subject as self-consciousness”
(1988: 33), an idea that makes self and world mutually entailing: “Together with the
free, self-conscious being, an entire world emerges out of nothingness—the single
true and thinkable creation out of nothingness” (Kant 1997: 72). The implication is
not that self and world just do mirror each other, but more nearly that they should
or must: “together” each “emerges.” Their emergence as a system, what Lacoue-
Labarthe and Nancy call “the System-subject” (1988: 34), appears in the “Earliest
Program” as a struggle between science “weighed down by laborious experiments”
and “a general (or greater) physics” which asks, “How must a world for a moral
being be constituted?” The answer, at once spiritual and material, is to be found in
the aesthetic: “[I]n beauty alone are truth and goodness joined together” (1997: 72).
As reflection, beauty ceases to be a formal condition of either subject or object and
becomes, in Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s phrase, “the subject’s self-presentation
of the true form of the world” (1988: 33).
According to the second path, that of production, the Romantics’ resolution
proceeds from Kant’s account of fine art. In his “Deduction of Pure Aesthetic Judg-
ments,” Kant describes the task of the artist as that of fi nding material representa-
tions that, despite being in excess of anything logically implied by a concept or
observable in its instances, will nevertheless combine to form an exemplary pre-
sentation of the concept. That is, Macbeth exemplifies a traitor, but from the con-
cept “traitor” one cannot derive Macbeth. What prefigures Romanticism is Kant’s
idea that, although the artist produces freely, from her own nature, she produces
in accord with a rule that her presentation itself is or becomes: “[B]eautiful art
cannot itself think up the rule in accordance with which it is to bring its product
into being. Yet since without a preceding rule a product can never be called art,
nature in the subject . . . must give the rule to art . . . . [I]ts products must at the same
time be models, i.e., exemplary” (Kant 2000: 186). In the “Earliest Program for a
System of German Idealism,” it is this aesthetic autoproduction that transforms
the system-subject from mere reflection into work. As Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy
indicate (1988: 35), key here is the role of presentation (Darstellung). What the “Ear-
liest Program” states as its goal, “a complete system of all ideas,” is to be achieved
through an “act,” simultaneously reasonable and aesthetic, in which these ideas are
presented mythologically. Little is said about how this is to occur, but what seems
clear is that the mirroring of self and world is to result from it: “Then eternal unity
will reign among us . . . . Only then will we find the equal cultivation of all powers”
(1997: 73). In other words, presentation is not merely a matter of how ideas ante-
cedently known are to be communicated. The manifesto’s declaration, “The phi-
losopher must possess as much aesthetic power as the poet” (72), suggests that the
“complete system of all ideas” exists only in its presentation, in its production-as-
rule. Apparently, “the idea that unites all”—that is, beauty—is not there yet. When
Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy conclude that “philosophy must fulfi ll itself in a work
of art” (1988: 35), they are not saying philosophy just is art. They are saying that,
prior to their exemplary presentation, nobody knows what counts as either one.
Although more work is required to make this strain of Romantic thought clear,
its present importance is that it inaugurates a literary necessity exactly as deep as
philosophy. Following Kant’s third Critique, the concepts of art, morality, and sci-
ence depend for their possibility on a human subject whose endless task will be
to present itself. This Romantic subject is free not as the Kantian moral subject is
free, by being essentially uncognizable, but as the Kantian genius is free, that is, by
producing in accordance with a system that comes into being only as production.
Theory and practice, taste and genius, thus become inseparable, making literature
and philosophy experimental together. When in his lectures on transcendental
philosophy (1800) Friedrich Schlegel declares, “Philosophy is an experiment,” he
means that, instead of comprising a discipline or canon, philosophy must proceed
from its origin: “Philosophy is not like other sciences, where one takes what others
have already achieved and builds on it. Philosophy is already a self-sufficient whole,
and anyone who wants to philosophize must simply begin anew” (1997a: 241). The
idea is that philosophy precedes its occurrence, existing in systematic relation with
its primordial impulse and, yet, in such a way that no prior presentation is identical
with it, ever counts as the whole philosophy primordially is: “Viewed subjectively,
philosophy, like epic poetry, always begins in medias res” (1991: §8, 28). To occur
at all, philosophy has to occur as development. What Johann Gottlieb Fichte in
The Science of Knowledge (1794) calls “an inner, self-active force” (1982: 30) is this
preexistent autoproductivity in philosophy’s origin, the necessity linking whatever
something will become to what, in its germ, it already is:
204 genres
[Philosophy’s] chosen topic of consideration is not a lifeless concept, passively

exposed to its inquiry merely, of which it makes something only by its own
thought, but a living and active thing which engenders insights from and
through itself, and which the philosopher merely contemplates. His role in the
affair goes no further than to translate this living force into purposeful activity,
to observe the activity in question, to apprehend it and grasp it as a unity. He
undertakes an experiment. (30)
To conduct an experiment in this sense is to provoke the origin into life. For the
early Romantics, as for Fichte, this is primarily a process of combining (F. Schlegel
1997a: 257), one in which a partial stability is undone and new, more primordial
unities generated. The experiment, whether an aphorism or essay or novel, origi-
nates with an “individual” (F. Schlegel 1997a: §427, 242), a phenomenon, character,
or concept whose individuality appears only against an implicit background of
contrasting possibilities. Experimenting means placing the phenomenon, charac-
ter, or concept into explicit relation with this background and projecting the new
wholes that result (Fichte 1982: §22, 188–89). So, in fragment §35 of the “Athenaeum
Fragments,” Friedrich Schlegel begins with an “individual”—that is, cynicism’s
customary appearance as base or unprincipled self-interest—and combines it with
its contrasting background possibility, that of principled self-negation or disinter-
estedness: “A cynic should really have no possessions whatever: for a man’s posses-
sions, in a certain sense, actually possess him.” Cynicism, now understood as itself
a kind of disinterestedness, forms a new whole, returning the concept of cynicism
to its origin in an account of freedom. This more primordial interpretation of cyn-
icism then generates others: “The solution to this problem is to own possessions as
if one didn’t own them. But it’s even more artistic and cynical not to own posses-
sions as if one owned them.”2 As a conjecture or imaginative projection, this kind
of experiment retains its connection with science, since it makes explicit the back-
ground of possibilities any empirical hypothesis presumes,3 but in its character as
a test or trial, it preserves experimentation’s etymological link to “peril.” What the
experiment imperils is the prior stability of the experimental subject. Its sequence
of developing combinations discloses not new information about cynics but a
system of relations that, in knowing cynicism at all, the experimenter must have
already known. This background, present but unacknowledged from the origin,
makes cynicism’s partiality a mirror of the subject’s: “Aren’t all systems individuals
just as all individuals are systems at least in embryo and tendency?” (Fichte 1982:
§242). In the experiment the subject presents itself as a repressed totality.
Modernism and Necessity: Stein

Two kinds of necessity emerge from this idea of experiment, both of which recur
in later accounts of experimental writing. The first, which following Adorno we
might call autonomous necessity, constitutes literature as its own origin. In this
version experiments are not acts performed on literature by a subject, but rather
are presentations, within the writing subject, of the experiment literature already
is. As Walter Benjamin has explained, poetic originality thus understood is sim-
ply the subject understood as poetically constituted, as a potential for coming to
consciousness in the act or medium of writing.4 Contrary to widespread assump-
tion, the aim of this kind of experiment is not the new or unprecedented but the
essential. From the standpoint of literature’s autonomy, the present exists as lim-
itation, and the necessity of experimentation is just that literature be literature.
What performs the experiment, therefore, initially appears as its product or result,
making experimentation the self-disclosure of literature’s origin, which means the
second kind of necessity, namely, historical necessity, is a consequence of the first.
This necessity constitutes literature as incomplete, as an experiment whose result
cannot be evaluated, not because it has sublimed every criterion, but because it
has not concluded yet. The idea, as Benjamin explains, is that self-knowledge is
productive, is itself what discloses, in the act or medium of writing, the subject’s
partiality (Benjamin 1996: 165f). This establishes a fundamentally ironic relation
of literature to its presentation (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1988: 78). What Ben-
jamin interprets as the Romantic theory of the work, of the text as a historically
limited totality (1996: 157), Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy characterize as the experi-
mental genre per se: the fragment. As essential fragmentariness, the writing sub-
ject is “the thinking of identity through the mediation of non-identity” (1988: 46),
a coming to itself in an encounter with its limit. The literary experiment, therefore,
would not be a subversive or exceptional version of a practice alternately known in
its normal version. Literature, like philosophy, would have no normal version. Its
past would persist only as repression. As historical necessity, then, experimenta-
tion represents the insistence of the absolute.
These two necessities receive continuous expression in modernism. Their most
familiar versions, both paradoxical, will combine either a demand for change with
an underlying wish for recovery or an account of determination with an under-
lying assumption of freedom. In Gertrude Stein’s “Composition as Explanation”
(1926), they coexist in formulations that appear nonsensically redundant: “a thing
made by being made” (Stein 1990a: 514), “what is seen when it seems to be being
seen” (514), “the thing seen by every one living in the living they are doing” (516),
and most dizzyingly, “the composing of the composition that at the time they
are living is the composition of the time in which they are living” (516). Despite
their surface bewilderments, these expressions all reiterate a common Romantic
theme: that already being in existence is the condition for originally coming into
existence. The idea is that in the experience of a historical present the distinction
between creating and discovering breaks down. To live in the present is actively to
produce it, but the originality of any productive act is its disclosure of something
already there, ongoing. The art that Stein considered modern sought to take this
paradox into itself. Its aim was to recover art’s essence, its primitive being, through
an acknowledgment of art’s historical constitution, its essence as changing. Like
206 genres
the shifting viewpoint of cubist painting, Stein’s experiments with a “continu-

ous present” (1990a: 517–18) sought to disclose—both through their form and in
their compositional procedures—this primordial conditioning of what happens
only now.
In Stein’s 1907 novella Melanctha, art’s paradoxical existence appears as a tem-
poral disjunction of words and actions. Melanctha Herbert is a figure of Nietz-
schean forgetfulness, a young woman who, in her present absorption, appears
incapable of recounting anything that has ever happened to her (Stein 1995: 70),
while her opposite, Dr. Jefferson Campbell, seems verbally affl icted, much like
Stein herself, with a repetition compulsion. Jeff’s obsessive topic, both a reform
program for African Americans and an ontology, is that self-knowledge should
determine experience, not vice versa:
[H]e believed you ought . . . to always know where you were and what you
wanted, and to always tell everything just as you meant it. That’s the only kind
of life he knew or believed in, Jeff Campbell repeated. “No I ain’t got any use
for all the time being in excitements and wanting to have all kinds of experience
all the time. I got plenty of experience just living regular and quiet and with my
family. . . .” (1995: 81–82)
This effort to make recounting life precede living it looks to Melanctha like alien-
ation. Speaking from experience, she counters that Jeff simply does not know him-
self: “It don’t seem to me Dr. Campbell, that what you say and what you do seem to
have much to do with each other . . . No, Dr. Campbell, it certainly does seem to me
you don’t know very well yourself, what you you mean, when you are talking” (1995:
82). For Stein, this conflict of self-knowledge and new experience occurs from the
origin. In the context of her writing, Jeff and Melanctha function as archetypes,
comprising antagonistic versions of what in The Making of Americans Stein will
call “bottom nature” (Stein 1995: 150). As such, their combination comprises a
Fichtean experiment, confronting each with his or her limit and producing a new
whole that feels confining to Melanctha but reestablishes Jeff’s relation to totality.
Although in their early courtship Melanctha exposes Jeff’s partiality, she cannot
herself rejoin words and acts, but can only occlude words through new acts of dar-
ing. As such, she is never present to herself, figuring instead as a tragic realization of
Adorno’s negative dialectic, the unpresentable remainder of her life’s passing. Her
position for Stein’s modernism remains ambiguous since, as absolute presentness,
Melanctha represents the necessity of change, of the self-overcoming modernism
is, and yet she cannot herself change. We could say either that Melanctha inhabits
the temporal sublime, a momentariness so absolute that, with Lyotard (1989: 197),
we can know only that it has occurred, or that she represents history’s repression,
the never-ending repetitiveness of all who cannot remember: “Melanctha Herbert
was always seeking rest and quiet, and always she could only find new ways to be
in trouble” (Stein 1995: 62).
By contrast, Jeff seems, for all his stodginess, to represent Stein’s modernism
itself. His task, like that of Stein—and, in different ways, that of Four Quartets,
early W. C. Williams, Proust, Finnegans Wake, Henry James’s Lambert Strether,

Woolf, Beckett, Faulkner’s Addie Bundren, and innumerable later experimental-
ists—is simply to become present. When Jeff first meets Melanctha, his talk of
“how he wanted things to be with the colored people” (Stein 1995: 82) is an effort to
talk over and around what, from their first evening together, stares him in the face:
“Melanctha began to lean a little more toward Dr. Campbell” (92). To mean what
he says, Jeff must act, must kiss Melanctha (92–93). What seems baffling, however,
is that, when Jeff finally does act, that is, when he acknowledges his inexperience
(100), falls silent (108), and lies with Melanctha (109), his change resembles more
an acquiescence to unchanging conditions—what Stein calls “being” (109)—than
an act per se. It is as though, for Jeff, the unity of word and act is to be undergone
rather than produced or, better, like the rule of the Kantian genius, is produced
precisely by being undergone. In the end, Jeff’s discovery that self-knowledge
requires “suffering” (131–32) replicates the “Earliest Program for a System of Ger-
man Idealism,” culminating in an experience of beauty capable of uniting theory
and practice, individual and group: “Jeff always had strong in him the meaning of
all the new kind of beauty Melanctha Herbert once had shown him, and always
more and more it helped him with his working for himself and for all the colored
people” (Stein 1995: 147). How could such timeless, purely subjective immediacy
conclude the story of experimental writing?
Lukács and Productive Form

This is György Lukács’s question. For Lukács, to derive literature’s historical neces-
sity, as Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy do, from autonomous originality and subjec-
tive fragmentariness is to make form absolute, a mere abstraction from history per
se. Such abstractness, Lukács never tired of repeating, was the mistake of his own
early Theory of the Novel (1920), where literary forms were imagined to develop
from a primordial unity of subject and action, meaning and world. According to
this and similar Romantic accounts, modernity figured as a crisis, a disconnection
of “the original form-giving principle” from its social and intellectual environ-
ment, leaving modern literature “homeless” (Lukács 1971a: 40–41). Afterward, all
that remained was a project like Jeff Campbell’s, that of discovering as his own
subjective essence “the true form of the world” (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1988:
33). Citing Heidegger’s “thrown-ness-into-being” as the exemplary instance of
this ahistorical subjectivism, Lukács in his later writings insists that modernism’s
“experimental gimmicks” (1971b: 37), regardless how shocking, actually represent
no change at all: “The only ‘development’ in this literature is the gradual revela-
tion of the human condition. Man is now what he has always been and always
will be. The narrator, the examining subject, is in motion; the examined reality is
static” (21). And yet there is something odd, almost perverse, about representing
208 genres
Stein’s modernism in this way. What the examining subject’s dynamism is sup-
posed to eliminate, according to Lukács, is “a sense of perspective” (33–34), the
critical distance on present conditions afforded by historical consciousness, but as
Adorno has explained, critical perspective is precisely what modernism’s experi-
ments are meant to achieve (1977: 162), what within a repressive environment the
insistence on literature’s autonomy maintains. In “Melanctha,” the examining
subject’s dynamism, far from a technical innovation for its own sake, is intended
to expose the historical consciousness that in “Composition as Explanation” Stein
blamed for the carnage of World War I.5 By including the composing subject within
her work, by demonstrating how Jeff Campbell—like Stein’s “generals before the
war” (1990a: 513)—composes his present as past, Stein provides a critical perspec-
tive on, among others, Lukács: specifically, on Lukács’s conviction that “the laws
governing objective reality” (1977: 38–39), which the realist forms into a narrative,
are knowable prior to their narrative formation. In short, her experiment denies to
Lukács’s philosophy its position outside of literature.
According to Adorno, Lukács’s blind spot is his tendency to equate a subjec-
tive resolution at the level of plot with a purely individualistic meaning of the work
as a whole (1977: 159–68). Jeff Campbell’s recovered unity of word and act, of his
meaning’s immanence in service to African Americans, is certainly individualis-
tic in the sense that no one else could have undergone it for him, but this merely
comprises Jeff’s social representativeness, rather than diminishing it. As Adorno
explains, “[T]aken to its logical conclusion, loneliness will turn into its opposite:
the solitary consciousness potentially destroys and transcends itself by revealing
itself in works of art as the hidden truth common to all men” (1977: 166). To the
extent that we find Jeff’s initial refusal of Melanctha intelligible, can understand
his wanting to avoid suffering by knowing “the laws governing objective reality”
prior to undergoing them, we undergo “Melanctha” itself as a new, specifically
modern, form of sociality. Lukács’s discounting of this social function beyond rep-
resentation represses not merely the historical significance of experimental works
but the historical significance of experimental form.
The formal innovation of Stein’s early writing, from “Melanctha” through
Making of Americans and Tender Buttons, is her gradual abstraction of narrative
context from the event of composition, of present meaning. In “Melanctha” this
abstraction, which entails the mirroring of Jeff’s spoken idiom by the narrator’s
discourse, consists of repetition on two levels: first, a repetition of particular gram-
matical forms in the discourse and, second, a repetition of particular speeches
and actions in the plot. The second repetition is produced by the first, specifically,
by the narrator’s repetition of unelaborated substantives (“trouble,” “wisdom”),
conditionals (“maybe”), present participles (“wandering”), and imperfect tenses
(“was always finding”), which themselves reduce or eliminate the specifications of
space and time distinguishing one event from another. In “The Gradual Making
of The Making of Americans” (1935), Stein explains the significance of such repeti-
tions, characterizing them as a subject’s “habits of attention” and saying that they
are “reflexes of the complete character of the individual” (1990b: 243), of “every-
thing that made them” (242). When Melanctha grasps Jeff’s alienation, his habits
of attention are what she reads. The idea is that a formative condition normally
represented only at the completion of a narrative is actually revealing itself from
the outset, is continuously present in every fragment, and it is this prior formation
of the subject that produces the narrative.
Following Romanticism, the acknowledgment of these productive forms is
how the writing subject presents itself. It is what we call experimental writing. Say-
ing that its necessity is our “repetitive compulsion,” Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy
elaborate its historical context thus:
For insofar as we are, we are all preoccupied with fragmentation, the absolute
novel, anonymity, collective practice, the journal, and the manifesto; as a
necessary corollary, we are all threatened by indisputable authorities, petty
dictatorships, and the simplistic and brutal discussions that are capable of
interrupting questioning for decades; we are all, still and always, aware of the
Crisis, convinced that “interventions” are necessary and that the least of texts is
immediately “effective”; we all think, as if it went without saying, that politics
passes through the literary (or the theoretical). Romanticism is our naiveté.
(1988: 16–17)
This characterization of our historical condition, that is, of what preoccupies

and so goes without saying, both prepares a plan of action and lodges a force-
ful critique. The plan is for literature and philosophy—and, insofar as they are
politically productive, for freedom and justice—to become practices of the inside,
where “inside” does not refer, or not primarily, to individual interiority or a small
cadre of the committed, but to the conditions producing practice, conditions both
presupposed and brought into existence by practice.6 What Lacoue-Labarthe and
Nancy call “the formation of form” is simply the question of this autoproduction
as itself what produces modern art: “What was at stake in the question of the
formation of form . . . was indeed the possibility of thinking the ‘subject-work,’ in
other words the becoming-artist of the work or absolute auto-production itself:
man as the work of art creating itself, art henceforth identified with the being-
artist” (1988: 77), which lodges Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s critique. Their
hedge, “For insofar as we are,” allows that we may not be. What we presently call
writing—whether of the left or right, Eurocentric or postcolonial, critical or pop-
ular, realist or innovative—may just comprise our effort to talk over or around
what stares us in the face. The obvious fact that many of us (many of “us”) do not
appear preoccupied with fragments, are unaware of an epistemological crisis, and
consider writing an instrument of politics, not its formation, simply means, for
Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, that we (“we”) do not inhabit our time. That dwell-
ing in the present is neither an unreflecting absorption in what presents itself nor
a critical predetermination of its limits is the point that the antagonism of Jeff
and Melanctha is meant to bring out. At the level of narrative or plot, this is what
Stein’s experiment means.
210 genres
Form and the Subject: Beckett

The experiment’s form, however, is another story. What Adorno recognized about
experimental art is that its revolutionary potential is not primarily a function of its
content, at least not of any content that philosophy could articulate as a meaning.
Samuel Beckett’s play Endgame (1958) became Adorno’s paradigm, not because,
like existentialist drama, it made meaninglessness into its meaning, but because
it took meaninglessness into its form, its existence as drama. Like every concept
in Adorno’s writings, the concept of form leads a double life, by turns compris-
ing experience and contradicting it (1997: 138–39), and so, in Adorno’s 1961 essay
on Beckett’s Endgame, the work’s form derives, first, from “a historical moment”
(2000b: 323)—the period following the Second World War—and then, later, from
drama’s own “immanent dialectic,” its autonomous development (338). Far from a
mere inconsistency, however, this double life of form, its irreducibility to a context
from which it appears inseparable, turns out to be drama’s condition of possibility.
Endgame takes place in what Adorno calls “a zone of indifference” (329), a land-
scape of Stein-like abstractness from which conceptualization—the difference
between inner and outer, self and other, utopia and nuclear holocaust—has all
but vanished. This interchangeability (“everything can signify everything” [338])
eliminates the possibility of drama, not because something has repressed it, but
because nothing resists it: “What is the raison d’être of forms when the tension
between them and what is not homogeneous to them disappears . . . ?” (337). Beck-
ett’s achievement is to have recognized this apparent lack of resistance as itself our
resistance. The idea is that the object of Endgame is to inform the present, where
present information cannot be conveyed in dramatic form, not because no one
accepts it, but because our acceptance would make no difference. The conflict in
Endgame thus becomes the seeming absence of a problem—the characters’ accep-
tance of their own acts as meaningless forms—a conflict manifest solely in their
worry that their problem might not be absent, that “something is taking its course”
(Beckett 1958: 13). In short, their worry is that they are still in a drama. If drama
in such circumstances seems all but impossible to us, then their problem becomes
ours, too. Deprived of the spectators’ alibi, the claim to be mere products of his-
tory, we discover our indifference as Endgame’s production.
But whether this means, as Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy maintain, “that we
have not left the era of the Subject” (1988: 16) seems unclear. Unlike Stein, for whom
forms manifest the subject’s productivity, Adorno regards Beckett’s drama as the
subject’s “final epilogue” (2000b: 336), a residual allegory of the ego’s end (346–47).
His idea is that the individual as experimental origin has proven historically “tran-
sitory” (327–28), rendering incoherent any Romantic theory of art as “subject-
work” or autoproduction. What has since Kant worked to present itself now goes
missing: “Because no state of affairs is merely what it is, each appears as the sign
of interiority, but that inward element supposedly signified no longer exists, and
the signs mean just that” (329). In this way, the meaninglessness that comprises
Endgame’s historical condition infects its medium, making Beckett’s “nonsensical”

(339) dialogue the result of subjectivity’s attenuation: “With this possibility long
since crushed by the overwhelming power of an apparatus in which individuals are
interchangeable and superfluous, the meaning of language also disappears” (338).
In an essay on Endgame written shortly after Adorno’s, Stanley Cavell reprises the
themes of individuation and Beckett’s medium, and like Adorno, Cavell initially
pits his modernist reading against Lukács. However, in Cavell’s account, the prob-
lem posed by Endgame is not how to understand it, but how anyone could fail to.
In contrast to the critical commonplace that Endgame mirrors a “meaningless uni-
verse” (Cavell 1976a: 115), Cavell argues that meaninglessness is Beckett’s goal, not
his given (156): “The discovery of Endgame, both in topic and technique, is not the
failure of meaning (if that means the lack of meaning) but its total, even totalitar-
ian, success—our inability not to mean what we are given to mean” (117). Beckett’s
technical innovation, what Cavell calls “hidden literality” (119), involves canceling
the tacit agreements that uphold this totality, using words in such a way that noth-
ing about their context of use is implied. “The strategy of literalization is: you say
only what your words say. That’s the game, and a way of winning out” (126). But
the surprise is that when reduced to their simplest meaning, Beckett’s words do not
produce a transparent and unequivocal message. They turn opaque.
The difference between Cavell’s and Adorno’s readings of Endgame is not, as
Simon Critchley (1997: 177–78) and others have imagined, the difference between
Cavell’s old-fashioned attempt to establish Beckett’s meaning and Adorno’s more
advanced recognition that, in modernist work, established meanings are the prob-
lem. The difference is between Cavell’s Wittgensteinian and Adorno’s Hegelian
understanding of what a meaning is, and this difference has far-reaching conse-
quences for experimental writing. In Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, the kinds of
sentences that in traditional epistemology grounded meaning—for example, “This
body has extension,” “That is blue,” “Sensations are private,” “Red exists,” “I know
from my own case”—cease themselves to be meaningful as descriptions and instead
become part of the linguistic apparatus through which meaning is produced (Wit-
tgenstein 1998: §50). Although previously regarded as models of self-evidence or
verifiability, such sentences for Wittgenstein are without informational content,
merely making explicit the grammatical conditions with which every competent
speaker is familiar. More than once Wittgenstein suggests that we should con-
sider them nonsensical (1998: §252). What misleads readers like Critchley is that,
unlike Adorno, for whom nonsensical speech implies nonindividuated speakers
and interpretive aporias, Cavell discovers no irresolvable problems of motivation
or logical consistency in the dialogue of Beckett’s characters. However, it does not
follow that Cavell—or anyone—can say what their sentences mean.7 The unique-
ness of hidden literality is that, when it works, it surprises its listeners with a sense
impossible to state more obviously. For example,
clov: “Do you believe in the life to come?”

hamm: “Mine was always that.” (Beckett 1958: 49)
212 genres
That Hamm’s reply is unexpected, and can even provoke a laugh, suggests that the
obstacle to understanding Beckett’s language is not, as in classic hermeneutics,
alienness of meaning, but rather intimacy with it. As Cavell explains, “The words
strew obscurities across our path and seem willfully to thwart comprehension;
and then time after time we discover that their meaning has been missed only
because it was so utterly bare—totally, therefore unnoticeably, in view” (1976a:
119). The idea is that, although Beckett’s forms of expression lack nothing nec-
essary to our understanding them, we nevertheless ignore what stares us in the
face and look for other meaning instead. For Cavell, as for Wittgenstein, the pre-
dictability of this response suggests that our relation to our ordinary language
involves repression.
The Event: Cavell and Lyotard

In Cavell’s account, Beckett’s experimental technique continues the writing sub-
ject’s effort, following Romanticism, to present itself—but with this difference:
instead of acknowledging, as in Stein’s early work, productive conditions of the
individual personality, Beckett’s hidden literality acknowledges productive condi-
tions of the literary medium, of writing’s material base. His forms are, like Witt-
gensteinian forms of life (Wittgenstein 1998: §23), kinds of action, not containers
of spirit, and as such, they are fully public, fully social. This provides the motive
for repressing them. In Cavell’s reading, the problem that hidden literality means
to undo is the condition of the world—that is, not just its miserable state, but the
condition under which humans have a world or inherit one. That condition turns
out to be a curse: “[A]nd moreover the commonest, most ordinary curse of man—
not so much that he was ever born and must die, but that he has to figure out the
one and shape up to the other and justify what comes between . . . . All those, how-
ever, are the facts of life; the curse comes in the ways we try to deny them” (Cavell
1976a: 122).
To show how our denial curses the world, Cavell follows the procedures of
ordinary language philosophy in resituating Beckett’s dialogue in circumstances
where the world’s damnable state ceases to be merely metaphorical. For those on
Noah’s ark (Cavell 1976a: 137ff), the curse is that they have a world only on con-
dition of injustice. Hamm and Clov have been sheltered; others suffered. They
were spared; others died. God’s selective mercy, by which Hamm’s descendants
enjoy life, is a travesty of mercy, making the whole of creation—all the philoso-
phy, art, science, and morality through which, after God’s retreat, we try to give
our world meaning—just so many attempts to justify the unjustifiable. Instead of
acknowledging the violence by which creation comes down to us, creation itself
now becomes culpable: its meanings shelter us from the suffering. And so it must
end (Cavell 1976a: 151ff).
For Cavell, the goal of Beckett’s literary procedures is the same as Wittgen-
stein’s: to disclose our state prior to any attempts to justify it. Only on such a basis
is responsible action still possible. The Kantian “crisis” of the subject now takes
this form. Living under repression as we do, however, we find such a goal indis-
tinguishable from nihilism: “Where does our investigation get its importance
from, since it seems only to destroy everything interesting, that is, all that is great
and important?” (Wittgenstein 1998: §118).8 Lukács is right: experimental writing
appears meaningless, aberrant, solipsistic, apolitical. We want to ask why Stein and
Beckett don’t just come out and describe the conditions they mean for us to rec-
ognize.9 In this way, our resistance to works like Endgame revives Romanticism’s
quarrel with Kant: How is the subject’s presentation (Darstellung) of itself different
from a representation (Vorstellung) of it?
Frustratingly, Cavell’s answer is as indirect as Beckett’s or Wittgenstein’s. Like
Adorno, he knows the goal requires not reducing forms to information, so Cavell’s
literary practice follows Beckett’s, depriving readers of shelter, literalizing its own
words, asserting as little as possible, until 41 pages into the scenarios of annihila-
tion, Cavell’s hallucinating stops at “solitude, emptiness, nothingness, meaning-
lessness, silence” (1976a: 156). Only after the subject has been emptied of content
(“The soul is impersonal” [Cavell 1979:361]) and what differentiates my pain from
another’s reduces to nonsense (Wittgenstein 1998: §253), can anyone begin “see-
ing what one is filled with” (Cavell 1976a: 156). Everything of value in Beckett’s
and Wittgenstein’s work depends on Cavell’s italics. If the competing necessities
of overcoming the past and renewing its origin are to coincide, if the formation
of form is to become present work and autoproduction realize itself as unrepress-
ing, then the conditions of meaning cannot be meanings themselves. In Cavell’s
reading, what is taking its course is still the era of the subject, but getting in on
the action requires more than refuting Adorno. It “will require passing the edge of
madness, maybe passing over, and certainly passing through horror” (Cavell 1976a:
156). At the end of such a passage, Wittgenstein feels inclined to say, “This is simply
what I do” (1998: §217). His remark tells us nothing about meaning production,
but it reminds us what meaninglessness sounds like. When the subject of writing
presents itself, it does not resemble a text. It is an event.
In his writings on experimental art, Jean-François Lyotard has explained the
event’s priority over meaning as art’s attempt to make confronting its end, its
potential for nonbeing, the condition for its continuation. The idea is that what
every institution, academy, and school tries to repress, precisely by instituting its
rules or “regimen,” is “the possibility of nothing happening, of words, colours,
forms or sounds not coming: of this sentence being the last, of bread not coming
daily” (1989: 198). Whether in science, music, philosophy, or politics, the convic-
tion that continuity can be assured by collective agreement protects institutions
from radical self-questioning, what Lyotard calls “paralogy” (1984b: 60ff; see also
43). What the event’s priority places at issue is this attempt to justify practice by
appeals to a social whole: “[I]n the diverse invitations to suspend artistic experi-
mentation, there is an identical call for order, a desire for unity. . . . Artists and
214 genres
writers must be brought back into the bosom of the community, or at least, if the
latter is considered to be ill, they must be assigned the task of healing it” (1984a:
73). For Lyotard, it is this nostalgia for community that motivates Jürgen Hab-
ermas’s call for limits on aesthetic experimentation, and although Lyotard and
Habermas disagree over the liberating or neoconservative consequence, both agree
that Wittgenstein’s philosophy would make such unity impracticable. For Haber-
mas, what Wittgenstein substitutes for the Enlightenment project of “the rational
organization of everyday social life” (Habermas 1983: 9) are heterogeneous “tradi-
tions which . . . are held to be immune to demands of (normative) justification and
validation” (14), while, for Lyotard, Wittgenstein’s language games model a society
of heterogeneous regimens whose conflicts cannot be rationally resolved (Lyotard
1988: xii). For both, the meaninglessness of the artistic event reveals the limits
of Kant’s sensus communis: “That it happens ‘precedes,’ so to speak, the question
pertaining to what happens” (Lyotard 1989: 197). In sum, the conflict between the
community and the avant-garde is not that the latter defies the former’s rules; it is
that, for those facing the possibility of nothing happening, the rules “always come
too late” (Lyotard 1984a: 81).
To investigate experimental writing as an event, not a text, is to turn attention
away from its meaning and redirect attention to its audience. Key here is that, for
both Lyotard and Cavell, the notorious differences of response to experimental
art are not explicable by a code or set of norms with which some in the audi-
ence are acquainted and others are not. On the contrary, for Lyotard, the specta-
tor’s stupefaction before the experimental work results less from any inaccessible
meaning than from meaning’s near total implication in the work’s facticity (Lyo-
tard 1989: 199).10 We could say that, if what astonishes a spectator is the happen-
ing of this, then her problem communicating her astonishment will not be that
its meaning transcends the this, but rather that its meaning and its occurrence
appear indistinguishable. I say, “Wow!” You say, “But it’s just a urinal.” According
to Cavell, Endgame manifests this division in its audience as a changed relation to
its script. Traditionally, what differentiates the actors from the spectators is the
former’s knowledge of the text, their already knowing, at the instant of each line’s
occurrence, what motivated it before, where it will lead afterward (compare Wit-
tgenstein 1998: §35). Lyotard calls such familiarity “narrative knowledge” and says
it encodes the group’s rules (1984b: 18ff). What Cavell observes about Beckett’s hid-
den literality, however, is that such knowledge no longer determines why the lines
occur: “It is a matter of our feeling that no one in the place, on the stage or in the
house, knows better than anyone else what is happening, no one has a better right
to speak than anyone else” (1976a: 158). If I do not know what Clov is asking—“Do
you believe in the life to come?”—then Hamm’s reply can only remind me. It pro-
vides no contextualizing information, or none I don’t already have. As a result, the
distinction between those in the know (e.g., the actors) and those on the outs (e.g.,
the spectators) breaks down: “To the extent the figures are not acting, but undergo-
ing something which is taking its course, they are not characters. And we could also
say: the words are not spoken by them, to one another; they are occurring to them.
It is a play performed not by actors, but by sufferers” (158). Nothing before Clov
asks his question determines whether what he’s saying will occur to me. Agreement
reaches its limit. In the event of experimental writing, what of necessity befalls all
alike necessarily befalls each alone.
The Promise of Experimental Writing

This paradox—everyone’s in the same boat, but if one denies it, “we” is sunk—
is what Gerald Bruns has characterized as the anarchic politics of avant-garde
groups. As he explains, “[A] poetic community has the structure of a series of
singularities rather than a fusion of many into one” (2006: 81), a characterization
of communal life that resembles an uprising more than an institution. The idea is
not just that these communities are unruly but that they model human solidarity
in its most primitive state. In Stein’s terms, we could say such communities are only
continuously present. When the contemporary experimental poet Clark Coolidge
writes that “you start with matter, not rules” (Bruns 2005: 24), he expresses what
Cavell has called the truth of skepticism: that our engagement with material real-
ity is always more fundamental than our knowledge of it. Avant-gardes can be
defined as groups no one enters except in this more fundamental way. The idea
is that matter, at least as Coolidge means it, never occurs to anyone unformed,
or if it does, that just means nothing is happening, nothing comes, that here and
now writing confronts its end. When it does happen, however, what makes writ-
ing matter precedes anything I can write about what makes it matter. To undergo
it is to suffer formation before knowing what that formation means, to allow the
public conditions of my subjectivity to materialize before me. In such an event I
am what’s happening. Representation never catches up.
Cavell has described this event as “find[ing] ourselves within the experience”
(1976b: 84), a locating of the subject that marks passage into the avant-garde group.
Comparing it to the self-knowledge sought by psychoanalysis, he differentiates it in
two ways from what customarily passes for aesthetic reception. First, it resembles a
change of life more than a change of ideas or beliefs, a radicalization of our encoun-
ter with texts that finds its best analogy in our encounter with a foreign culture. As
Bruns remarks, “In this respect understanding a work is more like understanding
a social practice or a form of life than it is understanding a concept, proposition,
or the use of criteria” (2006: 92), an explicitly anthropological version of recep-
tion for which no technical term is more precise than “getting hip.” (Cavell: “It
is essential to making an aesthetic judgment that at some point we be prepared
to say in its support: don’t you see, don’t you hear, don’t you dig?” [1976b: 93].)
And all that makes this anthropological analogy less than exact is Cavell’s second
emphasis that, unlike passage into a foreign culture, passage into the avant-garde
community provides access to no world previously unavailable. On the contrary,
216 genres
experimental writing discloses my ordinary form of life as foreign, as a world that

has somehow remained undiscovered by me. In other words, my conviction that
such writing presupposes knowledge I lack reproduces rather than describes my
outsider’s position. By contrast, finding myself within the experience of experi-
mental writing means losing interest in such knowledge. It is, as Lyotard explains,
to experience the immediate as itself sublime, as both nowhere and now here. The
reason the avant-garde has no popular audience is not that its audience requires
expertise, but rather that its goal has from the outset been the elimination of audi-
ence. In the community of experimental writing, there is only participation.
The history of experimental writing from Romanticism to the present is the
writing subject’s progressive discovery of the conditions of its continuing partici-
pation within the materiality of writing’s medium. In her generically unclassifiable
meditation, “Happily,” Lyn Hejinian begins a segment with the lines, “The day is
promising / Along comes something—launched in context” (2000: 386). It may
not appear at first either obvious or especially significant that what we see in these
lines as two distinct realities—words and meanings—is simply writing happen-
ing. That is, the equivocation of a day both holding promise and making us one
is a feature of our colloquial usage that Hejinian can only have discovered, not
created—or perhaps we should say that creation here takes the form of discovery, is
interpreted by that concept—but the line’s promising equivocation is itself some-
thing that just comes along. One way of avoiding what stares us in the face is to tell
ourselves that Hejinian’s writing is about itself, but what is happening on her page
is manifestly not aboutness, no more than a tree’s falling on a roof is.11 Finding one-
self within the experience is being struck, not by the relation of her words to their
meaning, but by the emptiness of any attempt to describe that relation. “Along
comes something” just means, if anything, along comes something. Her writing’s
simultaneous intelligibility and barrenness appears paradoxical only so long as we
picture it as the relation of something before us—the print on the page—to some-
thing absent, something the print’s presence ostensibly substitutes for, represents.
The fact that we can see nothing wrong with this picture does not mean anything
is right about it. The paradox is simply that her lines announce, as though factual,
a promise that, unlike performatives, is not made by the one uttering it but that, if
it occurs to us, occurs in its announcing. Nothing is being represented, but some-
thing quite materially real is taking its course.
In his commentaries on Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, Cavell has argued that
when skepticism demonstrates that material reality is unknowable, philosophers
have erred in concluding that reality is therefore dubious, that knowledge of it
is absent or lacking. According to Cavell, what Wittgenstein’s engagement with
skepticism reveals, by contrast, is that our participation in material reality is con-
ditioned not by our knowledge of it but by our acknowledgment.12 In other words,
our involvement with material reality precedes our reflection on our involvement,
implicating the activity of reflection itself in reality’s repression. The Wittgen-
steinian problem, as much literary as philosophical, is how to acknowledge these
conditions of our subjectivity without locating ourselves outside the experience.
Reflection may not produce suffering, but it reflexively denies it. Hejinian’s solu-
tion to this problem, like that of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations and
of experimental writers generally, is to make acknowledgment itself her medium
of reflection. That is, what Marjorie Perloff has identified as Hejinian’s wordplay
(2002: 185) acquires new significance, or perhaps acknowledges a significance the
play of words has always possessed, something Freud studied under the concept
of parapraxis and Wittgenstein identified with philosophy’s depth (Wittgenstein
1998: §111). There is no pun on “promising” in Hejinian’s lines, but for those par-
ticipating in her work, there is a promise—call it sublime—in the event of just
these words here and now. It is this impossibility of establishing the conditions of
practice prior to practice, of making the knowledge of systems and codes precede
action, that Hejinian has in mind when insisting that philosophy and literature are
interdependent. What comes along launches a context for reflection to follow. This
is the promise of experimental writing. Or its happiness.
NOTES
1. “[R]eason should take on anew the most difficult of all its tasks, namely, that of
self-knowledge” (Kant 1998: 101).
2. Fragment §35 consists of these three sentences, the first by Friedrich Schlegel, and
these final two by Friedrich Schleiermacher.
3. “Any hypothesis—even the most limited one, if thought through completely—
leads to hypotheses about the whole, and actually rests on such hypotheses, although he
who uses them may not be conscious of them” (F. Schlegel 1997b: 190).
4. Benjamin develops this idea from Fichte’s notion that the “I” does not precede
its act of self-realization. In Friedrich Schlegel’s early writing, this self-constituting act
of the “I” receives an aesthetic inflection: “In the early Romantic sense, the midpoint
of reflection is art, not the ‘I.’ . . . The Romantic intuition of art rests on this: that in the
thinking of thinking no consciousness of the ‘I’ is understood. Reflection without the
‘I’ is a reflection in the absolute of art” (Benjamin 1996: 134).
5. “Lord Grey remarked that when the generals before the war talked about the war
they talked about it as a nineteenth century war although to be fought with twentieth
century weapons. That is because war is a thing that decides how it is to be when it is to
be done” (Stein 1990a: 513).
6. When in Of Grammatology (1967) Derrida made his notorious statement, “Il n’y
a pas de hors-texte” (“There is no outside-text” or, looser but better, “The text has no
outside”), I take him to have meant what I have said here: not that texts signify nothing
real, but that there is no position from which a reader can say what a text signifies that is
not subject to what the text signifies. The critic’s judgment of the work, particularly of its
limits, makes the critic vulnerable to the judgment of the work. And everything Derrida
says of texts holds of our relation to other individuals, groups, and cultures. Reading is
an action and, as such, wants justifying.
7. Cavell’s account of the limits of paraphrase in “Aesthetic Problems of Modern
Philosophy” (1976b) is helpful in explaining what might otherwise seem a paradox
218 genres
(see esp. 78–81). Also, on the difference between following and interpreting a rule, see
Wittgenstein 1998: 82e (§201).
8. Among the many readers who have taken this passage to exemplify a nihilistic
attitude on Wittgenstein’s part, see Nussbaum 1986: 261–62.
9. “Why doesn’t [Wittgenstein] just say what he means, and draw instead of
insinuate conclusions?” (Cavell 1976b: 70). Here Cavell means to be mimicking the
impatient response to Wittgenstein’s indirect style of expression felt by many more
traditional philosophers. On Wittgenstein’s indirectness, see Cavell 1984: 225ff.
10. Speaking of Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation, Lyn Hejinian has characterized this
immanence of meaning as ordinary or commonplace:
It is impossible to “explain” Stanzas in Meditation. This is not because meaning
is absent from or irrelevant to the commonplace but, on the contrary, it is
precisely because it is inherent to it—identical with it. When it comes to
ordinary things, their meaning is the same as what they are . . . . In this sense,
one might say that things thinging is their achievement of the ordinary, their
achievement of the commonplace. (2000: 364)
Heidegger’s “thinging of things” reinterprets entities as events.
11. Bruns makes a similar point in saying that experimental poetry
is made of words but not of what we use words to produce: meanings, concepts,
propositions, descriptions, narratives, expressions of feeling, and so on. The
poetry I have in mind does not exclude these forms of usage—indeed, a poem
may “exhibit” different kinds of meaning in self-conscious and even theatrical
ways—but what the poem is, is not to be defined by these things. (2005: 7)
12. The conditioning of knowledge by acknowledgment is the subject of Cavell 1979,
most concisely elaborated in part 1 (3–125). However, a helpful short illustration of this
conditioning is found in Cavell 1976b: 238–66, esp. 254–58.
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part ii
PERIODS AND MODES

 
REALISM
bernard harrison
For words are wise men’s counters, they do but reckon with
them, but they are the money of fooles
—Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
The soul looketh steadily forwards, creating a world before

her, leaving worlds behind her.
—Walt Whitman, The Over-Soul
I
The notion of realism, in its development as a term of literary criticism, is in ori-
gin a genre concept. “Realistic” writing is, in that sense, essentially writing that
deals with “low” rather than “high” topics, with the doings of ordinary people
leading everyday lives, rather than with the acts of gods, princes, or nobles; and
deals with them in a “low” style, a style close to the plain language of daily life,
and remote from the “high,” poetic diction considered appropriate to the latter.
Erich Auerbach’s great book Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western
Literature (1957) deals exhaustively, through a multitude of examples, with the
gradual emergence of such concerns and styles of writing in literature from late
antiquity onward.
224 periods and modes
Discussions of realism in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary criticism

and polemic, however, rapidly acquire a moral and political dimension and, in
consequence, a philosophical one. Realism in literature, for one thing, becomes
associated with claims to “truth,” or at least to the truthful “representation of real-
ity.” Edmond and Jules Goncourt, in the preface to their 1864 novel Germinie La-
certeux, a preface that constitutes inter alia a kind of manifesto on behalf of the
French literary realism coming to birth in the period, assert bluntly, “Le public
aime les romans faux: ce roman est un roman vrai” [“the public likes false novels:
this novel is a true one”] (as cited in Auerbach 1957: 435). A later passage in the
preface both forges and explains the connection between an older realism, defined
by “low” characters and style, and a newer realism, in France that of Émile Zola
and Guy de Maupassant, for example, which adds to these purely stylistic concerns
those of social justice and the revelation of otherwise hidden depths in society:
Vivant au XIXe siècle, dans un temps de suffrage universel, de democratie, de

libéralisme, nous nous sommes demandés si ce qu’on appelle “les basses classes”
n’avait pas droit au Roman; si ce monde sous un monde, le peuple, devait rester
sous le coup de l’interdit littéraire et les dedains d’auteurs, qui ont fait jusqu’ici
le silence sur l’âme et le coeur qu’il peut avoir.
[Living in the nineteenth century, in a time of universal suffrage, of democracy,

of liberalism, we asked ourselves if what is called “the lower classes” did not have
a right to the Novel; if that world beneath a world, the people, must remain under
the literary interdict and the disdain of authors who have so far kept silent upon
the soul and the heart which it may have.] (1957: 435)
From this point, the line of descent is unbroken to twentieth-century theorists
of social realism such as György Lukács (1963) and to a host of writers who consider
themselves to be in some sense informing their readers upon, or making present to
them, real aspects of their lives and times that would otherwise remain unnoticed
and unreflected upon.
Realism in this sense sets up, as realism considered purely as a genre concept
does not, one of those linkages, or tensions, between literature and philosophy
that it is the business of this volume to investigate. It opens the door, in other
words, to a question of one of the standard kinds that professionally occupy phi-
losophers: what could possibly justify claims of this sort? If literature is to be, in
some sense, an exploration, an investigation, of reality, then some relationship
must, presumably, subsist between it and reality. What relationship could that be?
As we shall see, pursuing this question very soon involves a second, and perhaps
more profound, set of inquiries: Why is literature valuable? Is its value intrinsic
or extrinsic to it? To what extent does its value derive from its relationship to
reality?
Two answers to the first question, of the precise nature of the presumed rela-
tionship between literature and reality, have long been available. According to the
first, the relationship is a mimetic or representative one, and the value of literature
consists in its power to represent to its readers, to bring before them, aspects of
realism 225
human life of which they would otherwise remain ignorant. According to the
second, the relationship in question is simply truth. Great works of literature,
on this view, are of value because they “embody” or “express” important general
truths about human life and society. Both answers are, in their origins, compara-
tively ancient. The first, that the business of literature, as of all art, is mimesis
derives ultimately from Plato. The best recent defense in English of that claim is
to be found in A. D. Nuttall’s A New Mimesis (1983). It swims against the prevail-
ing current of thought, mainly of French origin, associated with the movement
known as critical and cultural theory. The view dominant within critical and
cultural theory is that the main social function of literature is the dissemina-
tion of ideologies— generally reactionary ones, whose function is to sustain one
ruling group or another in power. The claim of literature to have any commerce
with reality is baseless, since its function is precisely to disseminate an illusory
representation of reality. As the following passage of Roland Barthes in “L’Effet
du Réel” (1968) affirms, we are dealing, in the case of the purportedly “realis-
tic” details that authors insert in their work, not with reality, but merely with
verisimilitude:
[D]ans le moment même ou ces détails sont réputés dénoter directement le réel,
its ne font rien d’autre, sans le dire, que le signifier; le barométre de Flaubert,
la petite porte de Michelet ne disent finalement rien d’autre que ceci: “nous
sommes le réel.”
[T]hey do not say so, but at the very moment at which these details reputedly directly
denote reality, they in fact merely signify it; Flaubert’s barometer, Michelet’s little
door, have in the end only this to say: “we are reality.”] (cited in Nuttall 1983: 56)
The second general claim often advanced in favor of realism, that literature
conveys valuable general truths, has found a great many modern adherents among
writers and literary critics of the past two centuries, though fewer among philoso-
phers. It emerged at least as long ago as the seventeenth century and was already
familiar when, in the following century, Samuel Johnson, in Rasselas, famously put
a version of it in the mouth of the poet Imlac:
“This business of a poet,” said Imlac, “is to examine, not the individual, but
the species; to remark general properties and large appearances. He does
not number the streaks of the tulip, or describe the different shades in the
verdure of the forest . . . . He must divest himself of the prejudices of his age and
country . . . ; he must disregard present laws and opinions, and rise to general
and transcendental truths, which will always be the same” (1909: 48, emphasis
original)
Many more recent forms and versions of it are described and critically evaluated
in Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen’s book Truth, Fiction, and Literature
(1994), which offers an invaluable resource for this branch of the topic. But once
again, any such view has long been under threat from philosophers and literary
theorists generally. Lamarque and Olsen deploy arguments that leave one deeply
skeptical of the idea that any version of realism so founded can be made to stand
up to rational scrutiny. They opt themselves for what they call a “no truth” theory
of the functions and value of literature, which I address further below.
II
It is nevertheless observable, despite the force of the academic arguments brought
against it, that the conviction that great literature has cognitive gains to offer its
readers, that it sheds light on “reality” in some sense of that complex and abused
term, and that it does so both by “holding up a mirror to nature” and by open-
ing access to otherwise inaccessible insights that it is hard to avoid describing as
“truths,” retains a far greater hold at present over the minds of intelligent, edu-
cated general readers than it does over those of philosophers, literary theorists,
and other professionally interested parties. It is open to us, as theorists, to con-
clude that those outside our charmed circle who cling to such views are simply
poor deluded souls swept along in the current of their already outmoded times—
times, indeed, that have mysteriously so far failed, as times sometimes will, to
yield to the persuasions of currently fashionable versions of historicism, but no
doubt will so yield in time. But, on the other hand, it may equally be the case that
the deluded masses see something we do not. It is this second possibility that I
explore here.
It is best to begin by examining some of the main arguments against the idea
that literature has, or could have, any connection with reality. The most obvious,
and potent, perhaps, spring from the evident fact that works of literature are cre-
ated by an author who performs his or her creative task simply by arranging words
on a page at the behest of his or her free choice. It can be objected that the produc-
tion of literary works, at least of those realistic or naturalistic in intention, must to
some degree be constrained by the nature of reality. But to this it can be retorted,
as in Barthes passage quoted above, that such constraint as is exerted by reality on
the creation of the literary text is brought to bear on it, not by the need to achieve
truth, but merely by the need to secure verisimilitude: to produce, in other words,
not so much a faithful depiction of reality as a work likely to be accepted by a major-
ity of its readers as a faithful depiction of reality.
In modern philosophy, that simple point has been greatly refi ned and sharp-
ened, like much else in philosophy, by the work of Gottlob Frege. Frege held
that a statement cannot be assigned a truth-value unless the names that enter
into its composition can be assigned referents, or Bedeutungen. And the names
that occur in works of fiction, “Odysseus,” for instance, lack Bedeutungen pre-
cisely because the statements in which they occur—to take Frege’s best-known
example, “Odysseus was set ashore at Ithaca while fast asleep” (Geach and Black
1952: 62)—are fictional. What follows is not that the statements that figure in
works of fiction are false, but something rather worse, that these statements are,
realism 227
as it were, dummy statements, incapable of being assigned any truth-value, either

true or false.
A further implication of Frege’s point is that, along with the notions of truth
and falsity, the notions of confirmation and disconfirmation find no foothold in
fictional discourse. It would seem to follow that the entire apparatus of rational
scrutiny, the kind of scrutiny to which we subject a statement with a view to deter-
mining its adequacy as a description of reality (or “the world,” or “the way things
stand”), is automatically disabled the moment we pick up a work of literature.
The effect of these arguments is severely to weaken, if not entirely to invali-
date, any claim to the effect that literary works might embody any sort of useful or
enlightening reflection on the real world, as distinct from the “imagined worlds”
that spring from the freedom enjoyed by authors of literary fiction to set, at will,
one word after another on a blank sheet of paper. Their tendency is to reserve
any actual commerce with reality to putatively factual discourse—the discourse
of the sciences, or history. What role does this leave to literature? Plato, on the
usual interpretation, at least, credits art with offering us a vision of reality, even if
one as inferior to that offered by sensory experience as the latter is inferior to the
apprehension of the eternal Forms offered by Reason. The verdict of the empiricist
tradition—even less flattering to the poet than Plato’s—has tended to be that the
business of literature, as indeed of all art, is merely play.
Thomas Hobbes stands at the root of this Renaissance turn in the philosophi-
cal critique of literature. He distinguishes four uses of speech:
First, to Register, what by cogitation, we find to be the cause of any thing,

present or past; and what we find things present or past may produce, or
effect . . . . Secondly, to shew to others that knowledge which we have attained,
which is, to Counsell, and Teach one another. Thirdly, to make known to others
our wills and purposes, that we may have the mutuall help of one another.
Fourthly, to please and delight our selves, and others, by playing with our
words, for pleasure or ornament, innocently. (1997: 34:)
Literature, presumably, falls for Hobbes into the fourth category, of “playing with
words”: an innocent form of play, perhaps, but as Hobbes (followed later by Locke,
and still later by the entire tradition of critical and cultural theory) at once goes on
to say, one instinct with all the potential power of subjectively generated illusion
to mislead and, in so doing, to alienate us from the sad actuality that we in fact
inhabit.
The power of these arguments, issuing as they do from various philosophical
traditions, some frankly antiliterary in character, might lead one to suppose that
the main opposition to the idea that literature possesses the power to illuminate
reality comes from outside literary studies. That would be a mistake. The idea that
literature “holds up a mirror to humanity” and its affairs in any sense analogous to
that in which a good geological map of the southwestern United States, say, might
be said to “hold up a mirror” to the geological history of that region, comes under
critical pressure also from arguments that, given that they question the ability of
any such story to offer an adequate account of the value of great literature, might
be taken to come from within the tradition of literary studies, that is to say, the
tradition of reading and valuing great literature as a serious contribution to our
culture.
A striking articulation of this problem has recently been provided by R. M. J.
Dammann (forthcoming). Consider, to change genres for a moment, a painting
by George Stubbs of a racehorse, Whistlejacket, let’s say, and its subject, that very
horse. Suppose we say that the painting’s value as a work of art lies in the relation-
ship of representation between painting and horse. On the one hand, we seem
to have replaced one object, the work of art, with two objects, a horse, and some
slabs of pigment adhering to a piece of canvas. Still worse, neither of these objects
appears to possess any intrinsic aesthetic interest or value. Similarly, suppose we
say that the literary value of Othello lies in part in the relationship of representation
subsisting between the text of the play and a Venetian general of Moorish extrac-
tion. Which general, precisely? Shakespeare’s Othello? Or some Othello counter-
part presumed to occupy, like Stubbs’s subject Whistlejacket, a place among the
furniture of nature? If we say the second of these things we replace the single aes-
thetic object, the text, with two objects: on the one hand, a man; on the other,
some words. Now we face again the problem that we faced with the dissolution of
Stubbs’s painting into a real horse, Whistlejacket, and some equally real patches of
oil paint smeared on canvas: neither the words nor the man seem in themselves
of any aesthetic interest. But if we take the first course, of saying that the general
whose tragedy is represented in Othello is Shakespeare’s Othello, then talking of rep-
resentation has brought us no nearer, it seems, to connecting art and reality, since
Shakespeare’s Othello is a denizen, not of the (one) real world, but of the “world”
of Shakespeare’s play.
A closely related point to this one of Dammann’s is developed by John Gibson.
To the extent that we value literature for what it can teach us about the world, Gibson
argues, we move the locus of literary value from the literary to the extraliterary:
We may of course take what we find in a literary text and ask whether it holds
true in the real world, whether, if we apply it there, we can acquire a better
understanding of worldly affairs. But as soon as we have done this we have left
aside literary appreciation and stepped into something more like social science:
we are now investigating the world and not the literary work. These questions
may be infinitely important to us, . . . ; but they ultimately say nothing about how
we experience literary works, and thus they will fail to help us understand the
ways in which we can read the literary work of art. (2004: 113)
A further point, common to both Dammann and Gibson, is that literary appre-
ciation, the appreciation of the nature and value of great literature, is exercised
entirely about the language of the work. Literature is after all, an art made, wholly
and solely, out of language; an art whose works are created merely by arranging
words on a page. We seem, as a culture, to experience difficulty with this thought.
A particularly fatuous index of the kind of difficulty we feel has lately been provided
realism 229
by the BBC, which put on a series of “modern versions of Shakespeare plays” that
kept the plots and the names of the characters but dropped Shakespeare’s lan-
guage. The thought here—the thought that justifies continuing, absurdly, to call
these amusing travesties versions of Shakespeare—seems to be that Shakespeare’s
language cannot be all his work amounts to, cannot be what constitutes his work,
because language is—well, just language. And how can language, the mere deploy-
ment of words, considered just in itself, either be considered great—as distinct from,
say, resonant, or clever—or for that matter reveal to us anything about anything?
One of the major merits of Lamarque and Olsen’s treatment of the topic, also,
is their insistence that both literary criticism and our apprehension of the value of
literature are exercised about the language, the words, of the literary text, and not
about things external to the text to which those words might give access. And I
think, moreover, that they are right to see that fact as a further obstacle in the path
of those who wish to represent the value of literature as residing in its power either
to formulate truths or to “hold up a mirror” to human nature. In any statement
that purports to communicate a truth or, to put it more generally, to inform us
concerning how things stand in the real world, the language in which it is couched
is of value only from the standpoint of communicative efficiency. A given message
may be of very great value in that it informs those who read it, let’s say, of the sink-
ing of the Titanic. But the value of its language is relative solely to the efficiency
with which it serves to communicate that fact. It would be absurd, in such a case, to
suggest that intrinsic value resided in the choice of one form of words over another,
or that the message would lose its value as a message if any word in it were to be
altered. But those are precisely the sorts of things we do say about works of litera-
ture. And, since what makes quality of language no more than instrumentally rel-
evant to truth-stating discourse is precisely the relationship in which truth-stating
discourse stands to the representation of reality, this does rather suggest that litera-
ture lacks, precisely, that—or any analogous—relationship to reality, at least when
reality is taken, as it appears we must take it, as something existing independently
of, and externally to, language.
It is open to question, though, whether Lamarque and Olsen do not pay too
heavy a price for the centrality of this—undoubtedly, at least up to a point, sound—
insight to the development of their argument. Forcing too close an analogy between
literature and informative, fact-stating discourse undoubtedly makes it difficult,
for the reasons just given, to understand why we should ascribe intrinsic value to a
literary work, and do so, moreover, in virtue of the quality of its language. It has to
be said, however, that to deny literature any relationship whatsoever with reality, as
Lamarque and Olsen’s “no truth” account does, makes that even more difficult to
understand. And that is the direction in which their argument now moves.
Lamarque and Olsen grant, in their chapter “The Mimetic Aspect of Litera-
ture,” that literature has such an aspect. It has an aspect of “aboutness.” And what
it is “about” are themes. Thus (their example), the theme of Euripides’ Hippolytus
is human weakness in the face of forces beyond our control, coupled with the lack
of divine purpose. Euripides’ treatment of this theme is built around a number
of thematic concepts, “through which the different features of the play are appre-
hended and related to each other: freedom, determinism, responsibility, weakness
of will continence/incontinence, sympathy, guilt, human suffering, divine order,
purity, pollution, forgiveness, charity, reconciliation” (1994: 401–2).
The thematic concepts that articulate a work of literature are, however, accord-
ing to Lamarque and Olsen, “by themselves, vacuous. They cannot be separated
from the way they are ‘anatomised’ in literature and other cultural discourses”
(1994: 403). It becomes clear in context that a rather strong claim is being floated
here, namely, that outside “cultural discourses,” including those of literature, such
concepts find no application, find, as Wittgenstein would say, no foothold. Such
concepts as “divine order,” “purity,” “forgiveness,” “charity,” say Lamarque and
Olsen,
have received a significance over and above that which they have in everyday use
through the role which they play in religious belief, ritual and in theological
discourse . . . . To point this out is not to suggest that perennial thematic concepts
receive their definition in philosophical discourse or through the role they
play in religious practice and are then borrowed by the reader of literature who
wants to appreciate a work of art. On the contrary, these perennial thematic
concepts achieve the importance they have within the culture, and receive their
content, both from the role they play in philosophical discourse and religious
practice, on the one hand, and, on the other, from the role they play in literary
appreciation. (407, emphasis added)
In short, the thematic concepts that supply the content of literature not only are not,
but also could not be made, the vehicle of any body of insights concerning the real
world, because they have no application to anything “real” in the sense of external
to literature and other “cultural practices” loosely associated with literature.
As radical a divorce as this between the concerns of literature and those of
everyday life is, clearly, required of Lamarque and Olsen by the contention— central
to their “no truth” account of literature—that “whatever the purpose of fiction and
literature may be, it is not ‘truth-telling’ in any straightforward sense” (1994: 440).
The difficulty it involves them in, however, becomes evident the moment we ask
why literary activity, so understood, should be considered valuable. Why should
we care about the allegedly “mortal” questions [Thomas Nagel’s phrase, borrowed
by Lamarque and Olsen] that provide the themes of great literature, or waste time
worrying about the “thematic concepts” in terms of which such questions pose
themselves, if the concepts in question “receive their content” only from the role
they play in literature (and a few other, equally rarefied, “cultural practices”) and
otherwise have no bearing on the prosaic fabric of life as it is actually lived outside
the covers of books?
It can come as no surprise that Lamarque and Olsen have no answer to this
question, except to say, in the penultimate sentences of their book: “These are sim-
ply things we care about and always seem to have cared about. And this is where
the argument stops” (1994: 456).
realism 231
III
It is time for a new start. Let us return to the simple thought that lies somewhere
near the root of the philosophical critique, at least in its Renaissance and modern
forms: that since authors create literary works simply by arranging words on a
page at their own sweet wills, their works cannot teach us anything about reality.
Why not?
The reason cannot be that reality is external to the mind of the writer, for
that divorce plainly cannot, and does not, prevent the reality of things from being
adequately captured in plain, descriptive prose. The problem is rather that reality
is, or is held to be, in every sense, external to language. That thought is implicit in
Hobbes’s typically pregnant aphorism, “For words are wise men’s counters, they do
but reckon with them, but they are the money of fooles” (1997: 37). The gist of that
remark is that words have no meaning that is not derived from correspondence
with some item or aspect of extralinguistic reality. It follows that words can, by
their arrangement into sentences, compose statements capable of capturing real-
ity, only if their arrangement is dictated by reality, not if it is dictated by the will of
the author. Truthful discourse is discourse transcribed from nature. To abandon
the hard work of transcription from nature, and instead to arrange what are, after
all, so used, mere “counters,” into sentences at will is therefore merely, as Hobbes
says, to play with words, like a child, “for pleasure and ornament, innocently”
(1997: 34).
On such a view of language, language has no grip on, no commerce with, real-
ity, internal to itself. Its commerce with reality is a purely external commerce, con-
ducted via the conventional association of basic terms or sentences with elements
of the world; in recent philosophy, for example, Bertrand Russell’s individuals,
universals, and relations, or W. V. O. Quine’s collections of “stimuli.”
Is that true? Has language really no inward, internal, commerce with reality?
A very powerful and popular argument against saying that it has any such thing
is that such talk must lead immediately to linguistic idealism, the thesis that the
way we choose to speak has the power to create the reality of which we speak. Tak-
ing that route appears to sever all connection between the way we talk and the
way things are. Nothing created more animus against the late Jacques Derrida,
among English-speaking philosophers, than the latter’s remark Il n’y a pas d’hors-
texte, interpreted, at least in the anglophone philosophical world, as conveying the
proposition that there is no such thing as an extralinguistic world against which
to measure the success of our attempts to convey its nature in language. Whether
or not such an interpretation is fair to Derrida (see Harrison 1985, 1991: 123–43),
which is quite another matter, there can be no doubt that the position with which
it saddles him is a deeply unattractive one. After all, the connection with real-
ity that language seems most paradigmatically to possess, at least in the sciences,
runs precisely by way of procedures that are, in an obvious sense, external to itself:
measurement of, and experimentation on, the materially real. I would not wish to
go down any path of argument that terminated in a denial of the possibility of that
type of entirely external, relationship between language and reality. But is there
any other path down which one can go, starting from the thought that language
has, or might have, an internal relationship to reality, instead of, or possibly as well
as, a merely external one?
IV
I think there is. It is the path hacked out by Patricia Hanna and me in Word and
World: Practice and the Foundations of Language (2004).
One of the central arguments of that book goes, in brief, like this. Frege taught
us, among much else, that meaning in a natural language is primarily to be under-
stood in terms of the notions of truth and falsity, and that the prime locus of mean-
ing is, therefore, the statement—in linguistic terms, the sentence. A grasp of the
concept of meaning in a natural language therefore requires a grasp of the con-
cept of the assertoric or, to put it less tersely, of what it is for a linguistic expres-
sion to assert something, to be the vehicle of an assertoric content—to be, in other
words, a suitable candidate for the ascription of the predicates “ . . . is true” and “ . . .
is false.”
How is the concept of the assertoric to be acquired, or taught? There is, clearly,
nothing assertoric to be encountered in the natural world. Assertoricity, if one may
speak in that way, is a property not of lakes, trees, or mountains but of linguistic
expressions. What it is for such an expression to be assertoric in character has thus
to be specified, to be stipulated, if the notion is to get off the ground.
How is that to be done? To explain what it is for a linguistic expression to assert
something, to possess assertoric content, is, presumably, to explain its relationship
to the conditions that make it true or false. It is tempting to suppose that we might
do this, for the statement S expressed by a given sentence å, by listing, first, some
things or circumstances of which S might be truly asserted and, second, some of
which it would be false to assert S. This would be a mistake. Someone who grasps
what assertoric content is expressed by a sentence å is capable, in virtue of that
grasp, to extend indefinitely both the list of things or circumstances of which it
would be true to assert the corresponding statement S (call this the T-list) and the
list of those of which it would be false to assert S (call this the F-list). From a finite
number of items on either list, however, no continuation of the list can be confi-
dently inferred. If I am shown, for example, a finite array of objects of which I am
told only that the statement expressed by an English sentence å of the form “X is
three inches long” is true of each and every one of them, then I am plainly in no
position to add a new object to the array, since I have as yet no idea what assertoric
content, that is to say, what statement, S, is expressed by å, and hence no means
realism 233
of knowing which of the multifarious similarities exhibited by the objects in the

array are to be treated as relevant to the truth of S, and which are not. And simi-
larly for any finite array of items presented as exemplifying the class of objects of
which it would be false to assert the statement expressed by å.
Plainly, there is something that the learner still needs to grasp and does not:
something that, if he were to grasp it, would allow him to extend either array
with confidence. What could that be? Rather evidently, I suggest, what the learner
needs, somehow, to grasp is that the statement expressed by a sentence of the form
of å is a statement of spatial dimension, to be precise, of length. If he were to grasp
that, he would see how the T-list and the F-list are related to one another. He would
grasp that an object belongs in the T-list if its greatest linear dimension has a cer-
tain value, but is to be transferred from the T-list to the F-list if its greatest linear
dimension has any other value. Grasping that, he would grasp how to set about
extending either list in a manner consistent with the principles on which it was
constituted in the first place.
But how is the learner to be brought to grasp that the sentence expressed by
a sentence of the form of å is a statement of linear dimension? We have already
seen that there is no way in which we could bring him to that understanding by
showing him how to relate sentences of that form directly to classes of natural
objects. The only other possibility is that we show him how sentences of that form
are related to a certain human practice, namely, the practice of measuring. He
needs to learn that measurement institutes a standardized system for comparing
objects with one another. Our systems of linear measurement, I take it, are built
up from the basic idea of taking a small, straight-edged object, M, and seeing how
many end-over-end applications of that object it takes to span one edge of a larger
straight-edged object, O. The practical utilities of this idea are many. An obvious
initial one is that it offers a way of finding out whether a heavy object will fit into
a given space, without actually having to move it. The small object M may now
become standard in such operations: people in the M-using community begin to
ask questions like, “How many M’s long must a stone be to fit this space?” Then
some unusually astute M-user sees that the business of ascertaining the answers
to such questions would be easier if one were to take a rod and mark it out in divi-
sions, each a single iteration of M in length, by applying the object M successively
to the rod. “Here”—he says—“I have made an M-stick: use that.” As M-stick use
spreads and acquires other practical uses—in the measurement of plots of land,
say, people begin to need words for what they are doing in measuring. First, they
give a name to the length of M: they call it, let’s say, “an inch.” Then they introduce
a word that describes the way in which the object M functioned, and continues to
function, in their practice of linear measurement. They begin to say that M served,
and serves, them as a modulus of measurement.
How is the learner helped, by being thus taught, in practice, what measuring
is, and how to set about measuring? The problem he faced, remember, was that
of discerning any relationship between the items composing the T-list and those
composing the F-list. He needed, somehow, to grasp that the true and the false are
not different things, but rather different aspects of the same thing, namely, an asser-
tion. He needed to see that it is precisely the assertoric content of a statement which
makes it both true of some things and false of others.
This is the difficulty that is resolved for the learner when, as Wittgenstein
puts it, he sees, through learning the practice and the point of measurement, “the
post at which we station” (1958: 14e) a sentence like “This is three inches long”
relative to the practice. The practice gives him access to a procedure, measuring,
by appeal to which he can himself determine whether a given item is to be placed
in the T-series or the F-series. He thus sees what it is for the expression “This is
three inches long” to be assertoric in form, to convey an assertion, for the essence
of what it is to be an assertion is precisely that an assertion can be either true or
false.
The moral of this story is, of course, that if meaning in natural languages is,
as Frege thought, essentially connected with truth and falsity, and thus with the
concept of the assertoric, then the meaning of an expression cannot be explained
merely by correlating it with some item or aspect of the sensible world. Words are
not, as Hobbes thought, merely “counters” by means of which we represent to our-
selves the things, “out there” in the world, for which they have been conventionally
assigned to stand. On the contrary, the meanings of words are determined inter-
nally to language—or better, perhaps, internally to practice. Think, for instance,
of the ways in which the terms “inch” and “modulus” acquire their meanings in
the context of the simple system of linear measurement just discussed. “Inch” is
just the name we use for the distance between each mark and the next on the
yardstick we make by marking up a rod using the object M. “Modulus” is just the
name we give to any object, such as M, used in this sort of way. There is clearly no
way, for reasons we have already adduced, in which the meanings of these terms
could be explained by ostensively associating the terms with any element of the
extralinguistic world. Talk of their meanings is equivalent to, simply amounts to,
talk of their relationship to the practice of measurement—to the socially devised
and maintained device, the language game, as Wittgenstein would say, in which
they find a use.
Does that mean that, since such concepts as “measurement,” “modulus of
measurement,” “length” are not simply markers for prelinguistically existing fea-
tures of extralinguistic reality (“counters,” as Hobbes put it), there can be no pos-
sibility of using the corresponding words to frame sentences capable of expressing
true statements—statements correctly informing us about how things stand in the
extralinguistic world? Plainly not. The statement expressed by the sentence “This
book measures six inches by nine inches,” uttered with reference to a particular
book, manifestly admits either of being true or of being false, and which it hap-
pens to be can be easily determined by measuring the book. For it to be possible to
use language to say how things stand, or fail to stand, in the extralinguistic world,
it is indeed necessary that some relationship should subsist between language
and the extralinguistic. But (1) the relationship in question need not necessarily
run between elements of language (words, sentences, e.g.), on the one hand, and
realism 235
elements of “reality” (individuals, universals, relations, collections of “stimuli”),

on the other. On the contrary, it may, and does, run by way of the relationship
between practices and the natural circumstances in which their operations find
a foothold, or to put it another way, with which those operations engage. And (2)
it need not be identified with the relationship or relationships that determine the
meanings of linguistic expressions. On our account, that job is done by the rela-
tionships subsisting between linguistic expressions and the practices in the context
of which they find a use. What Hanna and I are suggesting in Word and World, in
effect, is that we should cease identifying what serves to establish the meanings of
linguistic expressions with what connects language in general with extralinguistic
references existing apart from human practices. Without language, we would still,
in a certain sense, “possess concepts.” But since, as alinguistic beings, we would
be restricted, like animals, to sensual and bodily interaction with the world, such
concepts as would remain accessible to us would be concepts only in the rather
limited sense of “concept” exemplified by psychological experiments on “concept
formation,” which in effect concern merely the ability of animals to respond dif-
ferentially to recurrent patterns of stimulation. The complex interactions, on the
one hand, between linguistic expressions and the practices—measurement, for
instance—in terms of which we interrogate reality and, on the other, between
the latter and the natural features of the world that determine difference of out-
come for their operations, equip us with the linked notions of “truth,” “falsity,”
and “assertion,” and thus with concepts in the full, language-presupposing, sense
of the term, that is to say, notions that cannot be entertained without ramifying
instantly into a fan of possibilities of sentential occurrence, because to grasp the
possibility of using a concept (in the full, language-presupposing sense) in the
framing of assertions is (again, in that, full, sense) just what it is to grasp, to pos-
sess, a concept.
V
The utility for present purposes of the possibility just outlined of thinking about
meaning, and about the relationship of language to the extralinguistic, is that it
gives us a way of crediting language with a semantic, as well as a syntactic, “inte-
rior.” The semantic interior of language, on the present view, is constituted by the
multifarious interactions of linguistic expressions with the practices in terms of
which we interrogate extralinguistic reality.
What sent us down this path, however, was the hope that we might discover
some sense in which language might be said to have an internal, as well as an
external, relationship to reality. And the argument, which might seem to have left
us as far from that goal as ever, states, in effect, that the relationship between lan-
guage and the extralinguistic runs not by way of the connection of elements of
language (words, sentences) with anything simply given, independently of prac-

tices, but rather by way of the establishment, through the operation of the practices
in relationship to which elements of language take on meaning, of binary sets of
options between which reality can be forced, as it were, to determine a choice, and
thus a distinction between the true and the false. If this is right, the connection
between language and the extralinguistic runs by way of assertion. And that, it
seems, leaves the poet, who as Sir Philip Sidney put it, “nothing affirmeth” (2004:
34) and the writer of fiction, who characteristically makes no assertions about any-
thing outside the “world” of his fiction, still lacking a grip on anything worth call-
ing reality.
But wait—there is one more level of complexity to come. So far, I have been
arguing that the involvement of words in practices is necessary to establish the
nature of the connection between what is affirmed and what is denied in assert-
ing the truth (or the falsehood) of a given statement. If the argument stands, the
involvement of words in practices is what gives us access to the linked notions of
truth, falsity, and the assertoric. Seen from that point of view, the function of the
internal machinery of language—the machinery constituted by linguistic expres-
sions taken together with their functional modes of insertion into practices of one
sort and another—is to make it possible for us to capture, in terms of the truth or
falsity of propositions, the nature of a world—the natural world—which is indeed
wholly external to language.
There is, however, a second way in which the creation of practices that are
in part linguistic in nature bears on our relationship to reality. In the very act of
creating the varied practices that found the possibility of propositionally formu-
lated knowledge of the world external to language, we also constitute a second,
nonnatural world: the human world, a world as real as the natural world—the
world wholly external to language—but this time a world partly internal to lan-
guage. Consider, once more, the practice of linear measurement, with its associ-
ated notions of “modulus,” “length,” “measuring rod,” and so on. For a society
to have access to a commonly understood practice of that kind renders accessible
possibilities of social organization, and with them, patterns of feeling, interest,
and self-description, that are not accessible to a society without such a practice. It
becomes possible to measure land and goods accurately, for instance, and to make
exact comparisons of the sizes of fields, or pieces of cloth, say, for purposes of sale,
exchange, or inheritance. Such practices very rapidly acquire a moral dimension.
Accuracy in measurement very soon becomes one of the parameters of honesty.
The merchant or trader who gives good measure is an honest man; one whose
instruments of measurement have been in some way corrupted or falsified in his
own interest, the opposite. Many preindustrial societies have reached the point of
having market officials whose duty is to check the accuracy of measuring imple-
ments used in commerce: scales, weights, measuring vessels, measuring rods, and
so on. It is easy, too, for the connection between accuracy in measurement and
honesty to take on a wider moral relevance, so that people begin to think of the
moral life itself as, crucially, a matter of observing limits, and of moral intelligence
realism 237
as accuracy in the measurement of the points at which the free exercise of per-
sonal choice ends and moral license begins. Out of these ways of thinking are
born further practices, including law, that are essentially moral in character: at
one and the same time ways of conducting life and also resulting patterns of feel-
ing and response to the events of life, which come to surround our original, purely
utilitarian practices of measurement. Such moral practices give rise, in turn, to
habits of response and corresponding traits of character of the sort immemori-
ally honored with the name of virtues. One such, comparatively little honored
among us nowadays, is the practice of refusing, and the corresponding capacity
to refuse, an unmeasured response to the invitations of sexuality. Another is the
practice of refusing, and the capacity to refuse, an unmeasured response, not only
to appetite, but also to such essentially unmeasured emotions as anger, including
righteous anger. New collections of terms defi ne themselves through their rela-
tionships to these practices, for example, “chastity,” temperance,” “a short fuse,”
and “self-control.” To these we may add also, since virtues have a tendency to
mutate into vices, and vice versa, as circumstances present one or another aspect
of themselves, such expressions as “spontaneity,” “decisiveness,” “strait-laced,”
and “cold-blooded.”
Now for several general points about this situation. A society for which mea-
sure is a central moral notion, governing a whole family of subordinate moral
notions, is a certain sort of society in which certain rather specific sorts of charac-
ter will predominate and certain rather specific sorts of tension and dilemma be
felt and experienced. That the society in question is this way is, I take it, a reality.
That it is a society of that specific type, in other words, conducted by persons of
a certain corresponding range of characters and personality types, has as much
right to be regarded as a real feature of the world, as part of the “furniture of
reality,” as some equally salient natural fact, as that the rate of acceleration for a
body in free fall near the surface of the earth is approximately 32 feet per second
per second. The facts about how a given sort of society works, what possibilities
of choice (“living options,” as William James would say [1954: 89]) it offers its
members, and what sort of people they become through having been brought
up to inhabit it, are not natural facts, in the sense that the workings of the law
of gravity or the structure and physiology of the human body are natural facts.
Rather, they are facts brought into being through the invention and adoption by
human beings of certain specific practices. The society dominated by those prac-
tices inhabits, I want to say, a certain human world or, to give a new sense to a term
that both Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty use in related, though
different senses, a Lebenswelt.
The relationship in which language stands to the reality constituted by a
Lebenswelt is, I want to say, different from the relationship in which it stands to
the nonhuman, the natural world. The natural world is in no sense constituted
by the practices, of linear measurement, for instance, through which we gain
access to the possibility of describing it in propositional terms. A given human
world, a Lebenswelt, however, is constituted by the very practices in connection
with which a range of associated terms and conceptual distinctions take on

meaning. In the case of the human world, or worlds, therefore, the reality of how
things stand, and the possibilities we possess of saying how things stand, possess
a common root in the practices constitutive of that reality. We have what we were
looking for: a department of reality that, because the practices that constitute it
constitute simultaneously—as it were, in the very act of constituting it—a spe-
cific, associated body of language, of terms with specific meanings, enshrining
specific conceptual distinctions, actually does stand in internal relationship to
language.
VI
But how, in practice, does that help, if it does, when it comes to the question of how,
if at all, literature can, at times, offer its readers cognitive gains?
It will be best, I think, to arrive at the general answer I want to give to that
question by way of a specific and concrete example. Shakespeare’s play Measure
for Measure suggests itself in that role, not least because its language connects
it with the kind of examples we have just been discussing. The plot of Measure
for Measure is simple enough. Vincentio, Duke of Vienna, wishes to restrain
the increasing sexual license of the city, whose strict laws against such license
have not for some time been enforced. But he does not himself wish to enforce
those laws, since having himself allowed them to lapse, he fears to be accused of
tyranny if he now has people punished for conduct that he himself allowed to
become acceptable. He therefore announces that he will make a long journey,
and leaves as his deputy Angelo, a man with a reputation for rigid moral recti-
tude and sexual purity. In his absence, Claudio, a young gentleman, is arrested
for getting with child his betrothed, but as yet unespoused, sweetheart Julia.
Claudio is duly sentenced to death by Angelo, that being the penalty for fornica-
tion strictly prescribed by the laws of Vienna. Lucio, Claudio’s brothel-haunting
friend, approaches Claudio’s sister Isabella, a postulant nun whose chastity is as
renowned as Angelo’s, to appeal to the latter for Claudio’s life. Her appeal fails,
at least on its own terms, but produces the unintended result that Angelo is sud-
denly seized with desire for her and offers to spare her brother’s life if she will
sleep with him. She is appalled and refuses. Fortunately, however, the Duke, who
set these events in motion, has not left Vienna but has remained there, disguised
as a friar, supposedly traveling with a papal commission. The Duke turns the
tables on Angelo, by arranging for Angelo’s former betrothed Marianna, who
has been rejected by Angelo for lack of a dowry, to take the place of Isabella in
the sexual encounter with Angelo that Isabella has arranged. Angelo, supposing
himself to have slept with Isabella, nevertheless reneges on the deal by ordering
realism 239
Claudio’s execution. This plan, too, is thwarted by the Duke, who fi nally reap-
pears and reestablishes order.
In one sense, the plot, thus baldly summarized, is an operatic farrago. The
characters, similarly, are pure invention. It would seem, then, that the play can
tell us nothing about what we are ordinarily inclined to term “the real world”—
nothing about the sociology or politics of Renaissance Europe, for example;
nothing, either, about “human nature,” in the sense of the subject matter of psy-
chology. It may be that the character of Angelo is a rather well-drawn instance of
a certain type of anal-obsessive puritan, but even if that were so, it is difficult to
see, following Dammann and Gibson, how Shakespeare’s success in “represent-
ing” a certain sort of puritan character could be relevant to the literary value
of the play. But in that case, what is relevant to the literary value of the play?
Shakespeare scholars, echoed by several centuries’ worth of common readers,
will reply with one great voice: Shakespeare’s language! But what exactly is that
answer worth? What, for a start, is one saying when one says that it is the lan-
guage of the play that constitutes its value? Is one saying more than that Shake-
speare has the gift of creating highly decorative, though entirely uninformative,
skeins of words?
It depends what one means by “uninformative.” In one sense, indeed, Frege
is not mocked. No intelligent reader or hearer of Measure for Measure has ever, I
suppose, been seriously tempted to assess for truth any of the sentences that occur
in the text. Rather, readers or auditors of the play assess what they read, or hear
spoken, for meaning. If the meaning of a word could be identified, as so many
philosophers have supposed, with some aspect or feature of the natural world,
that is to say, of a domain of reality altogether external to language, then assess-
ment for meaning would be a pointless proceeding, unless its object were simply
to determine what, if anything, a given statement asserts concerning that domain.
But I have argued that this is not a viable account of language and proposed an
alternative, broadly Wittgensteinian one, according to which to attend to what
is written or uttered from the point of view of its meaning is to attend to it from
the point of view of the foothold that specific words and sentences find in prac-
tices, practices that in turn determine in part the shape of a human world, which
in turn determines in part the sort of beings we, the inhabitants of that world,
have become through living in it, and the kind of dilemmas we face in conse-
quence. When language is used in the ordinary, assertoric way, it neither invites
nor allows us to pay much regard to the constitution of the human world our
practices have created for us, because the functions of the apparatus of assertion,
truth, and falsity, even when what is at issue are statements—historical or socio-
logical ones—for instance, concerning the workings of one or another human
world, can be brought into play only insofar as the subject matter of the state-
ments addressed can be considered independently of any intrinsic relationship in
which that subject matter may, at some level, stand to language. Therefore, to
bring before us the consequences, in terms of our situation, of the ways in which
our practices have devised for us a specific kind of world, the human world, whose
nature determines the scope and boundaries of what for us counts as a human
life, a tradition of using language nonassertorically is required. That tradition is
what we call literature. The poet “nothing affirmeth,” as Sidney observed, because
if he were to affirm anything he would not be a poet; he would be a deviser of ver-
sified philosophy, like Lucretius, or of versified sermons, like the Victorian poet
Martin Tupper. It is only by speaking nonassertorically that he can perform his
proper function of showing, rather than asserting, what the founding practices of
the particular human world that we and he inhabit, have made, and make, of us,
its inhabitants.
The title of Measure for Measure announces the central theme of the play: the
balancing of moral debts. The words invoke not only the prosaic practices of linear
and volumetric measurement and their uses in commerce, in which the various
meanings of the term “measure” originates, but also the extension of that term
into the description of morals: “measured response,” “measured words,” “just—or
fair—measure” for instance. The play of meanings here equally immediately
invokes the opposite of measure, the unmeasured, that which presses continually
against socially contrived boundaries, in the present case, sexual appetite. What the
play does, in effect, is explore a range of different responses to this conflict. It does
so through the creation of characters. The characters of the play have, clearly, no
reference outside the play. Shakespeare is plainly not concerned to offer us a “por-
trait” of a typical Viennese gentleman of the period, in the way that an Edward-
ian novelist like Arnold Bennett was concerned to offer his readers “portraits” of
typical inhabitants of the Five Towns in, say, 1905. Shakespeare’s characters are no
more than the situation assigned to them by the plot plus the words Shakespeare
puts in their mouths. Nevertheless, as a very long tradition of response, emanating
from scholars and common readers alike, assures us, they “live,” they are “real.”
What people who respond in that way are responding to, I want to suggest, is the
manner in which the words Shakespeare gives his characters invoke features of a
human world we share with them, which link our situation to theirs, allowing the
emotions associated with the pressures of that common situation to flood from us
into them, in such a way, that, viewed in them as in a glass (for the specular meta-
phor has always possessed a certain intuitive force, which it retains in this con-
nection and to this extent), our own situation as inhabitants of, and as the bearers
of natures formed by the pressures of, a certain human world becomes in certain
respects clearer to us, because surveyable as a whole.
Thus, Claudius, ruefully reflecting to his friend Lucio on the errors that have
led to his imprisonment, answers Lucio’s question “whence comes this restraint”
with the words,
From too much liberty, my Lucio. Liberty,

As surfeit, is the father of much fast;
So every scope, by the immoderate use
Turns to restraint. Our natures do pursue,
realism 241
Like rats that ravin down their proper bane,

A thirsty evil; and when we drink we die. (2001: I, 2, 11. 113–18)
As with the word “measure” in the title, the words of this brief speech carry with
them their modes of insertion in one or more of the many patterns of practice
that can frame a human life and, with that, the meanings of contrasting terms.
We speak of “surfeit” because we need a word for eating carried to an extreme
that produces illness. We need that word because it is in fact possible to make
ourselves ill by gorging. The speech simply brings before us the evident possi-
bility that giving unlimited scope to our appetites may result in the loss of our
power to satisfy them. We are like rats, says Claudius, that rat poison has made
ravenously thirsty but that has also ensured that to drink is death. In a sense, we
learn nothing new from this—we knew already what “surfeit” and “ravin” mean:
if we had not, we could not have understood the speech. What the speech and
the bitter metaphor of the dying rat give the reader or auditor, however, is a sud-
den sharp sense of what, in another sense of “means,” it means to have destroyed
one’s life by giving one’s appetites unlimited rein. By the mere force of the words
Shakespeare has given him, their power, that is to say, to make familiar relation-
ships rise up before us in a form made newly urgent by the terms of the plot, the
nature of Claudio’s situation becomes so sharply present that the emotions his
words express, of bitter regret and self-blame, become suddenly real to the reader
or auditor as well.
As with Claudius, so with the other characters. Each occupies a different situ-
ation with respect to the basic dilemma we—and not only Shakespeare’s char-
acters—face as beings of potentially unmeasured appetite who also live, and on
the whole wish to live, by the light of practices, monogamous marriage, religious
chastity, law itself, which all enshrine some concept of measure or boundary. The
play offers no advice, no solution to the difficulties we encounter in attempting to
square these moral circles. The moral rigorism of Angelo comes indeed to grief,
the law he is committed to enforce turning in his hands into a tyranny that reflects
the tyranny of his own sexual appetites. In a related way, the moral rigorism of
Isabella’s chastity stands compromised by its incompatibility with charity toward
her brother. But the play’s representatives of moral permissiveness, the “fanta-
stick” Lucio and his entourage of pimps, whores, and bravos, fare no better. The
Duke’s restoration of order in the final scene amounts really to no more than the
evasion of a series of impossible choices by means of ad hoc decisions. What, then,
have we learned from the play? We have learned, by being given a certain sort of
guided tour of certain aspects of a particular human world, a world that we, like
Shakespeare’s characters, in part continue to inhabit, that the topography of that
world is more complex than we might have supposed. We have, in learning that,
I suggest, learned something about reality—not, of course, the reality of the natu-
ral world, the world altogether outside language; rather, the reality of our world:
the—or rather, one possible—human world.
VII
Let me sum up by returning briefly to the questions with which the chapter began.
Literature is not about the “real world” in the sense of the natural world, the world
wholly external to language. But that does not mean that literature, including great
literature, necessarily concerns fantasy worlds, worlds made up out of whole cloth,
worlds conjured out of the fancy, the mere subjectivity, of one or another writer, in
the interests, as Hobbes thought, of amusement or play. Fiction can work like that
and serve those ends, but that doesn’t have to be all there is to it. The “subjectivity”
that characterizes the best literature is like the subjectivity that characterizes the
work of the best scientists: a subjectivity of personal voice and style only. What,
on the other hand, the best literary work, like the best scientific work, is actually
concerned with is not the “subjectivity” of the writer or, for that matter, of the
scientist, but rather reality, the “real world,” only, in the case of the former, the
department of reality it addresses is not the natural world but the—or a—human
world, and the latter considered rather from the standpoint of its constitution, of
its roots in praxis, rather from the standpoint of its status as subject matter of con-
tingent assertions, true or false.
It is possible to have an art of this kind, an art that is made simply by arrang-
ing words on a page, and yet that, at its occasional best, addresses realities, because
the realities in question are accessible via the assessment of language for meaning,
rather than for truth. They are accessible by this route because the meanings of
words are determined by the relationships in which words stand to the practices
that in part constitute the realities of a given human world.
Putting things in this way gives the present account, finally, a new grip on
those questions of value that turn out, as we saw above, to be inseparable from the
question of literary realism. We have come out, in the end, in agreement with the
central tenet of Lamarque and Olsen’s “no truth” account of literature: great litera-
ture asserts nothing, either false or true. But we can avoid the conclusion they draw
from this thought, namely, that the concepts and themes deployed in literature
and other “cultural practices” derive their content internally to such practices and
therefore have no foothold in, or relevance to, the prosaic affairs of everyday life,
by suggesting, in effect, that “cultural practices,” far from being something added
on to the “everyday life” of human beings, an optional extra, as it were, are, on the
contrary, main contributors to the constitution of the terms on which any such life
is available to be led.
That explains why so many have rightly supposed great literature to be in inti-
mate connection with other aspects of the life we lead. It explains, among other
things, how it is that, through reading it, we may be led to all sorts of insights,
including, as I have argued elsewhere (see Harrison 1975, 1991, 2001, 2004, 2006),
philosophical insights that we are unlikely to have stumbled upon otherwise and
that can perfectly well be expressed in indicative statements capable of being
assigned a truth-value. That such possibilities exist goes far to explain, I think,
realism 243
why so many minds are so reluctant to abandon the idea that great literature can
instruct, can be a source of truths, despite the evident force of the type of counter-
argument to that claim assembled by writers like Lamarque and Olsen.
Many of the concepts and conceptual distinctions whose ramifications are
displayed by great writers—the sort that Lamarque and Olsen call “thematic
concepts”—are moral concepts, and philosophers such as Richard Eldridge (1989)
and Martha Nussbaum (1986 and 1990) have begun to take seriously the idea that
some of the problems of moral philosophy might be more fruitfully addressed
by making literature and literary studies active partners, as it were, in philo-
sophical enquiry. At one point Lamarque and Olsen dismiss this tendency in the
following terms:
[Eldridge] argues as if literature provided answers to serious questions that we

have to address in our own lives, questions that exist for us independently of
the existence of literary practice. The trouble with this type of defence from our
point of view is that it demands a concept of what may be called “true-versions”
of themes that we have argued in detail cannot be sustained in any substantive
form. (1994: 451)
The view proposed here makes it clear, I think, why the programs of philosophers
like Eldridge and Nussbaum require no such theoretical underpinning: because
the “themes” dealt with in great literature are in fact deeply rooted in “our own
lives,” not through the (admittedly nonexistent) possibility of assigning truth-
values to the content of literary works, but through their roots in the practices
and forms of life which simultaneously (1) determine the content of the concepts
in question and (2) constitute the moral framework of whatever human world it is
in which our everyday lives are led. In other words, there is simply no such breach
as Lamarque and Olsen postulate between the concerns of everyday life and those
of literature.
But it also follows, from the position set out here, that the value of great litera-
ture does not, as we found Gibson and Dammann rightly insisting, consist in the
possibility of being guided by it to such truth-assessable insights as may be derived
from reading and reflecting upon it. According to us the power, and the value, of
great literature is, just as Gibson and Dammann argue, internal to it, because it
resides in the power of its medium, language, to summon up and display—for here
the metaphor of mimesis revives and recovers a good deal of the force ascribed to
it by writers like Nuttall—through its deployment in the medium of a fiction, the
nature of the human practices and choices that found the conceptual distinctions
it enshrines, and that simultaneously found, along with them, a world, one that
is not only the world in which we live, but a world, and its founding words, made
flesh in us: the world that exists only in us, the world of whose values and assump-
tions we are the living bearers, and that is not, moreover, a static world, but a world
constantly in a slow, glacier-like flux of change, one of the motivating forces of
which, of course, is great literature. That is why great literature is, or should be,
important to us.
That thought suggests a return to our starting point, in the notion of realism
as a genre concept. Realism as a genre is, for many literary historians, contermi-
nous with the brief reign of the nineteenth-century realist novel, and passes from
the scene with the rise of literary modernism, in the work of such writers as Kafka,
Proust, Joyce, Woolf, or Eliot.
The revolutionary character of modernism in literature, as in other arts,
is often taken to consist in two main characteristics, both involving a crisis of
authority. On the one hand, it is said, modernist writers are painfully aware that,
since the book is “only a book and not the world” (Josipovici 1977: 113), and since
the claim to capture reality in a fiction is a grandiloquent pretense, the writer
cannot rely on reality to authorize what he writes. On the other hand, the rec-
ognition by modernists that traditional literary forms and rules of composition
are “man-made and not natural” (122), it is claimed, destroys the authority of
past literary practice. That double lapse of authority leaves the modernist writer,
when it comes to deciding what to write down upon the blank page confronting
him, in that state of absolute freedom, at once liberating and angst ridden, that
the existentialist tradition, from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche onward, has made it
its business to explore.
One way of responding to this situation is to argue, with Gabriel Josipovici
(echoing Hobbes, in the passage from Leviathan cited above), that it gives to lit-
erature, as to art in general, “a greater sense of game, of playfulness, than ha[s]
ever been known since the dawn of the Renaissance” (1977: 122). But—and here
is the rub—such a stance leaves room for two darker responses: first, that it is a
short step from playfulness to frivolity—to an art that no longer functions either
as a transmitter or as a critic of cultural stances and values because it has subsided
into the self-absorbed pursuit of purely formal “experiments”; and second, that
of Thomas Mann in Doctor Faustus, that modernism in art, in its surrender of all
cultural authority in favor of the naked will of the artist, has a demonic side, a side
not without connections, for Mann, with the rise of Nazism.
If the position I have outlined here stands, however, the latter two, pessimistic,
responses have rather less to be said for them than might otherwise appear. On
the view suggested here, the negative part of the case for modernism advanced by
Josipovici and others is sound enough. It is indeed not the business of literature
to “describe reality”—even human reality—in the sense in which a true, literal,
indicative statement “describes reality.” No doubt, also, all questions of literary
form and technique do indeed fall to the will of the writer to determine. But if we
are right, it does not follow that literature is a free field for “play” in the sense of
frivolity, for the connection between literature and reality does not run by way of
the truth or falsity of statements, but by way of deeper linkages, internal to lan-
guage, between the meanings of words and the practices that constitute human
worlds and form the outlook and personalities of their inhabitants. To “play” with
these connections, to bring them to consciousness, to criticize them, at times to
transform them, is indeed the business of serious literature, including modernist
literature. But the “play” in question is serious play, since it affords us one of the
realism 245
few means we have of rising above our habitual acquiescence in the vast fabric of
historically accumulated practice, in and through which we live our lives, to a posi-
tion from which we can, in principle at least, contemplate with a serious eye what
that fabric has made, and continues to make, of us.
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—— . (2007) “Aharon Appelfeld and the Problem of Holocaust Fiction.” In J. Gibson
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 
ROMANTICISM
nikolas kompridis
In memory of Richard Rorty
[W]hat interests us in romanticism is that we still belong to

the era it opened up. The present period continues to deny
precisely this belonging, which defines us.
—Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy,
The Literary Absolute
Unexpected Resurgence
For much of the twentieth century, responding with modernist condescension
to anything that emitted even the slightest whiff of romanticism was simply de
rigueur. After all, romanticism was so nineteenth century, an artistically spent cul-
tural force whose obsolete remains have been drained of vitality and meaning. To
succumb to any warmed-over romantic impulses was to risk producing kitsch, or
to make common cause with the forces of cultural conservatism, or to participate
in the ideological distortion of reality.
Theodor Adorno’s supercilious and dismissive reaction to the music of
Jean Sibelius is a typical, if extreme, example. Written in the late 1930s dur-
ing the triumphant spread of European fascism, Adorno’s “Glosse über Sibel-
ius” pulls no punches in the name of progressive consciousness. Adorno, the
upright Schoenbergian and understandably anxious modernist, had no doubts

whatsoever about what he heard in Sibelius: music of obvious technical infe-
riority, produced by a musically backward, conservative hick: “If Sibelius is
good, then the perennial standards of musical quality from Bach to Schoen-
berg . . . are invalid” (1982: 251).1 The general popularity of music of such utterly
transparent banality was, for Adorno, a sure sign of undeniable musical and
cultural regression. Even worse, the ideological pitch of this music, intoned in
the corrupted but comforting language of romantic tonality, rendered it alto-
gether too congenial to “blood and soil” nationalism and to antimodern invo-
cations of “nature.”
Of course, the list of romanticism’s various sins can be very long indeed. In
addition to its unavoidable reversion to kitsch, its conservatism, its antimodernism,
and its ideological distortion of reality, there is also its quietism, its sentimental-
ity, its divinization of the visionary powers of the (male) artist, its depoliticization
of art, its aesthetic ideology, its masculinism, and, for some (not so long ago), its
emasculated, feminine sensibility. Given its many egregious sins, why the resur-
gent interest in German and American romanticism? The complex picture of
romanticism (and its unrealized possibilities) that one finds in the work of Stanley
Cavell, Charles Taylor, Richard Rorty, Dieter Henrich, Manfred Frank, Richard
Eldridge, and a number of other important scholars does not seem to conform to
the received view of romanticism as an exhausted and suspect set of responses to
the modern world.
Perhaps, this resurgent interest in romanticism can be viewed as just another
passing academic fashion—in today, out tomorrow. If popular culture can resort
to recycling its past when it has nothing new to say, why should we expect things
to be any different in the academy? More plausibly, the resurgent interest in
romanticism might be a consequence of the decline of confidence in “modernist”
modernity, and so an interest in retrieving long neglected or misunderstood pos-
sibilities for living modernity’s form of life—living it less rigidly, less destructively.
The dark side of twentieth-century modernism is rather familiar to us now, not
least, the authoritarian and intolerant character of its formalist aesthetic norms,
the cocksure aesthetic judgment, and the totalizing (and masculinist) style of
criticism.
Surely, one could object, we are not living in a “romantic” age. Whatever
might be percolating in the minds of scholars, we are not living in the 1790s,
when even the horrors of the French Revolution could not dampen the radi-
cal hopes of the young romantics. Our time is not a time anyone is going to
look back at nostalgically, as William Wordsworth did in The Prelude (1850), and
sigh: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive / But to be young was very Heaven!”
(11: 108–9). To be young today is very different and not a little frightening,
despite all the seductive consumer devices offering temporary relief from the
intensely felt anxieties of the age. If there is bliss to be had, it may be found only
in cultivated ignorance.
romanticism 249
The future, too, is different, dramatically less capable of bearing radical hopes,
were any to be articulated convincingly. Is romanticism even possible in a skeptical,
doubt-ridden age such as ours? The time for romanticism, for better and for worse,
has passed. Why not just let it fade into the sunset, move on, dealing realistically
with the world we face, making the most of the possibilities our historical circum-
stances allow? What need could romanticism answer today?
Well, a reinherited romanticism might provide us with a richer evaluative
vocabulary than modernism could provide, one that might make it possible for us
to say yes or no to modernity, to the present, to the future, in more complex and
nuanced ways. And so the resurgence of interest in romanticism could be construed
as part of a growing realization that it may be unwise as well as self-contradictory
to live modernity’s form of life unromantically.
For example, there are certain forms of individual and cultural change that are
simply inconceivable apart from our romantic understanding of such change, and
our romantic need of it. As long as you aspire to a kind of change in which “[y]ou
are different, what you recognize as problems are different, your world is differ-
ent,” then you are bound and answerable to the demands of romanticism (Cavell
1976a: 87). What is demanded of you, despite all the obstacles and constraints,
despite the improbability and possible futility of it all, is to find and found new
ways of looking at things, new ways of speaking and acting, new kinds of practices,
and new kinds of institutions. Anyone who thinks such change is not only neces-
sary but also (improbably) possible, whatever their view of “romanticism,” is a
hopeless romantic.
Even Wordsworth’s disappointment with the French Revolution—its betrayal
of its own ideals, not to mention its fervent deification of “naked” reason—did not
dampen his faith that such change as romanticism prefigures can be made visible
in romantic writing and, when made visible, made realizable.
. . . and I remember, well

That in life’s every-day appearances
I seemed about this time to gain clear sight
Of a new world—a world, too, that was fit
To be transmitted, and to other eyes
Made visible . . . (1850, 13: 367–72)
Any critical vocabulary that operates without some (not unassailable) faith in the
possibility of “a new world,” a faith fostered by “every-day appearances” here and
now, would be not only ineffectual as a critical vocabulary, but also inconceivable.
It would have to treat the aspiration to bring about a change in which “[y]ou are
different, what you recognize as problems are different, your world is different”
as naive romanticism, and romantic claims such as “all things have second birth”
(1850, 10: 83) as mystifications of “real” social change. But then it would leave unan-
swered the question of how we are to imagine “real” change if it does not lead to,
and is not seen as leading to, a new world—this world made anew. More important,
it leaves unanswered the question of how we are to foresee this new world with-
out the help of romantic writing and envisioning. To disclose a “new world” that
responds to our genuine needs will require all the resources of romantic writing if
it is to be “fit / To be transmitted, and to other eyes / Made visible.”
A critical vocabulary that thinks it must renounce romantic notions of change
and transfiguration will find itself hugely incapacitated, existentially, not just theo-
retically. Romantics have given us good reason to doubt that justice without trans-
figuration is possible. Neither justice nor transfiguration can be achieved merely
by providing “good arguments.” Conventional arguments, however “good” they
might be, cannot cast our problems in a new light, nor can they adjust the light so
that we can see ourselves and the things that matter to us in a new way. As Rorty
repeated tirelessly, only new vocabularies of description and evaluation will let
us do that.2 By lending themselves to the creation of these necessarily new ways
of speaking and acting, both philosophy and literature respond to, and occasion-
ally meet, the demands of romanticism. Having lived through the shortcomings
of an unromantic modernism, a modernism that had to suppress its romanticism,
might it be that romanticism can redeem modernism? Might it be that we still need
romanticism?
What Is Romanticism?
Before we even venture to answer this question, it might be worthwhile to ask
just what would count as a satisfactory answer. If we were speaking of a unified
and fully discharged set of artistic and cultural energies that we, owllike, grasp
retrospectively in the appropriate categories, we would be entitled to speak of a
glorious “early” romanticism and a decadent, politically distasteful “late” roman-
ticism. We would then place it in a historical sequence in which it is eventually
superseded by an aesthetically uncompromising modernism, which, having lost
its way and our confidence, mutated into a skeptical postmodernism.3 But if we
are of the view that romanticism is not something we are already beyond but is
a living, as yet unrealized possibility, then identifying romanticism too closely
with its past would construe its meaning and its history (as well as its geography)
far too narrowly.
We might also wish to recall Nietzsche’s dictum concerning the impossibility
of defining anything that has a history. Nietzsche, who could be a ferocious critic of
“romanticism,” did not try to grasp it in narrow historical categories. Instructively,
he applied the concept to a set of expressive responses to the world, the nature of
which could be distinguished not according to whether they represented an “early”
or “late” form of romanticism, but according to whether their response to the
world arose from “the overfullness of life” or “the impoverishment of life” (Nietzsche
romanticism 251
1974: 328). These are hardly uncontroversial criteria, no matter how one construes
them; what is of interest to our purpose here, however, is that Nietzsche’s very
romantic criteria of evaluation (even if Nietzsche could not acknowledge them as
such) refer to normatively distinct forms of expressive response, each of which
outlines a relation to the world and to ways of life, individual and shared, that these
forms of expressive response make visible, as livable possibilities.
In this respect, Nietzsche’s approach to the meaning of romanticism is entirely
congruent with the approach of this volume to forms as styles of attention to
human life, a request that is particularly congenial to my view of romanticism. By
treating romanticism as an expressive response to the world, as a form of atten-
tion to the possibilities and debilities of human life, we are able to understand it in
richer and more comprehensive terms.
That said, we are still left with the problem of determining what constitutes
distinctively romantic forms of response and attention. Without diminishing
the importance or centrality of any historically specific romanticism, determin-
ing what counts as distinctively romantic forms of response and attention might
require thinking of “romanticism” as a field of problems and concerns, as a field
of problematizations, to use a Foucauldian term of art. The “unity” of these prob-
lematizations is not to be found in specific theoretical positions or formal proce-
dures but in the family resemblance each bears to the others. Following a first step
taken in this direction by Cavell, let us call these problematizations the aesthetic
problems of philosophy. Following a second step proposed by J. M. Bernstein, let
us treat these aesthetic problems of philosophy as the aesthetic problems of mod-
ern society (Cavell 1976a; Bernstein 2003). In doing so, we find that what we are
ultimately dealing with is philosophy’s and modernity’s suspicious and anxious
relation to the aesthetic.
From the perspective of the latter, calling the problems of modern philoso-
phy and modern society “aesthetic” problems typically provokes the suspicion that
romantics are in the grip of some aesthetic ideology that cannot but misrepresent
and thereby distort problems whose modernity is such that they cannot possibly
be captured in aesthetic categories. This was precisely Hegel’s point in his lectures
on aesthetics: the problems of the modern world were sui generis, and certainly
too complex to be grasped in aesthetic categories. Modern social life and modern
political institutions simply exceeded the conceptual grasp of aesthetic categories,
be they of modern or classical provenance.
Nonetheless, romantics, emboldened by Kant’s compelling articulation of
the aesthetic problems of philosophy in the third Critique, took them also to
reveal the aesthetic problems of modern society, problems that had to be grasped
in aesthetic categories, for there were no other categories in which they could be
grasped. To grasp them in this way was also to see how the aesthetic has become
an urgent but repressed problem for philosophy and modern society. This will
sound rather unintelligible if, as Bernstein points out, aesthetics is understood as
referring to some specialized inquiry into the nature of art, artworks, or beauty, or
as having to do with a distinct form of sensuous perception. That there could be a
set of problems common to philosophy and modern society, and that these prob-
lems signaled the repression (and distortion) of something called the “aesthetic,”
is an idea that could be intelligible and intellectually urgent only if the “aesthetic”
is understood in a way that appears palpably counterintuitive to many—to whit, as
belonging to, as having a stake in, the “necessary conditions for cognition, reason,
meaning” (Bernstein 2003: 111). To think in this way about the aesthetic is to rec-
ognize, as Harold Bloom put it, that the dimensions of the aesthetic are “endless”
(Hartman and Bloom 2006).
Once one recognizes this, there is much to be gained by seeking to under-
stand “romanticism” as the self-conscious attempt to confront the aesthetic
problems of philosophy and modern society as aesthetic problems. To do so
successfully would mean, on the one hand, an enlargement of the significance
of the aesthetic, confi rming the problem-solving power of its semantic and con-
ceptual resources, and, on the other, a new and hopefully more apt response to
the problems faced by philosophy and modern society. This is not the place to
state these problems, for there is not sufficient space to do them justice.4 What
I can do is take up a few of these problems over the course of what follows, not
as part of a systematic treatment of them but to illustrate the romantic response
to them.
Conviction Lost and Recovered

(and Lost Again)
Already in the closing decades of the twentieth century, Adorno’s reaction to
Sibelius looked more reactionary than progressive. Composers of very different
stylistic and political persuasions found in Sibelius a compelling model for their
own compositional practice. In 1984, while lecturing at Darmstadt, the Temple
of Delphi of musical modernism, iconoclastic composer Morton Feldman made
use of the occasion to point out that distinguishing radicals from conservatives
is not as straightforward as modernists typically believe. Sometimes it is the con-
servatives who are the real radicals, and the radicals who are the real conser-
vatives. To underscore his point, Feldman hummed the theme from Sibelius’s
Fifth Symphony (Feldman 2006: 192). Four decades earlier, and just a decade after
Adorno published his diatribe, Arnold Schoenberg, the veritable gold standard
of Adorno’s modernism, anticipated Feldman’s point in the polemically titled
essay “Brahms the Progressive” (1947).5 The point being made here is not the
obvious one that our judgments are fallible and liable to future disconfi rmation
but, rather, that beyond any such conventional fallibilism, there is also a need
to reflect on and to acknowledge in our words and deeds the time-bound and
romanticism 253
time-imprinted nature of our judgments. Through such an acknowledgment,

we would be far less tempted to play the (highly seductive) role of the vanguard
critic who believes that one’s critical practice provides privileged access to “the
most advanced consciousness” of one’s time (Adorno 1998: 16). The very idea of
“the most advanced consciousness” is incoherent, for it must presume epistemic
authority over time itself: no on can be in a position to know in advance what has
a future, what only a past, or to know what the next significant turn in human
history will be.
Adorno’s overconfident (mis)judgment is therefore one more reminder of
how intractable is the problem of drawing firm distinctions between “mod-
ernism” and “romanticism,” not least because these categories are mutually
entangled and thoroughly permeated by history, a history that is far from over,
rendering their meaning far from settled. The multiple, diverse, and contested
ways in which these categories are applied evince their semantic elasticity and
historical plasticity. No matter how carefully attuned we are to the historical
conditions under which we think, judge, and act, the fact that such attunement
is fleeting and partial means that all our judgments are inescapably time bound
and time imprinted. This does not mean that we have to accept Paul de Man’s
stoic skepticism about the very possibility of historical knowledge, which skep-
ticism must dogmatically presuppose not that history has come to an end, but
that it never began. It does mean, however, that we have to temper our urge to
speak in the voice of authority about that over which we cannot claim author-
ity. “Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around this circle another
can be drawn” (Emerson 1990a: 173). Those of us susceptible to the temptation
to speak with authority about that over which we cannot claim authority might
wish to heed the “truth” of Emerson’s words. These words intend to outline a
possible way of life—a way of life in which criticism is compatible with critical
uncertainty, with the romantic consciousness of multiple and “infi nite” perspec-
tives. As we will see, that would mean changing the orientation of criticism, of
theorizing in general.
Before Emerson, Friedrich Schlegel tried to state this romantic “truth” in the
terms of his concept of irony; long after Emerson, Rorty tried to restate it in his
own version of that concept. Incautiously applied, as though it were a theoretical
truth, it can easily turn into dogmatic skepticism; alternatively, it can provide us
with the opportunity to find another way to live our skepticism, which is what
Emerson actually had in mind. The latter possibility depends on paying attention
to the idea that this other way to live our skepticism really does involve apprentice-
ship. Apprenticing oneself to this “truth” is willingly to submit to one’s possible
transformation—to an endless learning process about how to lead such a life, how
to articulate it in words and deeds that can be one’s own without being authorita-
tively final. This will involve considerable struggle with and over one’s self. It will
also involve permanently having to regard oneself as a beginner, one who will always
have to begin anew, finding new ways to understand and to bear the demands of
leading such a life, demands that will necessarily take on new forms each time the
circle is redrawn.
The “truth that around this circle another can be drawn” does not entail
having to remain silent when we feel called upon to speak in affi rmation or in
opposition. The possibility that our words will be redescribed and recontextual-
ized in unforeseeable ways, making us look pretty bad in the eyes of the future,
is not meant to silence us; rather, it is meant to attune us to how time imprints
itself on our words and our deeds. Remaining silent does not alter or mitigate
these circumstances, for if what we say is bound to, imprinted by, time, so is our
silence. There is no compelling reason why we cannot speak and judge with con-
viction about the historical circumstances in which we find ourselves, about the
things, the objects, with which we surround ourselves and with which we must
daily contend. Conviction, as Bernard Williams pointed out, does not require
certainty, only confidence (1985: 169–73). Besides, the form of life that we call
modernity cannot be lived without engaging in time-diagnostic analysis and
criticism. Engaging in these activities is to engage in the project of unsettling
our convictions and fi nding ways to restore our capacity for conviction, even
when we speak with the “intrepid conviction that [our] laws, [our] relations to
society . . . [our] world, may at any time be superseded and deceased” (Emerson
1990a: 177). We speak, then, as respondents and as initiators, speaking “second”
even when we speak “first,” hoping that our speech can inspire or initiate some-
thing potentially new, not close a circle around which no other can possibly be
drawn. Our apprenticeship to this “truth” is an acknowledgment to others, and
to ourselves, that we are leaving open a place, some space of possibility, where
someone or something can speak as if for the fi rst time, and we are ready to listen
with ears we did not know we had. “There is no virtue that is fi nal; all are initial”
(Emerson 1990a: 181).
This transformation and recovery of conviction and its instancing in literary
and philosophical modes of expression can thus be seen as one of romanticism’s
bequests, and one of its standing requests. Is such conviction possible? Well, is it
not precisely this possibility that Emerson is trying to capture by the term “appren-
ticeship”? What would our critical judgments look like, how would they function
in the language games of theory and criticism, and how would they change these
language games, were our convictions expressed with the awareness that they may
be superseded tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow? Would this not make us more
attentive, and more responsive, to the objects of our judgments? Would we not give
these objects more opportunity to talk back, and would that not make us better
listeners, and possible initiators of a different practice of listening? And would not
all this make us a different, a new kind, of we?
These questions are the central concern of Wordsworth’s preface to the Lyri-
cal Ballads (1800). Carefully, and with an almost excessive vigilance, he elaborates
answers to these questions that revolve around the observation, as much an expres-
sion of hope as an observation, that everyday language, the “language really used by
romanticism 255
men,” is the language on which the poet must draw, the language on which she must
model her own writing (Wordsworth 1990a: 597). Wordsworth’s justification for
such an unprecedented break with poetic practice follows from one further obser-
vation: it is in everyday language that human beings “hourly communicate with the
best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived (597).
With this observation, we find Wordsworth circling about an animistic or
Adamic view of language, a view of language as arising from a deep intimacy and
communion between words and things. It is precisely such a view of language
that Walter Benjamin is channeling in his essay “On Language as Such and the
Language of Man” (1916). For Benjamin, it belongs to the very “linguistic being
of human being to name things” (2004a: 64). In naming things, we are respond-
ing to their need for voice, translating “the language of things into that of human
beings” (70). When we give things their name, we animate them by acting as their
respondents. In responding to things in this way, we do not only bring things into
communication with us; we communicate ourselves by naming them (64).6
Of course, all this supposes, as Wordsworth and Benjamin do, that things
communicate with us, and we with them: “[I]f the lamp and the mountain and
the fox did not communicate themselves to the human being, how should she
be able to name them?” (Benjamin 2004a: 64). To “communicate with the best
objects from which the best part of language is originally derived” is to respond to
those objects attentively, receptively, which means to “look steadily” upon them
(Wordsworth 1990a: 600), abandoning oneself to them in order to bring them to
life in words, in just those words, and only those words, which give them life. If a
communicative relation between human beings and the things that concern them
does indeed obtain or can obtain, then the relation between the “best objects”
and the “best part of language” cannot be arbitrary, not if the name that we give
to things is what brings them into communicative relation with us. This would
then explain why Wordsworth and Benjamin hold the view that it is through the
communicative exchange with things that the best part of language is preserved
in, and as, semantically rich experience. Absent such communication, the very
capacity for experience is threatened, leaving us less capable of seeing things in a
new way, less capable of expressive response to things, less capable of seeing their
significance for us.
The anxiety that comes to the surface repeatedly in Wordsworth’s preface arises
from the felt proximity of that threat. All those many times that Wordsworth states
that he must bring his poetic language “near to the language of men,” that he must
“imitate . . . and adopt the very language of men,” he is not just drawing attention
to how different is his conception of poetic language from his predecessors and
peers. And while we could rightly regard the urgency of Wordsworth’s wish to
reattune poetic language with everyday language as a proto-Wittgensteinian call
to “bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use” (Wittgenstein
1958: §116, 48e), we would still be missing something of the anxiety that underlies
this call. Without doubt, a part of Wordsworth’s anxiety arises from a sense of
alienation from the everyday, from the fear that prolonged disconnection from
the semantic sources of everyday language impoverishes his own—poetry’s own—
powers of expression. But felt even more intensely is the fear that prolonged dis-
connection from the everyday would render its language opaque to him, as though
it had become an untranslatable foreign tongue, from whose semantic energies he
(and we) would be forever cut off.
Yet another part of this general anxiety arises from Wordsworth’s worries
about the current state of everyday language. Like twentieth-century romantics
such as Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Cavell, Wordsworth understood his own
task as a writer as requiring him to bring about a recovery of the everyday by
regaining contact with the semantic sources of everyday language and life. Once
a writer makes this task her own, she becomes vulnerable to the worry that the
semantic sources upon which this recovery depends will become depleted before
it can even take place. That worry is fueled, of course, by conditions of (capital-
ist) modernity that promote a flight from the everyday into the “extraordinary,”
and an experience of the “extraordinary” that is made possible by the narcotic
stimulants of consumer culture. We could call this “the flattening of the extraor-
dinary,” and as Wordsworth foresaw, to dwell in it was to risk weakening “the
discriminating powers of the mind,” reducing it to “a state of almost savage tor-
por,” from which state arises an ever more intense “craving for extraordinary
incident” and “outrageous stimulation” (1990a: 599). Although Wordsworth
tries to counter the leveling tendencies of the age with a sanguine expression of
faith that “the time is approaching when the evil will be systematically opposed,”
his faith is betrayed by the unstated worry that the time that is approaching
might very well be one in which the evil might be systematically braced and
unquestioningly embraced rather than systematically opposed. A time might be
approaching when the objects with which we daily communicate will not be the
best of objects, and therefore the best part of language will be daily impover-
ished, as will our daily contact with it. A century later, Rainer Maria Rilke noted
that this time had arrived:
. . . More than ever

the things that we might experience are vanishing, for
what drives them out and replaces them is an imageless act.
An act under a shell, which easily cracks open as soon as
The business inside outgrows it and seeks new limits.
(1995: 385, translation amended)
It is surely one of the demands of romanticism that we resist this standing threat to
our capacity for semantically rich experience. But how are we to resist? How do we
now communicate with “the best objects from which the best part of language is
originally derived” when those objects, those things we might “experience,” might
be vanishing? How does the romantic writer do so when she is that kind of writer
who must let herself be affected by her time, to let her time imprint herself on
romanticism 257
her words and deeds? How does such a writer keep from being torn apart by the
divided and divisive objects with which she must daily contend, and to which she
must remain vulnerably open? How does one actually live the demands of roman-
ticism and remain capable of expressive response?
The Redemption of Things

For modernist critics of romanticism such as Jerome McGann, these romantic
questions about everyday language and our relation to everyday things can no lon-
ger be our concern since, for him, we are well beyond treating the demands of
romanticism as our demands. Although romanticism’s scattered, stagnating rem-
nants still constitute a part of our contemporary culture, they represent only a
“body of illusions” through which we can clearly see when we occupy the right
“critical vantage” (McGann 1983: 12). That romanticism is something we have defi-
nitely surpassed and overcome is a view McGann can assert in epistemologically
overconfident terms because he understands the practice of criticism as an illusion-
shattering enterprise, a confirmation of its power of unmasking. When grounded
in the correct theory (in his case, Althusserian historical materialism), the work of
the critic cannot be vulnerable to the illusions it is her task to unmask. The correct
theory provides the critic with an epistemic firewall between herself and the ideo-
logical processes whose unmasking she undertakes. On principle, such a theory
cannot allow “critical uncertainty,” for it understands the practice of critique as
oriented to truth, to seeing our circumstances correctly, as though there can be
only one right perspective from which they can be seen correctly.
Romantic criticism, by contrast, aims at reflectively disclosing alternative possi-
bilities for going on with our practices differently, at enlarging the space of freedom
in which to exercise our agency. Critical uncertainty is a condition of seeing things
differently, of going on with our practices in a new way. The very idea of getting
our circumstances right, of criticism that tells it like it really is, is an idea that must
presuppose that our preferred final vocabulary is the final unsurpassable vocabu-
lary of description. Were we ever to have serious doubts about that vocabulary,
we would be left without “non-circular argumentative recourse” (Rorty 1989: 73).
This is the fatal weakness of ideology critique, a consequence of an overconfident,
unreflective trust in its own epistemic superiority.
McGann is not as attuned as he should be to the way in which ideology cri-
tique can turn on itself, thereby undermining its own epistemological and histori-
cal foundations7—and such critique as McGann practices is foundationalist at its
core. Ideology critique that does not directly confront this skeptical possibility is
also less attuned to alternative ways to live our skepticism. The foundationalist
posture it unreflectively assumes cannot but invite the most corrosive forms of
skepticism. A critical practice for which conviction requires certainty is a critical
practice generally unprepared to recover convictions that have become unsettled,

undermined, by the unexpected crises and new challenges to which any practice
is subject. Romantics have an awful lot to say about the matter of recovering one’s
convictions when they have become unsettled or undermined—if we are willing
to listen. However, to listen we would have to recognize that we are not beyond the
demands of romanticism and have to hope that “the demands of romanticism are
not beyond us” (Cavell 1989: 114).
One of those demands is to find a new stance toward the objects of our knowl-
edge, and the things that surround us. Unmasking brands of criticism presuppose
an ontology of disengagement,8 an ontology that places the critic safely outside
the object of criticism, unstained and untainted by its ideological effects. The
object stands at his disposal, makes itself available to his unmasking purposes.
Resistance is useless; talking back is pointless. Under the withering interroga-
tory gaze of the critic, the object cannot but betray itself, delivering its previously
hidden untruth to its remorseless and confident interrogator.9 This practice of
“ruthless critique” (Wang 1996: 15) has been uncritically practiced throughout
the late twentieth century, having become the dominant paradigm of critique in
the humanities. Perhaps, in light of the morally obscene images of really ruthless
methods of interrogation that have become a commonplace in the early twenty-
first century, we might now be ready to question ourselves a little more honestly
about what we found so appealing about the practice of critique as “ruthless cri-
tique,” and examine more conscientiously the ethicopolitical as well as epistemic
implications of the stance it lets us assume toward the “objects” of our knowledge.
We might now wish to be considerably more circumspect before we continue to
engage in the practice of critique as though it were identical to the practice of
“interrogation,” reflecting back to us the violence and violation inherent in “ruth-
less critique.” Unmasking critique must treat all its objects as suspects, including,
eventually, its own critical practice. Thus, it cannot but undermine itself, and
the very possibility of trust and conviction, without which no human practice
is sustainable. As Nietzsche himself realized, it is a very reckless and destructive
practice (1974: 35).
So, what might the practices of contemporary theory and criticism look like
if they were reconfigured in a different relation to their objects of knowledge,
allowing them to talk back, talking us into becoming new kinds of listeners?
What would change—in the critic, in the object—if we critics were to exchange
the interrogatory stance for a stance of receptivity to the objects of our knowl-
edge? What could objects say to us then? These very questions circulate through-
out Jean-Luc Godard’s Two or Three Things I Know about Her (1967), gathering
themselves together at the point in the fi lm when its omnipresent narrator poses
the question—“What is an object?” Groping tentatively toward some indetermi-
nate illumination, the narrator proposes the following suggestive answer. “Per-
haps it is a link enabling us to pass from one subject to another, therefore to live
together.” What could be more romantic than to think that objects, things, could
play this role in our lives? It is certainly equally romantic to let this somewhat
romanticism 259
tantalizing if obscure thought to be immediately engulfed with uncertainty and

doubt. One therefore expects it all to end on a note of resignation or despair.
Where else could it end once the narrator remarks upon the ambiguity inher-
ent in social relations, the power of thought to divide as much as to unite, and
the power of words to do likewise, and then adds to all of this the tendency to
reproach ourselves even when we feel blameless, the overpowering force of our
objective circumstances, and the inadequacy of our powers of agency to respond
to them? Yet, this voice does not invite resignation or despair; rather, it urges
a reactivation and intensification of one’s capacity for receptivity and connec-
tion: “ I must listen. I must look around more than ever. / The world—my kin,
my twin.” Godard’s invocation and resignification of the last line from the first
poem of Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleur du Mal (“—Hypocrite lecteur,—mon
semblable,—mon frère”) register not only the intimate complicity between poet
and reader, or fi lmmaker and viewer, but also the intimate complicity between
one’s own condition and the condition of the world. Godard’s words thus also
resonate with the words from Emerson’s “Fate,” written just a few years after Les
Fleurs: “[I]n the history of the individual is always an account of his condition,
and he knows himself to be party to his present estate” (Emerson 1990b: 349–50).
To acknowledge that one is indeed party to one’s “present estate” is implicitly to
remove the basis for resenting the world, a resentment that, if Nietzsche is right,
is the necessary precondition for a most undesirable kind of “romanticism.”
Giving an account of one’s own contribution to one’s “present estate” gives one
the chance of a second birth, a new beginning. It gives one the chance to over-
come the kind of “romanticism” whose expressive response to the world seeks to
revenge itself upon the world, to brand it with the image of one’s own suffering
(Nietzsche 1974: 330). By contrast, to acknowledge the world as one’s “kin” and
“twin” is to see that a change in one’s own condition is coextensive with a change
in the condition of the world—this world made anew. For such a new world
to arise as a world that we can realize, it must fi rst be prefigured in “every-day
appearances,” attentively perceived and made visible:
Not in Utopia . . .
Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where!
But in the very world, which is the world
Of all of us,—the place where, in the end,
We find our happiness, or not at all!
(Wordsworth, 1850, 11: 140–44)
The movement of reflection from our relation to objects to our relation to

the world has been an enduring feature of philosophical and literary prac-
tice. What is distinctively romantic is to think of our communication with
objects, and their communication with us, as an activity that illuminates the
conditions of our existence, conditions whose satisfaction includes meeting
the condition that there be things that have this kind of thingness. It is as
though our intelligibility to ourselves depends upon the presence, or presenc-

ing, of things—which is just what Benjamin means when he claims that by
naming things we communicate ourselves. Kant thought he had shown defi-
nitely that for a world of objects to exist as objects for us, objects had to satisfy
the epistemic conditions of human knowledge. But his romantic successors
turn the tables on Kant by showing that for objects to be accessible to us we
must first become accessible to them; failing that, we suffer from permanent
self-inaccessibility. With Cavell, we could say, more dramatically yet, that the
problem of how to communicate with objects has become a matter of life and
death—the life and death of the world.
Has the question of the possibility of objects ever been posed in a more star-
tling and luminescent way than it is posed in Godard’s Two or Three Things I Know
about Her? Consider the remarkable scene in the café during which the narrator
of Two or Three Things first poses the question of what an object is. In this scene,
it is the objects that are doing the real talking, and it is their perspective we are
asked to occupy. That perspective allows us to see not only these things that have
become inaccessible to the people in whose presence they are invisibly present, but
also how inaccessible, how unintelligible, these people are to themselves. So we
witness their concomitant inexpressiveness as it is contrasted with the rich expres-
siveness of the objects surrounding them. No character in the film conveys the
depth and mystery of that uncanny cup of coffee, its black liquid now swirling,
now still, framing the world of possibility it opens up. No character receives that
intensity of attention, either. Why do objects receive and, more important, why do
they respond to, intensely attentive concern? The narrator states: “Objects exist,
and if one pays more attention to them than to people, it is precisely because they
exist more than these people. Dead objects are still alive. Living people are often
already dead.”
To romantics, it is not enough to insist on establishing more comprehen-
sively and more globally, a noninstrumental relation to persons (as ends in them-
selves); we must also establish a noninstrumental relation to the things of the
world. Such a noninstrumental relation to things is not only consistent with a
nondominating relation to nature; it is also consistent with the quixotic roman-
tic commitment to the redemption of things in general. Part of what underlies
this commitment is the need to make sense of our relation to such things as art-
works, heirlooms, photographs, and a whole range of significant things, things
we treat “in ways normally reserved for treating persons” (Cavell 1976b: 189).
Cavell suggests that this tendency might have something to do with the self-
conscious persistence of animism in romanticism—that is, the idea that there is
a life of things, and it is the romantic writer’s obligation to say things, to let them
speak through us (Cavell 1988: 53):
Perhaps we are here in order to say: house, bridge, fountain gate, pitcher,
fruit-tree, window—at most: column, tower. . . . But to say them, you must
understand, oh to say them in ways more meaningful than the things themselves
romanticism 261
ever could say. . . . And these things that live, fleetingly, understand that you
praise them; transient themselves, they trust us for rescue, us, the most
transient of all. (Rilke 1995: 387, translation amended)
Rilke’s animistic image of things as dependent on us for their redemption turns

on an image of romanticism as a practice of redemptive reanimation, thus
satisfying the condition that there be things. This might explain why it is that
romantics—Godard as much as Wordsworth—attend so carefully to things pres-
ent (and absent) to them, as though, as Cavell puts it, they “prefer things to peo-
ple” (1988: 66). In giving things a hearing, something they rarely receive outside
literature and art, perhaps we allow them, at the very least, to remind us of our
common fate.10 Cavell shares with Heidegger and other romantics the thought
that to acknowledge that things are in need of redemption is to acknowledge that
their redemption would mean ours, as well. This acknowledgment of our com-
mon fate—that their conditions of intelligibility and possibility are intertwined
with our own—might let us see that romanticism is not a body of illusions to be
deposited in the garbage bins of history but an urgent reformulation of the task of
philosophy and literature.
The redemption of the things of the world is the redemption of human
nature, and chiefly from the destructiveness of its own conditions of existence.
Is this a philosophy of romanticism? If romanticism believes, and is right in its
belief, that things need redemption from the way human beings have come to
think, and that this redemption can happen only poetically, then, according to
Heidegger’s essay What Is a Thing?,” romanticism would be right in believing
that it is thereby a redemption of human nature from the grip of itself ” (Cavell
1988: 55).
For Heidegger, the redemption of things depends on a shift from “representa-
tional” thinking [vorstellendes Denken] to a form of thinking that “responds and
recalls” [Andenken]. Such a shift is not like an ordinary shift of perspective, or
change of theoretical paradigm. Certainly, we cannot simply will such a shift, as
though it were a matter of choice and self-control. Any transformative intellectual
or cultural process that is not at our disposal, not controllable by us, and therefore
not something for which we can be held accountable in appropriate ways, is typi-
cally regarded as suspiciously mysterious or esoteric, and so unworthy of our trust.
However, the shift from vorstellendes Denken to Andenken is no more esoteric and
mysterious than is the type of learning regarded by Emerson as a form of appren-
ticeship. It is a type of learning that by its very nature cannot, and therefore does
not, aim at mastery. It belongs to those transformative processes through which we
change our language and our life, our whole sensibility, and that change reposes
upon a change in our relationships to one another and to the objects of our knowl-
edge. Indeed, it is just the kind of learning on which art and literature are based,
the kind that they facilitate and demand. Andenken, the thinking that responds
and recalls, abandons itself to the receptive reflection out of which art and lit-
erature arise, and into which they invite us. It is the kind of thinking that brings
romanticism into being, bringing into being the kind of writing that responds and
recalls—romantic writing. Andenken could be Heidegger’s name for romanticism;
in giving it this name, he would also pay his debt to it.
Medium Dependence, Receptivity,

and Reflection
Wordsworth’s reflections on language in the preface to the Lyrical Ballads, and
in particular on the priority of everyday to poetic language, indirectly convey
romanticism’s discovery that all our attempts to make sense of the things that
matter to us, and thus to express their mattering, are radically medium depen-
dent.11 The meaning of what we are seeking to express can only be expressed in
a corresponding medium, from which it is inseparable. “Expressive meaning
cannot be fully separated from the medium, because it is only manifest in it”
(Taylor 1985: 221).
Romanticism’s “expressivist” or “constitutive” view of language, as Charles
Taylor has called it, departs completely from the typical Enlightenment view
of language that one fi nds in Hobbes and Locke, and a century later in Étienne
Condillac. For the latter, language’s primary function is representational and
our primary relation to it is instrumental: language is something to be mas-
tered in order correctly to represent states of affairs. If we do not master it, it
can master us, thus becoming an instrument of deception, distorting the way
things are. Of course, this attitude is in part a function of the atomistic assump-
tions about language on which this view rests. For romantics, however, to think
of language as something to be mastered, as subject to our control, is simply to
misunderstand it. In sharp contrast to these instrumental-atomistic concep-
tions, romantic conceptions of language from J. G. Herder and Wilhelm Hum-
boldt to Heidegger and later Wittgenstein understand language as a holistically
structured web of meanings and relationships, only partly, never fully, survey-
able. Before we even get to the point of using language as a tool or instrument,
language has already disclosed the relationships of meaning, set the conditions
of intelligibility, from which the very diverse things we do with words get their
sense and purpose.
To concede that we are dependent on language means relinquishing the human
claim to autonomy, construed in terms of mastery and self-mastery. Of course,
autonomy and self-mastery are not necessarily synonymous. But it has not been
easy to think of autonomy without thinking of it in terms of self-mastery. Roman-
tics were the first to explore ideas of freedom and autonomy that were compat-
ible with dependence, which, of course, requires thinking of dependence in new
and different ways. For instance, there are some relations of dependence that are
inescapable, that are constitutive of human forms of life. One of these relations of
romanticism 263
dependence is to media of expression that allow us make sense of things, and to

express their significance for us. This leads to the realization that not all relations
of dependence involve relations of domination (of mastery and slavery). Although
our sensemaking possibilities are radically medium dependent, our dependence on
a medium is not that of passive, agentless dependence. The medium on which our
expressive responses depends does allow us to reshape it. “Reshaping it without
dominating it, or being able to oversee it, means that we never fully know what we
are doing to it; we develop language without knowing fully what we are making it
into” (Taylor 1985: 232).12
We could look at this romantic theory of language as a response to romantic
worries about the semantically depleted state of language, and then we could see
that there are better and worse ways to reshape our inherited language. Although
“we never fully know what we are doing to it” or fully know “what we are making
it into,” we can attune ourselves to the language that we speak, and that speaks
us. Such attunement is not to something that has a preexisting and static order,
attunement to which requires a passive, mindless surrender of our agency and sub-
jectivity. As an ergon and energeia, language is dynamic and historical, a holisti-
cally structured web, to be sure, but the structure is not rigid or unresponsive to
those who inhabit it. Attunement means nothing other than attentive receptivity.
“Language is the place of attention,” wrote Maurice Blanchot (1993: 122).13 Attend-
ing to language from a receptive stance allows the thinking that responds and
recalls to gently reshape language, listening and—one must say it—obeying, that
is, responding to a normative demand that must be met, even if it appears inde-
terminate. Notice how naturally one can read Blanchot’s description of attention
as an elaboration of a remark of Emerson’s: “Our thinking is a pious reception”
(1990c: 188–89):
Attention is waiting: not the effort, the tension, or the mobilization of
knowledge around something with which one might concern oneself. Attention
waits. It waits without precipitation, leaving empty what is empty and keeping
our haste, our impatient desire, and even more, our horror of emptiness from
prematurely fi lling it in . . . . Attention is the reception of what escapes attention,
an opening upon the unexpected, a waiting that is the unawaited of all waiting.
(Blanchot 1993: 121)
That Blanchot and Emerson, separated by more than a century, make receptivity
primary is no coincidence. It is, rather, what binds them both to romanticism,
for they both see that receptivity is normatively binding for literature and art,
and for a certain kind of life, a life of freedom. But since modernism succeeded
in making an aesthetic of production primary, and in making production the
goal of free activity, the centrality of receptivity in romantic theory and practice
has been both neglected and underestimated.14 Contrary to the claim of Philippe
Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Literary Absolute (1978), romanti-
cism is not about the production of something, call it literature, whose primary
concern is with “production, absolutely speaking.” Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy
have been misled by both Kant and Johann Gottlieb Fichte, but especially by
Fichte, and just like Kant and Fichte, their thinking remains captive to figures
of mastery and control (even as they seek to escape from their hold). Romanti-
cism must not be misconceived as the instancing of the “truth of production.”
Its “truth” does not concern “production” or “autoproduction” but receptivity,
attentive receptivity.
Receptivity is prior to production, in every sense of prior. It is the condi-
tion of possibility of the unexpected, and the new. The unexpected, and the
new are not something that can be “produced,” since they are not subject to
our intentions or our will. That is why at the end of “Circles” Emerson speaks
of “abandonment,” a self-abandonment. We must be capable of such self-
abandonment if we are “to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety,
to lose our sempiternal memory, and to do something without knowing how
or why; in short, to draw a new circle” (1990a: 184). And that is why Blanchot
also plays a variation on the theme of receptivity as self-abandonment when
he writes: “[A]ttention has always already detached me from myself, freeing
me for the attention that I for an instant become” (1993: 121). To free ourselves
from ourselves through receptive attention to what lies outside us, to what is
not us, is a romantic impulse, if there is one, and behind that impulse lies the
hope that we can see through the self-centered forms of freedom that remain
so powerfully appealing, see through them as forms of unfreedom. I think it
was just such forms of unfreedom that Wordsworth was thinking of when he
wrote: “Whose mind is but the mind of his own eye, he is a slave, the mean-
est we can meet!” (1990b: 269). If my eye is ever on myself (altering slightly
another phrase of Wordsworth’s from “Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew-tree”),
I have become an obstacle to the realization of my freedom, which will mean,
paradoxically, freedom from myself, for that is just what attentive receptivity
demands of me.
Of course, this kind of attentive receptivity is continuous with a certain kind
of reflection on oneself and the form of one’s life. Similarly, attentive receptivity
is continuous with the same kind of reflection when the focus of such reflection
is art and literature. Reflection, as Benjamin’s monumental essay “The Concept
of Criticism in German Romanticism” (1920) first showed, became the key to
early German romanticism’s concept of art and its concept of criticism. What this
involved is precisely a form of attention and of expressive response to transforma-
tive possibilities that emerge only through such reflection on the form of things.
For Benjamin, early German romanticism did not just take over Fichte’s concept of
reflection; it greatly extended its application, making it possible to regard art as “a
determination of the medium of reflection—probably the most fruitful one it has
received” (2004b: 149).
The idea that art might be the most fruitful determination of the medium
of reflection will strike some as puzzling, if not absurd, not just because it means
treating art as a highly cognitive activity (which of course it is) but because the con-
cept of reflection has traditionally carried connotations of cognitive transparency
romanticism 265
(which of course art does not). For this reason, but not for this reason alone, it is
important to preserve the connection between receptivity and reflection, seeing
the latter as a function of the former. Of course, there is also something polemical
in Benjamin’s assertion. And it just may be that the target of his polemic is Hegel’s
remark in his lectures on aesthetics that the “modern culture of reflection” has
overtaken art, and in so doing has made art itself subject to its higher mode of
reflection, as though art would otherwise remain a primitive residue of a super-
seded stage of reflection. However, if reflection is constitutive of art and, indeed,
if it is a distinct form of reflection, then Hegel’s attempt to assimilate romantic
art to forms of reflection that are in the first instance external to art, was both
mistaken and presumptuous—another ambitious but failed attempt at philosoph-
ical disenfranchisement.
By the time Schlegel had formulated his theory of art, making art “a
medium of ref lection and the work a center of ref lection” (Benjamin 2004b:
155), it became clear—at least to the genius of Benjamin—that romantics had
left behind the traditional concept of ref lection, as it was understood from
Descartes to Fichte and Hegel. Ref lection did not have the status of a cognitive
medium that could render its objects fully transparent; rather, ref lection oper-
ated inside the hermeneutic circle of interpretation, belonging to an “infinite”
process of interpretation—infinite not in the sense of “an infinity of advance
but of an infinity of connections” (Benjamin 2004b: 126). Now this view of
ref lection also had consequences for the practice of criticism. Rather than
relating to the work of art as an object of possible unmasking, as something to
interrogate for its “untruth,” the practice of romantic criticism, constrained
as much as it is enabled by the hermeneutic circle, consisted not in “ref lection
on an entity,” as though from some epistemically privileged position outside
it, but in “the unfolding of ref lection . . . in an entity” (151). Criticism is con-
tinuous with the same form of ref lection as that which is constitutive of art,
and thus its task is understood as “a manifestation of the life of works” or an
“intensification of the consciousness of the work” (152). To claim, as Benjamin
does, that “for the romantics, criticism is far less the judgment of a work than
the method of its consummation” (153) is to think both of criticism as radi-
cally internal and the internal standards of critique posited in the work of art
as radically indeterminate. This calls for a very intimate kind of criticism, one
that constitutes a relation of reciprocal interaction and ref lection between crit-
icism and art. This is not to say, as Schlegel is wrongly taken to say, that criti-
cism and art are identical activities, but that they are continuous, reciprocally
interacting and reciprocally affected activities. Thus, the rather exorbitant and
bizarre claim from Schlegel’s Athenaeum Fragments 1798) that poetry can be
criticized only through poetry turns into something very different: “[P]oetic
criticism will present the representation anew, will again form what is already
formed . . . . It will complement, rejuvenate, newly fashion the work” (Benjamin
2004b: 154).
The Prose of Romanticism

Among the invaluable insights contained in Benjamin’s essay on romanticism,
not least is the insight into prose as the romantic “form of forms.” Summarizing
remarks of Novalis and Schlegel, Benjamin suggests “the idea of poetry as that of
prose determines the whole of romantic philosophy of art,” making it “so histor-
ically rich in consequences” (2004b: 175). It could be said, then, that prose gives
romanticism its look and its outlook. As the form of forms prose not only frees
poetry from strict rhythmic laws (and rulelike norms), giving it a new look, but also
constitutes romanticism’s prosaic outlook. Benjamin describes this prosaic outlook
as the “antithesis of ecstasy, the mania of Plato” (175) and thereby represents a deci-
sive break with Platonism (which still governs reflection on art today). It also places
romanticism more explicitly and more directly in the service of the everyday.
With the ascendance of prose, it is the novel and not poesy that is the ideal
romantic art form. If “art is defined as the medium of reflection of forms” (Benja-
min 2004b: 165), then of all of its forms it is the novel that is the highest and most
capacious medium of formal reflection. The novel can “reflect upon itself at will,
and, in ever new considerations, can mirror back every given level of consciousness
from a higher standpoint . . . . [B]ecause the novel never oversteps its form, every one
of its reflections can be viewed as limited by itself, for there is no rule-bound form
of presentation to limit them” (172).15
When later in the nineteenth century Baudelaire dreams of “the miracle of
a poetic prose, musical without rhythm and without rhyme, supple and staccato
enough to adapt to the lyrical stirrings of the soul, the undulations of dreams, and
the sudden leaps of consciousness” (cited in Benjamin 2006: 98), he is unaware
that the early romantics already dreamed this idea and made it the centerpiece of
their reflections on artistic form. It is an idea historically rich in consequences not
only in literature but also in music, as changes in musical form from Wagner to
Schoenberg were themselves oriented by an ideal of “musical prose” (see Dahlhaus
1980; Rosen 1996). Schlegel’s “[d]eliberate . . . cultivation . . . of the smallest detail”
(Benjamin 2004b: 176) describes precisely the changes in form and in the norma-
tive expectations of formal development that took place in nineteenth- and late
nineteenth-century music.
Benjamin and the romantics also anticipated Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the
novel and his concept of “novelness”—that is, a form that can integrate differ-
ent orders of experience and different forms. In “Discourse in the Novel” Bakhtin
reprises the romantic critique of the limitations of poetic rhythm, adding that a
unitary poetic language or poetic style shuts out heteroglossia, the critical inter-
animation and contamination of languages (1981: 296–98).
What we can add to all this is that the critical interanimation and contamina-
tion of languages takes place—must take place—at the level of everyday life and
language. The prose of romanticism is nothing other than the prose of the world—
the everyday world from which we draw meaning and intelligibility, to which we,
romanticism 267
if we can meet the demands of romanticism, must return with more of the same
and something different, too.
NOTES
I’m indebted to Richard Eldridge for his patience, generosity, helpful suggestions,
and much more.
1. I owe my knowledge of Feldman’s heterodox gesture to the illuminating chapter
on Sibelius in Ross 2007: 157–77.
2. Rorty’s significant contribution to changing our image of romanticism consists
in these persistent and persuasive reminders that this is in fact what romanticism tried to
teach us.
3. For an example of the conventional story about romanticism still au courant
among some contemporary scholars, see Sturma 2000.
4. For a more comprehensive discussion of these problems, see Kompridis 2006a,
Eldridge 2001, Cavell 1976a, and Bernstein 2003.
5. Schoenberg’s reaction to the modernists of his time made the same point in
relation to Brahms: “Pioneers of musical progress on the one hand, and keepers of
the Holy Grail of true art on the other, they considered themselves entitled to look
with contempt at Brahms the classicist, the academician.” Through detailed analysis,
Schoenberg demonstrates that Brahms, “the classicist, the academician, was a great
innovator in the realm of musical language, that, in fact, he was a great progressive”
(1984: 401). How many others might this also be true of? What have we failed to see or
hear with our “modernist” eyes and ears?
6. “And she names them; she communicates herself by naming them” (Benjamin
2004a: 64).
7. I am thinking, of course, of Nietzsche, Adorno, and Foucault, among many
notable others.
8. The term “ontology of disengagement” is from Taylor 1995.
9. For further discussion of the model of critique, see Kompridis 2000.
10. “The nature of the thing never comes to light, that is, it never gets a hearing”
(Heidegger 1971: 170). Compare Descartes’s treatment of the piece of wax in the Second
Meditation.
11. Here I am disagreeing with Bernstein’s otherwise valuable insights into the
medium dependence of works of art in Bernstein (2006). The fact of medium dependence
is true not just of artistic media but of all media—including everyday language, so while
it is true that “artistic sense-making is making sense in a medium” (Bernstein 2006: 144),
this is just a specific case of the more general truth that all sensemaking is making sense
in a medium.
12. Thinking of human language as energeia not just ergon, as Humboldt first
suggested, allows us to see that language is a “pattern of activity by which we express/
realize a certain way of being in the world, that of reflective awareness, but a pattern
which can only be deployed against a background which we can never fully dominate;
and yet a background that we are never fully dominated by, because we are constantly
reshaping it” (Taylor 1985: 232).
13. Blanchot’s “Language is the place of attention” is of course a variation on

Heidegger’s “Language is the house of being.”
14. For various reasons, receptivity does not have a good name. For two
complementary views of its significance, see Cavell 1989: 104–88 and Kompridis 2006b:
199–222.
15. Once again, I register disagreement with Bernstein’s critique of Jena
romanticism. I think Bernstein’s critique would have had to take a different direction
had he taken into account the fact that it is prose, not “poesy” (with its concomitant
commitment to the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign), that is the ideal of romantic
art. And as Benjamin points out, this is because the novel is the form of romantic forms
because of its capacity to explore and to integrate multiple levels of reflection on form
in form.
REFERENCES
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—— . (2006). “Poesy and the Arbitrariness of the Sign: Notes for a Critique of Jena
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 
IDEALISM
toril moi
A Forgotten Concept
Idealism is a venerable philosophical term. As a literary concept, however, it has
all but disappeared. It is absent from major dictionaries of literary terms.1 I have
never seen it discussed as an aesthetic concept on a par with realism or modern-
ism. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we appear to have forgotten how
important idealism was as a way of understanding art and literature; how strong its
hold on nineteenth-century writers, artists, critics, and audiences was; and what a
long, slow, and piecemeal task it was for a whole generation—the first generation
of modernists—to work itself free of that hold.
In this essay, I use “idealism” as a synonym for “idealist aesthetics” or “aes-
thetic idealism,” understood as an aesthetic norm based on the belief that the task
of art (poetry, writing, literature, music) is to uplift us, to point the way to the
ideal. Idealists thought that beauty, truth, and goodness were one. Artistic beauty
therefore simply could not be immoral; to call a work ugly was to question its eth-
ics as well as its aesthetics. Idealism thus seamlessly merged aesthetics and ethics,
and usually religion, too, since most (but not all) idealists also believed that God
was the highest incarnation of the trinity of beauty, goodness, and truth. Although
it could coexist with certain kinds of realism, idealism—at least in Friedrich Schil-
ler’s version—required writers and artists to idealize women and sexuality. If they
could not be idealized, they had to be demonized. The result was a long line of
literary women who sacrifice their life for love, opposed to an equally long line of
demonic temptress figures: the madonna/whore opposition is everywhere in ideal-
ist works.
By reintroducing the concept of idealism, we can make sense of the long period
in literary and aesthetic history that stretches from the end of romanticism as a
living artistic movement to the rise of modernism. Much of what is currently

lumped together under the general heading of “Victorianism,” for example, could
be analyzed historically and theoretically as the many-faceted effect of the specifi-
cally British appropriation of idealist aesthetics.
The concept of idealism is perhaps even more illuminating when it comes
to grasping the aesthetically confusing period from 1870 to 1914, which I see as a
moment marked by a great number of different, highly self-conscious aesthetic
attempts to negate idealism. In this respect, this period can be understood as
what Thomas Kuhn would call a period of crisis, a transitional period in which
one paradigm has broken down and another has not yet become dominant.
Kuhn writes that new theories usually emerge “only after a pronounced failure
in the normal problem-solving activity” (1996: 74–75). The failure of idealism, its
incapacity to deal with modern life and modern problems, became increasingly
obvious as the century wore on. For many European writers and intellectuals,
the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 and the rise and fall of the Paris Commune
in the spring of 1871 were events that confi rmed the bankruptcy of idealism, fi ll-
ing them with an urgent need to forge something new out of the destruction of
the old. The result was aesthetic crisis, and, ultimately, the birth of a new para-
digm: modernism.
Idealism’s star status in the history of philosophy makes its absence in literary
criticism all the more striking. I don’t mean to say that literary critics do not dis-
cuss idealism; my point is, rather, that when they do, they too have various aspects
of philosophical or ethical (as opposed to aesthetic) idealism in mind. Insofar as
idealist aesthetics is discussed at all in literary studies today, it is usually under the
rubric of romanticism. But if we take idealism to be just another word for romanti-
cism, we deprive ourselves of the resources we need to understand European art
and literature after the demise of romanticism as an active artistic movement. We
will also fail to understand why the advent of naturalism and modernism pro-
voked the most intense culture wars in European literary history, and why the
issues provoked by the death of idealism are relevant today.
This essay, then, is not really about philosophy. Nor is it primarily about lit-
erature. It is, rather, about idealism understood as a historically and culturally
significant intersection of philosophy and literature, namely, as a set of ideas about
art that profoundly affected both literature and the way people thought about lit-
erature in the nineteenth century. To write the story of idealism is to chart a glori-
ous rise and an ignominious fall: when idealist aesthetics emerged from German
idealist philosophy at the very end of the eighteenth century, it offered the world
an ecstatic, revolutionary vision of art as the embodiment of human freedom. A
century later, it had become a desiccated, reactionary moralism seeking to make
art subservient to church and state.
In this essay, fi rst, I bring idealism back from oblivion and show how impor-
tant it was to nineteenth-century debates about art, literature, and culture; sec-
ond, I show that when idealism is placed alongside realism and modernism, it
changes the meaning of these terms—that once we realize what idealism was,
idealism 273
we also have to rethink our understanding of realism and modernism. Then it

becomes apparent that neither realism nor modernism is one: just as there are
many kinds of realism, there are many kinds of modernism. Seen from this per-
spective, the widespread tendency to understand modernism as the negation of
realism, will come to look too simplistic.2 The emergence of modernism toward
the end of the nineteenth century was a revolt not against realism, but against the
principal tenets of idealist aesthetics. Last, I draw attention to the gender norms
embedded in idealist aesthetics. To achieve a less sexist and a more modern rep-
resentation of women and sexuality, writers and painters had to break with ideal-
ism. No nineteenth-century author did this in a more convincing fashion than
Henrik Ibsen, a playwright whose great women characters still entrance theater
audiences all over the world.
Before beginning this work, I need to stress that idealism was not one, either.
Idealist aesthetics drew on different philosophical sources and was received and
practiced differently in different national and religious cultures. It declined at a
different pace in different countries. In one essay I cannot hope to do justice to the
varieties of idealism that flourished throughout Europe in the nineteenth century.
(I draw on material from Scandinavia, Germany, England, and France.) It seems
to me that the first and most urgent task is to recover idealism as a literary and
aesthetic concept. This essay serves its purpose if it encourages others to look more
closely at different aspects of nineteenth-century literary and cultural history with
idealism in mind.
Rediscovering Idealism
I owe my own discovery of idealism as a key aesthetic category in nineteenth-
century art and literature to Naomi Schor’s pioneering 1993 book George Sand and
Idealism. In the introduction, Schor explains that she first realized the importance
of idealism in 1985, when she found a dusty old book in a secondhand bookshop
in Hay-on-Wye:
I flipped to the table of contents to see if [George Sand] was included. It was
then that I made an important, indeed a decisive discovery: she was included,
but under what struck me as a strange and unfamiliar heading, Le Roman
idéaliste. . . . I knew, of course, in a general sort of way—as anyone working on
Sand would—that an important idealistic strain existed in Sand’s fiction . . . . But
this moldy and outdated study aid suddenly made palpable for me the force of
that category and the extent of its disappearance. (1993: 4)
As I was working on my book on Ibsen, I came to realize how right Schor was: ideal-
ism was indeed a tremendously powerful aesthetic force in the nineteenth century,
and it has disappeared more thoroughly than any other aesthetic category of that
century. Refusing to connect Sand’s idealism to German aesthetics, Schor focuses
on the presence of idealist categories in nonphilosophical contexts, such as reviews,

correspondence, and political debates. Following Schor’s lead, I started looking for
signs of the presence of idealism in the literary debates provoked by Ibsen’s plays.
The results were spectacular. Not only was idealism everywhere, but it was clear that
Ibsen’s plays had been important battlefields for the all-out struggle between ideal-
ists and anti-idealists. Most important, I also realized that Ibsen’s plays explicitly
and repeatedly dramatize the questions and assumptions at the heart of idealist
aesthetics. (In this essay, Ibsen’s works will remain important as examples of the
cultural struggles over idealism.)
I think Schor was wrong to leave German philosophy out of her book, for the
omission weakens her understanding of what idealist aesthetics was. We have to
acknowledge that Kant, Friedrich Hölderlin, Schiller, Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel,
Hegel, and others laid the foundations of nineteenth-century idealist aesthetics,
and that in the first decades of the nineteenth century distinguished interpret-
ers such as Madame de Staël and Samuel Taylor Coleridge contributed powerfully
to spread German aesthetic idealism throughout Europe. But Schor was right to
focus on “idealism in action,” idealism as it was expressed in French nineteenth-
century debates. Truly original and inspiring, this aspect of her pioneering work
teaches us to look for idealist aesthetics in places we would not necessarily have
connected with German philosophy. In this essay, I follow her lead on this point:
I look at letters and newspaper reviews and revisit an institutional practice: the
award of the Nobel Prize in Literature.
To put all this slightly differently: around 1800, German idealist aesthetics
produced one of the most powerful and inspiring accounts of the nature and pur-
pose of art and literature the world has ever seen. This is hardly news. What is
news is that some version of this account, however debased, diluted, vulgarized,
and simplified, shows up practically everywhere in nineteenth-century aesthetic
discussions, not just in the 1810s and 1820s, but throughout the nineteenth and well
into the twentieth century.
The Idealist View of Art and Literature

Idealism is a complex word. It has as much to do with the idea as with the ideal.
Indeed, Plato’s ideas are ideals: the timeless pattern and archetype of any class of
things, as opposed to the lowly imitations we are condemned to live with here on
earth. For a long time, idea simply meant ideal. The Oxford English Dictionary
quotes Thomas Browne in 1682: “How widely we have fallen from the pure Exem-
plar and Idea of our Nature.” In everyday usage, we still speak of the idea of a thing
in the sense of its general pattern or plan. We are bound, therefore, to concede that
actual realizations may always fall short of the idea that spawned them, and thus
we find ourselves treading a fine line between the idea and the ideal, and between
idealism 275
the ideal and the real. Plato’s contrast between the pure sphere of the Idea and the
messy realities of ordinary life is only a few steps away.
In contemporary philosophy idealism is often taken to mean the opposite of
materialism: idealism is to materialism as Hegel is to Marx. In the late nineteenth
century, however, anti-idealism took many forms. Marxist materialism was only
one of them. Equally important was the rise of “free thought,” that is to say, of
secularism, agnosticism, and atheism, on the one hand, and of various forms of
scientific determinisms, on the other. August Strindberg’s flirtations with Darwin-
ism in a play like The Father are perfectly representative of the period.
Let me begin, then, with the German idealists. In 1796 Friedrich Hölderlin—
or rather Hölderlin together with his two good friends Hegel and Friedrich
Schelling—admirably encapsulated the key ideas of idealist aesthetics in a very
short paper titled “Oldest Programme for a System of German Idealism” (1796).3
Kant’s distinction between freedom (the realm of reason, of the human will and
imagination; the moral and creative world) and necessity (the realm of natural laws;
the world of science) is as fundamental to Hölderlin as it is to all the other German
idealist aesthetes. The world of necessity is the world of material objects, subjected
to natural laws that are explained by science. The world of freedom is the world of
consciousness, imagination, and the will, the world in which we make moral and
aesthetic choices. It is against this conceptual background that Hölderlin goes on
to discuss beauty, the key term of aesthetic idealism:
Finally, the idea which unites everyone, the idea of beauty, the word taken in
the higher, platonic sense. I am now convinced that the highest act of reason, by
encompassing all ideas, is an aesthetic act, and that truth and goodness are only
siblings in beauty. The philosopher must possess as much aesthetic power as the
poet. Those people without an aesthetic sense are our philosophers of literalness
[Buchstabenphilosophen]. The philosophy of spirit is an aesthetic philosophy.
One can be spiritually brilliant in nothing, one cannot even think about
history—without an aesthetic sense . . . .
Thus poetry gains a higher honour, it finally becomes what it was at its
inception—the teacher of humanity; for there is no longer any philosophy,
any history; the art of poetry alone will outlive all other sciences and arts.
(Hölderlin 2002: 186)
Echoing Plato, aesthetic idealism considers the beautiful, the true, and the good to
be one, but quite unlike Plato, idealism characteristically considers artistic beauty
to be the highest expression of this trinity. Because beauty is both sensuous and
spiritual—the idea made material through the use of the imagination—it over-
comes the split between freedom and necessity and offers us an image of our own
lost wholeness. Because truth without beauty remains arid and soulless, a great
poet is also a great philosopher, and the greatest philosopher will never be great
unless he is a poet, too. (The echoes of this creed reverberated all the way down
to the French 1930s, when Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir thought that
literature was a greater and more noble pursuit than philosophy, and Sartre in par-
ticular still thought that he could be “saved” by literature.)
Fusing aesthetics with ethics and religion, the idealist program holds out to us
all an optimistic, utopian vision of human perfection (see Hölderlin 2002; Schlegel
2003: 263). By advancing such a lofty image of the nature and purpose of poetry
(and, to a slightly lesser extent, the other arts), German idealist aesthetics turned
poets into prophets and mystics, and allowed artists of all kinds to claim that by
pursuing beauty they were serving God. Throughout the nineteenth century, writ-
ers would draw on such ideas to defend art in general and theater in particular
against the accusation of godlessness.
We have seen that Hölderlin connects ideas (and ideals) to freedom. Freedom
is the great theme of Schiller’s aesthetics, not least in his masterly little treatise On
Naive and Sentimental Poetry first published in installments in 1795 and 1796. The
ideas contained in this brilliant text circulated in one form or another through-
out European aesthetic discussions for the next hundred years. I use it here first
to convey both what aesthetic idealism was in its full, romantic, radical, utopian
glory and then to draw attention to its inner and ultimately destructive fault lines,
which enabled Schiller’s glorious vision of aesthetic freedom to be turned into a set
of moralistic and deeply reactionary aesthetic norms.
The key idea in Schiller’s aesthetics is a utopian vision of human perfectibility.
Humankind can become better, freer, more beautiful, more fulfilled. The task of
art is to ennoble us, to help us overcome the split between nature and freedom,
so that the whole of human nature can find full and free expression. Schiller’s
“Ideal”—the vision that poetry and art is supposed to convey to us—is an ample
and generous one, a picture of a fully harmonious human being, fully free and
fully at home in the world.
Long after the death of revolutionary, romantic idealism, this ideal had a
strong afterlife in the Marxist tradition. Around 1900, the young Leon Trotsky
declared: “As long as I breathe, I shall fight for the future, that radiant future in
which man, strong and beautiful, will become master of the drifting stream of his
history and will direct it towards the boundless horizon of beauty, joy and hap-
piness” (Deutscher 1954: 54). As late as in the mid-twentieth century, the great
Marxist literary critic György Lukács still believed in the advent of the fully “har-
monious human being,” although he thought that such a perfected creature could
only come into being under communism.4
Schiller’s fundamental starting point is nature. Poets must always be the
guardians of nature, he writes, for when we lose touch with nature, “moral and
aesthetic degeneracy” follows (1993: 196). Poets, therefore, “will either be nature
or seek the lost nature” (196). From this claim he derives his famous distinction
between naive and sentimental poets: the naive poet is nature; the sentimental
poet seeks nature. By nature, Schiller means above all human nature, which he sees
as a unique combination of spirit and matter or, in other words, of freedom and
necessity, infinity and finitude. The task of all poetry is to “give humanity its most
complete possible expression,” Schiller writes (201). Poetry is to uplift and ennoble
us, to give us concrete visions of a better world with better human beings in it. This
is the heart of Schiller’s idealist aesthetics.
idealism 277
By mapping the opposition between the naive and the sentimental onto the
opposition between the ancient and the moderns, Schiller develops an aesthetic the-
ory balancing finely on the line between neoclassicism and romanticism. Ancient
poets, Schiller writes, were at once natural and naive, characterized by an innocence
of heart that entirely escapes their modern colleagues. Their task, therefore, was
to describe the world as they saw it, as fully and as well as possible. For the naive
poet still living in the “original condition of natural simplicity . . . the most complete
possible imitation of the actual is what necessarily makes someone a poet” (1993: 201,
emphasis original). Naive poets are specialists in realism, in other words.5
In the modern world, on the other hand, “nature has disappeared from our
humanity, and we reencounter it in its genuineness only outside humanity in the
inanimate world,” Schiller writes (1993: 194). This gives us a yearning for truth and
simplicity unknown to the ancients who had never lost nature in the first place:
“They felt naturally, while we feel the natural” (195). Because the modern poet
has lost touch with nature, he (all of Schiller’s examples are male) cannot convey
nature itself, but only the idea of nature. “The ancient poets touch us through
nature, through sensuous truth, through living presence; the modern poets touch
us through ideas” (201). Since modern human beings are no longer at one with
themselves, the mere description of reality is no longer poetic: “Here in the condi-
tion of culture . . . the elevation of actuality to the ideal, or, what comes to the same,
the portrayal of the ideal is what necessarily makes the poet” (201). Schiller’s poetic
idealism thus emerges out of his historicizing analysis of modern culture.
Because ideas are infinite and nature is finite (the Kantian foundations of
Schiller’s thought are everywhere apparent), the sentimental poet will always have
to face the conflict between the limitations of the actual world and the unlimited
soaring of which the imagination is capable. For the modern writer, then, poetry
arises when the poet attempts to transcend the limits of the actual world; for the
ancient writer, it was enough simply to describe that world.
That these categories were influential in nineteenth-century Europe is beyond
doubt. Most important, however, is that they defined art as such. In the late 1860s,
the leading Danish critic Clemens Petersen (1865) insisted that Ibsen’s Brand and
Peer Gynt were not poetry because they failed to convey “a complete, definite, clear
and assured representation of the ideal.” The demise of idealism required a com-
pletely new understanding of the purpose and meaning of art.
Ideal Freedom and Vulgar Passions:

Women, Sexuality, and Self-Sacrifice
Against the “ideal of humanity” Schiller places the “ideal of animality,” by
which he means the needs of “sensuous nature” alone (1993: 245). Insisting
on the contrast between “sensuous nature” and fully free and fully expressive
“human nature,” Schiller claims that true beauty can be appreciated only by
someone who is not in thrall to mere material or sensuous needs: “Beauty is the
product of the accord between mind and senses; it speaks to all the capacities
of the human being at once. For this reason it can be felt and appreciated only
on the supposition of a complete and free use of all the human being’s powers”
(245). At once sensuous and ennobling, beauty overcomes the alienation (the
split) created in human beings by modernity. The incarnation of human free-
dom, poetic and artistic beauty lifts us up toward the ideal, which is precisely
the full and free expression of human nature. In this way, truth, goodness, and
beauty are united in the work of art, which itself is the highest expression of
human freedom.
In its fullest and most generous formulation, this is an intoxicating vision
of human freedom, a utopian vision of the ideal intended to inspire us to bat-
tle against all those forces that prevent us from realizing ideal freedom. Yet it is
hardly without fault lines. Most prominent is the foothold it provides for nar-
rowly moralistic judgments of poetry and art. Equally pernicious are the difficul-
ties Schiller’s reliance on the Kantian opposition between nature and freedom
causes for his treatment of sexuality in general and women in particular. Relying
on the distinction between actual [wirkliche] human nature (which may be bad)
and genuine or true [wahre] human nature (which is ideal, that is to say, always
good, true, and beautiful), Schiller declares that outbreaks of sexual passion are
always examples of actual and never of genuine nature (1993: 236). Naive poets,
who depict nature as it is, therefore often produce vulgar representations of sex
and sexuality.
If we wonder exactly what Schiller means by “vulgar,” he explains it in a lengthy
footnote concerning sex and women, inserted at the very point where he first uses
the word. No naive genius, Schiller claims, including Homer and Shakespeare, has
ever entirely avoided vulgarity (1993: 237–38):
If . . . nature is vulgar, then the spirit . . . deserts their compositions. For example,
in their portrayals of feminine nature, of the relations between both sexes, and
of love in particular, every reader with refined feelings must sense a certain
emptiness and a weariness that all genuineness and naiveté in the presentation
cannot remove . . . . One will hopefully be allowed to assume that nature, as far
as that relation of the sexes and the emotion of love are concerned, is capable of
a nobler character than the ancients gave it . . . . Here, then, would have been the
place for the ancients to render spiritual a material too crude on the outside and
to do so from within, through the subject [Subjekt]; that is to say, here would
have been the place to recover, by means of reflection, the poetic significance
missing in the feeling from the outside, to complete nature through the idea,
in a word, to make something infinite out of a limited object by a sentimental
operation. (237 n.)
It follows that sex and women—in the eyes of Schiller and his male comrades,
women, not men, are the bearers of human sexuality—should never be treated
idealism 279
realistically. The representation of human sexuality requires idealization, or it will

be vulgar. In order to become properly poetic, sex must be sublimated, ennobled,
and beautified, that is to say, it must be turned into highly idealized love. In order
to avoid the coarse and the vulgar, consciousness must transcend the body; moral-
ity, duty, and will must conquer mere material nature. This idea explains not only
the proliferation of wildly idealized representations of women in nineteenth-cen-
tury literature, but also the widespread tendency to require that the pure woman
prove her purity by being ready to sacrifice her life for love.
Schiller’s view of sex is no different from Kant’s. Since Kantian morality
demands that we elevate ourselves above nature (since moral action is an exercise
of freedom, to follow one’s natural inclinations can never be a moral act), Kantian
morality is extremely cautious with regard to human sexuality. Sex must always
have the aim of procreation. If it is used for mere “animal pleasure,” even het-
erosexual intercourse is immoral (Kant 1996: 178). The only thing that can make
sex morally permissible is the law, that is, marriage. For Kant, unnatural sexual
acts (by which Kant understands anything except procreative sex in marriage) are
always vile and self-defiling. But even natural sexual acts may be immoral. If sex
has no other aim than pleasure, for example, it turns the other person into a thing,
a mere means to one’s own enjoyment, and for Kant, it is never permissible to treat
another human being as a means and not an end. But it is also immoral to treat
oneself as a thing, for that is to violate one’s duty to one’s own humanity. To mas-
turbate, in particular, is to give in to one’s basest natural inclinations, to reduce
oneself to a thing with the sole aim of pleasure. The resulting act, Kant writes, is
so loathsome that it is repulsive even to “call this vice by its proper name” (1996:
179). Kant even thought that suicide might be more morally excusable than such
self-defi lement (179).
For thinkers like Kant and Schiller, women incarnate human sexuality. In
order to lift them above the mere animal stage, poetry and painting need to ideal-
ize them far more intensively than men; they need, in short, to create the figure
of the pure woman, which was to become an icon of idealist aesthetics.6 When the
woman is idealized, the feeling the man has for her can be represented as ideal love,
rather than as a base expression of animal nature. If women were to be described
as subjected to the same urges and needs as men, the foundation of idealist aes-
thetics would crumble. Only the extreme idealization of women enables Schiller
to continue to believe in the perfectibility of human nature. As we have seen, he
believes that this is the sole point on which modern poets always do better than
the ancients.
The idea that it is better to sacrifice one’s life than to give up one’s moral self-
respect (one’s honor) is everywhere in nineteenth-century European literature.
In the case of women, moral self-respect is almost always taken to be identi-
cal with bodily chastity. The result is that in a curious reversal of the hierarchy
between body and spirit, a woman’s honor comes to reside entirely in her sexual-
ity. A Doll’s House provides a caustic one-line dismissal of this whole tradition
of thought:
helmer: I would gladly work night and day for you, Nora—bear sorrow
and deprivation for your sake. But nobody sacrifices his honor for the
one he loves.
nora: A hundred thousand women have done precisely that. (Ibsen
1928–57, 8: 362)
By attacking the old clichés about sacrificing life for love, Ibsen hastened the mod-
ern deidealization of women and powerfully contributed to the demise of idealism
as an aesthetic theory.
Idealism and Realism

Schiller devotes a long passage to what he calls “a remarkable psychological antag-
onism between people in a century in the process of civilizing itself,” namely, the
opposition between idealists and realists (1993: 249). Humankind is divided into
two categories: realists who judge only by experience, and idealists who judge only
by reason. Realists risk becoming petty-minded positivists; idealists risk taking
off into ungrounded flights of fancy, cut loose from every sense of morality. The
two types each represent an aspect of ideal human nature, but neither reaches it
completely. While it is clear that Schiller considers idealists to come closer to the
ideal, he also shows that the “true realist” must ultimately agree with the “genuine
idealist” (259).
The same logic applies to the opposition between the naive and the sentimen-
tal poet: although the naive poet is a realist and the sentimental is an idealist, both
work with the same goal in mind: to give full and free expression to ideal human
nature. Schiller’s division of sentimental poetry into satire and elegy works in the
same way: while satire describes a world in which the ideal is absent, and elegy one
in which it is still present, however problematically, the task of both poetic modes
is to fill us with the “magnificence of the idea” (1993: 206). What matters to Schil-
ler, in short, is “the manner of feeling prevailing” in the various types of poetry
(211 n.). A realist technique is therefore perfectly compatible with idealist aesthet-
ics, for the realist serves the ideal by pointing to the deleterious consequences of
its absence. A generation later, the great French realist Honoré de Balzac explained
the difference between his own novels and those of George Sand precisely in such
terms.
In Story of My Life (1854–55), Sand sets out the principles of her own idealist
aesthetics. First of all, she writes, a novel should be poetic, not analytical. Just like
Schiller, she believes that the passion of love (and therefore also the character who
feels it) must be idealized:
One must not be afraid to endow it [the passion] with exceptional importance,
powers beyond the ordinary, or subject it to delight or suffering that completely
idealism 281
surpass the habitual, human ones, and that even surpass what most intelligent
people think is believable. In sum, the idealization of a sentiment yields the
subject, leaving to the art of the storyteller the care of placing that subject
within a situation and a realistic framework that is drawn sensitively enough to
make the subject stand out” (1991: 922).
In conversations with Balzac, Sand writes, she learned that “one could sacrifice
the idealized subject for the truth of the portrayal, or for the critique of society or
humanity itself” (922–23). If this is right, at first glance it is difficult to see what the
difference is between Balzac in the 1830s and the naturalists of the 1880s. As Sand
continues, however, the difference becomes clear:
Balzac summed this up completely when he said to me later on, “You are
looking for man as he should be; I take him as he is. Believe me, we are both
right. Both paths lead to the same end. I also like exceptional human beings;
I am one myself. I need them to make my ordinary characters stand out, and
I never sacrifice them unnecessarily. But the ordinary human beings interest
me more than they do you. I make them larger than life; I idealize them in the
opposite sense, in their ugliness or in their stupidity. I give their deformities
frightful or grotesque proportions. You could not do that; you are smart not to
want to look at people and things that would give you nightmares. Idealize what
is pretty and what is beautiful; that is a woman’s job.” (923)
That Balzac at his best was widely perceived to “combine the ideal and the real,” is
attested to by French criticism from the 1830s.7
Both Balzac and Sand believed that the task of literature was to draw attention
to the shortcomings of ordinary human life by exaggeration; both were committed
to the fundamental aims of aesthetic idealism: to uplift, ennoble, and transform
humanity by filling us with a sense of the ideal. While Balzac chose Schiller’s satiri-
cal mode, Sand settled on his elegiac mode, sometimes in the form of elegy (as in
Indiana), sometimes in the form of idyll (as in the postscript to Indiana, or in La
Petite Fadette). As Schor points out, they both subscribe to an aesthetic theory
in which idealism is the hierarchically superior and realism the subordinate term
(1993: 29).
This may seem an odd claim to make, for from the 1840s to the 1870s intense
debates raged between realists and idealists in France. The quarrel started
among painters and art critics, and soon spread to literature. Bernard Wein-
berg, however, has shown that most antirealist critics did not object to the
attempt to portray the real world; what they objected to was the absence of the
ideal, for without the ideal and the immaterial, they claimed, truth was absent
(1937: 141, 192–99). If the realist writers had style (beauty), the critics usually for-
gave them.
In the 1860s, British critics vigorously debated the respective merits of idealism
and realism in the same terms as Balzac had done in his conversations with Sand.
Mary Poovey finds that critics at the time were either straightforward idealists
or tried to show that realism is compatible with idealism. Among the latter, we
find George Eliot. Nobody defends a straightforwardly anti-idealist realism.
Rather, Poovey writes, they “did not precisely prefer realism to idealism but tended
to maintain that what critics called realism could also approach higher truths
through detailed but imaginatively interpreted descriptions of everyday things”
(2004: 443). In Norway, the battle between “realists” and “idealists” turns up in
cartoons in the 1880s, after the publication of Ibsen’s Ghosts.
It is only when the idealist trinity of truth, beauty, and goodness falls apart
that realism becomes the outright enemy of idealism. (When critics and writers
start thinking that the aim of art is to produce beauty, but not truth, we get vari-
ous kinds of aestheticism; when they think it is to produce truth, but not beauty,
we get naturalism.) Realism, then, is not one. The tendency among present-day
critics to theorize all kinds of realism in the same way, namely, as “reference” or
“representation,” obscures the significant differences among Balzac’s, Gustave
Flaubert’s, and Ibsen’s realisms. One example of such differences is that Balzac,
Flaubert, and Ibsen have a strikingly different relationship to the ordinary. As we
have seen, Balzac is highly critical of the ordinary, which he tends to exaggerate,
make grotesque, and infuse with melodrama. Flaubert, on the other hand, finds
the ordinary indescribably dull, a place where no values, no thrills, no excitement
can possibly be found. Ibsen, for his part, turns to the ordinary and the everyday,
not as something that has to be overcome, exaggerated, or idealized, but as a sphere
where we have to take on the task of building meaningful human relationships. If
we fail at this task, the everyday becomes unbearable; if we succeed, it becomes a
source of human values.
Truth Undoing Beauty: The War between

Idealism and Naturalism
In France, the first signs of an emerging tension within the idealist trinity of truth,
beauty, and goodness can be dated to the critical reactions to Balzac’s works that
surfaced in the 1840s.8 Truth, however, was not the major issue in 1857, when the
French public prosecutor Ernest Pinard took the authors of Madame Bovary to
court for blasphemy and of Les Fleurs du Mal for obscenity. Flaubert won his case
and Charles Baudelaire lost his, with the result that six poems of Les Fleurs du Mal
remained officially prohibited until 1949. The underlying reasons for the prosecu-
tor’s outrage were nevertheless very similar in both cases. These works shocked
because they appeared to be beholden to no ultimate ethical and religious ideal.
Baudelaire’s attempt to produce beauty out of evil and Flaubert’s nihilistic irony
both attacked the very core of idealist aesthetics, and both proposed a new and
unsettling understanding of the purpose of art, pointing in the direction of a mod-
ern, anti-idealist formalism, and not in the direction of the naturalist crusade for
idealism 283
truth. This is why it is the story of modernism, not of naturalism, that starts with
Baudelaire and Flaubert.9 In other words, the development of the modern faith in
the “autonomy of the aesthetic” begins when aesthetics is severed from ethics.
The trials of Madame Bovary and Les Fleurs du Mal are significant because
they show that idealists genuinely feared that if truth, beauty, moral goodness, and
religion were allowed to come apart in aesthetic works, then the very foundations
of the community were in danger. The idealists were right to feel threatened, for
once the idealist trinity fell apart, the ground was cleared for all kinds of anti-
idealist theories and beliefs: it is no coincidence that materialism, determinism,
Darwinism, skepticism, nihilism, “free thought,” and atheism were major natural-
ist themes and that political movements such as anarchism, socialism, commu-
nism, and feminism were all associated with the naturalist onslaught on idealism.
Late nineteenth-century antinaturalist polemics conveys an overwhelming
sense that beauty has been blemished, innocence defi led, womanhood dishonored,
God defied. Idealists expressed their disgust at the ugliness of naturalism through
an unusually insistent and widespread imagery of dirt, manure, sickness, boils,
sores, infection, rotting corpses, and sexual depravation. In 1880 the German ide-
alist Paul Heyse wrote to Georg Brandes, the Danish critic and intellectual, that he
was working on some Provençal stories in order to oppose the modern Zolismus,
the craze for Émile Zola, which he thought could not last: “Perhaps the world will
soon return to the idea that the dirty washing of a courtesan in the long run looks
uglier than clean linen and fine silks clinging to healthy and chaste limbs in beau-
tiful airy folds” (quoted in von Moisy 1981: 216).
The true inheritor of Schiller’s perfectionist aesthetics (and of Sand’s idealism,
too), Heyse here produces a set of automatic connections between the ugly, the
dirty, the sexual, and the “fallen woman,” in every respect exemplary of late idealist
polemics. Already in 1873, soon after their first meeting, Brandes wrote that Heyse
“considers it a kind of duty to depict human beings as better and greater than they
on average are; he would like to strengthen everyone’s self-respect, give him cour-
age to continue to live and hold up for him examples that show that even in a lowly
human being there lies much beauty hidden, and that even in a philistine a hero
may be slumbering” (reprinted in Brandes and Brandes 1939, 1: 188). In 1882 Heyse
wrote a letter to Brandes in which he commented on the work of two Scandinavian
novelists, the Dane J. P. Jacobsen and the Norwegian Alexander Kielland:
When they [the young Danish writers] establish a veritable clinic in which
the wounds and boils of society are exposed, the eternal stench of disinfectant
is so shocking that it drives away the unbiased and spiritually free friends of
humanity, who until now were looking to the fine arts (to which I still think
the art of writing belongs) to find comfort for the misery of the world . . . .
I am completely convinced that a single work giving the sunny side of this
wonderful world of sun and shade its due . . . would exert a deeper, warmer,
more stimulating, more reformist influence than all these brilliant studies of
putrefaction. (quoted in von Moisy 1981: 216–17)
While Heyse’s wish for art and literature to represent a kinder, gentler view of
the world, his desire to uplift and encourage people through art, may strike us as
quaint and naive, it expresses perfectly the feelings of embattled idealists in the
1880s and 1890s. Unlike some of his fellow idealists, however, Heyse was at pains
not to dissociate himself from the free-thinking aspects of naturalism—he did not
wish to be taken for a reactionary religious spirit; he just believed that works with a
more positive outlook on the world would have stronger political and moral effects
than the dirt and stench of the naturalists. Lamenting the loss of the good and the
beautiful in literature, Heyse continued to give voice to the utopian longings of
idealism until he died in 1914.
“A Dunghill at Delphi”: Ghosts

No play challenged the idealists as deeply as Ibsen’s Ghosts, perhaps because it dra-
matizes the conflict between the competing aesthetic norms that would rage in
response to it:
pastor manders: Is there not a voice in your mother’s heart that forbids you
to break down your son’s ideals?
mrs. alving: Yes, but what about the truth?
pastor manders: Yes, but what about the ideals?
mrs. alving: Oh—ideals, ideals! If only I weren’t as cowardly as I am!
(1928–57, 9: 90)
Throughout Ghosts, Mrs. Alving and Pastor Manders embody the conflict between
naturalists and idealists, faithfully reproduced and reenacted by outraged or
exhilarated reviewers, all of whom deplored the shocking absence of reconcilia-
tion and uplift in the play. Ever since the publication of Catiline, the Norwegian
Hegelian M. J. Monrad had been one of Ibsen’s most intelligent and supportive
reviewers, but when Ibsen broke with idealism, Monrad broke with Ibsen. Monrad
began his 1882 review of Ghosts by complaining that idealist aesthetics was being
threatened by truth:
The time is long gone when one turned to creative works in search of what
one used to call poetry and beauty, when one sought refreshment for the spirit
and the heart, to be uplifted above the messy, tiring confusion of everyday life,
to find a reconciled and reconciling view of life. All such things are now only
considered to be ghost-like matters; what poetry, like every other form of art,
now wants to offer us, is only what it calls “truth,” that is to say the naked, even
stark naked reality in its most repellent form. It wants to smash all illusions, all
so-called ideals. (1974: 194).
All Ghosts could teach us, Monrad ironically concluded, was that modern society
actually requires a “religious foundation,” and that the whole of humanity desires
idealism 285
to be “liberated from the natural corruption and its consequences of natural

corruption” (200).
Elsewhere, the idealist response to Ghosts was simple outrage. The kindly
Heyse, who had admired A Doll’s House, wrote to Brandes in December 1881 that
when he read Ghosts, he felt as if he were sitting in a charnel house, incessantly
smoking to keep the stench away, yet nevertheless succumbing to nausea at the
abominable mixture of uneasiness, horror, and disgust that Ibsen had arranged
with such consummate artistry (von Moisy 1981: 215).
Ghosts, in short, was received as if it were the most horrible expression of natu-
ralism ever produced. This was not least true in Britain, where the culture wars
unleashed by the production of Ibsen’s plays in the early 1890s laid the foundations
for the advent of modernism. After the first London performance of Ghosts in 1891,
The Daily Telegraph devoted a whole editorial to it. In the long article, the writer
makes a point of denouncing a claim made by some of Ibsen’s English defenders,
namely, that Ghosts had the purity and simplicity of a Greek tragedy. The passion
and the sense of outrage, as well as the language and the themes sounded here,
make this article particularly striking and particularly representative of the feel-
ings of the defenders of idealism all over Europe:
Ay! The play performed last night is “simple” enough in plan and purpose, but
simple only in the sense of an open drain; of a loathsome sore unbandaged; of
a dirty act done publicly; or of a lazar-house with all its doors and windows
open. It is no more “Greek,” and can no more be called “Greek” for its plainness
of speech and candid foulness, than could a dunghill at Delphi, or a madhouse
at Mitylene. It is not “artistic” even, in the sense of the anatomical studies of
the Great Masters; because they, in carefully drawing the hidden things of life
and nature, did it in the single and steadfast worship of Truth and Beauty, the
subtle framework and foundation of which they thus reverently endeavoured to
seize . . . .
But Morality, Criticism and Taste alike must certainly draw the line at
what is absolutely loathsome and foetid. If Medea could not, according to
Horace, kill her children upon the stage, still less can Art allow what common
decency forbids. Realism is one thing, but the nostrils of an audience must
not be visibly held before a play can be stamped as true to nature. It is difficult
to expose indecorous words—the gross, and almost putrid, indecorum of
this play of Ghosts. Suffice it to indicate that the central situation is that of a
son exposing to a mother—herself, in past days, a would-be adulteress—his
inheritance of a loathsome malady from a father whose memory the widow
secretly execrates while she publicly honors and consecrates it. If this be
Art—which word, be it remembered, is but the abbreviation of the Greek
name for what is highest, most excellent, and best—then the masterpieces of
English literature must be found in such vagaries as Ben Jonson’s Fleet Ditch
Voyage, Swift’s mad scurrility, and Congreve’s lewd coarseness. (March 14, 1891,
reprinted in Egan 1972: 190, 192.)
This passage has it all: the references to dirt, putrefaction, rotting bodies (the
“lazar-house”), sexual depravation, and nihilism. This outraged and outrageous
article brings out particularly clearly that by the end of the nineteenth century
Schiller’s aesthetic vision of human perfection had been reduced to a desic-
cated and moralistic demand for art to be decent, well mannered, simple, and
harmonious.
By 1890, then, many intellectuals and artists took idealism to be virtually iden-
tical with hypocritical, antiartistic, moralistic conservatism. This is the image of
idealism that emerges from George Bernard Shaw’s The Quintessence of Ibsenism
(1891), a book written in response to The Daily Telegraph’s attacks on Ibsen (Shaw
1905: 3–5). Shaw’s despicable idealists have no connection to Schiller and Madame
de Staël; they are simply trying to cover up the unpalatable reality of their own
miserable lives. “The idealist . . . has taken refuge with the ideals because he hates
himself and is ashamed of himself,” Shaw declares (30).
Because Shaw defends Ibsen by turning idealism into the expression of a
personally and politically thwarted psyche, The Quintessence of Ibsenism conveys
no sense of the illustrious origins of idealist aesthetics, no sense that idealism
once had genuine claims to be taken seriously. By reducing idealism to an effect
of psychological repression, Shaw accelerated the process that would lead read-
ers and critics of Ibsen to forget idealism entirely. But when we forget all about
the idealist tradition in aesthetics, we are no longer able to see that Ghosts is not
just about family sickness and family secrets, but about aesthetic norms. Para-
doxically, then, the death of idealism that Ibsen helped to bring about makes it
harder for us to see the aesthetically self-reflective aspects of his contemporary
plays more.
Shaw’s analysis of idealism, moreover, is entirely based on the opposition
between ideals and truth. Realists face the truth of the human conditions; idealists
demand that people sacrifice themselves in the name of chimerical ideals. All over
Europe, critics engaged in similar polemics. The battles over naturalism were in
fact battles over idealism. At the time, it was impossible to avoid taking sides. The
moralistic and conservative idealists kept harping on beauty, harmony, and uplift.
The naturalists rightly revolted against the increasingly anachronistic, unrealistic,
and reactionary demands of idealism. With truth and freedom on their side, they
were not in a mood for compromise.
Published in 1886, Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil is in large parts a response
to the debates over naturalism and idealism raging all over Germany. At the time,
however, his provocative critique of the starry-eyed belief in the power of truth to
set us free could gain him no support from the naturalists, while the very title of
his book was enough to ensure that no self-respecting idealist would touch it. If
they had opened it, Nietzsche’s devastating denunciation of Christian slave moral-
ity and European herd morality would have made them throw the book across the
room.
By throwing idealists and naturalists together as equally misguided meta-
physical moralists, Nietzsche’s book far outstripped the cultural debates that sur-
rounded it. The first part of the following passage could have been written specially
for Heyse; its second part is directed against naive defenders of naturalism:
idealism 287
Nobody is very likely to consider a doctrine true merely because it makes people
happy or virtuous—except perhaps the lovely “idealists” who become effusive
about the good, the true, and the beautiful and allow all kinds of motley,
clumsy, and benevolent desiderata to swim around in utter confusion in their
pond. Happiness and virtue are no arguments. But people like to forget—even
sober spirits—that making unhappy and evil are no counterarguments.
Something might be true while being harmful and dangerous in the highest
degree. (1989: §39, 49–50)
Nietzsche’s critique points beyond naturalism, to a kind of art that will reject
metaphysics and place itself truly beyond good and evil, an art that understands
“the existence of the world is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon,” an art
that will “fight at any risk whatever the moral interpretation and significance of
existence” (1967: 22). This art, of course, turned out to be modernism.
I have defi ned naturalism as an aesthetic movement obsessed with an anti-
idealist quest for truth. Of course, the quest for truth expressed itself in different
ways: in a turn toward science, in a preference for critique rather than utopia,
and, in general, in a desire for literature to become less ideal and more real.
But by the 1870s, realism per se was not unacceptable to idealists. At the begin-
ning of Heyse’s Children of the World (1873), the reader is slowly introduced to
the inhabitants of a boarding house in Berlin, in a manner remarkably (and,
surely, deliberately) reminiscent of the beginning of Balzac’s Père Goriot. When
Zola’s L’Assommoir was published in 1877, a critic in Le Figaro wrote that the novel
was “not realism, but fi lth; not crudity, but pornography” (Buss 2000: viii). The
problem with Zola, then, was not that he was a realist, but that he was the wrong
kind of realist, the kind that refused to deliver beauty and moral uplift to his
readers. We have seen that The Daily Telegraph drew on the same distinction
in order to condemn Ghosts. What is missing in objectionable realist works, in
short, is reconciliation.
Idealism in Action: The Nobel Prize

in Literature
When Alfred Nobel established the Nobel Prizes in his will of 1895, he specified
that the prize in literature should be awarded to “the person who shall have pro-
duced in the field of literature the most outstanding work of an idealistic ten-
dency” (Espmark 1991: 1). There has been significant debate about what exactly
Nobel meant by “idealistic tendency.” Much evidence indicates that he probably
wanted to keep faith with the utopian idealism of revolutionary romanticism and,
in particular, with the “religiously colored spirit of revolt” of his favorite author,
Percy Bysshe Shelley (Espmark 1991: 4–5). But Nobel was out of touch with his
time, for by the 1890s, “idealist” no longer meant revolutionary romanticism; it

had become the slogan of the antinaturalist, antimodernist, moralizing lovers
of uplifting beauty in literature, such as the permanent secretary of the Swedish
Academy at the time, Carl David af Wirsén (1842–1912). Because of Wirsén’s influ-
ence, the first Nobel Prizes in literature allow us to grasp with particular acuity the
nature of late idealist aesthetics.
From 1901 to 1911, Wirsén made sure that the Nobel Prize went to works
steeped in a “lofty and sound idealism,” exhibiting “a true nobility not simply
of presentation but of conception and of philosophy of life.”10 In his invaluable
study of the aesthetic criteria governing the choice of the Nobel laureate in litera-
ture, Kjell Espmark tells us that in the Wirsén era the “literary quality of a work
was weighed against its contribution to humanity’s struggle ‘toward the ideal’ ”
(1991: 10). Atheists and agnostics were automatically disqualified, unless they
demonstrated an unusually strong “striving towards higher things and moral
responsibility” (12–13). Like most late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-
century idealists, the early Nobel committees consistently praised clarity and
simplicity, using words like “obscure” and “unclear” as terms of strong disap-
proval (see 14–15).
The outspoken commitment to rigidly conservative idealist principles explains
why the list of the first 10 Nobel laureates in Wirsén’s era looks as strange as it does
today:
1901 Sully Prudhomme
1902 Theodor Mommsen
1903 Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson
1904 Frédéric Mistral, José Echegaray
1905 Henryk Sienkiewicz
1906 Giosuè Carducci
1907 Rudyard Kipling
1908 Rudolf Eucken
1909 Selma Lagerlöf
1910 Paul Heyse11
The fi rst Nobel laureate was an establishment candidate, enthusiastically nomi-
nated by the Académie Française. Honored “in special recognition of his poetic
composition, which gives evidence of lofty idealism, artistic perfection and a
rare combination of the qualities of both heart and intellect,” Sully Prudhomme
was chosen in preference to Zola, that year’s prime reject, whose naturalism was
dismissed as “spiritless, and often grossly cynical.”12 In 1902, the German his-
torian Theodor Mommsen was preferred to Leo Tolstoy, “an author who in his
otherwise magnificent War and Peace attributes to blind chance such a decisive
role in the great events of world history . . . and who in countless of his works
denies not only the church, but the state, even the right of property” (Espmark
1991: 17).
idealism 289
Wirsén, who was largely responsible for these decisions, was in fact some-
thing of an idealist activist. He had spent large parts of his career as a literary
critic praising Bjørnson and panning Ibsen (see the essays on Ibsen in Wirsén
1901). It is hardly surprising, then, that in 1903 the Nobel committee crowned
Bjørnson and soundly rejected both Ibsen and Brandes. Brandes’ view of life and
ethics was unacceptable to the committee, for he was considered to be “nega-
tively sceptical, totally atheistic,” as well as far too lax on sexual matters (Esp-
mark 1991: 18). With the explicit exception of The Pretenders, Brand, and Emperor
and Galilean, Ibsen’s works were criticized for being negativistic, obscure, and
generally repellent; about his later plays the committee wrote that their “nega-
tive and enigmatic features have repelled even those who would have willingly
given the world-famous author a substantial recognition” (18). Bjørnson, on the
other hand, was lauded for his poetry, for his freshness of spirit, and above all
for his positive and pure idealism in works nobody, not even in Norway, reads
anymore.
“On or about December 1910 human character changed,” Virginia Woolf
famously declared (1988: 421). The Nobel committee begged to differ, for in
December 1910 it solemnly awarded the Nobel Prize to Ibsen’s and Brandes’s old
friend Heyse. That year, the committee rejected Thomas Hardy, whose heroines
were accused of being lacking in “character,” that is to say, in “religious and ethical
firmness” (Espmark 1991: 22). Not surprisingly, precisely the qualities that make
Hardy’s women modern made Hardy unacceptable. Heyse, on the other hand,
was praised as the greatest German poet since Goethe. In his presentation speech,
Wirsén stressed Heyse’s importance as a symbol of the idealist struggle against
naturalism:
Naturalism, which burst forth in the eighties and dominated the scene for the
next decade, directed its iconoclastic attack especially against Heyse, its most
powerful opponent. He was too harmonious, too fond of beauty, too Hellenic
and lofty for those who, slandering him at any price, demanded sensation,
effect, bizarre licentiousness, and crass reproductions of ugly realities. Heyse
did not yield. His sense of form was offended by their uncouth behaviour; he
demanded that literature should see life in an ideal light that would transfigure
reality.13
Heyse was also praised for his independence, which he had proved not least by
disliking Ghosts and all the rest of Ibsen’s late plays. In his final peroration, Wirsén
quotes Schiller, and thus gives full voice to the idealist aesthetics he had defended
all his life:
Aesthetically [Heyse] has been faithful to truth, but in such a manner that he
mirrored inner in external reality. Schiller’s well known words, ‘Life is serious,
art serene,’ properly understood, express a profound truth which can be found
in the life and work of Heyse. Beauty should liberate and recreate: it should
neither imitate reality slavishly nor drag it into the dust.14
Forlornly seeking harmony in an ever less harmonious world, Wirsén here mixes
fragments of Schiller’s idealist romanticism with conservative German neoclassi-
cism and mounts a desperate last-ditch defense of the spiritual over the material
and—above all—over the sexual.
Modernism and Idealism

In 1918 idealism was dead; Heyse was forgotten, and nobody remembered that
Ghosts had once been a play about aesthetic conflicts. Soon author Bertolt Brecht
would deride Ghosts as irrelevant to an age that had invented a cure for syphilis.15
The rise of modernism started the process that was to turn Ibsen into a fuddy-
duddy old realist or overly melodramatic symbolist.16
The demise of idealism has turned the period from 1870 to 1914 into a puzzle
for literary historians. After the horrors of the Franco-Prussian war and the Paris
Commune in 1870–71, idealism was decidedly on the defensive in Europe. As we
have seen, naturalism was its first prominent enemy. But in the shadow of natural-
ism, there flourished a plethora of other anti-idealist projects. The closer we get
to the ultimate death of idealism, the more hectically different trends and move-
ments flourish and die: symbolism, decadence, neoromanticism, estheticism, fin-
de-siècle, and avant-garde are just some of the terms one regularly comes across in
discussions of this period.
Despite the proliferation of terms, many of the most important writers of the
period remain exceedingly difficult to categorize. It is not just Ibsen who fails to
conform to such labels; Oscar Wilde, Hardy, Henry James, and the young André
Gide are just as difficult to categorize. Hardy’s fascination with the grotesque and
the gruesome, his honesty about sex, and his uncanny grasp of women’s complex-
ity made his novels anathema to idealists.17 In 1911, Wirsén’s last year on the Nobel
committee, James’s nuanced, careful, subtle weighing of human motivations, his
fascination with the movements of human consciousness was deemed insuffi-
ciently clear and concentrated, and the prize went to Maurice Maeterlinck.18 The
very title of Gide’s L’Immoraliste (1902) would have been enough to make the Nobel
committee cringe, and his fascination with transgressive action for action’s sake
(Les Caves du Vatican, 1914) would be completely outrageous to an idealist. (Gide
received the Nobel Prize in 1947.)
While finding him entirely alien to his own aesthetic preferences, Wilde
admired Ibsen.19 In fact, Wilde’s brilliant paradoxes, his searing indictment of
moralism, are as anti-idealist as Ibsen’s turn to the ordinary. In its way, The Picture
of Dorian Gray (first published in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in July 1890) is as
preoccupied with the battle between idealism and realism as Ghosts. At the very
beginning of Wilde’s novel, the painter Basil Hallward explains that he is looking
for a new aesthetic school, a school he finds embodied in the beauty of Dorian
idealism 291
Gray: “Unconsciously he defines for me the lines of a fresh school, a school that is
to have in it all the passion of the romantic spirit, all the perfection of the spirit that
is Greek. The harmony of soul and body—how much that is! We in our madness
have separated the two, and have invented a realism that is vulgar, an ideality that
is void” (1992: 10). Here realism is aligned with the body and vulgarity (as it was
in contemporary discussions of Zola’s and Ibsen’s “naturalism”) and ideality with
a hollowed-out notion of the soul. Hallward’s diagnosis of the problems of con-
temporary aesthetics turns out to be a perfect description of Dorian Gray himself,
for the uncanny paradox at the heart of The Picture of Dorian Gray is that Dorian’s
soul, forever captured in Basil’s picture, is as visible, ugly, and material as can be,
while his body, engaged in so many mysterious vices, remains perfect, the very
embodiment of “void ideality,” if there ever was one.20
A virulent opponent of idealism, Wilde detested its characteristic mingling
of ethics and aesthetics. “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book,”
he declares in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray. “Books are well written,
or badly written. That is all” (1992: xxiii). In “The Critic as Artist” (1890) he rein-
forces the point: “The sphere of Art and the sphere of Ethics are absolutely dis-
tinct and separate. When they are confused, Chaos has come again” (1968a: 393).
Unlike Shaw, however, whose anti-idealism turned him into a fairly dry left-wing
champion of realism and naturalism, Wilde remained a revolutionary romantic at
heart, who adored historical novels full of exquisite and exotic details such as Flau-
bert’s Salammbô, Charles’s Reade’s The Cloister and the Hearth (“as much above
Romola as Romola is above Daniel Deronda”), and Alexandre Dumas’s The Vicomte
de Bragelonne (Wilde 1968b: 299–300).
Sometimes Wilde sounds like a modernist Schiller, insisting that truth and
goodness have nothing to do with beauty, while at the same time believing that
“[i]t is through Art, and through Art only, that we can realize our perfection”
(1968a: 380). The inheritor of Schiller’s idealism, Wilde was a perfectionist sympa-
thetic to socialism. No wonder, then, that in 1888 he praised the stalwart idealist
Sand for the spirit of “social regeneration” that is so characteristic of her novels:
“This spirit . . . is the very leaven of modern life. It is remoulding the world for us,
and fashioning our age anew. If it is antediluvian, it is so because the deluge is yet
to come; if it is Utopian then Utopia must be added to our geographies” (1968c:
87). Wilde, in fact, appears to have found in Sand somewhat of a kindred spirit, a
writer of genius fusing a passion for social transformation with a highly self-con-
scious awareness of the role of art in that transformation. Lauding Sand’s “delight-
ful treatment of art and the artist’s life,” he declares, “What Mr. Ruskin and Mr.
Browning have done for England, she did for France. She invented an art litera-
ture” (87–88).21 Like Brandes before him, then, Wilde split the idealist tradition
in two, so as to be able to combine the admiration for revolutionary romanticism
with the rejection of moralistic idealism.22
Once the idealist trinity of truth, goodness, and beauty was coming apart,
Wilde chose to cultivate Beauty; Brandes, Zola, and the naturalists who followed
them settled for Truth; and Nietzsche and Gide bravely attacked the Good.
The Legacy of Idealism

The demise of idealism furthered the autonomization of art and literature. When
idealism disappeared, ethical and religious claims on art lost their legitimacy.
Left was politics. There has always been a great deal of tension between formal-
ist modernism and politically committed forms of criticism. In 1871, Brandes
called for modern literature to “place problems under debate.”23 The natural-
ist generation that followed him—the “men of the modern breakthrough” as
Brandes himself called them, thus conveniently erasing from his conscious-
ness all the women writers he knew and sometimes even encouraged—took for
granted that the purpose of literature was to work for radical social and political
change. The idea that art and literature have to serve a political purpose, how-
ever, is a successor project to the idealist vision in which the ultimate task of art
was to ennoble mankind.
With formalism, the separation of ethics and aesthetics is completed: art is
perceived as fully autonomous of all moral, social, and political duties; its task is
neither to uplift or improve us nor to change society through its relentless uncov-
ering of truth, but rather to make us think about art. Insofar as naturalism inher-
ited the utopian and perfectionist project of idealism, modernism comes to stand
as a negation of both. There is nevertheless an incipient conflict here. If we consider
formalist modernism as the ultimate negation of both idealism and naturalism, it
represents the final breakthrough of the autonomy of the aesthetic. If this is right,
modernism simply can have no political, social, or religious purpose. Yet there has
always been a strong political strand within modernism. Marxist modernists such
as Erwin Piscator and Brecht spearheaded the twentieth-century quest to combine
aesthetic formalism with political commitment.
Inspired by Roland Barthes and Alain Robbe-Grillet, French poststructural-
ism and its American and European avatars have generated a plethora of more or
less sophisticated theories of the “politics of form” or the “politics of the signifier.”
These are only the most recent attempts to overcome the conflict between utopia
and critique, between the desire for a positive project for change and the conviction
that all art can do is to avoid, negate, hollow out, or undermine the contaminated,
commodified, and fetishized forms of communication characteristic of modern
society. Yet it is hard to maintain such artistic purity, for the more art negates and
avoids modern society, the easier it is for astute critics to read the gesture of nega-
tion itself as a refusal of communication or commodification, thus as a statement
of alienation from mass society and a protest against the degradation of art by
market forces. It is not difficult, in other words, to turn the formalist negativity
of late modernism into a powerful political statement. Here resides an important,
but unacknowledged, legacy of idealism: just as Schiller and his friends thought of
the artist as a seer, close to God in his understanding of the ideal, late modernism
turns the artist, now perceived as a laborer of negativity, into a bearer of purity or
authenticity in a corrupted world.
idealism 293
The demise of idealism made it increasingly impossible for artists, writers, and
critics (as opposed to politicians, religious leaders, and school board members) to
claim in public that art has a duty to promote social ideals, show us the beauty of
life, help to uplift us in a difficult world. All these tasks, if they are to be performed
at all, have been relegated to the category of entertainment, to the middlebrow and
the lowbrow.24 In the twentieth century, however, idealism did not just live on in
the middlebrow and the lowbrow. It also lived on in socialist realism and the fascist
cult of “healthy” art. The demise of idealism, therefore, was a fantastic victory for
artistic freedom. With the death of idealism, political, religious, and ethical inter-
ference in the autonomy of art could no longer find aesthetic justification. Women,
in particular, have had everything to gain from the death of the outlandish idealist
requirements for the representation of women, sexuality, and love. These gains
remain enduring legacies of the victory of modernism over idealism, a victory that
owes much to the pioneering, controversial plays of Ibsen.
After modernism, however, critics and writers also routinely take for granted
that anyone who reads to be consoled for the sorrows of the world, to be uplifted,
to gain a positive vision of what human beings can achieve, has no understanding
of literature. Perhaps this is why the formalist, skeptical, ironic paradigms of mod-
ernism and postmodernism have come to seem increasingly empty: all they appear
to offer is critique bereft of the utopian vision that rightly ought to sustain their
critical power. What can they tell us about the task of art in an era dominated by
war, genocide, and terrorism? What can art do in an era when secular liberalism,
the modern defender of the autonomy of art and literature, is under pressure from
militant religious fundamentalisms of every kind? Unless we find answers to these
questions, we leave the way open for the return of the death-dealing “claim of the
ideal” in ever more pernicious forms.25
NOTES
This essay is based on material included in Moi 2006, esp. chap. 3. When not
otherwise noted, all translations from foreign languages are my own.
1. “Idealism” or “idealist aesthetics” is not an entry, for example, in Cuddon 1998 or
Baldick 2001. In Childers and Hentzi 1995, the entry on idealism is devoted exclusively to
idealist philosophy.
2. It is true that the generation of modernists I think of as “high modernists” often
thought of themselves as opposing a certain kind of realism. This becomes clear, e.g., in
Woolf’s superb essays “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (1988: 384–89) and “Character in
Fiction” (420–38). But if the “high modernists” felt free to elaborate their own views in
this way, it was because they were no longer held by the idealist aesthetics that dominated
the generation before them. In this way, they build on the achievements of thinkers and
writers such as Ibsen, Nietzsche, Émile Zola, Oscar Wilde, the early André Gide, and
many others.
3. The fragment is attributed to Hölderlin, but the manuscript version is in Hegel’s

handwriting, and Jay Bernstein writes that “it is more plausible to regard the fragment
as the result of an exchange of ideas amongst the three friends” (2003: 185 n. 1). Eckhart
Förster, on the other hand, makes a careful case for Hölderlin as the author; see Förster
2004: 470–75.
4. Lukács’s idealist humanism is eloquently expressed in essays like “The Ideal of
the Harmonious Man in Bourgeois Aesthetics” and “Marx and Engels on Aesthetic,”
collected in Lukács 1978.
5. “In terms of reality the naive poet has the better of the sentimental poet”
(Schiller 1993: 234).
6. Schott 1988 is a marvelous study of Kant’s investment in purity.
7. For the critical reception of French realism from 1830 to 1870, see
Bernard Weinberg’s illuminating study French Realism: The Critical Reaction, 1830–1870
(1937).
8. In French Realism, Weinberg writes that Balzac criticism became markedly more
hostile in the 1840s. I am inclined to interpret this as a sign of the breakup of the union
between idealism and realism described in Sand 1991: 32–90.
9. For a succinct overview of the two trials, see LaCapra 1989: 726–31.
10. From the Nobel committee’s report of 1905, when the prize went to Henryk
Sienkiewicz (Espmark 1991: 9).
11. The web pages of the Nobel Prize in Literature are full of valuable information
and documents; see nobelprize.org/literature/.
12. The quotation about Prudhomme is the official Nobel Prize citation
for 1901, available from nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/1901/index.html; the
quotation about Zola comes from the Nobel committee’s internal report cited in
Espmark 1991: 17.
13. Presentation speech by Wirsén, available at nobelprize.org/literature/
laureates/1910/press.html.
14. See nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/1910/press.html.
15. What Brecht actually wrote, in the 1940s, was this: “While Ibsen was writing
Ghosts, Ehrlich was working to find a cure for syphilis. The devil that Ibsen painted on
the wall for the hypocrites, was wiped out by Ehrlich . . . . The bourgeoisie had become
a greater evil than syphilis, its hypocrisy was not interesting because it threatened the
bourgeoisie, but because it threatened humanity” (Brecht 1993: 42).
16. This is a reference to a set of attitudes to Ibsen’s theater that became
particularly widespread in the period after 1945; for more information, see Moi 2006,
chap. 1.
17. For an interesting discussion of Hardy’s hybrid form, see Daleski 1996.
18. Wirsén complained about James’s “lack of concentration” (Espmark 1991:
25–26).
19. Richard Ellmann writes:
Wilde did not underrate his Norwegian rival; he allowed that Hedda Gabler
was Greek in its power to generate pity and terror. But his own goal, he saw, was
to make dialogue as brilliant as possible, while Ibsen confined his characters
to ordinary words in ordinary life . . . . One probed a situation to uncover an
infection; the other relied on verbal ricochet, to express a ‘conflict between
our artistic sympathies and our moral judgment.’ For Wilde, unlike Ibsen, the
setting had to be in the leisure class, people with time, money, and education,
proficient in conversation. (1988: 333)
idealism 295
20. “You were to me such an ideal as I shall never meet again. This is the face of a
satyr,” Basil says to Dorian when he sees the picture (Wilde 1992: 157).
21. Among Sand’s artists’ novels, Wilde recommends Consuelo, Horace, Les Maîtres
Mosaïstes, Le Château des Désertes, Le Château de Pictordu, and La Daniella.
22. In Moi 2006: chap. 3 I show that Brandes, in his breakthrough lectures on
literature in Copenhagen in the winter of 1871–72, published in 1872 under the title
Emigrantlitteraturen (“Emigré Literature”), calls for a modern literature that would
resurrect the spirit of radical romantics such as Madame de Staël and Schiller.
23. This is the famous catchphrase from Brandes’ breakthrough lectures on main
currents in European literature delivered in Copenhagen in the winter of 1871–72.
24. The classical work on mass culture as modernism’s other is Huyssen 1986.
25. The “claim of the ideal” is my translation of Gregers Werle’s incessant harping
on den ideale fordring in Ibsen’s The Wild Duck. Another possible translation would be
the “ideal demand.”
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 
MODERNISM
philip weinstein
Thinking is judged by a standard that does not measure up

to it. Such judgment may be compared to the procedure of
trying to calculate the nature and powers of a fish by seeing
how long it can live on dry land. For a long time now, all too
long, thinking has been stranded on dry land.
—Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism”
There are no classes in life for beginners.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of
Malte Laurids Brigge
One begins by being confused. A cryptic epigram from Rilke, a heady passage
from Heidegger, suggesting that conventional paradigms for “thinking” denature
the activity itself: that’s all you have to go on, for starters. In what follows, I propose
two defining dimensions of modernist texts: (1) their initial difficulty (one begins
by being confused), and (2) their experimental departure from earlier conventions
of thinking. To these two dimensions I would add a third: modernist texts involve
less a “judging” than a “trying,” in the double sense that they are invested more
in trying things out than in representing according to normative schemas, and
that they are trying to read—deliberately so. We do not often like being confused.
(I return later to the notion of “trying” by trying out Franz Kafka’s The Trial [1925],
a text that Theodor Adorno characterizes as “the trial of a trial” [1983: 268]—a sort
of fish unavailable to dry land judgment.)
modernism 299
Contributors to this volume were invited to take seriously the “and” in its
title, Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature. I take this to mean that at least
two feasible projects are not invited: either a reading of literature as enabled by
certain identifiable philosophic positions (literature as a covert rewriting of phi-
losophy), or a reading of philosophy as a species of literature under another name
(philosophy’s truth-claiming difference disappearing, postmodern fashion, into
the subjective maw of literature). Instead, the invitation called for a consideration
of philosophy and literature as distinctive genres—or better, “distinctive kinds
of attention to human life,” literature involving, as philosophy rarely does, acute
attention to the representation of particulars.
I intend to use particulars for the basic claims of this argument about modern-
ism. I assess neither poetry nor drama here, nor do I say much about the variety of
fictional strategies that emerge during the period normally glossed as modernism
(1900s to 1930s). Instead of attempting encyclopedic coverage, I consider in some
detail the practice of three novelists—Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, and William
Faulkner—with the aim of shedding light on central strategies and powers of mod-
ernism.1 The philosophical company these writers keep includes Freud and the
phenomenologists—Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Emmanuel
Levinas primarily—proposed as company, not as foundational supports. My proj-
ect is to show how the formal practices of my novelists, so to speak, philosophize,
enact a philosophic stance through their particular way of deploying materials.
One such way is already before us: modernist fiction’s insistence that one begin by
being confused alters the traditional genre’s way of staging the figure against the
ground.
“There are no classes in life for beginners,” the fictional Malte writes in Rilke’s
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), and he continues: “[I]t is always the
most difficult that is asked of one right away” (1964: 80). The Notebooks bears out
this claim, immersing the reader in Malte’s confusing notebook entries for (rather
than his developing understanding of) his unmappable Paris experiences. A fun-
damental difference between life realities and narrative conventions emerges. Life
unfolds (the verb is too bland) unpedagogically, while narrative centers on peda-
gogic development. Narrative seems primordially structured so as to make sense
of the human passage through time, to represent it developmentally. To do this, it
turns “life” into a “life class.” In class, what occurs now (“right away”) prepares us
(as in narrative) for what is to come. But in life we never exit from a perpetual pres-
ent tense that may—whenever crisis arrives—return us abruptly to an inescap-
able first grade. Almost 70 years before Rilke, Kierkegaard emphasized the same
radical difference between unpredictable life realities and domesticating narrative
conventions: “For my part,” Kierkegaard’s Johannes di Silentio claims, “I presum-
ably can describe the movements of faith, but I cannot make them. In learning to
go through the motions of swimming, one can be suspended from the ceiling in a
harness and then presumably describe the movements, but one is not swimming”
(1983: 37–38).
Swimming and “Swimming”

Swimming as opposed to “swimming”: the former occurs only if one is immersed
in the water of unrehearsable presence, while the latter is learnable by way of a har-
ness and repeated simulation. Might this correlate to a difference between a kind
of thinking (typically hostile to narrative) that occurs in the water, and a kind of
thinking (narrative’s bread and butter) that takes place on dry land? Heidegger’s
analogy, like Kierkegaard’s, is strikingly spatial, so we need to factor in its no less
crucial temporal component. Narrative is fashioned to escape the unknowing of
sheer presence—the time frame in which life is actually lived—by providing ret-
rospect, the knowing that graces presence with a perspective available only after
presence has passed. In the present, if habit fails, we are suddenly unknowing. To
see how this situation might be represented in its modernist fictional particulars,
let us try out a scene from the early pages of Kafka’s The Trial (1925). Joseph K.
has awakened to find two strangers in his room, dressed in apparently coded but
indecipherable uniforms. They take him into an adjoining room where he is told
he is under arrest:
“You are only under arrest, nothing more. I was requested to inform you of
this. . . . That’s enough for today, and we can say good-by, though only for the
time being, naturally. You’ll be going to the Bank now, I suppose?” “To the
Bank?” asked K. “I thought I was under arrest?” K. asked the question with
a certain defiance, for though his offer to shake hands had been ignored, he
felt more and more independent of all these people, especially now that the
Inspector had risen to his feet . . . .“How can I go to the Bank, if I am under
arrest?” “Ah, I see,” said the Inspector, who had already reached the door. “You
have misunderstood me. You are under arrest, certainly, but that need not
hinder you from going about your business. Nor will you be prevented from
leading your ordinary life.” “Then being arrested isn’t so very bad,” said K.,
going up to the Inspector. “I never suggested that it was,” said the Inspector.
“But in that case it would seem there was no particular necessity to tell me
about it,” said K., moving still closer. The others had drawn near too. They
were all gathered now in a little space beside the door. “It was my duty,” said the
Inspector . . . .“I was assuming that you would want to go to the Bank. . . . And to
facilitate that . . . I have detained these three gentlemen here, who are colleagues
of yours, to be at your disposal.” “What?” cried K., gaping at the three of them.
These insignificant anaemic young men, whom he had observed only as a
group standing beside the photographs, were actually clerks in the Bank, not
colleagues of his—that was putting it too strongly and indicated a gap in the
omniscience of the Inspector—but they were subordinate employees of the
Bank all the same. How could he have failed to notice that? (1968: 14–15)
What figure-ground relation operates here? How does the passage propose a pic-
ture whose caption might read: “What’s wrong with this picture?” What con-
ventions for representing the human figure in social space and time have been
subverted?
modernism 301
The first subverted convention is the reader’s capacity to understand subjects

by reliably deciphering their movement through familiar space and time. We abso-
lutely depend on this capacity (in and out of fictions); a good portion of our social
intelligence resides in our knowing how to tease out the implications of others’
gestures, to catch the false move in an expected sequence. (When, halfway through
Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady [1881], his protagonist, Isabel Archer, glimpses Gil-
bert Osmond and Madame Merle talking intimately together, he sitting while she
stands, Isabel deciphers—and we with her—the legible transgression of a social
code. Neither we nor she is wrong in doing so; a shared code for reading human
behavior in space and time is operative, and its infraction tells much, tells all.)
I have much to say later about the philosophic stance buttressing this assumption
so commonplace as to go unnoticed.
The second convention, also sabotaged here, is that represented space is reliably
inventoried: not that everything is identified, but that everything pertinent to the
subject’s orientation is identified. The typical narrator silently performs this task
of domesticating space in the moment of describing it, making it fit for progressive
narrative. Kafka breaks this rule: his text is unpredictably “mined,” and the result
is (in the Freudian sense of the term) uncanny. The three “anaemic young men”
eventually surge into recognizability well after K. has already entered the room,
and we ask: How did they get there? Do they belong to the Bank or to K.? How
can he have “failed to notice” them? (It is more than a question of bad lighting.) In
the two centuries of realist fiction that precedes Kafka, there is no room that the
protagonist can enter without the narrator—cannily, expeditiously—identifying
the pertinent furnishings.
If we resurvey the passage, we note that it is suffused with (what we normally
take to be) orientational spatial gestures. The Inspector who rises to his feet, reaches
the door, K. who goes up to him, moves still closer, the others who gather together
beside the door: all these details that would traditionally facilitate a scene of clari-
fication carry here a tinge of epistemological menace. The orientational assump-
tions of social life dependent on shared spatial convention—the handshake, the
privacy of the bedroom, the meaning of arrest if it does not signify disruption in
K.’s ordinary management of space and time—are being sabotaged.
We can generalize this figure/ground further: without orderly space, no
orderly time; without either of these, no subject development. K. can learn noth-
ing (see Kern 1983).2 Later, while discussing his case with the lawyer Huld, the
spatial trap is sprung again: “ ‘For example,’ Huld says, ‘there’s a dear friend of
mine visiting me at this very moment,’ and he waved a hand toward a dark corner
of the room. ‘Where?’ asked K., almost rudely, in his first shock of astonishment.
He looked round uncertainly . . . [a]nd then some form or other in the dark corner
actually began to stir” (Kafka 1968: 104). Not so unmotivated this time: K.’s lapse
is partially explainable. But the point is that Kafka represents him as no longer in
perceptual control of his space; he has lost his road map. Other spatial surprises
abound—the building (it could be any building) where he enters on the fifth floor
and the hearing is being held, the discovery of court doors in Titoretti’s apartment,
the performance of the Whipper scene within the precincts of the Bank itself.
There are no classes in life for this Joseph K., who, despite entering his 31st year, is
incomprehensibly returned to the (dis)orientational state of a beginner. His trial
unfolds (the verb is too bland) as his being continuously tried by everything that
happens to him.
What would be at stake in centering modernist narrative on such ongoing
distress—a state in which none of one’s previous “swimming” lessons has taught
one how to swim? To answer this, we need to sketch in the several centuries’ his-
tory of Western orientational assumptions and procedures that predate Joseph K.
and—by privileging canniness—make his sudden incapacity (his being “un-can-
ed”) so startling. Such assumptions and procedures—constitutive of Enlighten-
ment thought and the realist fiction that body of thought subtends—center on the
Western drama of a subject coming to know. Although chapter 10 in this handbook
focuses on the practice of realism, my argument here must briefly rehearse that
prior practice of representation. Only in response to its operative assumptions can
we unpack the resonance of modernist unknowing.
Enlightenment Knowing
For a subject to come to know, an Enlightenment premise of reliable correspon-
dence between the individual and the world must operate. Thanks to the prior
establishment of lawful time and uniform space, a subject can learn to map the
outer world accurately and, in so doing, achieve inner orientation, as well. Personal
identity gets confirmed by way of this achieved knowledge of what is out there. On
this model, the subject who would know and the object to be known are assumed
to be meant for each other—the latter destined for the former. How did the West
come to reconceptualize the outer world so that it might enter these conditions of
knowability?
We might best pursue this question by proposing a composite narrative of
progress that draws upon four exemplary Enlightenment thinkers: Descartes,
Newton, Locke, and Kant. Put too schematically, we can say that Descartes initi-
ates the narrative by conceiving the Western subject who would know. Cogito ergo
sum gives birth—in pure alienation from parents, siblings, church, state, and cul-
ture—to the single knowing subject: res cogitans. His opposite number—the outer
world now removed from its status as a cosmos of kindred being, and alienated as
mere material nature awaiting scientific knowledge—is res extensa. Together, res
cogitans and res extensa make a marriage that launches Western science and, later,
realist fiction.
The second thinker in this emergent Enlightenment narrative is Newton. His
“system of the world” proposes a gravitational model that calculates the movement
of matter in both the farthest heavens and an apple falling from the tree. Newton
modernism 303
is the Enlightenment’s grand mapmaker. Thanks to his theory of gravitational

forces, the world—everyone was sure—made rational, secular, knowable sense; it
had become a universe of calculable forces. (Not that anyone, including Newton,
understood why gravity operated as it did, but few doubted that it did operate as
he said it did.)
Descartes conceives the unencumbered rational subject, stripped free of custom
and—liberated/liberal now—capable of coming to know. Newton makes available
a lawful, material cosmos, conceptually mastered and open to being known. Miss-
ing still is a narrative for how Descartes’s knowing subject might best learn—in
time—to negotiate Newton’s knowable world, there before him and awaiting his
negotiation. Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690) supplies this
narrative, laying out precisely the story of empirical trial by error—of beginning
as a blank slate but being capable of knowing more—the story that was to ground
Western fiction.
Drawing on representative Enlightenment propositions, we have identified the
birth of an unhampered subject who seeks to know (and who knows how to know:
by way of doubt), and the authoritative ordering of the material universe (from
apples to stars) in uniform space and time, its force and motions open to exact
calculation. Procedure, subject, and setting are in place. Locke takes these and sets
them in motion by way of a plot that has proved to have abiding appeal—launch-
ing novels and compelling audiences from his time to our own.
The plot goes like this, moving progressively from dawn to day (but rarely far
into the evening): I am born; I learn swiftly that I do not yet know but am capable
of knowing; I am not predicated (no inherited schema contains me), but the world
I inhabit is predicated: knowable by way of trial and error, God-given perhaps but
secular in its operations; I can learn to negotiate objects and others in the familiar
space and time of this schema, obtaining property as I go; my doing this confirms
reflexively my identity as an agent in my own life (property referring simultane-
ously to what I own and to what is “proper to me,” mine alone); I cannot obtain
everything, but if observant, prudent, and self-aware, I can get what I deserve.
I am, it seems, everyman. I am also white-male-bourgeois-developmental acquisi-
tiveness. Therefore, one last element is required of this narrative: something that
will allow it to continue speaking to my projects while at the same time honoring
my Judeo-Christian conviction that the systematic career of selfhood is an exercise
not of virtue but of vice. The narrative must be effectively moralized, yet without
repudiating the earlier givens. This is not only not easy, but probably impossible.
Enter Kant.
Kant shows, first (in Paul Guyer’s words), “that the validity of both the laws of
the starry skies above as well as the moral law within had to be sought in the legis-
lative power of human intellect itself” (1992: 2). Legislative: the moral law within
is as rule driven as Newton’s obedient comets. Second, despite the fact that, as
material phenomena, we are—like all phenomena—unfree, at our unreachable
noumenal core we cannot know that we are unfree, and we must therefore, to be
human, act as though we are free. Thus, Kant arrives at the categorical imperative:
“Act in such a way that you always treat humanity . . . never simply as a means, but
always . . . as an end” (as cited in Guyer 1992: 322). Others conceive and pursue their
ends, even as I conceive and pursue mine. Newton’s famous Second Law of Motion
becomes moralized. It is no longer that what I do to you rebounds on me, but
rather that I am forbidden to encroach on your freedom, even as you are forbidden
to encroach on mine, for we each have our own motions in mind.3
This Enlightenment narrative is torn by opposed convictions: on the one hand,
a story of self-flourishing, as far as one can take it; on the other hand, a story of
self-disciplining, treating others as ends rather than means. Others as ends—a tall
order for a narrative that has so prioritized the knowing subject, has in fact posited
the reality of others and objects as knowable only because answerable to the sub-
ject’s categories for knowing them. This is a story in which I come first, in which
you become recognizable only because you enter into my categories for apprehend-
ing you. You reduce to what I know you as. Levinas—a twentieth-century religious
thinker and philosopher—repeatedly attacks this story, showing that the subject at
its center engages in no real risk; everything I encounter eventually reduces to my
categories for encountering it. Levinas calls this master plot of Western discourse
“a return to Ithaca,” a return to self-sameness in which all my ventures are, thanks
to later recognitions, recovered and grounded.
Anatomy of Realism
We may briefly test this Enlightenment narrative—with its contradictory emphases
on both my flourishing and my need to respect yours—by developing an anatomy
of fictional realism that resembles it, in four parts: introducing the subject, famil-
iarizing the subject, space and time travel, and recognition. Realist fiction intro-
duces the subject by bringing him close-up. Close-up—like Jane Austen’s Emma
and Charles Dickens’s Pip—but not too close-up—as Benjy Compson of Faulkner’s
The Sound and the Fury and Stephen Dedalus of Joyce’s Ulysses are too close-up.
Reliably close-up, as well: not like Kafka’s Joseph K., whom “someone must have
traduced, for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morn-
ing”: a narrative situation putting us in a familiar bedroom with the protagonist
all right, but (as we have seen) there’s something wrong with that room, something
that was never before wrong with it, something we’re never going to find out. In
realism, we will find out fully what’s “on his mind” or “in his path.”
Next, familiarizing the subject: the novelistic canvas is immediately peopled
with others and their social norms. The protagonist’s developing familiarity with
these others is doubled by the reader’s developing familiarity with them all; the
capacity to recognize others proceeds swiftly. Not that realism does not deal in
misrecognitions, but it shapes them mainly in the form of mistakes eventually set
right—as in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, a host of Wickhams in time replaced by
modernism 305
Darcys. Misrecognition in modernism tends to be more stubborn, perhaps irre-

versible; in much postmodernism it is no longer even pertinent.
Next, space and time travel: in realism, the hero and the reader move around a
lot; such moving around is always pedagogic. The realist world of space and time,
because lawful, accommodates an incremental series of Lockean trials. Initial
sightings prepare for later, reliable ones. As Descartes established doubt to be ini-
tiatory, and as Locke stressed ignorance to be the first step toward knowledge, so
certain entities on the realist canvas will be misread when first presented, so that
they may be, eventually, accurately reread when re-presented. Anyone observing
from a neutral position would concur, as though to say, “This is how things are,
you need not take my word for it.”
Finally, recognition: realism’s sublime moments center on recognition. Con-
sider Pip’s long-withheld encounter with Magwitch, that stormy night in Pip’s
chambers. Virtually everyone who matters—Miss Havisham, Estella, Magwitch,
Joe, and most of all Pip himself—comes suddenly into a new and disturbing focus.
Such recognition scenes appear as crescendo moments of realism—clarifications
of an entire life, made possible by coming to know one’s world better, and thus
oneself better.
How does the realist protagonist manage to rise above the flow of his own life
in time and space, and eventually to see who he really is? Such experience becomes
fruitful only if the protagonist’s identity is assumed to be a coherence sustained
throughout time. Time is a disinterested friend of Enlightenment subjectivity; the
conscious I of the Enlightenment possesses reliable memory. This model of identity
is atemporal. Pip has to (and can) remember his past accurately, as Maggie Tulliver
and Anna Karenina suicidally remember theirs. Memory cannot be evaded; real-
ism launches its recognitions by way of that resource: was blind, but now I see.
This is the bread-and-butter story of Western fiction; it moves with a systolic-
diastolic rhythm of eventual progress and enlightenment, of coming to know the
territory. Why, and how, do modernist writers refuse this story?
Here are some suggested answers. First, that bread-and-butter story of progress
can be unbearably smug—and, second, not just smug but colonizing. It assumes
that the rest of the world is somehow just out there waiting for our getting to know
it better, to master it better. Its figure/ground model is out of whack: the figure
(the individual at the center of the narrative) so large, the ground (all that sur-
rounds him/her) so small. John Maynard Keynes once remarked, “I don’t think
one realises how very discrete (in the mathematical sense) one’s existence is” (as
cited in Banfield 2000: 112). One’s existence as discrete, infinitesimal within the
immeasurable field of countless others: you wouldn’t realize this by reading the
canon of Western realist fiction. Such fiction is committed, as Virginia Woolf put it
in a gender context, to producing mirrors that make the (male) subject look twice
his size. Modernism corrects this visual error by puncturing the balloon of male
project, reducing its sway. Made smaller, the male subject shares a canvas with
others whom he does not succeed in knowing and converting to dimensions of his
self-sameness.
As we have seen, the Enlightenment narrative of coming to know assumes law-

ful time and space as awaiting the mapping energies of a knowing subject. Is this
everyone’s favorite story because it proposes that we are a species that sustains
identity in our course through space and time? (Would we still so believe in the
coherence of personal identity if we did not have numberless narratives telling us,
“It exists, it really does”?) Western narrative may be shaped primordially to these
purposes. As Peter Brooks (1984) puts it, narrative “perverts” time by represent-
ing human behavior as a mastering of time by way of achieved self-recognitions:
returns to Ithaca. I understand such “perversions” to enact a human fiction at once
necessary and without foundation (or, as James Joyce would say, founded on the
void). Unlike our nonhuman pets, we do not, and cannot, inhabit a temporality
wholly unfurnished with the shapings proposed by narrative. We accommodate
time, perforce, by perverting it.
Jean-Paul Sartre describes this trick in his novel Nausea (1938): “This is what
I thought: for the most banal event to become an adventure, you must . . . begin
to recount it. This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he lives
surrounded by his stories and the stories of others . . . and he tries to live his own
life as if he were living a story. But you have to choose: live or tell” (1964: 39). Live
or tell: live a life without knowing how it comes out, or tell a life from the end-
supplied perspective of knowing how it comes out. The binary is, of course, too
sharp: a form of living uprooted from every retrospective order provided by telling
is no form at all, but rather chaos or insanity. Yet the binary lets us grasp a central
distinction: realism tends to evade precisely this problematic of time, while mod-
ernism seeks to take it head on. Realism knows it is returning to Ithaca. It tells its
story from the (unannounced) perspective of an Ithaca already returned to: the
boat is docked before the adventure on the water begins. By contrast, the modern-
ists produce narratives that are difficult precisely because they dislocate the act of
“telling” so that it might better represent the unmasterable conditions of “living.”
The moment of now—sheer presence—becomes opaque without the clarifications
provided by what went before and that prepare for what comes after. Freud is the
theorist of opaque presence, of subjectivity unmoored from its legible becoming in
time. He is the doctor of unknowing. For this story in the realm of fiction, we go
to Proust, Kafka, and Faulkner.
Modernist Unknowing
We begin with some of Freud’s fundamental ideas: defenses and repression as shap-
ing forces guaranteeing that the subject is, at the same time, other than itself; the
uncanny as a spatial fault line testifying to ego’s “bleeding” into space and warping
modernism 307
it; trauma as the wound to psyche that makes it inhabit a time frame simultane-
ously then and now (the subject “bleeding” into time). These Freudian concepts
emerge in the work of Kafka, Proust, and Faulkner as narrative forms (just as real-
ist narrative configures Enlightenment convictions as narrative forms). I do not
propose Freudian readings; rather, I argue that Freud’s seminal concepts reemerge
in modernist fictional procedures. Uncanny space turns unlawful; things slip, lose
their familiarity (or are hauntingly familiar even though unknown). Unbound
time forfeits linearity; progress comes to a halt. Modernist narrative involves the
discovery, not of who one is (the drama of knowing), but that one is other. As the
fictional subject’s compact with reconfirming space and time founders, a poetics
of knowing cedes to one of unknowing.
One further Freudian term—anaclisis—allows us to measure the stakes of a
shattered compact between the subject and the outer world. In seeking to under-
stand the origin of sexual instincts, Freud distinguishes between anaclitic and
autoerotic activities.4 Freud’s narrow distinction is between the earliest infantile
instincts that “lean upon” the mother’s milk itself, and a later separation/sexual-
izing of these instincts as they move away from any necessary object. (First, the
infant instinctively seeks the life-sustaining milk, and then, more playfully, the
breast that contains the milk but is gradually becoming a sexualized object in
itself, and thereafter any number of potentially sexualized objects unconnected
with “milk”—a trajectory that launches the unplotted history of human sexual-
ity.) The term “anaclitic” has, however, taken on a larger reference. It describes
not the instinct’s “leaning,” but rather the infant’s “leaning”—in Jean Laplanche’s
terms—“on the object, and ultimately a leaning on the mother” (1985: 16, emphasis
original). “Leaning on the mother”: anaclisis figures a sort of elemental socializing
or bonding between infant and mother. More broadly, I read as anaclisis the rela-
tion of the subject to already familiar space, space previously “leaned on” and made
safe by association, so to speak, with the mother’s breast, space located on the path
of ego maturation.5 Uncanny space, by contrast, is space removed from familiarity,
no longer breast-sanctioned, space you can do nothing with—like the space you
find yourself in, for example, when you’ve become a noxious insect and your own
bedroom is suddenly a prison.
When the unthinkingly anaclitic pact between knowing subject and famil-
iar world collapses, space and time, “here” and “now,” no longer function as law-
ful, cooperative frames for being. The Enlightenment drama of a subject coming
to know ceases to operate. In such conditions, the subject itself—“I”—alters as
well. A microscopic and ceaseless traffic among all three terms—subject, space,
time—replaces the more easily manageable figure/ground polarity implicit in the
drama of the singular Cartesian subject. In the older Enlightenment model, a fore-
grounded res cogitans moves through doubt and learns to gauge accurately a back-
grounded res extensa. By contrast, modernism’s representational schema draws
on different tenets, produces a different figure/ground—one that might best be
understood as phenomenological.
Modernist Representation and

Phenomenology
Since my argument centers on the philosophizing enacted through literary
form, I only sketch here some basic phenomenological tenets. A range of late-
nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Western thinkers (F. H. Bradley, Henri
Bergson, Franz Brentano, and Edmund Husserl among them) were engaged in
reconceptualizing the embodied subject’s ways of inhabiting and registering
the exterior world. Oversimplifying, one may say that, in their work, individ-
ual consciousness appears less as the separate subjective lens through which a
Hume would despair of arriving at lawful objective conclusions, and more as
the participatory “field” within which world apprehension continuously occurs.
Consciousness and the world preengage each other, producing in individuals
the experience of a lifeworld. Husserl claims that our minds never grasp “the
matter straight out,” but rather how things “ ‘appear.’ For this reason, they are
called ‘phenomena,’ and their most general essential character is to exist as
the ‘consciousness-of ’ or ‘appearance-of ’ the specific things” (1973: 50). With
Heidegger’s publication of Being and Time (1927), phenomenology emerges (and
for the next two decades remains) as a major current in European philosophy,
marking the existentialist thought of Gabriel Marcel, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas,
and Sartre.
I make no claim as to influence. (It is likely that, apart from Proust’s knowing
some of Bergson’s work, none of my novelists read these philosophers.) Rather,
I seek to disengage some common intuitions that shape my writers’ representa-
tional strategies, and one leaps into view. In modernist fictional practice things
tend (more aggressively than in realism) to enter representation as perceived or
“intended” by consciousness. Of course, Enlightenment thought also understands
the subject’s grasp on the object as phenomenal alone, but subject and object—an
immaterial res cogitans and a material res extensa—remain oppositional terms. By
contrast, phenomenology stresses the mental framing of world perception so as to
bond inseparably subject and object; subject and world are “hard-wired” into each
other.
As Merleau-Ponty puts it, this is, pace Descartes, “a philosophy for which
the world is always ‘already there’ before reflection begins—as an inalienable
presence” (1973: 72). I am always inserted in the world; all my analyses of it are
affected by that preobjective insertion.6 Merleau-Ponty again:
It is because it is a preobjective view that being-in-the-world can be

distinguished from every third person process, from every modality of the res
extensa, as from every cogitatio, from every first person form of knowledge—
and that it can effect the union of the “psychic” and the “physiological.” . . . We
must therefore avoid saying that our body is in space, or in time. It inhabits
space and time. (1999: 152, 155)
modernism 309
“Here I am,” in phenomenologically oriented modernist fiction, means not that a

separate “I” happens to find itself in space and time, but that the (embodied) “I”
cannot be responsibly thought apart from the space and time it always inhabits.
In this cohabiting, a certain subset of res extensa—one’s body—gets reconceptual-
ized as the inalienable grounding of res cogitans: not alien body but lived body. As
Heidegger puts it in his study of Nietzsche, “we do not ‘have’ a body; rather, we
are ‘bodily’ ” (as cited in Merleau-Ponty 1999: 124). With a different set of assump-
tions, Freud arrived at a similar view. The body “speaks” the being, “speaks” it
more revealingly, often, than the mind.
“Here I am,” an incarnate being moving in space/time. In realism, the sub-
ject’s capacity for movement is taken for granted; the narrative focuses instead on
res cogitans’s various projects. In phenomenologically inflected fiction, however,
the details of the embodied subject’s lifeworld—an array of orientational arrange-
ments prior to, more intimate than, the pursuit of projects—become inexhaustibly
pertinent. These writers are more likely to attend to the elemental world-furnish-
ing that makes human being possible. Heidegger writes:
When we speak of man and space, it sounds as though man stood on one side,
space on the other. Yet space is not something that faces man. . . . Spaces, and with
them space as such—“space”—are always provided for already within the stay of
mortals. . . . To say that mortals are is to say that in dwelling they persist through
spaces by virtue of their stay among things and locations. (1977a: 334–35)
Levinas understands this primordial insertion of embodied being into familiar

space/time as enjoyment itself—that unthinking orientational confidence that
I have been calling anaclitic. Levinas writes:
Dwelling is the very mode of maintaining oneself . . . as the body that . . . holds
itself up and can. . . . The “at home” is not a container but a site where I can,
where, dependent on a reality that is other, I am, despite this dependence or
thanks to it, free. It is enough to walk, to do, in order to grasp anything, to
take. . . . The site, a medium, affords means. Everything is here, everything
belongs to me. . . . The possibility of possessing, that is, of suspending the very
alterity of what is only at first other, and other relative to me, is the way of the
same. I am at home with myself in the world because it offers itself to or resists
possession. (1969: 37–38)
If these two passages seem familiar in their claims—however unfamiliar their

vocabulary—it means that they reprise an assumption about the subject in space/
time already central to realist protocols: that human being is at home there. Taken
for granted and therefore unspoken in Enlightenment thought, that assumption
gets articulated—put into thought—in twentieth century phenomenology, allow-
ing us to see writ large the anaclitic dimensions of our pact with space/time.
Yet a crucial difference obtains in the later schema. The phenomenological
model binds subject, space, and time as radically interdependent terms (whereas
Enlightenment thought, Cartesian-wise, grasped the subject as essentially free of
its setting). No embodied subjects without immersion in space/time; no absolute
space/time indifferent to embodied subjects. The terms are wholly correlative.

Finally—and this is the point I have working toward—the articulation of subject/
space/time as radically bonded carries with it the possibility of the bond’s rupture.
In Enlightenment thought neither such a pact nor its rupture is readily conceiv-
able. By contrast, much modernist philosophy and fiction engages this intimate,
moment-by-moment pact (“here I am”) by way of exploring its rupture. Indeed,
the shattering of the subject/space/time bond is the signature event in the mod-
ernist fiction under discussion. Levinas has already let us see how this scenario
of at-home-ness—furnishedness—sustains itself by converting the alterity of the
other into dimensions of the same. What is modernist shock if not the arrival of an
alterity that cannot be so converted?
Before resuming that analysis by way of the assaulted modernist subject, let us
stay with Levinas’s terms a bit longer. Although his concern is philosophical rather
than literary, he identifies the logic that drives progressive realist motion through
space and time. The wayfaring subject, engaging a set of suspended obstacles (alter-
ity), eventually manages to negotiate these obstacles, converting them into a con-
tinuation of the same. In so doing, he returns home. In these terms, realism is the
infinitely rewritable story of Ulysses making his way through alterity as he heads
toward Ithaca. This drama of turning other into self—of coming to possess it as
knowledge, as challenge met and resolved—is, as I argued above, the Ur-narrative
of Western realist fiction and Enlightenment philosophy.
Finally, Levinas characterizes not just the logic and the temporality of realist
representation, but its seductiveness, as well:
[We are dealing with] an experience always anticipated and consented to…. The
given enters into a thought which . . . invests it with its own project, and thus
exercises mastery over it. What affects a consciousness presents itself at a distance
from the first . . . is represented, does not knock without announcing itself, leaves,
across the interval of space and time, the leisure necessary for a welcome. What
is realized in and by intentional consciousness offers itself to protention and
diverges from itself in retention, so as to be, across the divergency, identified and
possessed. This play in being is consciousness itself: presence to self through a
distance, which is both loss of self and recovery in truth. (1998: 101–2)
Attended to with sufficient care, this knotty description reveals the temporality
of realist plot as an unfolding of experiences anticipated, consented to, accommo-
dated, eventually mastered. Knock, knock; who’s there? Realism informs us who,
maintains the good manners of announcing the intrusion in advance and provid-
ing time for it to be appropriately welcomed. The other then enters the field of
intentional consciousness as something partly recognizable in advance (it permits
protention), as well as something rewardingly recognized later as slightly different
(its retention in consciousness is corrective). Across this divergency—the other’s
manageable alteration over the time of encounter—the other is “identified and
possessed,” becoming, for the subject thus encountering it, an event in the career
of the same. Finally, this game of the subject’s loss and recovery—of consciousness
at first inadequate to its encounters but eventually adequate to them—enacts the
modernism 311
temporality that “grounds” identity: to lose and then to recover oneself by engag-
ing others in ongoing time just is identity. Time—within the anaclitic realm of
realism—is the medium in which, encountering others, we (re)become ourselves.
I have entered into this discussion of phenomenology because Enlightenment
philosophy—be it idealist or empirical—is typically unprepared to analyze the
teeming traffic that occurs at this microscopic level of “here I am.” Its epistemolog-
ical project is focused elsewhere. To recognize what is at stake when this obscure
traffic goes awry and orientation fails, I have briefly drawn from the work of Heide-
gger, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas. Despite his insistence on human furnishing,
Heidegger concedes that orientation may fail. “In anxiety, we say, ‘one feels ill at
ease [es ist einem unheimlich].’ . . . We can get no hold on things. In the slipping
away of beings only this ‘no hold on things’ comes over us and remains” (1977b:
103). Unheimlich: the reverse of canniness, of the “I can” of intentional identity.
David Krell glosses this negative liability in Heidegger as follows: “Such intricate
contexts of meaning—which are usually implicit in our activities and become vis-
ible only when something goes wrong, when the hammer breaks or the bulb burns
out—constitute what Heidegger calls ‘world’ ” (1977: 20).
The broken hammer, the burned-out bulb, the interrupted enjoyment of a
“world”: when our subject/space/time contract shatters, “here I am” shifts from
capacitation to arrest, from orientation to errance and obsession. “Obsession tra-
verses consciousness countercurrentwise,” Levinas writes,
is inscribed in consciousness as something foreign, a disequilibrium, a
delirium. . . . In the form of an ego, anachronously delayed behind its present
moment, and unable to recuperate this delay—that is, in the form of an ego
unable to conceive what is “touching” it, the ascendency of the other is exercised
upon the same to the point of interrupting it, leaving it speechless. (1998: 101)
Space here becomes opaque (I cannot name what is “touching” me), time loses its
“re-presentational” docility (I cannot catch up with what is marking me and will
not release me). Such a subject has exited from the soothing familiarity that Levi-
nas calls “the disappearance of what could shock” (1969: 124). This is the subject
who claims our attention in the work of Kafka, Proust, and Faulkner. Wherever
he is going, it is not to Ithaca. His distress registers an unknowing penetrated by
anxiety, an unpreparedness fraught with fear and trembling.
Time and Space as Trouble

in Modernist Fiction
I indicated at the opening of this chapter that I would proceed, as fiction itself
proceeds, by way of compelling particulars. Let us consider now, in uninterrupted
slow motion, the particulars of temporal trouble—of trauma—in Proust. Such
trauma unfolds (the verb is too bland) as a breaching of the intersubjective bonds
we unthinkingly require in order to be at all. Reduced to merely oneself, the subject
fails to cohere. Lack reasserts itself whenever the anaclitic frame (within which we
experience the world outside ourselves as familiar, reliable, breast-sponsored) rup-
tures. Proust’s most moving instance of this dynamic occurs when Marcel, anx-
ious about his grandmother’s health, comes upon her unannounced:
Alas, it was this phantom that I saw when, entering the drawing-room before
my grandmother had been told of my return, I found her there reading. I was
in the room, or rather I was not yet in the room since she was not aware of
my presence, and, like a woman whom one surprises at a piece of needlework
which she will hurriedly put aside if anyone comes in, she was absorbed in
thoughts which she had never allowed to be seen by me. Of myself—thanks
to that privilege which does not last but which gives one, during the brief
moment of return, the faculty of being suddenly the spectator of one’s own
absence—there was present only the witness, the observer, in travelling coat
and hat, the stranger who does not belong to the house, the photographer
who has called to take a photograph of places which one will never see again.
The process that automatically occurred in my eyes when I caught sight of my
grandmother was indeed a photograph. We never see the people who are dear
to us save in the animated system, the perpetual motion of our incessant love
for them, which before allowing the images that their faces present to reach
us, seizes them in its vortex and flings them back upon the idea that we have
always had of them, makes them adhere to it, coincide with it. How, since into
the forehead and the cheeks of my grandmother I had been accustomed to read
all the most delicate, the most permanent qualities of her mind, how, since
every habitual glance is an act of necromancy, each face that we love a mirror
of the past, how could I have failed to overlook what had become dulled and
changed in her, seeing that in the most trivial spectacles of our daily life, our
eyes, charged with thought, neglect, as would a classical tragedy, every image
that does not contribute to the action of the play and retain only those that
may help to make its purpose intelligible. But if, instead of our eyes, it should
happen to be a purely physical object, a photographic plate, that has watched the
action, then what we see, in the courtyard of the Institute, for example, instead
of the dignified emergence of an Academician who is trying to hail a cab, will
be his tottering steps, his precautions to avoid falling on his back, the parabola
of his fall, as though he were drunk or the ground covered in ice. So it is when
some cruel trick of chance prevents our intelligent and pious tenderness from
coming forward in time to hide from our eyes what they ought never to behold,
when it is forestalled by our eyes, and they, arriving first in the field and having
it to themselves, set to work mechanically, like films, and show us, in place
of the beloved person who has long ago ceased to exist but whose death our
tenderness has always hitherto kept concealed from us, the new person whom
a hundred times daily it has clothed with a loving and mendacious likeness.
And—like a sick man who, not having looked at his own reflexion for a long
time, and regularly composing the features which he never sees in accordance
with the ideal image of himself that he carries in his mind, recoils on catching
sight in the glass, in the middle of an arid desert of a face, of the sloping pink
protuberance of a nose as huge as one of the pyramids of Egypt—I, for whom
modernism 313
my grandmother was still myself, I who had never seen her save in my own soul,
always in the same place in the past, through the transparency of contiguous
and overlapping memories, suddenly, in our drawing-room which formed part
of a new world, that of time, that which is inhabited by the strangers of whom
we say “He’s begun to age a good deal,” for the first time and for a moment only,
since she vanished very quickly, I saw, sitting on the sofa beneath the lamp,
red-faced, heavy and vulgar, sick, vacant, letting her slightly crazed eyes wander
over a book, a dejected old woman whom I did not know. (1981, 2: 141–43)
Freud understands trauma as a breaching of the psyche’s defenses sufficiently vio-

lent to cause unmanageable distress. The psychic system, overwhelmed, fails to
reorder itself, thus revealing how progressive time itself is dependent on the func-
tioning of the intentional ego. As the ego loses its resourcefulness, so movement
in time loses its linearity. One enters, as it were, a state of fibrillation; purposive
behavior ceases. A trap in the past has been resprung. Proustean trauma arises
otherwise. It involves not a collapse into the suddenly reemerged and engulfing
past, but rather an unbearable recognition of one’s present. In the space of a single
moment, Marcel sees something traumatizing: what does he see?
First, he sees that seeing itself is reciprocal (a shared pact rather than a pri-
vate resource), and therefore without guarantee, liable to collapse. All his former
seeings of his grandmother have been unknowingly conditioned upon a recipro-
cal seeing-back that underwrote their value. Her inestimable value resides in this
mutual seeing; he remains Marcel so long as she remains his grandmother. But her
physical insertion in space and time makes her, at the same time, a being continu-
ously altering and materially unreachable—a situation repressed by the needs of
sanity itself, but unfortunately revealed in this untoward moment. Looking at her
not looking at him, he discovers himself as “the spectator of [his] own absence.”
Literally, he is not there in her field of vision; more deeply, he is not there unless
sanctioned by her field of vision. Uncorroborated, he gazes at his own absence.
Insofar as all oriented human being depends upon the unthinking sponsorship
of others, Marcel momentarily ceases to be. Need it be said that no realist novel
entertains these quietly terrifying notions, that no realist novel fails to deliver the
drama of coherent individuation? If, as Adorno proposed, modernist art “brings to
light what is infantile in the ideal of being grown up” (1997: 43), Proust reveals what
is grown up in thinking through the aporias of subjective interdependency.
“How could I have failed to overlook . . .?” Marcel asks, and we remember
Joseph K.’s suddenly distressful “How could he have failed to notice that?” In the
Kafka example, space suddenly becomes opaque, closed to subjective mastery. In
the Proust example, time lurches into view, complicating what had seemed to be
only a familiar entity in space. Marcel realizes that for the longest time now he
has not been seeing his actual grandmother. He has been seeing her as though his
commerce with her in space were time-free; but a photographic lens is ruthlessly
time-focused, on the present. The pathos of the passage resides in the fact that it
takes her not seeing him, for him to see her, for once, as she is. There is no iterative
becoming here, no cozy continuity of being-in-time. Rather, there is a convulsive
alteration, lasting a moment only, and then the curtain drops again. She appears
once more as what she used to be. The disinterested camera, capturing only what is
actually there, registers (in Proust’s model) the world as seen without a self, intol-
erably up-to-date. More, the inhumanity of this disinterested gaze is potentially
Marcel’s as well, the camera merely an alibi.
The unfurnished grandmother appears with unmatchable distinctness here,
bathed in the estranging and disfiguring medium of time. To see her like this is
to recognize all human being in space as continuously time-marked, and to real-
ize that the normal time-coefficient for such seeing is long out-of-date, the act of
seeing “an act of necromancy.” The passage speaks of “a new world, that of time,”
which is “inhabited by strangers.” Though Proust uses the phrase “êtres de fuite”
only for beings in the field of desire, we grasp here its larger resonance. A stranger,
his grandmother is being whisked away from him in time, no less than her body
will later be (faculty by faculty) taken from her during her illness. In time there are
only decomposing strangers headed for unspeakable destinations. The passage’s
ultimate message is unknowing, “a dejected old woman whom I did not know.”
What bursts forth in Proustean trauma is not the Freudian return of the repressed
but the rupture of the time-annealing intersubjective compact.7 The present breaks
through—it breaches—and all is disfigured. Marcel sees that, unknowing, he has
all along been seeing the past in place of the present. In this moment he becomes
a stranger—to the loved one, to himself—for the new seeing (the past as past, the
present as present) is not bearable (and mercifully not there for long: Proustean
subjects falsify time as they falsify space, necessarily, involuntarily). Thus undone,
it is Marcel who emerges as “the stranger who does not belong to the house.”
The psychic operation in Proustean trauma is eviction from the familiar—a
forced relinquishment of the maternal breast. The passage insistently reminds us
that, as the pact is mutual, the damage done to her registers in him. The analo-
gies offered—the tottering Academician, the sick man—point to a male subject.
Indeed, the sick man whose strategies consist in eluding awareness of his own ill-
ness figures less the grandmother than Marcel himself, perpetually buoyed by the
reciprocal love of mother and grandmother, ignoring his irreversible physical pas-
sage through time. Deprived of his outdated, supportive mirror, he is forced to see
himself in uncanny fashion, to catch up with himself: the nose as huge as a pyramid
weirdly intimating the momentarily emergent, detested Jew in Proust himself—the
Jew otherwise concealed, or projected outward upon Swann, Bloch, and others.8
Such glimpses, however they differ from each other, imply the same collapse—a
falling back upon one’s always inadequate personal resources, a return to incurable
lack. Indeed, all such Proustean scenes of collapse rehearse the original ejection of
Marcel from his mother’s kiss, his mother’s breast, his mother’s womb.
None of this unfolds as realism, for it forfeits the Cartesian premise of res
cogitans, an independent entity capable (through clear and distinct reasoning) of
accurately mapping others in space and time.9 Proustean time is not a transparent
medium within which one progressively pursues one’s project. Or, rather, one can
do this, one does do this, and the work of the Proustean text is to reveal its terminal
modernism 315
inauthenticity. Terminal in the sense of permanent nonarrival: one cannot arrive

in Proust (as Tom Jones, Pamela Andrews, Elizabeth Bennet, Eugene Rastignac,
and Rodion Raskolnikov all arrive at their appropriate destinations). But one can
go back—find out where one has been, even who one has been. In all this we find a
rebuke of bourgeois plotting, a repudiation of instrumental achieving—an under-
mining of the Enlightenment-inspired projecting (attempted, failed, revised) that
constitutes the main business of Western realism for more than 200 years.
What might Kafkan realism look like (if one could fantasize it)? I suspect it
would center on the unfolding career of the Assistant Manager in The Trial. This
figure—ambitious to rise to the top of his career ladder, unquestioning as to the
ends that motivate his effort (focused wholly on the means of arrival)—has no
trouble with space, time, or others. His compact is unshakable. Spiritually empty,
he embodies his culture’s materialist norms, and (if asked) he would say what the
chief clerk says to a suddenly disabled Gregor-turned-giant-insect: “[T]his is not
the season of the year for a business boom, of course, we admit that, but a season
of the year for doing no business at all, that does not exist, Mr. Samsa, must not
exist” (Kafka 1995: 77–78). Time as money is the convention within which worldly
projects are pursued, attained, failed, or revised. One fine day he will die, but the
Assistant Manager will not experience his death until then. His world makes sense,
it has a plot, that plot is realism.
As all readers of Kafka know, nothing happens this way. In place of the Assis-
tant Manager, we find figures like Georg Bendemann and Gregor Samsa and Joseph
K. Although they themselves are unsurprising (how often they long to become
Assistant Managers!), their pathway suddenly becomes a thicket of surprises. Noth-
ing is any longer what it was; even an innocent bank storage room can now house
a lurid scene of whipper and victims. It is as though an all-transforming report
had been issued off-stage, terminating the successful deployment of habit, career,
project. Canniness no longer applies; nothing is any longer reliably familiar.
As for Faulkner, he seems to have taken seriously Nietzsche’s remark (which he
never read): “I’m afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in gram-
mar” (1954: 483). Faulkner invents an entire rhetoric for saying trauma—for word-
ing psyches under assault and immersed in space/time in ways unpremeditated by
Newtonian realism. The subject shatters, lives incoherently a scene occurring both
then and now. To see how this undoing occurs, let us examine (once more in the
uninterrupted slow motion of compelling particulars) young Joe Christmas from
Light in August (1932)—rushing from a scene of violence at the dancehall to Bob-
bie’s room, thinking to elope with her:
He knocked. There was a light in her room, and another at the end of the hall,
as he had expected; and voices from beyond the curtained windows too. . . . He
knocked again, louder, putting his hand on the knob, shaking it, pressing his
face against the curtained glass in the front door. The voices ceased. . . . He
knocked again . . . he was still knocking when the door . . . fled suddenly and
silently from under his rapping hand. He was already stepping across the
threshold as if he were attached to the door, when Max emerged from behind
it, blocking it. He was completely dressed, even to the hat. “Well, well, well,” he
said. His voice was not loud, and it was almost as if he had drawn Joe swiftly
into the hall and shut the door and locked it before Joe knew that he was
inside. Yet his voice held again that ambiguous quality, that quality hearty and
completely empty . . . like a shell, like something he carried before his face and
watched Joe through it. . . . “Here’s Romeo at last,” he said. “The Beale Street
Playboy.” Then he spoke a little louder. . . . “Come in and meet the folks.”
Joe was already moving toward the door which he knew, very nearly running
again, if he had ever actually stopped. . . . suddenly he saw the blonde woman
standing in the hall at the rear. He had not seen her emerge into the hall at all,
yet it was empty when he entered. And then suddenly she was standing there.
She was dressed, in a dark skirt, and she held a hat in her hand. And just beyond
an open dark door beside him was a pile of luggage, several bags. Perhaps he did
not see them. Or perhaps looking saw once, faster than thought I didn’t think she
would have that many Perhaps he thought then for the first time that they had
nothing to travel in, thinking How can I carry all those. But he did not pause,
already turning toward the door which he knew. It was only as he put his hand
on the door that he became aware of complete silence beyond it, a silence which
he at eighteen knew that it would take more than one person to make. But he did
not pause; perhaps he was not even aware that the hall was empty again, that the
blonde woman had vanished again without his having seen or heard her move.
He opened the door. He was running now; that is, as a man might run far
ahead of himself and his knowing in the act of stopping stock still. The waitress
sat on the bed as he had seen her sitting so many times. She wore the dark dress
and the hat, as he had expected, known…. And in the same instant he saw the
second man. He had never seen the man before. But he did not realise this now.
It was only later that he remembered that, and remembered the piled luggage in
the dark room. (1985: 555–56)
This is not Kafka’s boarding-house room where you perceive only inadequately
who is there, yet the subject-space contract operative in realism is no less fun-
damentally revoked. What in the Kafkan encounter emerges as anxiety registers
in Faulkner as velocity and incomprehension. Joe is traveling, as it were, at more
than human speed—faster than thought can keep up with—and he runs pell-mell
into disaster. Nothing in this space—which nevertheless had earlier been perfectly
familiar—answers to his expectations. He encounters, with a vengeance, the “bro-
ken hammer” and “burned out bulb.” The door opens suddenly, pulling Joe as of
its own accord, and Max emerges, dressed for a purpose Joe is too rushed to worry
about not understanding. Max’s words, with their racist barb, are likewise incom-
prehensible, but Joe can’t attend to them, is moving too fast to register anything
accurately. The blonde woman appears and disappears, jerkily, the representation
of her movement aligned with Joe’s heaving sensory apparatus rather than with her
own deliberations. Joe’s consciousness may be intentional in the phenomenologi-
cal sense, but it lacks intention in any other sense. He is unbearably unfurnished.
In this definitive moment of his life—Joe’s 15 years on the road follow hard on this
traumatic encounter—he can get nothing straight, just registers, camera-like, the
incomprehensible sense-data coming at him. Why are they dressed this way? How
can he carry all those bags? Who is this stranger?
modernism 317
He doesn’t so much think these questions as become, fleetingly, penetrated

by them one after the other, like events on a speeding movie reel, each one just
short of enough repetitions to permit coherent representation. The entire scene is
punctuated with “perhaps”; the narrative act refuses to sort out Joe’s spatial/tem-
poral experience, to reduce it to retrospective epistemological order. (Retrospec-
tive arrangement in Faulkner tends to be ideological rather than accurate.) When
the encounter is over, he’s on the floor, abandoned and bleeding profusely: he has
learned nothing. His final moment will repeat this one: again flat out on the floor,
castrated and with his life pouring out of him, still having learned nothing. Light in
August is fiercely nonpedagogic. Again, the cinema analogy is pertinent: the sound
and fury of experience exploding upon the subject (in the subject) in the form
of unmasterable encounters, at a pace faster than thought can digest. Conscious-
ness, despite Enlightenment guarantees of accountability, is a defective resource
for mapping these spatial/temporal events.
Faulkner’s experimental rhetoric savages the decorum of realism’s gathered
subject-verb-predicate; the reader is hurled unprepared into the nongrammatical
turmoil of the text. When, later in Light in August, Joe walks toward Joanna Burden’s
dark house, about to commit the central act of the novel—to slit her throat—he
thinks not “I am going to do something” (the basic syntax of agency: subject moving
through verb and affecting object), but rather “Something is going to happen to me”
(1985: 486). “Something” is the subject, not Joe. He does not know what he is on the
edge of doing; he can conceptualize it only as a shapeless yet monstrous event about
to happen to him, not her. The “central act,” I called it, and therefore the act that
every reader feels compelled to assess. But an act requires an actor, and Faulkner’s
syntax represents Joe as acted-upon, not agent: how judge him at this moment?
Faulkner’s great work shares with modernist fiction more generally a refusal to
indulge in the fatuity, so to speak, of a judgment-centered stance toward its materi-
als. If reason-governed “trial” is a central activity fueling realism—a careful trying
of the materials over time, to get them (and thus oneself in relation to them) into
finer focus—then it is telling that perhaps the most famous modernist novel turns
“trial” on its head. Kafka’s Trial enacts, as Adorno put it, “the trial of a trial”: a
trial of the subject’s capacity to know, to convert the other outside itself into an
adventure of the same. Joseph K. learns no more about his trial, at novel’s end, than
he knew when it began. Likewise, Joyce’s Bloom learns nothing in his 24 hours,
Mann’s Castorp passes his seven years atop the mountain as in a heady yet person-
ally weightless parenthesis, Proust’s Marcel is stuck for several thousand pages in a
fluid time zone somewhere between childhood and early manhood. These novels
refuse, like Faulkner’s, to grant their protagonists the ever more accurate judg-
ments that constitute maturation.
For such modernists, the underlying drama of the subject that countless realist
novels deploy and redeploy—yet another story of the “I” of “I can”—has revealed
its parochialism. This well-worn story of Ulysses heading home remains enclosed
within a self-certainty incompatible with the trial of spirit itself. Such certainty—in
Levinas’s terms—“remains the guide and guarantee of the whole spiritual adven-
ture of being. But this is why this adventure is no adventure” (1998: 99). To stage
an adventure that would really be one, modernists must go beyond the repertory of
narrative moves sanctioned by realism, for realism assumes the continuity of cul-
tural norms (norms open to tweaking as a protagonist moves progressively in famil-
iar space/time). It remains friendly to its reader: it presupposes a shared and viable
world. It is of limited help if, as a writer, you want to make a great deal of trouble.
I conclude by returning to time as trouble. Trouble tends to be mounted in
realism so as to be surmounted; it is a distracting force field presented in order
to be removed—like dark clouds in a weather mandated as sunny. Realism’s
insistence on capacitating its protagonists is constitutive of the genre. Finally, its
Enlightenment conviction that individuality is the priceless condition of human-
ity, that individuals negotiate their own lives against a complex yet manageable
social backdrop, disposes realism toward moralized dramas of individual resolu-
tion. Given Sartre’s “live or tell,” realism chooses “tell” and labors cunningly to
make it look like “live.”
In a number of courageous ways, modernism chooses “live,” and its work is cut
out for it. How can you write about “live” without turning “live” into “tell”? Ulti-
mately you cannot, but the heroism of these three writers—a heroism regarded as
naive and rarely attempted by postmodern followers—resides in their innovative
attempts to do so. In their efforts to return the movement of being from dry land
to being’s native water—its ongoing and unenlightened present—they brought
more of the trouble of life in time and space into their narrative forms. The truth
is, we are not knowing in the ways realism proposes. The larger part of our actual
experience is uninsured by knowing. Our lives unfold in an unending present that
becomes opaque whenever it escapes the grooves of habit or expectation. In real-
ity, we learn slowly in time, by dint of many repetitions. Nor do we own our space
except in tentative, provisional, and short-term ways—our relation to the outer
world resembles renting (or indeed borrowing) more than it does owning. For
many aspects of our lives, we cease, after a certain point, to learn at all. Who is
wise in love? Who even becomes wise in love? These are unfriendly truths about
life in time and space, and the work of modernist fiction is to convey their impor-
tance while continuing to honor their unfriendliness. It is the “ungratefulness” of
such labor—modernism’s putting into narrative what narrative seems designed to
repress—for which we should be most grateful.
NOTES
1. A case could, of course, be made for other writers, but I focus on Proust, Kafka,
and Faulkner because they are the supremely haunted modernists. They are haunted, not
(as in Freud) by repressed sexuality, but more broadly and unpredictably—their texts
intimating a sort of underweave of the socially unworkable. Among those writers missing
from this essay, James Joyce is the indispensable, indeed iconic, modernist, yet Joyce’s
modernism 319
texts are not revealingly haunted. The play of consciousness fi lls the pages of Ulysses.
He has little interest in repressed psychic materials; Bloomian consciousness is amply
“streamed” onto the page. When Joyce wants to access his characters’ unacted desires,
he invents in “Circe” less a discourse of subject repression than one of fantastic social
carnival. Virginia Woolf, likewise, writes a modernist fiction centering on the dance
of consciousnesses, not that which lies repressed beneath it. She produces in Septimus
Smith a breathtaking case study in psychosis, not a neurotic who reveals symptomatically
the psychic disturbances he ignores. One would not align him with the duplicities of a
Charlus or Legrandin, the obsessions of a Quentin or Joe Christmas, the blankness of
an unreadable Joseph K. Thomas Mann might well have a claim on my argument—his
great work is laden with the collapse of exhausted Western norms—yet Hans Castorp (to
take a telling instance) has little unconscious. Mann distributes Castorp’s possibilities
into the array of surrounding characters atop the magic mountain, even as he plays out
the implications of Aschenbach’s collapse into the surrounding Venetian setting and
imagery. D. H. Lawrence, no less than Mann, was creatively attentive to the collapse
of the “knowing subject,” but he is finally more interested, like André Gide and
Hermann Hesse, in representing release than in dramatizing the kinds of arrest that are
central here. I omit Robert Musil because his protagonists lack what Proust figures as
“infrared”—an interior cathecting energy intimating that what lies beneath the surface
is shaping unawares the surface itself. My point is less to disqualify all other modernist
candidates than to shore up, briefly, the logic of this particular grouping. I should say, in
closing this note, that the claims proposed throughout this essay derive from the book-
length argument I make in Unknowing: The Work of Modernist Fiction (2005).
2. Stephen Kern draws on Eugene Minkowski (an early-twentieth-century French
psychiatrist) to identify the two most prominent subject stances toward the future
in this period of technological explosion: “activity” and “expectation.” Minkowski
aligned “activity” with instrumental, Cartesian man, reshaping the social (and natural)
world as never before possible. But, in his psychiatric practice, Minkowski more often
encountered “expectation.” Its terms are startlingly apt for Kafka: “[Expectation]
englobes the whole living being, suspends his activity, and fi xes him, anguished. . . . It
contains a factor of brutal arrest and renders the individual breathless. One might say
that the whole of becoming, concentrated outside the individual, swoops down on him
in a powerful hostile mass, attempting to annihilate him” (Kern 1983: 90). Impotence
to master future space and time—this emerges as both Kafka’s narrative signature and
a precise rebuke of Western technological man’s unprecedented mastery over space and
time in the early twentieth century.
3. I emphasize here the nonnegotiable priority of the (single) subject in Kantian
epistemology, but Richard Eldridge reminds me that, on the ethical plane, Kantian
autonomy is everywhere doubled by (and weightless without) a larger social project of
freedom for all, not just for the (single) subject. These two stances require each other
even as, from the perspective governing my argument, the tensions between them are no
less telling.
4. As Jean Laplanche has pointed out (1985: 15–16), editor and translator James
Strachey’s term “anaclisis” is unnecessarily erudite (derived from a Greek term that
means “leaning”); Freud’s Anlehnung is a familiar noun for “leaning” or “propping.”
5. Since the term “anaclitic” is an important marker in my discussion of modernist
fiction, I need to emphasize two points. First, although the term is Freudian, my usage
of it is not. The readings that follow have everything to do with the sudden experience of
defamiliarized space, but little to do with scenarios of repressed desire. Second, although
I apply the term to realist practice, the Enlightenment narrative prefers to imagine the
questing subject as a free-standing agent immersed in lawful, objective space and time:
no “leaning” conceded. The burden of much of my analysis of that narrative was to
unearth the “anaclitic” premises that—by making the spatial/temporal world amenable
to subjective encounter and exploitation—underwrite realism’s progressive plot.
6. The following passage from Kierkegaard reads as presciently phenomenological:
A system for existence cannot be given. Is there, then, not such a system? That
is not at all the case. . . . Existence itself is a system—for God, but it cannot
be a system for any existing spirit. System and conclusiveness correspond to
each other, but existence is the very opposite. . . . In order to think existence,
systematic thought must think it as annulled and consequently as not existing.
Existence is the spacing that holds apart; the systematic is the conclusiveness
that brings together. (1968: 107)
The world, for God, may be a system, but for us who exist in it, it can only be an
unsystematic lifeworld. Our constitutive way of inhabiting space and time registers
existence as a something “that holds apart,” not a “conclusiveness that brings together.”
7. If we wish to speak of repression here, it involves not a character’s desires but
an entire representational schema’s will not to know. For realism will not “know” what
modernism here grasps: that our compacts are ruptured by an immersion in time no
longer domesticated but impersonally hostile to our project of renewed self-sameness.
8. Compare this vignette from Freud’s “The Uncanny”:
I was sitting along in my wagon-lit compartment when a more than usually
violent jolt of the train swung back the door of the adjoining washing-
cabinet, and an elderly gentleman in a dressing-gown and a traveling cap
came in. I assumed that . . . he had taken the wrong direction and come into
my compartment by mistake. Jumping up with the intention of putting him
right, I at once realized to my dismay that the intruder was nothing but my
own reflection in the looking glass on the open door. I can still recollect that I
thoroughly disliked his appearance. (1955: 248 n.)
9. Heidegger strikingly echoes Proust when he describes (in “Building, Dwelling,
Thinking”) the space we inhabit as aligned with our psychic investments rather than
matching any surveyor maps: “When I go toward the door of the lecture hall, I am
already there, and I could not go to it at all if I were not such that I am there. I am never
here only, as the encapsulated body; rather, I am there, that is, I already pervade the space
of the room, and only thus can I go through it” (1977a: 335).
REFERENCES
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Mass.: MIT Press. (Original work published in 1967.)
—— . (1997). Aesthetic Theory (R. Hullot-Kentor, trans.). Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press. (Original work published in 1970.)
Banfield, A. (2000). The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell and the Epistemology of
Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Brooks, P. (1984). Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York: Knopf.
Faulkner, W. (1985). Light in August. In J. Blotner and N. Polk (eds.), William Faulkner:
Novels 1930–1935. New York: Library of America. (Original work published in 1932.)
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the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (vol. 17). London: Hogarth Press.
Guyer, P. (1992). Cambridge Companion to Kant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Heidegger, M. (1977a). “Building, Dwelling, Thinking.” In A. Hofstadter (trans.), Martin
Heidegger: Basic Writings. New York: Harper and Row. (Original work published 1954).
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New York: Harper and Row. (Original work published in 1949.)
Husserl, E. (1973). “Phenomenology.” In R. Zaner and D. Ihde (eds.), Phenomenology and
Existentialism. New York: Putnam. (Original work published in 1927.)
Kafka, F. (1968). The Trial (W. and E. Muir, trans.). New York: Schocken. (Original work
published in 1925.
—— . (1995). “The Metamorphosis.” In W. and E. Muir (trans.), Franz Kafka: The
Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and Other Stories. New York: Schocken.
Kern, S. (1983). The Culture of Time and Space: 1880–1918. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press.
Kierkegaard, S. (1968). Concluding Unscientific Postscript (D. F. Swenson and W. Lowrie,
trans.). Princeton: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1846).
—— . (1983). Fear and Trembling (H. V. and E. H. Honig, trans.). Princeton: Princeton
Krell, D. (1977). “General Introduction.” In D. F. Krell (trans.), Martin Heidegger: Basic
Writings. New York: Harper and Row.
Laplanche, J. (1985). Life and Death in Psychoanalysis (J. Mehlman, trans.). Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press. (Original work published in 1970.)
Levinas, E. (1969). Totality and Infinity (A. Lingis, trans.). Pittsburgh: Duquesne
—— . (1998). Otherwise Than Being: Or Beyond Essence (A. Lingis, trans.). Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press. (Original work published 1974.)
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1973). “Preface” to The Phenomenology of Perception (C. Smith,
trans.). In R. Zaner and D. Ihde (eds.), Phenomenology and Existentialism. New York:
Putnam. (Original work published in 1945.)
—— . (1999). The Phenomenology of Perception. In D. Welton (ed.), The Body: Classic and
Contemporary Readings. Oxford: Blackwell. (Original work published in 1945.)
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Nietzsche. New York: Viking. (Original work published in 1888.)
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T. Kilmartin, trans.). New York: Random House. (Original work published in
1913–1922.)
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published in 1938.)
 
POSTCOLONIALISM
simona bertacco
Literature, we are told, is vitally engaged with the living

situation of men and women: it is concrete rather than
abstract, displays life in all its rich variousness, and rejects
barren conceptual enquiry for the feel and taste of what it is to
be alive. The story of modern literary theory, paradoxically,
is a flight from such realities into a seemingly endless range
of alternatives.
—Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory
This is what one reads in the final chapter of Literary Theory. It is not at all sur-
prising that, in 1983, Eagleton decided not to mention the contribution that post-
colonial theories were bringing to the field of literary studies. It was in line with
his intention to prove that all literary theory is ultimately political, rather than
only the most recent and explicitly ideological schools of thought, to which he
admittedly acknowledged only a cursory reference. Although he did somehow
compensate for the omissis in the second edition of the book, published 10 years
later, I take the “gap” in Eagleton’s work to be interesting as a sign of a generalized
“presbyopia” of literary criticism up to the 1980s, meaning that the range of texts
actually entering critical analyses were still mostly those belonging to the English
canon, from Spenser to Shakespeare and Milton, from Blake to Wordsworth and
Coleridge, from Austen to Dickens and the Brontës, and so on. Yet, before becom-
ing a synonym for a supposedly radical theory, “the postcolonial” started its circu-
lation as early as the 1950s—as far as the British context is concerned, slightly later
in the American one—as a fast-growing body of writing, coming from around
the world but published by “metropolitan” publishing houses.1 This writing was
postcolonialism 323
perceived as “new” for the way in which it handled the English language and fused
together stylistics coming from diametrically opposed traditions. Starting with
the First World War, such writers as Rabindranath Tagore and Raja Rao (from
India), Claude McKay (from Jamaica), and Solomon Plaatje (from South Africa)
had started publishing their works in which they took up Western genres and cou-
pled them with indigenous forms, vocabularies, and rituals of narrative transmis-
sion. These texts were crammed together under the “commonwealth literature”
rubric, considered as a subcategory of English literature and evaluated in relation
to the standards of excellence pertaining to English literature “proper”: timeless-
ness and universality.
Today we may well stand at the opposite end of the spectrum: it is rare, unless
it is the sign of an intentional refusal, to find people totally unacquainted with
novels such as Things Fall Apart (1958)—possibly the first postcolonial classic—by
Chinua Achebe, or Midnight’s Children (1981) by Salman Rushdie, or Foe (1986)
by J. M. Coetzee. The extent of the change is visible if we pick any English text-
book and browse how works such as The Tempest, Robinson Crusoe, Jane Eyre,
or Heart of Darkness are presented. In terms of literary history, postcolonialism
has occupied the space opened by modernism’s fascination with the unfamiliar
and the primitive. In 1952, Faber and Faber published Nigerian Amos Tututola’s
The Palm-Wine Drinkers, while Editions du Seuil published Martinican Frantz
Fanon’s Peau Noire, Masques Blancs [Black Skin, White Masks]. The former dis-
played Yoruba culture and an English language visibly uprooted from its British
geography and syntax; the latter was a study of black subject formation, pointing
to the distinction between the universal man of European Enlightenment and the
black man emerging from the historical experience of colonization and slavery.
Fanon had written his work in the thick of the Algerian war of independence, at
times comparing the need for a struggle for national autonomy to the mental bat-
tle to be waged against the canonical texts of the European tradition. The polemic
nervousness of Fanon’s works derives in large part from the extreme closeness
between the text and the world. A similar tension between text and world can
be found in many literary works coming from formerly colonized countries. In
the hands of what Fanon calls the “Native intellectual,” the literary work forces
its way into current history and the struggles that define it. It aims at serving
a social and pedagogical function, paving the way toward the “decolonization
of the mind” that Ngugi wa Thiong’o describes as a way out from the maiming
image of selfhood that colonial education has left behind in postcolonial nations
after independence.
It should not be forgotten that the rise of English as a discipline occurred dur-
ing the phase of British High Imperialism, with the 1835 English Education Act
defining the study of English texts as instrumental to breed subjects who learned,
through the great classics of English literature, “the moral values for correct
behaviour and action” (Viswanathan 1989: 93), both within and without the Brit-
ish Isles. In the famous words of Lord Macaulay, in his “Minute on Indian Educa-
tion” (1835), the goal was to form an indigenous class “English in taste, in opinions,
in morals, and in intellect” (1995: 430). As moral exempla, the literary texts that
were selected aided in establishing the equivalence between English and Christian
morality upon which the whole rationalization of colonial expansion rested and
gave a clear social function to the teaching and reading of literature that, ironically,
has become one of the essential tenets of postcolonialism itself.
If early postcolonial texts were primarily intended to fight in Fanonian terms
against the European canon, a countercanon has by now been established and
sanctioned, so much so that one has the impression that some of the new postcolo-
nial texts are simply following a formulaic pattern. An understanding of postcolo-
nialism today cannot possibly ignore “the disciplinization of the field” as Deepika
Bahri defines it (2003: 37), and its largely pedagogical frame of reference. Postco-
lonial studies has been, first and mostly, a critical maneuver nurtured in literature
departments: it has placed under scrutiny the allegiances of literary texts to the
ideological systems that were the backbone of the imperial enterprise, investigat-
ing the relationship between literature and society, literature and knowledge, lit-
erature and value. What we are dealing with today is a literary postcoloniality,2
which is a “nervous condition,” in Fanon’s words, in the sense that while the liter-
ary imagination is cherished to the extent to which it contributes to affecting the
“symbolic overhaul” (Boehmer 2005: 3) necessary to redress the inadequacies of
the past, it is simultaneously cast in an order of existence that is political rather
than imaginative.
Caught in the middle ground between the ideological and the aesthetic, the
postcolonial text has quite consistently been valued more for its supposed political
message than for its formal excellence. Such a hermeneutic stance posits “textual-
ity as endemic to the colonial encounter” (Gandhi 1998: 142) and to its aftermath.
The postcolonial outlook on textuality is marked first by a preponderant atten-
tion given to the historical conditions of the production of culture—what Edward
Said calls the necessary “worldliness” of texts—which reattaches itself to the tra-
dition of cultural materialism. But also and most of all, it is marked by a way of
understanding the British Empire in textual terms—looking at the ways in which
texts translated the ideology of colonialism into their narratives and forms—
mostly derived from poststructuralism via deconstructionism. In Elleke Boeh-
mer’s words, the text, as “a vehicle of colonial authority, symbolized and in some
cases indeed . . . performed the act of possession” (2005: 14). If the whole colonial
enterprise of taking possession and knowing the new lands was performed textu-
ally (through settlers’ journals, letters, travel writing, maps, edicts, treaties, etc.),
one of the major vehicles of anticolonial struggle could not but be, again, the texts
themselves—this time read and written by the colonized subjects. Postcolonial
literary theory has therefore favored a notion of subversive textuality whereby the
agency of texts—of literary texts in particular—is automatically transposed onto
the social and political spheres.
One unavoidable critical voice in the debate concerning textual politics is
that of Homi Bhabha, whose The Location of Culture—a volume published in
1994 that brings together many of his earlier essays—provided a timely, at times
postcolonialism 325
overcharged, vocabulary for the study of the “new” textualities. In a sense, all of
Bhabha’s thinking originates from a deconstruction—rather than negation—of
dualisms in all their forms, not least the one between theory and politics, as a
way to respond to the syncretism of contemporary societies and their cultural
forms: “[I]f we are seeking a ‘worlding’ of literature, then perhaps it lies in a criti-
cal act that attempts to grasp the sleight of hand with which literature conjures
with historical specificity, using the medium of psychic uncertainty, aesthetic
distancing, or the obscure signs of the spirit-world, the sublime and the sublimi-
nal” (1994: 12).
The erasure of the traditional boundary between theory and politics dispenses
both with an abstract notion of theory—which is replaced with a Sartrian and
Fanonian theory of/as practical knowledge—and, most important, with the reifi-
cation of the Other typical of Western critical thought, where the Other is framed
and cited as an object of knowledge and, as such, deprived of “its power to sig-
nify” (Bhabha 1994: 31). From a postcolonial perspective, the language of critique
takes on a political role when it attempts to negotiate the antagonistic affi liations
and citations of the postcolonial text, when it consciously locates itself outside
familiar traditions and conditions of knowledge, when it stands “at the significa-
tory boundaries of culture, where meanings and values are (mis)read or signs are
appropriated” (34). Only if and when critical theory focuses on the problem of
the enunciation of cultural difference3 is the revisionary potential of theory fully
exploited.
The import of Bhabha’s reflection on textual politics is easily understood if
we think, for instance, about using it to enter the complex ambivalence of many
apparently imitative works produced in colonial times where the imperceptible
variations of both native and colonial models can be deeply engaged in the post-
colonial struggle. Yet, precisely because literature has often been used in these
contexts as a real weapon against, first, colonial rulers and, then, local regimes,
the notion of textual politics has a dangerous side that cannot be overlooked. The
many instances one can provide of exiled artists and intellectuals, of writers whose
works have been banned or who have been imprisoned because of their writing,
such as Nuruddin Farah or Wole Soyinka—or killed, such as Nigerian Ken Saro-
Wiwa—reveal the crucially different meanings that the adjective “political” still
bears in these contexts. In fact, if, in Bhabha’s reading, textuality is to be read and
is political agency, the “seamlessness” of such a passage from civil action to aes-
thetic representation is problematic, to say the least, and it has not gone unnoticed
within postcolonial studies itself. The danger that such foregrounding of postco-
lonialism as a discursive maneuver brings with it is represented by its “slippery
political significations” (Shoat 1992: 322), resulting in the loss of the potential for
antineocolonial resistance in today’s world.
It is from Marxist critics that the most scathing critiques of literary postco-
loniality have come. Aijaz Ahmad, for instance, attacks the call to indeterminacy
implicit in how the postcolonial is marketed in the late imperial marketplace of
our times, an indeterminacy that strips all cultures of their historicity and density
and reduces them “to those lowest common denominators which then become
interchangeable” (1995: 290). Ella Shoat, as well, demands that more attention be
paid to the “politics of location” of the postcolonial phenomena under scrutiny: as
“a signifier of a new historical era, the term ‘post-colonial,’ when compared with
neo-colonialism, comes equipped with little evocation of contemporary power
relations” (326). Yet this “habit of silence” toward the present is all but politically
innocent and risks leaving “no space, finally, for the struggles of aboriginals in
Australia and indigenous peoples throughout the Americas, in other words, of
Fourth World peoples dominated by both First World multi-national corporations
and by Third World nation-states” (327).
Indeed, the number of texts being criticized for failing to bring forward a rec-
ognizable revolutionary project has increased, in line also with the flourishing of
what Derek Attridge terms “instrumental approaches” (2004: 12) in literary stud-
ies. In institutional contexts especially, the postcolonial text is read as a repository
of sociological or historical information, and its “aesthetic dimension” put to one
side as trivial and not essential to the communication of its social message. Such
an interpretive stance seems to contradict the notion of textual politics shaped by
postcolonial theory and takes us back to the question of what it means to respond
to a work of literature as literature, when the postcolonial qualifier enters the pic-
ture. Does literature change sides—from the aesthetic to the political—when it
exits the “first” or “old” world and enters the “third”?
Postcolonial or Literary?
The peculiar status of postcolonial literature—successful by virtue of its margin-
ality—provides an interesting case study for exploring the import of literature in
our times. Not only has, in fact, the literary text been revived by the social function
acknowledged to literature in the former colonies, but also the study of literature
has been remarkably brought back to prominence in, mostly Western, universities.
In the age of information and communication technology, moreover, the visibility
of postcolonial literature has been responsible for an unprecedented populariza-
tion of literary authors and critics who, like Rushdie and Said, have received a cov-
erage from the mass media hardly common for writers or theorists in our times.
Now, if we are to look for at least one crucial change brought about by the impact of
postcolonial literatures, it certainly resides in the acknowledgment “that historical,
geographical and cultural specifics are vital to both the writing and the reading
of a text” (McLeod 2000: 5). In the pages of postcolonial literary works, we can
observe how the European notion of literature has been altered by the encounter
with native notions. Especially, we can observe how the modes of Western writing
have influenced and have been influenced by local modes of orality; we read texts
that are written in several varieties of English or that, by mixing English with other
postcolonialism 327
languages, break the chain traditionally binding together nation, literature, and
language. Postcolonial literature, by casting itself off from literature tout court,
exposes its supposed nonliterariness: its emphasis tends to be on the political
or ideological rather than on the aesthetic, and this view has led the way for the
first wave of postcolonial theory preoccupied with dismantling the epistemologi-
cal violence of the process of colonial “othering” (sensu Gayatri Spivak), as Said’s
explorations of the invention of the Orient for the sake of the Western eye and
Bhabha’s analysis of the ambivalence and anxiety embedded in colonial discourse
have brought to the fore.
Postcolonial literatures intervene right here, upsetting the possibility of build-
ing a liberal education today through syllabi still anchored to nineteenth-century
ideas of one language per people and of national culture as the expression of the
“unified spirit of a people” (Sommer 2003: 4). Postcolonial literary works remind
us that many people live day in, day out in more than one culture and more than
one language. They accept that what can be said in one language may be inexpress-
ible in another, and they write works that negotiate the irreducible spaces between
cultures in a variety of ways: thematically, by foregrounding figures of interpret-
ers and translators, larger-than-life characters living between different imaginative
and cultural worlds; stylistically, by developing sophisticated techniques of code-
switching, by translating or mixing languages in the same sentence, by letting inter-
ferences from one language affect their way of using the other, and so forth. When
these techniques are used in literature, language steps out of its ordinary function
and becomes exhibitionist and intensive—in other words, unfamiliar. According
to Evelyn Ch’ien, the “weird English” of postcolonial literatures (in English) may
well be seen as the “new language” of contemporary literature (2004: 6), and I am
sure this statement may scare quite a lot of people in literary circles around the
world. As readers, we often encounter textualities that are indocile, sometimes
secretive, and that make the experience of reading, to say the least, uncomfort-
able, as I show in the final section of this chapter. The writings the postcolonial
has popularized are novel in that they have reworked traditional narrative forms
from the multicultural and multilingual contexts they have developed in, but they
are also new in the sense that they have provided a point of access into debates that
are controversial, yet crucial, not only to rethink the function of the literary in our
society, but also to think about the horizons of our knowledge, how we locate our-
selves on the world map when we read, and what this entails in terms of taste and of
notions of aesthetic excellence. Postcolonial literature attempts to offer a broader,
non-Eurocentric, perspective on some traditional questions of theory concerning
what is or could be considered literature, what criteria should guide the evaluation
of meaning and excellence, and how indebted even these notions are to the West-
ern literary tradition (see Ashcroft et al. 1989: 181).
I turn to a well-known novel, Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999), and the unflattering
staging of the role of a literary education in society that it offers, for an illustration
of the working of the postcolonial literary imagination. In the opening of the novel,
which is set in Cape Town roughly in the years 1997–1998, a professor of English,
pouring quotations from the “classics” of English literature, is turned into a moral
monster by his own intoxication with the literary at the expense of the real. David
Lurie, a white South African professor, has a crush on one of his female students.
He takes her home once and, to the notes of Mozart’s clarinet quintet, asks about
her literary passions. The rhetorical stance of pertinent questioning and answering
that is part of the seduction scene reveals the incommensurability of the cultural
worlds they inhabit. He, for whom “as long as he can remember, the harmonies of
The Prelude have echoed within him” (Coetzee 2000: 13), has to bear with Melanie
Isaac’s emotionless comment, “I liked the Wonderhorn stuff” (12).
The first four chapters of the novel capture with admirable sharpness the con-
tradictions of the teaching of literature in contemporary postcolonial countries,
and not only there. David Lurie is the emblem of the redundant humanist in an
educational system struggling to find adequate ways to teach about forgiveness
and reversal of fortunes in a way that makes students into responsible citizens of
the new Republic of South Africa. The text weaves together an intricate pattern of
implied quotations from Baudelaire, Shakespeare, Flaubert, Manzoni, lines taken
from Wordsworth, Byron that subtly wink at the Western reader who is “lured,”
like the naive Melanie Isaacs, to take—even though just for a few pages—his side
but who then will feel bad about it for the rest of the novel. Yet the foundations
supporting this sophisticated and decadent literary edifice are laid bare as morally
gangrened already in the novel’s opening when, after a fastidiously precise descrip-
tion of Lurie’s affair with a prostitute named Soraya, the truth about his scholarly
status is revealed: “Once a professor of modern languages, he has been, since Clas-
sic and Modern Languages have been closed down as part of the great rationaliza-
tion, adjunct professor of communications. Like all rationalized personnel, he is
allowed to offer one special-field course a year, irrespective of enrolment, because
that is good for morale” (3) He is an academic dinosaur whose upbringing makes
him, or so he likes to believe, inappropriate for the role he is to fulfi ll in society. As
a professor, he is cast in the role of the educator.
We follow him in the classroom and observe him while he teaches Words-
worth’s Prelude.4 Here again, the contrast between the rhetorical mode of the lec-
ture and the experiential distance of the literary text, on the one hand, and the
real aims of the man delivering the lecture (he is trying to capture the attention of
his student-girlfriend), on the other, makes the scene emblematic in terms of its
metaliterary value. They are reading the stanzas that deal with the poet’s trip to the
Alps. “We don’t have the Alps in this country,” admits an increasingly frustrated
David Lurie, “but we have the Drakensberg, or on a smaller scale Table Moun-
tain, which we climb in the wake of the poets, hoping for one of those revelatory,
Wordsworthian moments, we have all heard about” (23). The pluralis majestatis is
yet another wink the author gives his model reader: the reference to the Alps, to
the archetypes of the imagination, appeal to a European or Western reader—to
me—but in his classroom, no one responds or reacts to Lurie’s questions. The
narrative voice—which speaks David Lurie’s own consciousness—translates this
clumsy silence in the following terms: “A man looking at a mountain: why does it
postcolonialism 329
have to be so complicated, they want to complain?” (21). The wording of the ques-
tion is interesting: it is not a poet, but a man; not the Alps, but a mountain. In the
process of cultural translation, from West to South, something of Wordsworth’s
poem went lost: the Alps are not, as David and his students know, the Drakensberg
or Table Mountain. Together with his students, we are left wondering about what
can actually be learned from Lurie speaking of “the great archetypes of the imagi-
nation we carry within us” (21): whose imagination is he actually talking about?
Whose archetypes? Especially, how are they to speak to the young people living in
today’s Cape Town?
What went missing in the operation of cultural translation of Wordsworth’s
poetry that Lurie is rather negligently performing is the poem itself as artistic cre-
ation, its ability to say something about the intensity of our response to nature in
terms that travel not only across time, but also across geography and culture, and
still ring a charming note. Indeed, what this scene offers is an ironic allegory of
colonial education: the English poem—the same poem that was used as a moral
exemplum by colonial educators—is miniaturized, and not because its expiration
date is past due, but rather because it is associated with a world, David Lurie’s,
that has gone sour. The bleak image of literature resulting from Lurie’s lectures
in the first chapters of Disgrace is deliberately juxtaposed against all that has been
said and written about the “political energies” of the literary text postulated by
postcolonial theory, a notion that—as Coetzee could know only too well—finds in
romanticism an important precursor.
If literature does not come out totally undone in Disgrace, it is by virtue of
Disgrace itself being a work of literature, and a fine one, existing not merely as a
work of local testimony, but as a work that expresses its tension with that real world
through its use of language, its structure, its style—in a word, through its form.
Disgrace is not a documentary text on life in republican South Africa, and it should
not be read that way. Too often postcolonial literature is read and raided anthro-
pologically as an “unmediated text” (Huggan 2001: 39) and used as a substitute
for historical or political analyses of national cultures, therefore bracketing any
aesthetic value the text may hold in itself. In this sense, Disgrace contains one of
the most complex lessons in reading one could hope for in order to give substance
to what, as a reader of literature, one is doing. By approaching the text as cultural
document, we read yet another account of the enormous costs in terms of human
lives of the injustice and irrationality that are part of the process of constructing
a national community out of a profoundly divided population. By looking at Dis-
grace as literature, by pausing on the rigorous precision of its narrative structure
contrasting with the anarchy of the world depicted, by following the gradual disin-
tegration of the literary floweriness of the beginning toward the dry, matter-of-fact
syntax of the end, in order to capture the ways in which meaning is layered, one is
actually drawn to direct attention to the literariness of the novel, to the subtlety of
a textuality that negotiates its thematic concerns with the distressing reality of the
new country through an allegorical construction that loses its clarity and faces its
impossibility as the story unfolds.
Disgrace is very interesting also in another respect. The relationship between

genders, even before that of ethnic groups, is given central stage and treated as
emblematic of the complex challenges the new South African society has to meet.
In the novel, the relationship between David Lurie and Melanie Isaacs results in
Lurie losing his teaching job, which literally undoes his life. Most important, how-
ever, it is David’s own daughter, Lucy Lurie, who is the one character who accepts
to pay for the violence of the past and who will take part in the building of the new
society. Lucy is a lesbian. She is raped by a gang of three black men and decides
to have the baby resulting from the rape and to become the third wife of Petrus,
her black neighbor and assistant as well as the protector of one of the rapists. Her
stoicism at the end of the novel is bewildering as well as disturbing. She does not
want to go back to Holland to raise the child; she wants to remain in South Africa,
but she understands she now has to play by new rules: “Yes, I agree, it is humiliat-
ing. But perhaps it is a good point to start from again. Perhaps that is what I must
learn to accept. To start at ground level. With nothing. Not with nothing but. With
nothing. No cards, no weapons, no rights, no dignity” (205).
In recent years, perhaps the thorniest debates concerning theoretical models
within the postcolonial field have concerned the issue of gender in non-Western
societies and cultures and its problematic relationship both with Western feminist
and postcolonial theories. The idea is that, if the postcolonial is to survive as a
viable critical discourse for the future, it will have to embrace the theoretical tradi-
tions that are forming in areas as diverse as the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa,
and India. In other words, even the current “womanist” phase of postcolonial
discourse seems to point toward a new—less metropolitan, more vernacular—
postcolonial discourse.
Critics such as Chandra Talpade Mohanti, Trinh Minh-ha, and Sara Sul-
eri—to name but a few—have contributed to this dismantling of the category of
the “native woman,” the “third-world” woman, as the emblem of oppression, mov-
ing away from what is perceived as the imperialism of “first-world” feminism,5 that
deploys homogenizing, and therefore colonialist, feminist criteria to achieve the
emancipation of women living at the four corners of the world. In other words,
liberal feminism, when it includes women of color in its discourse, seems to deploy
the iconic simplification that Said detected in the forms of Orientalism. Mohanti,
for example, argues for an analysis “of the discursive construction of ‘third world
women’ in Western feminism” (1991: 172). Despite a superficial similarity, Mohanti
points in an opposite direction with respect to Said’s theory—which has been
criticized for never actually stepping out of the literary and cultural horizon of
imperialism—and gestures instead toward a recuperation of the authenticity of
lived experience when dealing with postcolonial women. While this “enamorment
with the ‘real’ ” (Suleri 1992: 340) has its dangers, namely, a problematic return to
forms of essentialism, it might nonetheless be useful to keep an eye on the shifting
ground on which, as a European and white woman, I stand as a way of framing my
reading of the works by three women writers, from Somalia, Tobago, and Trinidad,
respectively.
postcolonialism 331
It is undeniable that, even today, non-Western women often appear as silent

silhouettes, mere figures of speech, in current humanitarian and political rhetoric.
They are often cast in the role of the seductive but passive objects of the colonial
and postcolonial orders. One need only look, however, at the news coming from the
“Orient” and the “South” of the world to understand the extent to which Western
ideas of emancipation may need some adjusting: the increase in popular esteem
that followed Sonia Gandhi’s “all feminine” resignation as India’s Prime Minister
in 2004; the hope for change that led Liberians to choose a woman, Ellen Johnson-
Sirleaf, as Liberia’s president and Africa’s first elected female head of state; and the
human rights achievements of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina are
all examples that should make us think, or think again, about the public roles that
women are playing outside the West. As much as there still remain gender—as
well as ethnic—inequalities in these countries (as well as in ours, one should add),
there also are actual wars of attrition being waged by women that, as Hazel Carby
argues, risk being “ignored in favour of applying theories from the point of view of
a more ‘advanced,’ more ‘progressive’ outside observer” (1982: 216).
If the postcolonial embodied, when it first emerged, the need for a revision of
commonly held assumptions about central and peripheral nations and cultures, it
seems quite natural that the most vexing questions emerging today from within
the field demand a further revision of dominant ways of seeing within the postco-
lonial project itself. Robert Young has identified an analogy between the develop-
ment of postcolonialism and feminism in political and philosophical terms; in his
view, both movements have performed a “conceptual reorientation” toward new
“perspectives of knowledges” (2003: 5) developed outside mainstream culture. Yet
it is an analogy that does not hold at a deeper level, and in fact yields to one of the
deepest fractures within postcolonial studies along the lines that oppose Western
women to Native women. In other words, when “the subaltern” is recognized as
gendered, a whole new story is about to be told, a story in which postcolonialism
and feminism themselves are forced to unveil their biased systems of knowledge—
postcolonialism for putting a universal (and male) colonized subject at the center
of its inquiry; feminism for presuming to speak for all the women in the world.
In her 1987 essay titled “French Feminism in an International Frame” (less
famous than her “Can the Subaltern Speak?”), Spivak puts her own education and
personal experience down for scrutiny in her attempt to criticize the conceptual
categories of both first-world feminism and male-centered postcolonial theory.
At the core of her argument is her own habit, as a young scholar, to approach
the works and experiences of “third-world” women through the far too abstract
lenses of Western feminist theory. Recalling a childhood memory of two washer-
women arguing with each other over who owned the river in 1949 India, Spivak
muses on how “for these withered women, the land as soil and water to be used
rather than a map to be learned still belonged . . . to the East Indian Company”
(1987: 135). Those women may well have known nothing of the events that were
rewriting Indian politics in those post-Independence years, but they certainly had
a clear idea of who the master of the water was. Instead of patronizing them, of
wondering, “What can I do for them?” the feminist critic should ask herself, “Who
is the other woman? How am I naming her? How does she name me? Is this part of
the problematic I discuss?” (150). The terms of the problem that Spivak is explor-
ing are engrained in the very constituency of an international or transnational
feminism. In her words:
The academic feminist must learn to learn from them [third-world women], to
speak to them, to suspect that their access to the political and sexual scene is not
merely to be corrected by our superior theory and enlightened compassion . . . .
How, then, can one learn from and speak to the millions of illiterate rural
and urban Indian women who “live in the pores of” capitalism, inaccessible to
the capitalist dynamics that allow us our shared channels of communication,
the definition of common enemies? (135)
If the colonial subaltern, in Spivak’s terms, is in no position to speak, the gen-
dered subaltern will be further removed from any position of enunciation. Where
does this leave us vis-à-vis the literary texts “written” by non-Western women?
Spivak’s deconstructionist method, her way of reading texts “against the grain”
in order to find, under the surface, the gaps, the silences, all the things that the
text does not openly “say,” leave us at a loss, as far as a message-seeking reading of
works of literature is concerned. However, there is a lesson in my view that we can
take with us: the emphasis on the need to learn to listen to the “other woman” in
her own terms, even if this entails losing our ground and moving on a foreign ter-
ritory: “The reader must accustom herself to starting from a particular situation
and then to the ground shifting under her feet” (Spivak 1993: 53). She will need to
watch her step, to turn to experts for specialist knowledge, to learn, if necessary, a
new language.
So much of the experience of reading postcolonial texts has to do with our
engaging with them through a Calibanic perspective, yet putting a Calibanic
perspective into practice—as Spivak urges us to do—is more easily said than
done. If it is true that today postcolonial literature is read much more widely
than in the past, it is likewise true that it is increasingly approached within a
world literature framework (and often in translation), therefore without the spe-
cific sociolinguistic knowledge that would unveil some of its local references.
The language of postcolonial literatures is mostly English, or another European
language, if we think of the postcolonial in global and discipline-based terms.
As a translator, Spivak has a good saying that when studying the literatures of
the global South, “you learn the pertinent languages with the same degree of
care” (2002: 106) in order to enter the new comparative field that postcolonial-
ism is bound to be. This is wishful thinking, at least for the time being. Postco-
lonial studies would profit enormously by being cast as the “new comparative
literature”: by learning also the non-European languages of postcolonial texts,
readers would learn to do away with exclusively Eurocentric canons, languages,
and cultures by becoming familiar with other textualities, syntaxes, vocabular-
ies. Attention given to the textual, or the literary, would put the postcolonial
literary text, at least partially, at bay from the exoticizing anthropological or
postcolonialism 333
pseudoanthropological readings whose main preoccupations Graham Huggan

sums up in the following terms: “[T]he desire for authenticity, projected onto
the screen of a ‘real Africa’; the insistence on the documentary value of literary
and, especially, fictional sources; the attempt to co-opt [African] literature into
a Euro-American morality play centring on the need to understand ‘foreign’ cul-
tures” (2001: 54).
An illustrative example of the ambivalence of reading (but also of writing)
comes from autobiography, the genre par excellence of Western individualism, but
also one of the major genres through which African women’s writing has acquired
visibility in the world. As Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson have pointed out,
“[T]his autobiographical ‘I’ is a Western ‘I,’ an ‘I’ of the colonizer, . . . complicit in
the West’s romance with individualism” (1998: 28), and this creates quite a few
problems for the expression of a non-Western sense of selfhood. One need only
think of the ethnographic practice of collaborative autobiographies where an
often illiterate native informant is helped by a Western interpreter to make the
story available and sometimes palatable to large audiences. Who is the author in
these texts? How might subjects brought up in the south of the world find a voice
through or despite this “I”? How much is it possible to overcome the shadows this
“Western I” casts once it is adopted as a point of articulation? And, second, who is
the implied reader of these autobiographical accounts? How much does this figure
of a model-reader account for the way in which the book is written?
By way of illustration of the complex maze of writing and reading sketched
above, I now turn to a novel by Waris Dirie, Desert Flower: The Extraordinary Jour-
ney of a Desert Nomad, published in 1998 in the United Kingdom, where the writ-
ing is the result of a collaboration between the protagonist of the events (the model
and U.N. ambassador Dirie) and the American journalist Cathleen Miller. This
book is part of its author’s active involvement in urging Western nations to punish
the practice of clitoridectomy as a crime against the bodily integrity of individu-
als and to admit it as a reason for political asylum. At the level of close reading,
however, the book poses a series of problems to the reader, none of which concern
its form. It is on this level that the hand of the Western enabler can be detected in
the work done to create a readable text, through the use of clear thematic structure
and of catchword titles for each chapter, such as “Becoming a Woman,” “Free at
Last,” or “On the Road,” pointing at important icons of Western liberal thought.
The story of this woman, delivered through a first-person narrative, is taken as
exemplary for Somali women, and the difference of Dirie’s cultural background
is made acceptable in the terms in which it is filtered through a Western idea of
physical and mental emancipation:
Another benefit of growing up in Africa was that we were part of pure nature,
pure life. I knew life—I wasn’t sheltered from it. And it was real life—not some
artificial substitute on television where I’m watching other people live life. . . .
I am grateful that I’ve experienced both lives—the simple way and the fast
way. But without growing up in Africa, I don’t know if I would have learned to
enjoy life the simple way. (1998: 234, 236)
My reaction to this novel was, first of all, a reaction to a textuality that, as can be
inferred from the excerpt above, I felt was closer to journalism than to literature.
Yet, this was the text that most of my students (all of them women) actually enjoyed
the most out of a reading list featuring more remarkable literary works such as
Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga, Beloved by Toni Morrison, and The
Stone Virgins by Yvonne Vera: they found it readable and clear; many even went
so far as to buy it for their mothers and friends. The diversity of our reactions got
me thinking about how much, as a reader of literature, I was less prone to engage
myself completely with a text whose authorship I felt was somehow “tainted” from
the start. Where did my skepticism arise from? Was I projecting over the text—in
its nature as a postcolonial text—an essentialist or, even worse, a purist desire for
“authenticity”? Evidently, I cannot exclude this possibility. But the aspect that pro-
foundly disturbed me was actually another. As a woman from a country in which
practices of female genital mutilations are banned, yet are illicitly performed in
various immigrant communities, and the legal aspects of the matter are all but
clearly defined,6 I could not but react strongly to the message lying at the core of the
text and advertised in its final pages: am I competent enough in terms of cultural
knowledge in order to understand this issue in terms other than my own?
At the same time, this is one of the central issues to be faced, more and more
frequently, in modern societies, and one way or another, one is supposed to form
an opinion about it. Shouldn’t literary texts be useful tools to put one’s own values
to the test and, possibly, enlarge one’s scope of vision? In Spivak’s terms, was my
approach suited to hearing the “other woman” speak in her own terms? Was I being
too anthropological? Or too literary? Finally, I managed to reconcile myself with
my negative reaction to the novel. First, this was a clear example of that formulaic
wave that is affecting the postcolonial publishing world: the novel was marketed
and sold as literature when it was not meant to be read that way. Second, I could
not but feel the shadow of the Western “I” engrained in the genre of autobiography
covering, as Woolf wrote in A Room of One’s Own, quite a few corners of the issue:
the story is the account of the flight from a prearranged marriage of the young
protagonist from the Somali countryside to Mogadishu, and from Mogadishu to
London, and then to New York. Except for the first 84 pages, the whole narrative is
taken up by the Western emancipation of the young woman, which coincides with
the westward direction of her life journey. Could this be an example of that form
of “globalized high-tech feminism without frontiers” (Spivak 2002: 50) under the
attack of postcolonial feminists? That was my suspicion in the face of the moral
single-sidedness of the book. Desert Flower retains its value as part of U.N. ambas-
sador Dirie’s humanitarian campaign, and it deserves to be respected for the way
in which it makes available for discussion to a large audience an important issue
for contemporary multicultural societies; but it also stands as an example of the
formulaic patterns into which Western publishers have often fi ltered postcolonial
literature. In the words of Stephen Gray:
Ever since Joseph Conrad’s perennial Heart of Darkness (1899) that began the
century now closed, British and American readers have seemingly developed a
postcolonialism 335
bottomless appetite for the very untold horrors that Conrad’s work was meant
to deplore and which the “Dark Continent” appears—at least in the media
version—only too willing to keep feeding. (2000: xvi)
Calibanic Texts, Cannibal Readers

Most of this chapter has been dedicated to a questioning of the value of the canoni-
cal literary text from a postcolonial perspective. I turn now to two literary exam-
ples that, while giving the literary text a crucial role to play in today’s society,
contribute to broadening the gamut of forms the literary is taking in order to bring
my reflection to its conclusion. And by way of a response to the role of Romantic
poetry in contemporary South Africa, I return to poetry with the work of two
Caribbean writers, both now living in Canada, who attempt to answer the question
of what it means to write literature today. Social engagement emerges clearly from
their texts, but, as writers, their most radical struggle is the one waged against tra-
ditional constructs of womanhood and textuality.
A strong, at times overcharged, deconstructive pull is at work in Marlene
Nourbese Philip’s poetry.7 Her work combines a strong metaphorical qual-
ity with an equally strong experimentation in syntax and phonetics meant
to establish a sustained investigation into the appropriateness of the literary
and linguistic tradition to her writing. Hers is an instance of a deconstructive
poetics, a poetics that literally chews up the literary vocabularies of different
traditions and different places, and articulates, through a physically laborious
process that is captured on the page, its own struggle to ground meaning in
history and place.
She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (1989) is a difficult book to
read, a collection of verses with frequent prose interruptions, a book in which the
author faces the problem, for the African artists from the Caribbean, of writing
in a language “where the word, their word and the power to name was denied
them” (1994: 102). The volume is a radical and at times scathing critique of con-
ventional presuppositions, of all that goes without saying when we approach a
literary text, and a poetic text in particular. In the poem “Discourse on the Logic
of Language,” Philip offers some variations on the theme of natural language
and, by recourse to the parental figures of mother and father, creates the central
metaphor of the anguish of speaking with a language defi ned by and as vio-
lence. The fi rst deconstructive move the poem enacts has to do with the need
for adjustment in terms of reading habits: the reader has to choose whether to
read the poem from left to right, or from right to left. Choosing the latter way,
the fi rst texts that we fi nd are two italicized fragments of legal edicts concerning
the enforcement of language policy in the plantations. Edict I orders the mixing
of slaves in heterogeneous linguistic groups in order to disrupt communication
among slaves and therefore prevent rebellion. Edict II describes the punishment
attending the disobedients:
Every slave caught speak-

ing his native language shall
be severely punished. Where
necessary, removal of the
tongue is recommended. The
offending organ, when re-
moved, should be hung on
high in a central place, so
that all may see and tremble. (138)
History, language, experience come together in this highly convoluted text through
the assembling, with a collage-like technique, of various texts within it. The two
edicts on the right-hand side of the first and third pages encapsulate the voice and
the tone of the “father language,” the language of the law and, therefore, of colo-
nialism and slavery that the artist of African descent must necessarily confront. A
vertical column placed on the left-hand side of the same pages with the text written
in capital letters and going from the bottom to the top of the page, embodies its
opposite, the natural, soothing language of the body:
The mother then put her fingers into her child’s mouth—gently
forcing it open;
she touched her tongue to the child’s tongue, and holding the
tiny mouth open,
she blows into it—hard. She was blowing words—her words,
her mother’s words,
those of her mother’s mother, and all their mothers before—into
her daughter’s / mouth. (138)
The sensuous description of the mother breathing language into her daughter’s
mouth is placed alongside a slender sequence of words that constitute the lyrical
core of the poem, or the poem proper, and that occupy the center of the page that,
with a syncopated and repetitive pace, laments the loss of the mother tongue:
English
is my mother tongue.
A mother tongue is not
not a foreign lan lan lang
—a foreign anguish (136)
The phonetic pun on the words anguish/language underlines the physical “pain of
speaking when one’s tongue has been amputated” (Godard 1993: 162). By working
postcolonialism 337
intensely on the signifier, Philip writes a poem that embodies the outrage of the
violent act: the halting repetition of “lan, lan, lang” is the poem, sung with just the
stump of a tongue in one’s mouth, of that violation. Realizing that:
I have no mother
tongue
no mother to tongue
no tongue to mother
to mother
tongue
me
the speaking I can only conclude that she:
must therefore be tongue
dumb
dumb-tongued
dub-tongued
damn dumb
tongue (Philip 1994: 136)
The more the verbal text invades and expands on the page, is hybridized, its texts and
contexts multiplied, the more the poem as a sound creation is made hard to perform,
hard to utter, and would seem to move toward its impossibility. Unable to recite the
poem, the speaker is left speechless, inarticulate—in a word, dumb. This word, if
only for the number of times it is repeated, demands attention. Defined as something
or someone “lacking the faculty of speech, therefore silent,” but also “someone that is
stupid, ignorant, foolish” (Oxford English Dictionary), this word in this text suggests
another possibility: that she is speaking incorrectly because culturally and cerebrally
inferior. And, as a matter of fact, the prose explicatory section on the next page about
the neurological processes of speech in the de Broca and Wernicke areas of the brain
brings Philip’s critique full circle. Puncturing the pseudoscientific discourse with a
few lines on its racist undertones, Philip brings to the limelight the inevitable “world-
liness” of all forms of discourse, scientific as well as literary.
In a fashion rather typical of postcolonial works, the poetic text is complicated
in terms of layout and especially in terms of the interaction of diverse elements
within it: by using the “found text” strategy, Philip goes a long way to disrupt the
conventional space of the poem and to turn the language of the poem into the
embodiment, the written mark, of a very physical pain. As a poem, “Discourse
of the Logic of Language” does not read easily, or comfortably, since we have to
change our angle of reading, by turning the book sideways, in order to take it all
in. By focusing and making us, as readers, focus on literature as embodied experi-
ence of writing and reading, Philip is articulating a poetics that recognizes and
exploits the sensuous potential of words. The final metamorphosis of language
and poetry is in fact mediated through the body, and it is from here that Philip’s
poetry starts again, from the acknowledgment that “body should speak when
silence is” (149). Taking poetry down to its material, bodily existence triggers the
final change of the poems at the end of a collection bearing as an epigraph a line
from Ovid’s Metamorphosis: “All Things are alter’d, nothing is destroyed,” and
moves poetry on:
That body should speak

When silence is,
Limbs dance
The grief sealed in memory;
That body might become tongue
Tempered to speech
And where the latter falters
Paper with its words
The crack of silence;
That skin become
Slur slide sussurration
Polyphony and rhythm—the drum; (149)
Dionne Brand’s poetry strikes a different note from Philip’s. The sharp barbs of
Philip’s violent reconstruction of the literary text are bracketed in favor of a poetic
sentence that, though ungrammatical for its proselike quality and its use of Trini-
dadian Demotic English, casts a powerful poetic aura around itself. Brand could
be described as one of Canada’s most refined writers, but also as one of the most
complex and uncompromising voices to be heard in the Canadian literary and
intellectual scene. No Language Is Neutral was published in 1990 and marked the
beginning of Brand’s recognition within the Canadian literary mainstream. In it,
Brand tells of her early life in Trinidad, the need she felt to escape from there and
from its slave mentality, while providing a picture of the Caribbean as a deeply
gendered culture. The book’s title is taken from a line from Derek Walcott’s col-
lection Midsummer, and it might be useful to quote the stanza it is taken from in
order to shed some light on the operation that Brand is carrying out in her work.
These are Walcott’s lines from his poem “I heard them marching the leaf-wet roads
of my head”:
No language is neutral;
the green oak of English is a murmurous cathedral
where some took umbrage, some peace, but every shade, all,
helped widen its shadow. I used to haunt the arches
of the British barracks of Vigie. There were leaves there,
bright, rotting like revers or epaulettes, and the stenches
of history and piss. (1992: 506)
By choosing Walcott, Brand is inserting her poetry within a West Indian literary
tradition, a countercanon in itself, while simultaneously as well as polemically
postcolonialism 339
adding to Walcott’s idea of the language of poetry the difference of her experience as
a woman poet from the same area. No Language Is Neutral is divided into four sec-
tions: “hard against the soul,” “return,” “no language is neutral,” and “hard against
the soul” again, leading the poet along an exploration of her linguistic heritage and
of the history that she wants to bear witness to. The texture of the book is, actually,
made up of interweaving long poems: lines and stanzas from the various sections
keep resurfacing—in a way that is typical of all of Brand’s production—throughout
the text, repeating images of women, of discovery and engagement with women.
The starting point of the collection recalls the structure of Philip’s poetry: the
poetic sequence “return” goes back to the past of enslavement and colonization
as the necessary acknowledgment of the scar of slavery in order to recuperate the
social value of writing. “Blues Spiritual for Mammy Prater” is a poem written, as the
paratextual note introducing it makes clear, “looking at ‘the photograph of Mammy
Prater an ex-slave, 115 years old when her photograph was taken’ ” (Brand 1990: 17).
The whole poem pivots around the act of seeing, of witnessing “her lines and most
of all her eyes/and her hands” (17). Mammy Prater had the patience to wait for the
time when her experience of enslavement would be told by one of her ideal great
granddaughters. The image of stillness provides a new intake of the history of slavery
focusing on the forms of silent resistance along the centuries. Brand fully explores
this aspect in her novel At the Full and Change of the Moon (1999), where she recu-
perates from “the forgetful places” (18) of history the story of a slave who, in 1802,
plotted a mass suicide and died saying, “This is but a drink of water to what I have
already suffered.” There is an urgency that one can easily follow in Brand’s develop-
ment as a writer to be clear about the social value of literature: poetry is a form of
eyewitnessing, bearing testimony to a history the poet has inherited by being born a
woman in a Caribbean island. Like Marie Ursule, waiting to plot the suicide for all
the members of the rebellious Convoi Sans Peur, Mammy Prater comes to perfection
by waiting for the poet to catch her gaze and note it down:
she knew then that it would be me who would find

her will, her meticulous account, her eyes,
her days when waiting for this photograph
was all that kept her sane
she planned it down to the day,
the light,
the superfluous photographer
her breasts,
her hands
this moment of
my turning the leaves of a book,
noticing, her eyes. (19)
The title section of the book, “no language is neutral,” is made up of a single long
poem consisting of the genealogy, in the feminine, of the poetic persona as well as
of a revisitation of the native landscape. The opening lines draw us into the scenery
and set the relentless rhythm of the long poem as a whole:
No language is neutral. I used to haunt the beach at

Guaya, two rivers sentinel the country sand, not
backra white but nigger brown sand, one river dead
and teeming from waste and alligators, the other
rumbling to the ocean in tumult, the swift undertow
blocking the crossing of little girls except on the tied
up dress hips of big women, then, the taste of leaving
was already on my tongue and cut deep into my
skinny pigeon toed way, language here was strict
description and teeth edging truth. Here was beauty
and here was nowhere. (22)
The island’s beauty, its sand the color of its people, its almond leaves “fat as
women,” cannot dissimulate the air that still stinks of slavery, oppression, and
hopelessness. The persona’s schizophrenic relationship to her native land is fur-
ther developed in conceptual terms in the analysis of the language echoing in
that place:
To hate this, they must have been

dragged through the Manzinilla spitting out
the last spun syllables for cruelty, new sound forming,
pushing toward lips made to bubble blood. This road
could match that. Hard-bitten on mangrove and wild
bush, the sea wind heaving any remnants of
consonant curses into choking aspirate. (23)
The “they” in these lines are the poet’s ancestors who have been drawn with force
to abandon their original idioms (spun syllables), in order to adopt a new language,
made of new sounds, turning their mouths into holes of blood, an image pro-
pounding the idea of removal of the tongue as we have seen in Philip’s poem even
though, here, the syntax of the poem still holds, despite the harsh alliterations on
sibilant, plosive, velar consonants, as poetry. It is a poetry that warns us that “no
/ language is neutral seared in the spine’s unravelling. / Here is history too” (23),
and meaning can be found only in the interconnection of history, experience, and
words. Only after this poetics statement can the poet proceed and write in Trinida-
dian Demotic in a way that is not belittling or exotic, but poetically necessary:
Silence done curse god and beauty here,

people does hear things in this heliconia peace
a morphology of rolling chain and copper gong
now shape this twang, falsetto of whip and air
postcolonialism 341
rudiment this grammar. Take what I tell you. When

these barracks held slaves between their stone
halters, talking was left for night and hush was idiom
and hot core. (23)
These lines mix world-views and cultural orders by simply coupling together
abstract nouns and cultural referents that belong to the Western tradition (heli-
conia peace, morphology, falsettos) with ordinary, monosyllabic words, recording
the concreteness of the history of slavery in the West Indies: the morphology of
the new idiom is made of rolling chains and copper gongs; falsettos are produced
by the sound of whips in the air and a derogatory twang is the rudiment of this
grammar.
Brand’s writing, because of the analysis it provides of how her received lan-
guage was formed, and because it is written in that very language, propounds
an intense metaliterary reflection that attempts to imagine the place of poetry
today as “another place, not here, a woman might touch / something between
beauty and nowhere” (34), ushering us into the utopian dimension of the liter-
ary text, the ability that art has to have visions to be rendered in a language
freed from the burden of mimetic representation. The link this “new country”
has with the world is poetry itself, the text struggling to be written in a new
language, drifting away from words learned by heart, and longing for new ones,
in the realization that
Each sentence realised or

dreamed jumps like a pulse with history and takes a
side. What I say in any language is told in faultless
knowledge of skin, in drunkenness and weeping,
told as a woman without matches and tinder, not in
words and in words learned by heart,
told in secret and not in secret, and listen, does not
burn out our waste and is plenty and pitiless and loves. (23)
Literature and Its Unfamiliars

Unlike in Coetzee’s novel, where the social importance of literature is put to the
test in a time of intense civic turmoil, poetry is captured by Brand and Philip as
“room to live,” as offering a utopian space not only for redressing the legacy of the
past, but also, and more crucially, for crafting a literary text capable of respond-
ing to its social call. In the end, what difference is there between the professor’s
idea of literature in Disgrace and these women’s poetries? Nothing much varies
in the substance of the texts at hand as literature: they all are written, contain
lyrical expansions, and offer a layout that serves its intended—harmonic or caco-
phonic—effects. What definitely differs between them is how these texts—Word-
sworth’s Prelude and Philip’s or Brand’s poems—are offered to the historically
specific reader. The issue is not that of good versus bad literature. In Coetzee’s
novel, Wordsworth’s poetry is associated with the ideology of old South Africa:
does this affect or diminish its value as a cultural text? As unfair as it sounds, it
does, at least in a contingent sense. Literary works are written and read within
specific systems of culture that, while fostering a set of styles, issues, materials,
and expectations, inevitably deny others. The core of the issue can be summa-
rized using Frederic Jameson’s words: “The third-world novel will not offer us the
satisfactions of Proust or Joyce” (1986: 65). Contained in this observation is not
so much the perennial question of the contingency of literary value mistaken for
universal excellence as a very honest acknowledgment that in order to name—in
Gérard Genette’s terms—the figures of a text, the reader has in the first place to
be able to see them. And this is still often not the case when literary critics look at
postcolonial writing.
The training of the imagination that literary texts are supposed to grant
their readers is still deeply implicated in the kind of familiar unfamiliarity that
leaves the critics satisfied with their ability to crack the “secret code” of texts. By
playing on the principle of creative variation rather than repetition, literature is
supposed and expected to puncture ordinary modes of speech. And readers of
literature are eager to read and listen to the unfamiliarity resulting from such
a process: the more elaborate the text, the greater the pleasure in the achieve-
ment of interpretation.8 However, there seem to be varying degrees in what is
considered sanctioned unfamiliarity that explain why an Indian novel such as
Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey has been criticized for not supplying
the non-Indian reader with a glossary of foreign words. I am thinking about a
reader advancing the same request in order to read Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot:
how unflattering an image it would provide of the reader’s ignorance. There are
books that, like Such a Long Journey, raise doubts about our competence, lin-
guistic and cultural, before literary. And this is part of the experience of read-
ing writings emerging out of dissimilar and even opposed legacies of narrative
transmission.
The texts I have mentioned in this chapter insist on not being read as “the
Proust of the Papuans,” as Saul Bellow famously put it; rather, they develop a
textuality that speaks its message through an intentionally convoluted structure,
marking the distance, not only from ordinary language, but also from ordinary
readings. This is a central part of the actual experience of reading postcolonial
texts, and it deserves more critical attention than it has so far received. When
foreign words or unfamiliar varieties of English are used and mixed together in
postcolonial texts, they are the graphs of cultural differences, and that difference
should be respected, not obliterated by a reading aimed at “saming” the otherness
of the text. Missing the pun in a line because we do not master all the languages
or the rhetoric of a text is not the end of the world, or the sign of our being unfair
postcolonialism 343
to the text; however, casting the blame on the text’s supposed unintelligibility
or lack of complexity misses the point by far. There are texts that intentionally
leave some readers out, thereby raising questions of accessibility that are cursorily
dismissed or overlooked by an almost exclusive focus on the thematic content
of the literary work. Part of the challenges of reading these works has to do with
learning to read them, as we have seen in Philip’s poem when an actual choice in
the direction of reading is required, or in Coetzee’s novel when the microcosm of
the novel slowly but relentlessly casts us and the cultural values we represent out
of the horizon. We need readings that are textually specific and attentive, also and
especially when we are dealing with works of which we do not share either the
symbolic or the rhetorical grounds. As with languages, social differences are not
always comprehensible or bridgeable, and this aspect of cultures’ untranslatabil-
ity, which indirectly points to the limits of our competence, needs to be acknowl-
edged. In a very literal sense, translation is the model not only for postcolonial
writing developing within multiple cultural and linguistic contexts, but also for
its critical reading.
NOTES
1. Publishing houses (and, later, literary prizes) played an important role in making
the new literatures in English visible as a separate corpus to a larger audience. The British
publishing house Heinemann launched its African Writers Series in 1962; its debut novel,
written by one of the founding editors of the series was Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall
Apart. Longman opened its Drumbeat Series in the 1970s, and Women’s Press its Black
and Third World Women Writers Series. For a critical reading of the development of
African Writers Series books, see Huggan 2001: 51–57.
2. “Postcoloniality” is a term generally used to distinguish between the intellectual
revisionist project of postcolonial studies and the empirical, market-driven life led
by postcolonial or exoticized “commodities,” on a global scale. It therefore places
the emphasis on the commercial context in which all things postcolonial necessarily
live and flourish, and on the capitalistic logic regulating the exchanges. Given the
counterhegemonic bent that postcolonial theory has taken since its beginnings,
the notion of postcoloniality has been produced—resulting in quite different
formulations—by theorists themselves as a warning sign against the forms of cultural
imperialism hidden under the increasing institutionalization and commodification of
the postcolonial.
3. The notion of cultural difference is crucial to Bhabha’s attempt to operate a
revision of Western critical theory. Bhabha distinguishes cultural difference from
cultural diversity. The former is defined as “the process of the enunciation of culture
as ‘knowledgeable,’ authoritative, adequate to the construction of systems of cultural
identification” (1994: 34). The latter results from the tendency to abstraction and
reification that Bhabha criticizes in Western critical theory, and indicates “culture as an
object of empirical knowledge” (34), defined and encased within a comparative view of
cultural contents and customs, artifacts, etc. It is through cultural difference, defined as
a process of signification and inhabiting the performative space and time of enunciation,
that Bhabha derives his ideas of the ambivalence of colonial discourse, the untenability of
claims to cultural purity—hence the necessary hybridity of contemporary metropolitan
culture and of the contemporary, postmodern or postcolonial, nation.
4. It should be noted that, especially in early postcolonial texts, the name of William
Wordsworth recurs with curious frequency in relation to the psychological alienation
produced by colonial education. Wordsworth’s “golden daffodils” have often become the
objective correlative of a colonial education that, from Antigua to New Zealand, did not
question its irrelevance to the native experience.
5. I am aware of the unhappy terminology I am adopting in this section. Both
“first-world” feminism and “third-world” woman are, to say the least, unhappy
generalizations. However, they are useful in order to direct our attention to the core
of the issue that, to put it bluntly, has to do with women trying to fight patriarchy in
capitalistic countries vs. women from noncapitalistic countries (in the original sense of
third world) having to deal not only with the patriarchy of their social milieus, but also
with the effects of colonialism’s exoticizing gaze.
6. There is a legal debate going on in many European countries focusing on the
issue of rights, bodily integrity, and female excision. Sweden and Great Britain were the
first European nations to adopt specific laws on female genital mutilations in the early
1980s, and today such mutilations are legally prosecuted in Finland, France, Germany,
Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Portugal, and the Netherlands. In Italy the justice
system, under the Berlusconi government, launched an advertising campaign against
female genital mutilations. But a legal controversy has arisen around these issues,
opposing conflicting versions of human rights and of notions of bodily integrity. In many
immigrant communities, in fact, the notion of an individual self is still perceived as
foreign and opposed to a collective sense of identity that substantiates itself through the
enacting of rituals and cultural habits of the home country.
7. Born in Moriah, Tobago, in 1947, Philip moved to Canada in 1968. Before
turning to writing, Philip obtained a degree in Law at the University of Western
Ontario, but she soon gave up the practice of law—immigration and family law—to
become a full-time writer. Her fi rst book of poetry, Thorns, was published in 1980.
After that, she published two more volumes of poetry, Salmon Courage (1983), and
She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks in 1989. She has published two novels
to date: Harriet’s Daughter (1988), for young readers, and Looking for Livingston: An
Odyssey of Silence (1991).
8. I have drawn insightful inspiration about the issue of unfamiliar textualities from
the reading of Doris Sommer, Proceed with Caution (1999), and Bahri, Native Intelligence
(2003)
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Attridge, D. (2004). The Singularity of Literature. London: Routledge.

Bahri, D. (2003). Native Intelligence: Aesthetics, Politics and Postcolonial Literature.
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Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.
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Brand, D. (1990). No Language Is Neutral. Toronto: Coach House Press.
—— . (1999). At the Full and Change of the Moon. Toronto: Vintage Canada.
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Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain. London: Routledge.
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McLeod, J. (2000). Beginning Postcolonialism. New York: Manchester University Press.
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pp. 172–97. London: Arnold. (Original work published in 1991.)
Philip, M. N. (1994). She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks. In C. Morrell (ed.),
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Brand, pp. 97–167. Fredericton, Canada: Goose Lane. (Original work published in
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Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, pp. 321–34. London: Arnold.
Smith, S., and J. Watson. (1998). “Introduction: Situating Subjectivity in Women’s
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Investigations, pp. 1–18. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Spivak, G. C. (1987). “French Feminism in an International Frame.” In Spivak, In Other
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Arnold. (Original work published in 1992.)
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Young, R. J. C. (2003). Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
part iii
DEVICES AND POWERS

 
IMAGINATION
kirk pillow
A venerable tradition conceives imagination, for the most part correctly, as far as it
goes, as a mental power for making present what is absent through the production
of images. Several philosophical disputes are buried in this formulation, and some
of these are addressed below. On the whole, however, there is broad agreement that
through imagination we exercise a kind of sight for that not currently perceived,
and we also visualize alternatives never before seen. The image of an absent loved
one, of a treasured or a fabled landscape, of a misplaced heirloom, of a life not pur-
sued—imagination invests absence with significance, but also clothes the present
with meaning. Imagining at its most powerful is, I argue here, an interpretive act
through which we, more than simply producing images, see things as this or that
investment of meaning, as this or that means of transcending the present toward
something else. Imagination, writes Mary Warnock, “enables us to see the world,
whether present or absent, as significant, and also to present this vision to oth-
ers, for them to share or reject” (1976: 196). Literature, taken casually to comprise
poetry and narrative fiction, is one of our richest enactments of this imaginative
vision. Both in its production and in the exercise it provides its readers for cultivat-
ing meaning-making imagining, literature advances seeing as.
Both poetry and narrative fiction are acts of creative imagination that stim-
ulate the production of images and the interpretive recasting of what matters.
Poetry accomplishes this perhaps more intensively through the evocation of dense
imagery via the most economical uses of language, while fiction represents a more
extensive mode of expression. The sometimes great investment of time required to
read fictions contributes to their imaginative power to “spin a cocoon” around us
and hold us within “a containing cosmos” while they do their work on us (Brann
1991: 514). Works of literature generally, or their authors, rather, invite us to “see”
things not present and to understand or value otherwise what is present before us
by means of the extension of imaginative vision. When fictions bring us to see a
350 devices and powers
character as of a type, to see a course of life as at odds with satisfaction, to see this
world as a far cry from something better or worse—then imaginative literature
complements, extends, or poses outright challenges to our conventional under-
standing. Imagination’s power to make present what is absent positions it as a
means of insight into but, even more significantly, as a source of challenge to the
status quo of the “given” world before us. The role of imagination in literary pro-
duction and reception makes literature a powerful source of pressure placed upon
the real to be otherwise. This will lead us to conclusions regarding imagination in
literature as a transgressive expression of freedom, regarding the ethical impera-
tives of imagining, and regarding imagining as the cultivation of a “double vision”
(Brann 1991) that not merely shapes fictional worlds but also reshapes our own.
Imagining and Perceiving

We will make progress toward appreciating the role of imagining in literature if we
first clarify the contrast between perception and imagination. The contrast high-
lights the distinctive features of acts of imagining and will guide us toward under-
standing the act of seeing-as.
It has long been observed that imagining is voluntary, or subject to the will,
in ways that perceiving is not. One can call up at will an image of home from
across town, while one can only directly perceive its kitchen when standing in it.
One can invite another to imagine something, but not to perceive something not
available for the looking. Percepts are experienced as passively received, in con-
trast to our voluntary control over images. This contrast holds even if we reject
a naive conception of perception as purely a matter of passive reception. Various
post-Kantian epistemologies regard perception as an active process of categoriza-
tion, and a Sellarsian rejection of the “myth of the Given” is a rejection of per-
ception as pure reception of sense-data. But whatever goes into perception, the
phenomenologies of perceiving and imagining differ regarding their voluntarism.
When observing my desk, I do not choose to perceive a keyboard, even if I can
choose what on the desk to attend to. Nor can I choose not to see the keyboard in
front of me, except by closing my eyes so as not to perceive visually, or by look-
ing the other way, in which case what I see when looking away is not up to me,
either. Percepts “come at us” whether we like them or not, while images can be
called up at will and recede as soon as we cease to imagine them. This contrast
should not be overstated, however, because there are limits to how subject to will-
ing imagining is (Brann 1991: 159): one can try to call up an image of someone not
seen for many years, but fail, and in some cases images come to us against our
will or can be recalcitrant to receding once imaged. The contrast holds and is of
vital importance nevertheless, because the voluntarism of imagining is, of course,
imagination 351
what allows it to serve as a ready alternative to the annoying persistence of the

perceived present before us.
The voluntarism contrast exposes several others between percepts and images.
The aspects of an image are attention dependent—they cease to exist when one
stops attending to them—whereas the details of percepts are there whether one
attends to them or not (McGinn 2004: 26–29). When one imagines a favorite pet,
the wagging tail wags only as long as one makes it so and exists as part of the image
only as long as one wills it. The perceived pet’s tail wags, if it does, whether one
notices or not. Furthermore, percepts are constrained by the psychophysical struc-
ture of the visual field: they must be positioned in space in front of us (22–25). Per-
cepts are situated wherever the eyes are directed, whereas images need not be fi xed
spatially at all. One can imagine a favorite pet riding in a car in another state, or
sleeping in front of one, or standing behind one. Additionally, given the visual and
spatial constraints on percepts, they are occlusive of each other, whereas images do
not occlude percepts (32–34). One can freely imagine a favorite pet while looking
at a computer screen, but one cannot perceive the wall behind the screen while per-
ceiving the screen (without use of a mirror, at least, which will then occlude what
lies behind it). Hence, images can be layered over objects “translucently” in ways
that percepts cannot. This feature of imagining will prove central to understand-
ing seeing-as and its interpretive function.
Images and percepts also differ in what we learn from them. Being largely
subject to the will, images are not informative in the way that percepts are, because
images contain only what we put into them (Sartre 1991: 11). Close observation of a
favorite pet can reveal an infestation of fleas, but an imagined pet has fleas only if
one chooses to imagine this; we don’t learn anything about the pet by imagining it
one way or another. As Wittgenstein puts it, “It is just because forming images is a
voluntary activity that it does not instruct us about the external world” (1967: 110).
The content of images is stipulated by our imagining, and so images have only as
much content as we plug into them, whereas percepts are saturated with continu-
ous content. “The object of perception,” writes Jean-Paul Sartre, “is constituted of
an infinite multiplicity of determinations and possible relations. The most definite
image, on the other hand, possesses in itself only a finite number of determina-
tions, namely, only those of which we are conscious” (1991: 21). And because their
content is stipulated, images do not require recognition. A favorite pet approach-
ing from a distance has first to be recognized as such when the percept comes into
focus, so to speak, but an image of a favorite pet approaching from a distance is just
known already to be of the pet irrespective of the limits distance places on recogni-
tion (McGinn 2004: 25, 31). We do not come to discover things about our images,
because we decided what they were to be when opting to imagine them.
These observations hammer another nail into the coffin of the outmoded “pic-
ture theory” of mental images. That theory holds that mental images assume the
form of pictures in the mind that refer to what they picture by virtue of a resemblance
between picture and object. But unlike mental images, actual perceived pictures
can be highly informative regarding their objects, and they require recognition of
what they are pictures of. “Images are not pictures,” Wittgenstein writes. “I do not
tell what object I am imagining by the resemblance between it and the image” (1967:
109). There can be no question of what I imagine via a certain image, because each
image intends its object directly via the voluntary act of imagining. There can, on
the other hand, be a question concerning what a picture pictures, with an answer
perhaps in some cases established partly by virtue of resemblances. Sartre, for one,
took the intentionality of imagining to undermine not only the picture theory of
mental images but even, at least at some points in his The Psychology of Imagina-
tion (1940), the very notion of mental imagery. On his view, imagination intends
its object so directly as to dispense with the mediation of an image. “The imagi-
native consciousness I have of Peter,” Sartre writes, “is not a consciousness of the
image of Peter: Peter is directly reached, my attention is not directed on an image,
but on an object,” Peter himself (1991: 8). To imagine Peter from across town is to
“see” Peter rather than an image of him. “There is no image in a consciousness
which contains it,” Sartre adds (19). But this view is unable to make much meta-
phorical sense of how imagination “sees” what is absent; the view seems to reduce
imagining simply to thinking of the absent object. Oddly, Sartre does not deny the
existence of mental images, so their role in his theory is obscure. To some extent,
his ambivalent conception of them is motivated by his commitment to a dubious
theory of the transparency of consciousness (6). In any case, the fact that mental
images intend their objects directly is sufficient to make consciousness of a mental
image a consciousness of its object; we need not deny mental images a mediating
role. The production of mental images gives imagination what it visualizes in the
mind’s eye. Such a conception of imagining can be sustained without suffering
from the problems attached to the discredited picture theory of mental representa-
tion (for further discussion, see Brann 1991).
The fact that images do not inform as percepts can may suggest that imagin-
ing has no educative function. Were this correct, attributing to imagination a vital
role in writing and reading literature would seem to derail the sorts of claims for
literature that I began by proposing. But first of all, our imaginings surely are edu-
cative at least indirectly. The content of images, however stipulated, can remind us
of features of objects or situations in ways that inform our judgments and behav-
ior. Further, discovering what we are more or less able to imagine can teach us
much about ourselves. More directly to the point, the contrasts described thus far
between images and percepts have not shown the full range of what we do with
images, and shortly we will see that images serve as powerful tools of interpreta-
tion when we engage in imaginative seeing-as. Such a use of imagery will be critical
to the experience of literature, and it will secure a profound educative potential for
the literary work. Images and texts will be partners in promoting interpretation
not merely of the story but of the world. Their ready pairing reflects commonalities
of their nature: percepts, as we saw, are saturated with continuous content, while
the content of images is limited and stipulated. But much the same is true of fic-
tions: their depictions are stipulated by the author, and even the richest depiction
imagination 353
cannot approach the saturated continuity of perception. “The image is like a story
in this respect,” McGinn writes: “it is constitutionally incomplete” (2004: 25).
Far from being a shortcoming, however, this incompleteness inherent to fictions
invites the imaginative interpretations through which we fill out fictional worlds
and, more important, through which we use fictions to reinterpret and reach new
understandings of our own world.
A final contrast between images and percepts reflects my starting point for
understanding imagination while also reinforcing the idea that it can yield under-
standing. Visual percepts, as we know, are of objects present to the visual system of
the body, while images are of objects absent to perception. Imagination is a power
for making present “to the mind’s eye” objects or scenes currently unavailable for
perception or even never to be seen. To imagine is to “see” something other than
the humdrum present perceptible before us. This standard contrast prompted an
observation by Wittgenstein about which I share McGinn’s fascination: “While
I am looking at an object I cannot imagine it” (1967: 109). Although Wittgenstein
intends this remark to reveal differences in our language games regarding perceiv-
ing and imagining, rather than as a psychological claim, it does nevertheless seem
empirically true. I can perceive a wheelbarrow before me; I can close my eyes or
look away and call up an image of a wheelbarrow, but I cannot call up an image
of the wheelbarrow before me while staring right at the real thing. It does seem,
however, that I can, while perceiving a wheelbarrow, imagine another, or even this
one, behind me. Hence the problem with perceiving and imagining the same thing
at once hinges on the presence-absence contrast between percepts and images. But
note that one can, while perceiving a wheelbarrow, also imagine it dancing the
can-can in a live revue. Here, one “sees” the wheelbarrow as a dancer on stage,
and this seeing of the object as something else is not constrained by the perceptual
presence of the object in the way that merely calling up an image of the object is.
Clearly, some more sophisticated act of imagining is at work in seeing-as, distinct
from simply calling up an “uninflected” image of a thing. I turn now to elucidating
this imaginative seeing, for this practice will prove central to the role of imagina-
tion in our responses to literary fictions.
Imagination and Seeing-As

Imaginative seeing, variously called “seeing-as” or “the seeing of aspects,” is
explored famously by Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations (1953) by means
of the duck-rabbit picture and other devices. Seeing-as is there understood as an
operation of imagination distinct from perception, but one that inflects perception
when an image “invades” a percept and so motivates interpreting the percept as
being or as representing or referring to something other than what it is. This
requires some unpacking, first with regard to the distinctness of seeing-as from
“basic” perception. “ ‘Seeing as,’ ” Wittgenstein writes, “is not part of perception.
And for that reason it is like seeing and again not like” (1953: 197). It makes no
sense, Wittgenstein thinks, “to say at the sight of a knife and fork ‘Now I am see-
ing this as a knife and fork.’ . . . One doesn’t ‘take’ what one knows as the cutlery
at a meal for cutlery” (195). The taking that Wittgenstein denies to perception
is, of course, the take of interpretation. Similarly, some pages later Wittgenstein
adds, “I cannot try to see a conventional picture of a lion as a lion, any more
than an F as that letter” (206). One just sees a lion picture, or sees a lion “in” the
picture, without having to interpret the picture as a picture of a lion. Seeing the
lion picture for what it is, namely, a picture of a lion, requires the act of recogni-
tion typical of perception, but seeing it thus does not, Wittgenstein holds, require
interpretation. Now, this is hardly a settled matter among philosophers of mind,
hermeneuts, and philosophers of art. Some would argue in a Nietzschean vein
that all experience is charged with quasi-artistic interpretation, or at least that the
comprehension of pictures requires interpretation of an image in light of artificial
pictorial conventions. Others would hold, as intimated above, that any Kantian
or post-Kantian commitment to the experiential unity of sensory passivity and
categorizing spontaneity already entails understanding experience as such as an
outcome of interpretation. But even if Wittgenstein were to agree that elaborate,
creative, reality-determinative cognitive processes underlie the turning of sense
data into the experience of a lion picture, or of an actual lion, he would reject the
view that such processes entail seeing the sense data as a lion. We just see a lion,
whereas seeing a lion picture, or an actual lion, as a symbol of royalty or as Bert
Lahr in costume does involve an imaginative exercise of interpretation. Whether
Wittgenstein is correct or not about the noninterpretive recognition of pictures,
imaginative seeing is an interpretive act in ways that much perception is probably
not, however active the process of perception is.
In seeing-as, Wittgenstein writes, “[i]t is as if an image came into contact, and
for a time remained in contact, with the visual impression” (Wittgenstein 1953:
207). To see a percept as something more or something else involves layering over
the percept an image by means of which we “read” the percept in one direction or
another and so see it differently, despite there being no change in the underlying
percept. “The expression of a change of aspect is the expression of a new percep-
tion and at the same time of the perception’s being unchanged” (196). To see a
lion as Bert Lahr in costume is to undergo a change of perception, via the imagi-
native significances one has layered over the percept, even as the initial object of
perception has not altered. The lion remains the lion it was, but layers of imag-
ery have altered its meaning for a time. Wittgenstein illustrates this both with the
duck-rabbit drawing (194) and with a triangular figure seen in various aspects.
One might be shown the duck-rabbit and only ever see a duck; in such a case, one
does not see the picture as a duck picture, one just sees a picture of a duck. But by
prompting or otherwise, it may dawn on one that the picture can instead be seen as
a rabbit picture. While seeing the picture as a rabbit picture, one’s perception alters
as imagination reinterprets it as a rabbit picture, even though in one sense one sees
imagination 355
the same old perception all along. Similarly, a figure of a right triangle with hypot-
enuse facing and parallel to the bottom of the page can be seen as “a triangular hole,
as a solid, as a geometrical drawing; as standing on its base . . . ; as a mountain . . . ,
as an overturned object which is meant to stand on the shorter side of the right
angle,” and so on (Wittgenstein 1953: 200). While it is possible always to see only
a duck in the duck-rabbit picture, seeing the triangle as any of these things takes
an effort: “[To] take the bare triangular figure for the picture of an object that has
fallen over . . . demands imagination” (207).
If imaginative seeing deploys images as an interpretive supplement to percep-
tion, we should be able to specify seeing-as further via the differentia between per-
cepts and images discussed above (see McGinn 2004: 50–53). Imagining is largely
subject to the will, whereas perception is not voluntary. Seeing-as, oddly positioned
between the two, is a voluntary act of interpreting perception by means of images.
It does not alter the underlying involuntary percept, even while seeing-as alters
what we see by investing what is seen with fresh meanings. Images are attention
dependent, whereas percepts are not, so what a percept is seen as imaginatively
shares the transience of the image: the lion seen as Bert Lahr is altered only for as
long as this interpretive attention is paid. Percepts are saturated with continuous
content, unlike images, so what the percept is seen as does not appear to us with
the saturation of full perception. Seeing a lion as Bert Lahr will be rich with lion
perception, but not with the content of actually perceiving Bert Lahr in costume.
Again, images, unlike percepts, do not require recognition, because their content
is stipulated, so percepts can be misrecognized, but not what we see them as, since
we supply the interpretation. Further, because percepts occlude one another but
images do not occlude percepts, the images that layer over percepts when we see
imaginatively add interpretively to the percept without occluding it. We still see
the lion, but we see it as Bert Lahr.
I want to focus more carefully on the remaining contrasts between images
and percepts: spatial specificity, presence-absence, and relative informativeness,
because it is in these respects that the power and importance of imaginative seeing
become clear. Percepts are spatially positioned in front of us, with the consequence
that what we see them as imaginatively, when we layer an image over the percept,
is seen as if before us. To see a perceived lion as Bert Lahr is to see the lion in front
of you as Bert Lahr in costume; it is as if Bert Lahr were before you, costumed
as the Cowardly Lion. This observation clearly entails a variation in imaginative
seeing regarding the presence-absence contrast between percepts and images: the
perceived lion is present to the visual system, and what this percept is seen as is
presented to us imaginatively as if present, even though what the percept is seen
as is itself absent. The key point is that seeing-as involves the “quasi presence” of
an imagined object parasitical on the true presence of the object on which one
lavishes images. That is, imaginative seeing is a seeing of the object via an interpre-
tive layer of imagery, rather than merely an imaging in the mind apart from what
we see before us. Put simply, to see imaginatively is to see the object, or the world,
differently, as if other than it is. (Note that this conclusion vindicates Sartre’s view
of the object-oriented intentionality of imagining, though at the level of seeing-as

rather than in the mere calling up of images.) To see imaginatively is at once to
see and to interpret something in the world. I argue below that the experience of
literature relies upon and promotes an imaginative seeing that is transformative,
for a time, of the world before us.
We saw above that images do not exactly share the informativeness of per-
cepts. We learn new things from perception in ways we evidently do not from
imagining, especially because the content of images is voluntarily stipulated. Does
this mean we have little to learn from seeing-as? Quite the contrary. Seeing-as
serves an educative and reflective function in between the involuntary observa-
tional content of perception and the voluntary production of images, precisely
because when seeing-as layers images onto the perceived world, it accomplishes
an investment of meanings into the world. It transforms worldly things at the
level of their significance for us, and it does so in the world, not merely in our
heads. Warnock conveys this eloquently: “Imagination is our means of inter-
preting the world, and it is also our means of forming images in the world. The
images themselves are not separate from our interpretations of the world; they
are our way of thinking of the objects in the world” (1976: 194). Imaginative see-
ing lends a depth to experience that the mere saturation of the percept, however
fascinating, cannot provide; seeing-as shows things to be or to mean more than
they appear to perception. To practice imaginative seeing is to enact “the belief
that there is more in our experience of the world than can possibly meet the
unreflecting eye;” it is by virtue of creative seeing-as “that there is always more
to an experience, and more in what we experience than we can predict” (202).
But note that while the interpretive function of seeing-as enriches experience,
it is also constrained by the world it interprets. Positioned between involuntary
perception and voluntary imagining, seeing-as is answerable to the world that
it layers over with its image construals. Percepts need to be amenable to specific
choices of interpretation; otherwise, seeing-as devolves into idle fantasy. Indeed,
fantasy in the pejorative sense, while one outcome of imagining, must be dis-
tinguished from the seeing-as that engages constructively with present realities.
Imaginative seeing requires informed understanding of the world to make its
interpretive recastings compelling or useful.
In sum, seeing-as creatively complicates the image-percept contrast by bring-
ing images into reinterpretive contact with perception. Unlike the simple imaging
of something absent, seeing-as is not bound by the Wittgensteinian dictum that
“while I am looking at an object I cannot imagine it.” While observing an object
or the world, one can imagine it otherwise than it appears. One can see the object
as something else or as invested with invisible significances. One can see the world
other than it is, by the lights of unrealized possibility. To do so is not merely to
fantasize some other world, but to see in this world its other potentials. Seeing-as is
the power of imagination fully realized, remaking the world and hence granting us
a freeing critical distance from the pressing present before us. Aided by imagina-
tion, this, too, is what literature does.
imagination 357
Interlude: Imagination and Romantic

Genius
The two powers of imagination discussed above—the calling up of images and the
more creative seeing-as reinterpretation of things—have a long history in Western
discourses of imagining. That history has been studied in depth by many scholars
(see, e.g., Engell 1981; Kearney 1988; Brann 1991); here I provide only a brief discus-
sion of romantic theories of imagination as a means to summarize certain themes
and to prepare for the remaining claims of this essay. Richard Kearney has identi-
fied historical paradigms of imagination, each informed by a different metaphor
or figure of its power (1988: 17). The premodern mimetic paradigm for imagination
employs the referential figure of a mirror capturing images of what we have seen.
This reproductive capacity of imagination I outlined in the contrast between per-
ceiving and imagining. The modern productive paradigm employs the expressive
figure of imagination as a lamp casting a transforming light of creative rethinking
on its objects. I have outlined this creativity in terms of imaginative seeing-as. (I do
not address Kearney’s third paradigm, the “parodic” imagination of postmodern-
ism and its reflexive figure of a labyrinth of mirrors.)
We owe to Kant the most elaborate modern discrimination of the different
reproductive and creatively productive powers of imagination. While reproductive
imagination is largely limited to calling up the images of phenomena from past
perception, Kant invests productive imagination with a range of roles crucial to
cognition, aesthetic appreciation, and artistic creation. In the Critique of Pure Rea-
son (1781) imagination mediates between sensation and understanding throughout
the process of conceptualizing sense data into a coherent experiential structure
(1998: 271–77). In the Critique of Judgment (1790) imagination is essential to the
play of mental powers in which Kant thinks we feel the pleasure of finding some-
thing beautiful. Moreover, productive imagination is the guiding power of artistic
genius: its “aesthetic ideas” (for Kant, the expressed content of works of art) create
“another nature, out of the material which the real one gives” (2000: 192). In artis-
tic genius, imagination “steps beyond nature” (192) by producing a perspective on
or interpretation of things that supplements perception with fresh possibilities of
significance, as we have seen in the act of seeing-as (see Pillow 2000).
Deeply influenced not only by Kant but by Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich
Schelling, the romantic poets William Wordsworth and especially Samuel Tay-
lor Coleridge made the modern contrasts among imaginative powers central to
their conception of poetic creation. In his Biographia Literaria (1817) Coleridge dis-
tinguished what he calls “fancy,” or the mere associative reproduction of images
without any unifying structure, from imagination proper (1985: 305). This pejo-
rative fancy is the idle passing of trains of imagery to no purpose but diversion.
He divides true imagination into primary and secondary forms corresponding,
roughly, to the cognitive versus the aesthetic/artistic powers that Kant had charac-
terized. Coleridge’s famous declaration is both fascinating and obscure:
The primary imagination I hold to be the living Power and prime agent of all
human Perception, and as a representation in the finite mind of the eternal act of
creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary I consider as an echo of the former,
co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the
kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation.
It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is
rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is
essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead. (304)
Primary imagination functions along Kantian lines to imbue perception with con-
ceptual richness. It is, for Coleridge, as James Engell writes, “the agency of perceiv-
ing and learning. It is the process of education in the original and general sense: a
leading of the mind out into the world” (1981: 343). Secondary imagination, on the
other hand, produces ordered structures of rich expression that transcend actual
nature into a second nature of organic unity and balance. Coleridge coined the
term “esemplastic,” drawing on Greek roots, to characterize the power of imagina-
tion to “fashion into one” disparate materials ordered for the purpose of conveying
something new (Brann 1991: 508). In his poetry, along with Wordsworth in the
Lyrical Ballads (1798) and elsewhere, Coleridge sought uses of language expressive
of a quasi-divine power of imaginative unification.
Throughout its history, from Aristotle onward, imagination has been pressed
into the role of mediating between the bodily senses and the rational intellect.
Kant’s theory of imagination in his epistemology and aesthetics culminates that
tradition and grants profound importance to imagining as an agent of cognition
and feeling. His theory of artistic genius, and its adoption by the romantic poets
and later thinkers, tends, however, to isolate imaginative creativity in a hallowed
hall of great and original minds. For Kant, genius is a rare gift of nature more
remarkable even than the scientific talents of a Newton (2000: 187). The conse-
quent romantic cult of original genius should be resisted, I believe, for the imagi-
native seeing characterized above is not the exceptional practice of a gifted few but
is instead ubiquitous in the sensemaking practices of interpretive human beings.
Acts of seeing-as thoroughly mediate and meld perception and thought wherever
we layer image over percept to imbue things and persons with unseen meanings.
However correct Wittgenstein may have been that we do not see the cutlery at
dinner as a knife and fork, we do see them as heirlooms of family tradition, as
arranged on the table according to cultural tradition, as one among many cultures’
means of dining, as exemplars of a school of design, as embarrassing in their need
of polishing, and so on. The imaginative seeing that I have associated with the
modern Kantian conception of productive imagination accompanies our experi-
ence of the world constantly as an interpretive supplement to more or less all that
we see. Artistic talent certainly lies in the organization and expression of emotions
and ideas in various sensuous media, and few may be the great poets and artists
capable of profound expression in those media. But we are all geniuses of seeing
things, through the lens of imagination, as something more or something other
than they appear.
imagination 359
The Romantic notion of genius is distinctive of the modern period’s empha-

sis on the individual subject as cognitive agent, aesthetic judge, and political
unit. While the capacities of imagining discussed above are hardly unique to the
modern subject, they come in modernity to be symbolic of that subject’s creative
autonomy (about which more below). It takes a culture of individualism to make
how each of us differently interprets the world something of defi ning interest:
imaginative seeing-as, it appears, is seen as defi nitive of the modern self. It per-
haps takes that same culture to make the personalities, emotions, choices, and
fates of fictional characters maximally of interest, so there is little wonder that
modern individualism set the stage for the rise of the novel as an artistic form.
The novel’s “extensive” mode of expression, the investments of time its apprecia-
tion can require, reflects cultural convictions about the fascination of individ-
ual lives and what strikes us as a pleasurable use of politically and economically
secured leisure. The modern individual is one primed and prompted to make full
cognitive and aesthetic use of imagination’s seeing-as powers. The endless narra-
tive fictionalizing of modern life is among the richest expressions of this life of
imagination.
Imagination and Literature

In a remark pregnant with significance, Wittgenstein observes in Philosophical
Investigations that he can see something “in various aspects according to the fic-
tion I surround it with” (1953: 210). To see imaginatively is to clothe something in
a fiction that transforms its meaning. This fiction may take the simple form of an
image that reinterprets a picture of a lion. It may take the more complex form of a
system of images evoked by the language of a poem. Or it may take the form of
a fiction proper: an extended narrative relating characters and events, inviting
sequences of visualization on the part of the reader, whose imaginative response
to the fiction is a kind of seeing and interpreting at once. Reading literature is a
process of transforming language into visions, and this process puts imagination
as a power of visualization into creative cooperation with language. I noted above
that both images and fictions are incomplete: the stipulated content of images falls
short of the saturated content of perception; what is described and narrated in a
fiction leaves unspecified all manner of details that would be present to perception
were the story instead an experience. However profound the power of language to
describe events and invite their visualization, language “can never achieve fully
determined visibility” (Brann 1991: 473). Neither can imagining, whose products
supplement rather than replace perception. Brought into collaboration in the
response to literature, visualization and narrative in words take advantage of their
similar incompleteness to spark an imaginative seeing in which the stipulation of
images by the reader is both encouraged to fi ll in missing detail and guided by the
constraints the narrative poses. “[We] respond appropriately to the statements of

fiction,” David Novitz argues, “only if we respond imaginatively—that is, [if we]
respond by imagining the situations or lives of its fictional characters in terms
closely specified by the author” (1987: 81; see also Walton 1990). Just as seeing-as
is answerable to perception, the fiction’s terms direct our imagining. Even so, the
incompleteness of description also frees imagination to visualize well beyond what
the language conveys, however short of the saturation of perception its images will
remain.
Studies of childhood language acquisition suggest that the development of lan-
guage skills is closely related to the capacity for imaginative play. Much play entails
the acting out of story lines, and playing a tea party or a moon launch requires
exiting reality sufficiently to enter into a nonpresent imaginative state of affairs.
Paul Harris argues that the understanding and production of narratives, or what
he calls “connected discourse,” “is only possible for a creature who is capable, tem-
porarily, of setting current reality to one side and constructing a situation model
pertaining to a different spatio-temporal locus” (2000: 194). The capacity to invent
“situation models” in pretend play, Harris proposes, underpins the sophisticated
uses of language in which children and adults describe noncurrent situations. That
is, playing at a pretend moon launch prepares the language skills that underlie the
ability to understand and describe an actual moon launch one has not witnessed
directly. Harris misses the point, however, that the pretend tea party happens in
the here and now, not in some other space or time. The hand not actually gloved
in white lace, with curled pinky actually distended, is seen as sipping a cup of tea
in the present world, not in some other. Seeing-as, we know, transforms things of
this world through shifts of interpretation. The imaginative response to literature
is a comparable mode of play in which, I propose, we envision our own world dif-
ferently rather than escaping into some other.
Comprehending a fiction, like playing at tea, indeed requires setting aside,
to a degree, current reality so as to envision another. What Colin McGinn calls
“fictional immersion,” the experience of disappearing into an engrossing story,
is made possible by an imagination capable of seeing an image system for a fic-
tional world, sometimes with an intensity to rival perception, even though it never
occludes perception (2004: 103). To become immersed in a fiction, we must be
able to free ourselves sufficiently from the grip of present affairs, so that we can
visualize a narrative of nonpresent events. Imagination makes possible this tran-
scendence of the present, the visual projection of events happening elsewhere, and
so our immersion into the story of that world. Now we have seen two principal
capacities of imagination: the power to call up images of things absent to per-
ception, and the power to reinterpret things through the layering of images over
percepts. Both acts of imagination enrich our response to literature. We visual-
ize the story world through sequences of imagery that fill out its absence. These
images hover before the mind’s eye and take us out of the humdrum present. This
response to literature is an imaginative mode of play akin to fantasy, where fantasy
is understood as a hermetically sealed interlude apart from real life, an escapist
imagination 361
diversion from reality. Such fantasy has its pleasures as well as its limit of value, for
we have seen that the second power of imagining, to see things as other or more
than they appear, sustains an “eminent contact with real and daily life” (Brann
1991: 561) that fantasy does not. Full imaginative seeing construes this world cre-
atively and invests its objects and scenes with fresh meanings. Imagination enliv-
ens the fictional narrative not merely via the imaging of a fictional world; its more
profound service to literature is to bring the fiction to bear on this world through
the interpretive work of seeing-as. The things and situations represented in works
of literature are intended by acts of imagining directed at this world: they have
“substance” not merely in a fantastical space immanent to imagination, but are
“intended as external to the imaginer, as imaginations projected into the world”
(Brann 1991: 449). When imagination not only “sees” what is absent but also rein-
terprets what is present, when imagination sees this world as another, or another
world in the potentials of this one, it fully serves the interests of literature. Works
of poetry and narrative fiction, far from merely calling up isolated sequences of
imagery cut off from the pressing real, are fundamentally about the present world
over which their images and stories layer. They invite the imaginative seeing of this
world otherwise than it is.
This general claim can be further specified in terms of a central device both
of imaginative seeing and of literary creativity: the use of metaphor. McGinn
calls “cognitive imagination” the entertaining of a proposition, or imagining
that p, as opposed to the layering of images in seeing-as (2004: 128). Borrow-
ing his example, when one imaginatively sees the sky as oceanic, percept (sky)
and image (ocean) merge into a new perception of the sky under an aspect of
watery blue vastness and depth. When one entertains the proposition that the
sky is oceanic, McGinn proposes, image and belief merge into metaphorical
understanding (134–35). These are really sides of the same coin: the imagina-
tive layering of image over percept inspires the metaphorical cognition of one
thing as another, and the metaphor expressed in language enlivens imagina-
tion’s capacity to see the sky as oceanic. Metaphor is essentially the linguis-
tic expression of seeing-as, imaginative seeing pursued in words rather than
images. Metaphor distills into language the seeing of one thing in another such
that, when successful, it inspires creative seeing-as on the part of its hearer or
reader. Now, various philosophers have argued that the structure of works of
art, whether linguistic or not, is fundamentally metaphorical (see Hausman
1989): a work functions as a system of metaphors that recast our understand-
ing of something by motivating us to see it not as it is but otherwise. Works
of literature often make elaborate use of metaphor internally and invite us to
understand characters or events in metaphorical terms or as metaphors for
this or that. The larger claim, though, is that the target domain for literary
metaphor is the reader’s own world. A fiction reshapes our thinking about this
world by inviting us to see it under the aspect of an imagined variation or
alternative. To take in a fictional narrative is to layer it over the world present
before us as a metaphor exposing just how this world is, or as a metaphor for
how else, for better or worse, this world might be. Wittgenstein provides the
perfect metaphor for the seeing-as that literature prompts: it is “the echo of a
thought in sight” (1953: 212). Imagination serves literature by aiding our see-
ing, both literally and figuratively, and by understanding the world differently
through the metaphorical lenses that fictions provide.
The creative flexibility to see one thing as another, to see one thing in another,
is intimately linked to the empathic power to see oneself as another, to see in
another life the joys and pains possible in one’s own. Our responses to works of
fiction are often deeply emotional, and while those responses may range across joy,
anger, disgust, and admiration, our emotional investment in fictions is secured
fundamentally through empathy. Imaginative seeing makes the empathic relation
to fictional characters possible. To care about the life and fate of a fictional char-
acter is to imagine that life or fate as one’s own. “It is only when one responds
imaginatively,” Novitz writes, “by ‘thinking one’s way into’ the situation of [Anna
Karenina] . . . that one can acquire beliefs about Anna which allow us to feel the
urgency, dread, and hopelessness of her situation” (1987: 86; see also Cohen 1999).
The empathic power of imagination is accomplished precisely through the imagi-
native seeing I have emphasized: we see our own lives transformed as into another
by metaphorically living out the days and troubles of fictional characters. We have
seen that imagining is largely subject to the will, and we know too well that emo-
tion usually is not. Yet the voluntarism of imagination plays a powerful role in
helping us “summon emotions and feelings not only as spontaneous accompani-
ments but even, to some degree, as intentional effects” (Brann 1991: 764). Imagina-
tion mediates between the will and the passions, summoning emotions usually
out of our hands to concoct; works of poetry and narrative fiction are among the
richest means of providing such deliberate exercises of emotional depth. Imagina-
tion enriches emotional responses to fiction, but it also informs more broadly the
tenor of our desires and what it means when they go unfulfi lled. Both imagination
and desire are defined, after all, in terms of the absence of their object, though
imagination can sometimes partially satisfy desire by making virtually present the
absent thing or one desired (Brann 1991: 762)—hence the great appeal of the love
story to many of those desiring love.
Imagination and Human Freedom

Imagination allows us to make present through images what is absent from the
present world before us. It allows us to reconfigure that world through the image-
layering interpretive practice of seeing-as. And in literature, imagination richly
realizes its capacity to revise the present world by layering a transfiguring other
world over it. In a tradition made gospel by Sartre, these powers identify imagina-
tion as a principal source of human freedom. A creature devoid of freedom would
imagination 363
be one utterly beholden to the determinacy of the present, unable in any way
to escape the clutches of what is the case in each successive moment. The men-
tal horizon of a being without freedom would not extend beyond what is before
it. But by making present what is absent, imagination regularly transcends what
is the case at present to envision other places, times, and possibilities. By doing
so, imagination regularly enacts our free transcendence of present determinacy
toward something else. “To posit an image,” writes Sartre, “is to construct an
object on the fringe of the whole of reality, which therefore means to hold the
real at a distance, to free oneself from it, in a word, to deny it” (1991: 266). The
voluntarism earlier attributed to imagining, the fact that the calling up of images
is largely subject to the will, Sartre understands as definitive of human conscious-
ness as an experience of freedom from present conditions. “For a consciousness to
be able to imagine,” he writes, “it must be able to escape from the world by its very
nature, it must be able by its own efforts to withdraw from the world. In a word
it must be free” (267). Consciousness as such is for Sartre an act of setting itself
apart from the world, of negating the world through awareness of it; hence, he as
much as holds that consciousness is inconceivable without the power and free-
dom to imagine. At the everyday level, imagination enacts our freedom because
the images we call up of absent objects, scenes, or persons open consciousness out
into futures of possibility, inform our judgments about better and worse options,
and spur us to action.
Sartre emphasizes that however much consciousness negates the present world
in apprehending it as not-itself, imagination’s freeing production of images always
occurs from a determinate perspective on that world:
[E]very apprehension of the real as a world tends of its own accord to end up
with the production of unreal objects because it is always, in one sense, a free
negation of the world and that always from a particular point of view . . . . [An]
image, being a negation of the world from a particular point of view, can never
appear excepting on the foundation of the world and in connection with the
foundation. (1991: 269)
Our experience of the world is regularly accompanied by imagery of the unreal
or the not-present because conscious experience itself negates the fi xity of the real
and frees imagination to see what is absent or otherwise, what is not real now or
yet. But such imaginings always arise from and reflect the subject’s place in the
world. They have as their backdrop the definite circumstances of the individual
consciousness and its awareness not just of any world but of the facticity of this
one. This point applies not only to the calling up of images of what is absent, but
also to the imaginative seeing in which we reinterpret the world through the layer-
ing of images over what is present. Seeing-as is responsive to the definite present;
it reinterprets not some fantasy world but the constraining reality of given cir-
cumstance. (I take this to be true of many works of fantasy literature; seeing the
present world imaginatively does not require a commitment to literary realism or
naturalism.) Through its recasting of things of this world, it expresses our freedom
to transgress against current understandings of things, while also acknowledging
the hold this world has on our points of view. Seeing-as is a worldly act that, while
enacting a power to interpret freely and creatively, does not free us of being in the
world.
Authors of works of literature attempt the kind of free self-making, the creative
shaping of a world that the Greeks called poiesis. Poietic works are self-fashioning
because, as Richard Eldridge writes, they “are representations of subjects, their
characters, their interests, and their possible stances in culture that are made by
subjects and that in turn help to make them, insofar as they make available cer-
tain routes of self-construal and of action and identity in culture” (1996: 7). Poi-
etic works are expressions of freedom because their production shows that we are
“able to articulate and envision, albeit in specific ways, impersonal ideals of free
activity and ways of pursuing them” (10–11). They are never creations ex nihilo,
for they are made from given materials and reflect the situated facticity of the cre-
ative subject. But they demonstrate our capacity to transcend determinacy toward
fresh possibility. Eva Brann summarizes three aspects of imaginative freedom:
“freedom from the compulsions of the present, the freedom to control imagina-
tive vision, and the freedom to show physical competence” (1991: 186). This last is
of great importance. It refers in broad strokes to all of our capacities to externalize
imaginative products within shareable media of expression, to use physical, men-
tal, and emotional labor to communicate creatively with each other. Not all prod-
ucts of imaginative fancy achieve such communication. A centuries-old tradition
associates imagining with madness (see Pillow 2000), especially where imagina-
tion devolves into escapist and incommunicable fantasy or delusion. This tradi-
tion shows through in the psychologist’s alternate definition of poiesis recorded in
the Oxford English Dictionary: “the coining of neologisms, especially by a schizo-
phrenic.” To create poietically is to stretch out past given patterns of intelligibility
in order freely to express something else and, as such, carries with it the risk of
producing nonsense along with the potential for real revelation.
As the truism states, with freedom comes responsibility. The free exercise of
imaginative seeing, in both the production and appreciation of literature, entails
ethical obligations that raise imagining above escapist play. We have already
observed the role of imagination in empathy: our capacity to don the clothes of
another’s life substantiates our obligation to care about the joys and sufferings
of others. Kearney has identified two other ethical functions of imagination: the
testimonial and the utopian (1991: 225). Complementary to the more evidentiary
practices of historiography, imaginative storytelling records affectively rich tes-
timony about human choices and forms of life. It compels the self-examination
that comes from seeing oneself portrayed in an unsavory fictional character, and it
exercises our recognition of what should count as worthy lives. The utopian func-
tion is really poetical and ethical at once: poiesis enacts the imperative constantly
to reimagine the world in hopes of something more, for the sake simply of creative
transcendence of the present, for the sake of fashioning “products of imaginative
power calling to ways of cultural life not yet in being” (Eldridge 1996: 8). But this
imagination 365
self-making creativity must be ethically centered in an imaginative seeing that

seeks to improve the human condition. The utopian obligation of storytelling does
not require a Utopia of every fictional narrative. It does require at least the effort
to affect incremental improvement of the human person through the depiction of
better and worse choices. It requires depicting the consequences of the presence or
absence of kindness, and it requires depicting the courage to achieve, or the cow-
ardice of avoiding, a fresh imaginative vision.
However much it expresses the point of view of the artist from and on his
or her foundation in the given world, a work of art is a kind of realized unreality
expressed in transgression of that world. While realized in tangible media, the
unreality of a poem or a novel lies in its counterpoint to the present world, its chal-
lenge to see that world from a critical distance or to see to the world’s evolution
toward something else. The imaginative seeing that works of literature encour-
age is fundamentally an act of transgression against the current state of affairs.
The “production of unreal objects” that Sartre associated with consciousness of a
world poses a continual challenge to the stasis of the status quo. Imagination is our
principal means of putting pressure on the real to become unreal. We accomplish
this imaginatively by replacing the real with a real perceived otherwise through
the lens of seeing-as. When imaginative seeing reinterprets the world before us
through its layers of images, it becomes conceivable that the world could or should
be otherwise. “The possible’s slow fuse,” Emily Dickinson wrote, “is lit by the
imagination” (quoted in Kearney 1988: 370). There is violence in Dickinson’s met-
aphor: imagination lights a fuse to explode the actual so that it may be replaced
by the newly possible. But in a sense, this is simply what happens inevitably in
the passage of every moment: the possible perpetually replaces the actual with
successive actualities as each actuality fades into the past. Indeed, on a Kantian
conception of imagination’s role in cognition, imagination is responsible for “sche-
matizing” temporally the basic categories through which we structure experience
(Kant 1998: 271–77). Imagination puts those categories into time so that they can
bear on the passing manifold of sensory input. If, in artistic creation and in see-
ing-as, imagination lights the fuse of transformative possibility, its role is really to
accelerate the pace of change in which it already has a cognitive part.
The distance from the present that our capacity for imagining makes possible,
the seeing of present things as something more or something else, and the freedom
of self-making embodied therein, all make imagination’s sight a critical one, one
not beholden to the given state of things. In this respect, as John Whale observes,
“imagination is an inescapable and essential element in cultural critique” (2000:
196). Imagination serves literature by affording it the power to intervene some-
times mightily in critical reflection on ourselves. Imagining may generally embody
a critical distancing from what is present, but its use especially in the produc-
tion and reception of works of poetry and narrative fiction can bring its freeing
glance of alternative vision to bear fully on transforming the present. My claim has
been that imagination works in the service of literature by inviting the seeing-as
interpretive play through which poems and fictions call us to revise our under-
standings of things. My claim may as well have been that works of literature, or
their authors, serve imagination by providing the incendiary fuel to make its con-
trary vision shine most brightly.
Imagination as Double Vision

Brann has eloquently summarized the contributions that imagination makes
to enriching our lives. Imagining, she writes, “serves our worldly existence by
pulling us out of its dumb immediacy, distancing us from an oppressively close
present and disqualifying the primacy of the merely real here and now, while
according actuality to the absent and the nonexistent” (1991: 798). While Brann
does not refer to literature in this passage, my claim has been that imagination
and works of literature partner intimately in this enrichment. What she describes
imagining as accomplishing for us, literature does, as well. This commonality is
not just a happy coincidence but is rather a consequence of the vital role imagi-
nation plays in bringing alive the words on the pages of books of poetry and
narrative fiction (not to mention the role it plays in getting the words on the page
in the fi rst place). Imagination brings words alive by fi lling in language with
imagery responsive to the text but expansive of its significance for us. Imagin-
ing accomplishes this by visualizing objects and scenes in the mind’s eye, but it
enlivens language more profoundly by seeing the world differently, interpreting
the world anew through the lens of imaginative seeing-as. At the height of its
powers, “the world-revising, world-emending imagination,” Brann writes, “proj-
ects an inner world onto the external environment and elicits a second appear-
ance from the visible world” (1991: 774). Layering imagination over perception
in seeing-as helps us to see more, or other possibilities, than are evident to the
perceiving eye. We engage in such creative and interpretive sight when we make
sense of the world through metaphor, for example, but we arguably see most
imaginatively when works of literature revise our perceptions so as to reveal the
world otherwise than customary habits of thought and perception permit. The
visual and emotional intensity of the poem and the character exploration and
narrative complexity of the novel are efforts of imaginative seeing that, if suc-
cessful, “elicit a second appearance from the visible world” (Brann 1991: 774).
Imagination makes this possible through its powers of visualization, its mediat-
ing role with the passions, its interpretive fi nesse, and above all, its capacity to
free us from the pressing present.
Brann calls imaginative seeing a power of “double vision” (1991: 774). In it
we continue to perceive the world before us, but that world takes on a different
light. We see the contrast between what is the case and the alternate possibilities
or meanings that the interpretive layering of images reveals. We see the world
imagination 367
doubly: as it is and as something else. Seeing double can be a dizzying expe-

rience, and works of literature at their most powerful do make us dizzy with
imaginative possibility. The double vision of one thing as another in seeing-as,
invited of us richly in poetry and narrative fiction, warrants careful navigation
around Wittgenstein’s slippery remark: “While I am looking at an object I can-
not imagine it.” Though literally true with regard to the simple calling up of
images, the statement is mistaken with regard to seeing-as. At the figurative level
of imaginative seeing, I can imagine an object otherwise while looking at it; I
can through image and metaphor transform its significance. This capacity to
see otherwise is the freedom of creative transformation that imagining embod-
ies. Works of literature are some of the denser structures of metaphor by means
of which we undertake such transformation. They and imagination in concert
provide lenses for double vision.
REFERENCES
Brann, E. T. H. (1991). The World of the Imagination. Savage, Md.: Rowan and
Littlefield.
Cohen, T. (1999). “Identifying with Metaphor: Metaphors of Personal Identification.” The
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 54, 399–409.
Coleridge, S. T. (1985). The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. 7, Biographia
Literaria (2 vols.; J. Engell and W. J. Bate, eds.). Princeton: Princeton University
Press. (Original work in published 1817.)
Eldridge, R. (1996). “Introduction.” In Eldridge (ed.), Beyond Representation: Philosophy
and Poetic Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Engell, J. (1981). The Creative Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Harris, P. L. (2000). The Work of the Imagination. Oxford: Blackwell.
Hausman, C. (1989). Metaphor and Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kant, I. (1998). Critique of Pure Reason (P. Guyer and A. Wood, trans.). Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press. (Original work published in 1781.)
—— . (2000). Critique of the Power of Judgment (P. Guyer, ed.; P. Guyer and
E. Matthews, trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Original work
published in 1790.)
Kearney, R. (1988). The Wake of Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
—— . (1991). Poetics of Imagining. London: Harper Collins.
McGinn, C. (2004). Mindsight: Image, Dream, Meaning. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press.
Novitz, D. (1987). Knowledge, Fiction and Imagination. Philadelphia: Temple University
Press.
Pillow, K. (2000). Sublime Understanding: Aesthetic Reflection in Kant and Hegel.
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Sartre, J.-P. (1991). The Psychology of Imagination. New York: Carol. (Original work
published in 1940.)
Walton, K. (1990). Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational

Arts. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Warnock, M. (1976). Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Whale, J. (2000). Imagination under Pressure, 1789–1832: Aesthetics, Politics and Utility.
Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical Investigations (G. E. M. Anscombe, trans.). New
York: Macmillan.
—— . (1967). Zettel (G. E. M. Anscombe, trans.). Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
 
PLOT
alan singer
P is the means by which human agents negotiate the obstacles that time and
worldliness put in the path of our desire to sustain purposeful action. Or, as
Aristotle puts it in the Poetics, plot is an imitation of actions, not of men: “We
maintain, therefore that the first essential, the life and soul so to speak, of Tragedy
is the Plot; and that the characters come second . . . . We [therefore] maintain that
Tragedy is an imitation of action, and that it is mainly for the sake of the action
that it imitates the personal agents” (1450b; 1941: 1461).
Aristotle’s clarion privileging of act over character in the Poetics tells us in the
most compelling way what is at stake in narrative plot: knowledge of the changing
self. In his elaboration of the process of plot making, Aristotle makes us intensely
aware of the fact that plot instantiates a now self and a then self. This proposition
is most articulate in the emphasis Aristotle gives to peripeteia or peripety, reversal
of fate. Aristotle’s precept that the “unity of a Plot does not consist, as some sup-
pose, in its having one man as its subject” (141b8; 1941: 1463) introduces the argu-
ment that character is forever knowable only through the vicissitudes of action. As
Aristotle goes on to say, “An infinity of things befall that one man, some of which
it is impossible to reduce to unity; and in like manner there are many actions of
one man which cannot be made to form one action” (141b8;1941: 1463). It is in an
action, involving reversals and recognitions (takings of responsibility) over time,
that character is not only displayed but also developed. It exists as a responsiveness
to variability. In other words, the value of character is inherently a function of
character’s variability in changing circumstances.
It is not surprising that the occasion for Aristotle’s account of plot is the cir-
cumstance of human tragedy. Tragedy is a register of human frailty coordinate
with the temporal métier of mortal existence. For Aristotle, the link between plot
and tragedy seems to be a given: all temporal experience reminds us of our sus-
ceptibility to the reversibility of intentional acts. Furthermore, any attempt to
come to terms with plot independent of the form of tragedy must reckon with
Aristotle’s own point of departure for the consideration of plot as a significant sub-
ject: the inextricability of tragedy from a more general mimetic impulse. When,
in Poetics, Aristotle insists that imitation is an instinct of our nature, implanted
in man from childhood, he reasons it is because we delight to contemplate: “[T]o
be learning something is the greatest of pleasures not only to the philosopher but
also to the rest of mankind” (1448b10; 1941: 1457). The universality of the imita-
tive reflex is coherent with the persistence of mind in its pursuit of objects to
contemplate over the troublesome course of time. Both constructing and grasping
imitations (mimemata) are inherently active enterprises, due precisely to the con-
tingent temporal circumstances or situation within which any action or character
or life arises.
Because, for Aristotle, the mimetic mode is ineluctable in the human experi-
ence of learning, that is, because the task of becoming human presupposes the
capacity to imitate, the concept of plot is closely bound up with the more general
philosophical ambition of knowing oneself. The concept of plot as a mimesis of
human agency bears the burden of self-understanding. Under this description, plot
ceases to be merely a subgenre of literary art, of the genre of fiction particularly.
We might say that in plot art and philosophy are united. Furthermore, their inti-
mate connection is likely to warrant a rethinking of the terms of human character
altogether, rather than a mere subordination of character to typologies or kinds of
human action. As I discuss below, while types of plots tend to be associated with
types of characters, such generalized thinking invites the very condition of stasis—
the constative mode—that is most inimical to Aristotle’s focus on activity.
On the contrary, plot must be conceived of as indistinguishable from the proj-
ect of human agency. This presumption of an active stance toward experience coor-
dinates the concept of plot with norms of behavior and rules for self-justification.
Certainly, without these considerations, the goal of self-understanding is a moot
proposition. We might even be inclined to think that plot is inextricably bound to
tragic knowledge by the responsibility for self-justification per se because tragedy
menaces identity. We need only think of how the coherence of self or subject as a
continuing source of reasoned expression of character in action is undermined by
the abrupt reversals and recognitions that give structural integrity to tragic plot.
If nothing else, tragic experience begs for rationalization. Accordingly, we take
responsibility for ourselves through the protocols of reason giving. And according
to these protocols, we know ourselves to be rational creatures even in the midst
of personal catastrophe. The catastrophes of tragic experience are, after all, typi-
cally the result of hamartia, a form of not knowing. It denotes the condition of
not possessing the fullest context of reflection upon one’s circumstance. As J. M.
Bremer explains in Hamartia: Tragic Error in the Poetics of Aristotle and Greek
Tragedy (1969), the tragic hero suffers hamartia as his “involuntary and inevitable
ignorance of one or more of the particular circumstances involved” (26) in an
action. In an important way, the sense of error thus associated with hamartia is
proleptic, soliciting a compensatory knowledge of those “one or two particular
plot 371
circumstances” that otherwise constituted the blind spot of the agent’s personal
perspective.
For the Aristotle of the Nicomachean Ethics, there is always a wider hori-
zon of reflection awaiting human deliberative agency. We might imagine that
plot and narrative are thus indistinguishable from the ethical dimension of a
character’s ineluctably passionate becoming, as opposed to the presupposition of
a character’s dispassionate being. Pathos or the notion of man as patos mathei
is very much at the heart of plotted narrative precisely because it propels our
sense that the intrinsic significance of human temporal experience is the suffer-
ance of personal transformation. Plot is thus a purposive human response to the
vicissitudes of temporal experience. It is inescapable given the ethical concept of
human nature as both knowing and aspiring to know more from within the grip
of temporality.
I
As Peter Brooks has pointed out in Reading for the Plot (1992), “Plot is, first of all,
a constant of all written and oral narrative, in that a narrative without at least a
minimal plot would be incomprehensible” (5).1 On this account, plot is a form of
reasonable engagement with the incomprehensible. If narrative denotes our situ-
atedness in the eventfulness of time, plot postulates something to be known as a
result of our observing the interconnectedness of events. This is to say, reasons
obtain for our countenancing that events are connected. Plot is the locus of that
reasoning. The nature of the reasons is correlative with the principle according to
which the events narrated seem to cohere and vary according to the specific nature
of the mind contemplating those events. To project the coherence of events in the
face of difficulty is to admit the necessity of a mind struggling against incoher-
ence. This is true from the seminal moments of literary plotting. We need only
consider the off-stage scene that looms over the plot of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex:
the episode at the crossroads of Phocis. Here, where Oedipus unknowingly meets
his father, he confronts the possibility that his intentions to elude the torment of
Apollo’s prophecy of patricide and incest may themselves be thwarted. His is an
encounter with the Ur-condition of human suffering. He himself may not know
what he is doing, or who he is as a result of his doing it. Human intent and human
knowledge are revealed here as potential antagonists. When human intent to act
and human knowledge of what we have done fall apart, then the very comprehen-
sibility of experience is in jeopardy. Plotting strives to put intent and fact back
together again.
This logic of the plotting subject contending with the unknown is perhaps
most perspicuously and instructively figured in Joseph Conrad’s deviously plotted
short novel Heart of Darkness (1899). I say this in large part because the conceit
Conrad chooses to epitomize the existential challenge posed to the plot maker
is particularly resonant for the question of plot’s relation to knowledge. In Heart
of Darkness, plot is tantamount to a recognition of the necessity “to live in the
midst of the incomprehensible” (Conrad 1995: 20). Conrad evokes both plotting
character and plotting reader in the figure of a Roman explorer who hails, in a
manner of speaking, from the beginning of time, the source of all plotting. Aptly
enough, the figure of the Roman legionnaire is the bearer of a civilization that itself
stands upon the rationalizing foundation of plot making. But this civilization has
tragically overreached the boundaries of its knowledge by undertaking a colonial
adventure in the wilderness of a yet unsubdued and therefore incomprehensible
alien culture.
In order to reflect the full complexity of the situation adequately, Conrad’s
plot is famously framed by an unidentified narrator whose protagonist is another
narrator, a seafaring purveyor of plots, Marlow. Marlow is in turn obsessed with
another protagonist—the Enlightenment savant-cum-savagely avaricious ivory
trader, Kurtz. Marlow’s plot is aptly characterized within Conrad’s own text as “not
typical” (1995: 18), and yet it is revealed to be exemplary for the practice of the nov-
elist himself. This is what makes Heart of Darkness such a vivid emblem of the
problematics of plot generally. Heart of Darkness is, after all, a narrative unlike that
of tales “the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut” (18),
that is, where comprehension is a foregone conclusion. Rather, Marlow’s plot is a
concatenation of episodes whose meaning, according to the most didactic intru-
sions of the narrator of Conrad’s novel, “was not inside like a kernel but outside,
enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the
likeness of one of those misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spec-
tral illuminations of moonshine” (18). This epitome of Conrad’s own plot—a glow
within a haze—amounts to an admonition about the centrality of reflective mind
to the task of comprehension by which we negotiate the predicament of dwelling
in the midst of the incomprehensible, for in Heart of Darkness the reflection on the
medium of telling becomes an explicit object of the tale. It is widely agreed that
plot is a creature of the structuralizing imperatives of human desire, but Conrad
makes us acutely aware of the burdens of reflective consciousness that our natural
enthusiasm for plotted order too often obscures. Typically, we do not have to accept
the relativity of narrative framing as the only available premise of plot knowledge;
here we must. When we take up such burdens in Heart of Darkness, the simple sat-
isfaction of narrative desire gives way to the perpetuation of narrative desire, the
obtrusive presence of reflective mind as an end in itself.
It could therefore be said that Conrad’s métier as a narrative plotter acknowl-
edges the problem that made Plato an antagonist of artistic plotters and made
Aristotle an advocate. Plato sought to ground human character in the relative stasis
of an ontological truth that transcended the shifting ground of appearances. By
contrast, Aristotle sought to reclaim the ground of appearances or phainomena2
in the pursuit of truthful knowledge by accepting the epistemological responsibil-
ity to choose among them. Aristotle’s stance entails the possibility of error and so
plot 373
highlights the discipline of judgment. Plato posits a perfection of character that

brooks no errors. For this reason, Plato allows no warrant for pity toward suffer-
ing character.3 Very much to the contrary, in Aristotle’s Poetics pity is a marker for
the fragility of judgment within the framework of changing appearances. In other
words, for Plato the manifest order of the world is a counter for a transcendently
divine truth and so implicitly a topos of human passivity. For Aristotle, narrative
order instantiates an active attunement of human attentions to the world—with-
out which its orderliness and rational truth would remain hidden in the merely
perceptible forms of Nature.
Likewise for Aristotle, the vocation of plot, insofar as it entails the mentally
reflective labor of choosing and ordering among the disordered difference of phai-
nomena, is the attainment of eudaimonia. Eudaimonia is a modality of human hap-
piness as opposed to a modality of divine bliss. For Aristotle, plot is the métier of
this human flourishing. But it is not to be confused with timeless happiness, nor
is it an illusory refuge of self-indulgent pleasure. If we follow the lead of Martha
Nussbaum, among other scholars of ancient Greek philosophical thinking, the
term eudaimonia implies activity per se rather than constative pleasure, as has
often been assumed by Kantians and utilitarians: “Most Greeks would understand
eudaimonia to be something essentially active, of which praiseworthy activities are
not just productive means, but actual constituent parts” (1986: 6).
It is thus fair to say that the enterprise of Aristotelian tragic plot not only
describes the world of human labor but also engages the labor of a reader to sort
and focus upon the objects of the world with an expectation of their usefulness to
us as resources for self-ordering, self-knowledge, and the substantiation of subjec-
tive identity. It acknowledges our involvement with the outside world as a condi-
tion for positing a meaningful human interiority. It is a touchstone of human goal
directedness or what the Greeks termed orexis.4 But it also determines the degree to
which our goal directedness exposes us to conditions of risk and self-destruction.
Plot is certainly a vehicle of moral learning. It comes at the price of realizing our
vulnerability as the paradoxical condition of our prowess as moral agents. It is a
testimonial, as Nussbaum has eloquently pointed out in The Fragility of Goodness
(1986), of “the great power of luck in human affairs” (319). It makes the project
of living well incompatible with the Platonist world view according to which the
agent always has a firm grip on an external world where uncontrolled events do not
pose a significant threat to rational mind.
Such is the case as Plato articulates it in the Phaedo, where the vulnerability
of the body counts insignificantly by comparison with the self-sufficiency of the
soul.5 In Plato’s world, the warrant for reflective mind that seems to be prompted
by Aristotelian plot would cease to be an important rationale for moral agency
because the vagaries of space and time pose no significant challenge to human exis-
tence. For this reason, my equating of plot with reflective consciousness is really
a concession to a strong linkage between plot and tragedy that persists beyond
the historical instance of Greek tragic drama and the immediate historicocultural
circumstance that dictated the operational terms of Aristotle’s Poetics. And, of
course, tragedy in this context does not reduce to fatalism. As Richard Eldridge
has affirmed in an important effort to remind us that tragic representations may
be our best hedge against the self-delusions of modernist autonomy: “It cannot be
that tragedy instructs us only that people like us undeservedly suffer” (2001: 148).
Rather, the plottedness of tragedy is the portent of hitherto unrealized explanatory
powers that only knowledge of our fateful contingency can make available.
On the basis of these remarks, we can quickly discern that plot passionately—
inasmuch as it is pathos driven—possesses an ethical dimension. The mind that
must reflect upon itself because events have transpired in a way that defy expecta-
tions is already invested in change of state as a hopeful enterprise. One cultivates
the hope in order to understand what has happened in terms that even the most
rigorously intentional act did not comprehend. Aristotle’s notion of the inextrica-
bility of anagnorisis, or recognition, from peripety, or reversal, directs us to think
that tragically plotted action is intrinsically remediable, in the sense that new
knowledge entails a positing of new ends.
II
Not coincidentally, Frank Kermode, in The Sense of an Ending (2000), his expan-
sive analysis of narrative plot making throughout human history, takes “ends” and
the desire for ends as seminal to any full comprehension of how the imperative of
emplotment governs in all human affairs. For Kermode, the ultimate end, apoca-
lypse, is the product of failed prophecy, that is, the lack of experiential knowledge
adequate to one’s sense of purposiveness or cogent beginning. This is to say that
we are almost constitutionally creatures who revise our sense of the ending. As
Kermode explains it, we fear the end as our own death (2000: 7) and so we are
fascinated with the prospect of perpetually ordaining the end. It is an imagina-
tive cooption of what is otherwise a temporal terminus over which we exercise no
control:
Broadly speaking, apocalyptic thought belongs to rectilinear rather than

cyclical views of the world, though this is not a sharp distinction; and even in
Jewish thought there was no true apocalyptic until prophecy failed, for Jewish
apocalyptic belongs to what scholars call the Intertestamentary Period. But
basically one has to think of an ordered series of events which ends, not in a
great New Year, but in a final Sabbath. The events derive their significance from
a unitary system, not from their correspondence with events in other cycles. (5)
End determined plotting is a vicarious escape from the trauma of tempo-

ral uncertainty that failed prophecy sustains. The irony of the compulsion to
plot in this fashion is that all such attempts to elude the failure of prophetic
knowledge are doomed to fail. Only time endures. Kermode himself traces the
plot 375
history of apocalyptic narratives demonstrating the revisionary logic to which

they condition us as plot makers. Kermode lets us see how the struggle of the
Roman Church to cope with the apocalypse mongering that beset Christian
culture with the approach of the fi rst millennium is emblematic of the eschato-
logical burden that plot making can dispose of only by more ingenious plotting.
Kermode observes, “The pressure of reality on us is always varying, as Stevens
might have said: the fictions must change, or if they are fi xed, the interpreta-
tions must change” (2000: 24). Or, as Kermode puts it in another passage, the
end is no longer “imminent”; it is “immanent” (25) to each moment of time.
This is very much in keeping with Aristotle’s intimation that peripety lurks in
every episodic motion of tragic plot. As Oedipus Rex reminds us, each moment
of time is pregnant with the revelation of truths that arise out of the improvisa-
tional will of the protagonistic hero, or, as Henry James might prefer to say, in
every moment of “consciousness.”6 James, who is too often assumed to sacrifice
plot to character, nonetheless invests his character with the will to change. With
respect to plot in general, this will is explicitly the protagonist’s and implicitly
the reader’s. Aptly, Kermode characterizes our disposition toward an end that is
constantly being revised according to a “pressure of reality” that is always vary-
ing as a site of “perpetual transition” (2000: 28).
When we countenance the failure of prophecy, in the manner of the early
Christian eschatologists, we are forced to reckon with the necessity to improvise
new concordances between the episodic moments of our lives and more hypo-
thetical ends. Only in this way does plot keep faith with the enterprise of purpo-
sive selfhood swimming against the tide of unpredictable temporal change. Our
focus is shifted from a plot whereby the present moment is already reconciled
with a future moment, what Kermode designates as “myth,” to a plot whereby the
end is rendered a speculative proposition based upon the reversals of the moment.
The latter prospect entails a speculative enterprise that Kermode designates as
“fiction.”
I would say that the important point is not so much the distinction between
myth and fiction as the ineluctably dialectical play between them. If we now live
in an age of “perpetual transition,” as Kermode claims, we might see that the
discrepancies we discover between our expectations of how things ought to end
and our experience of what thwarts those ends forces our recognition that ends
are inherently rationalizations. They must therefore be reconciled with norma-
tive rationalistic practice. I defend and elaborate the close connection between
plot making and protocols of reason giving below. For the moment, it suffices to
say that we who live in perpetual transition are always negotiating the meaning-
less succession of temporal moments that Kermode identifies as Chronos—the
opposite number of an egotistical mandate for temporal integration that Ker-
mode identifies as Kairos. Though Kermode’s sources are earnestly theological,7
construing kairoi as qualities of God’s time, the very imaginative burden of inte-
gration carried by this concept reveals it to be an inherently human and, as we’ll
see, rationalistic imperative.
III
As Kermode implies, the formal study of literary plot seems to be perpetually
caught up in a recognition of the challenge to reconcile temporal differences—
or, as Kermode himself puts it, to establish concordance between Chronos and
Kairos. The specific arranging or rearranging of discrepant events that plot entails
with respect to this goal was probably most influentially theorized in the early and
mid-twentieth century by narratologists: Russian formalists (Victor Shklovski,
Vladimir Propp, etc.) and French structuralists (Roland Barthes, Gérard Gen-
nette, Tzvetan Todorov, etc.).
The distinction proposed by Shklovski between fabula and sjuzet, or story
and discourse,8 warrants particular consideration. It proffers an elucidation of
the way the existential circumstances of plot makers dovetail with the interpre-
tive mandate faced by all responsible readers of narratives and all hapless human
agents caught in the ebb flow of time. While fabula designates the order of events
as they might happen according to the fact of temporal successiveness, sjuzet des-
ignates the order of telling those events according to the imperative of human
desire. Sjuzet expresses the human will to wring intelligibility from the otherwise
merely successive and hence unintentional moments of experience, often regarded
by Russian formalism as strictly preverbal. As Robert Caserio reminds us in Plot,
Story and the Novel (1979), the distinction between fabula and sjuzet is a power-
ful cautionary against reducing narrative texts to thematic generalities and so
a hedge against underestimating the important links between the sensemaking
work done by and in plots (7). Caserio scrupulously admonishes us to see that the
mere distinguishability of fabula and sjuzet constitutes a mandate for assuming
a perspectivist stance toward the meaning of action. Fabula and sjuzet constitute
something like a ratio of involuntary and volitional acts. While separately they
would be understood as divergent accounts of human agency, the narratological
pairing of these terms ever more urgently prompts the question: What really hap-
pened? It potentiates the perspectivism of reason giving without which no compel-
ling answer to the question is imaginable in the first place.
We typically ask the question “What really happened?” under the pressure of
wanting to keep the realms of reality and fictionality discrete. But it may be that,
just as plot, in Brooks’s words, “cuts across” (1992: 13) the distinction of fabula and
sjuzet, the distinction itself reveals our stake in reason, or reasons, as the essential
underpinning of a plotted reality—one that is not merely the antithesis of fiction.
If the Russian formalists show us that we must always speak of the elements of
story as a seemingly invariable sequence, and that we must always speak of the
ordering of the elements of story as a variable of the perspective of the story teller,
then we are acknowledging the substrate of plot making to be simultaneously situ-
ational and deliberative.
The elements and the order of the elements that make up a plot are thus incipi-
ently dialectical, in the way that acting and thinking are. There is a rough analogy
plot 377
here to Aristotle’s explanation of animal movement in the human as a dialectic

between physical automata and a scruple of “choice and thinking.”9 Nussbaum
emphasizes Aristotle’s care to distinguish the merely causal movements of brute
animals from human actions that presuppose a “why” and denote an animus of
reasons, desires, and beliefs. Any other program (in this case, she glosses Aristo-
tle’s differences with Democritus) “would certainly lead to a breakdown of our
ordinary distinction between causal explanation and the giving of reasons” (1986:
271). In other words, reason giving is inconceivable without positing the kind of
relationality that I’m suggesting the distinction between fabula and sjuzet prompts
us to think about. This is the case even if the theorists of this distinction do not
follow the dialectical line of such thinking themselves.
Indeed, I do not believe that narratologists focus enough on the fact that there
can be little sense of what constitutes the fabula without resorting to a sjuzet-like
perspective (albeit without hypostatizing human life into something with fi xed
sjuzet). This in turn compels our recognition that all such perspectives are inher-
ently relational. Fabula itself is thus rendered a variable of such perspectivism. We
are not simply capitulating to relativism with this notion; we are only acknowledg-
ing the necessity to relate scrupulously to the existential constraints of emplotment
in real time. And once again, the eudaimonian pursuit associated with Aristote-
lian poetics is relevant, for by their very incommensurability, fabula and sjuzet
constitute a warrant for activity—in this case interpretive activity, an elemental
protocol of reason giving. The reality that is graspable within the narratological
purview thus keeps faith with Aristotelian activity by its implicit authorization of
new explanatory powers—even if Russian formalist and subsequent French struc-
turalist methodologies tend toward more taxonomic and static accounts of what
kind of knowledge plot can purvey.
Too often, the narratological handling of the fabula/sjuzet dyad obscures the
reciprocity that obtains between any order of events and its necessary reordering
according to the perspective of one who seeks to discern the meaning of its order.
That is, if we admit that plots are constructed out of a reflective attitude, distinct
from the events related, then every telling is already a retelling and is itself sus-
ceptible to retelling. It is worth pointing out that this retelling is conspicuously
the burden imposed upon the reader of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The framing
device of Conrad’s narrative leaves the reader feeling responsible for knowledge
of the famous lie that Marlow tells to Kurtz’s “Intended.” This is a particularly
onerous moral encumbrance because the narrator of Marlow’s tale remains a silent
witness to that lie. We contrastingly are bound to contemplate what it is reasonable
to do in similar situations such that we escape complicity with the destructive cycle
of history that Marlow’s lie succumbs to. In other words, the quandary of how to
dispose of the sense of irony that Marlow’s lie bestows upon the reader invites us to
contemplate the tragic knowledge of living in the midst of the incomprehensible.
But Conrad invites us to contemplate the incomprehensible as a spur to normative
work, not as a fatal condition of narrative emplotment. In this instance, fabula and
sjuzet are very conspicuously reciprocating propositions.
On the contrary, narratological inquiry tends to treat fabula as potentially dis-

tinct from sjuzet. This practice invites the idea that any narrative order can be made
to submit to something like a set of grammatical rules. Attempting to promote
itself as a “scientific” study of narrative on this basis, narratology moves increas-
ingly toward an emphasis on the forms of narration at the expense of the act of
narrating. Narratology thereby deprives itself of the kind of dialectical perspective
I wish to accommodate here. Narratological theorists like Todorov, whose work
derives from the structural anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss, shifted analyti-
cal emphasis to the narrated over the narrating intelligence in his Grammaire du
Decameron (1969). This work made an effort to equate the narrative object with
the object of empirical scientific inquiry by reducing the phenomenon of narrative
transformation to a relatively static typology. Todorov saw plot as a programmatic
transformation of a predicate term common to the beginning and end of a nar-
rative (see Todorov 1971). Elsewhere, drawing upon the aesthetic stance of Edgar
Allen Poe, Todorov insisted that “the tale is characterized by the existence of a
single effect, acted upon at the end, and by the obligation all the elements of the
tale are under to contribute to this effect” (1975: 87).
Likewise, Propp, in his Morphology of the Folktale (1928, translated in 1958),
taxonomized the formal elements that are exhibited in manifold combinations or
recombinations over the history of Russian storytelling. Propp identified 31 struc-
tural functions and gave an equally compendious account of the dramatis personae
that reappear under different names to serve repeatable roles: the villain, the hero,
the princess, the donor, the helper, and so on. As late as 1973, Claude Bremond
offered a Logique du Récit in which he identified elementary plot structure with a
series of three functions each corresponding to aspects of an unfolding process:
an opening possibility, the actualization or nonactualization of that possibility,
and the achievement or nonachievement of a deliberate aim that results. In all
of these cases—which not coincidentally are based upon a generalized analogy
between linguistic system and narrative structure—plot is reducible to relatively
static schemata that brook little scope for Conradian incomprehensibility.
French structuralists like Barthes, in S/Z (1970) and “The Structural Analysis
of Narrative” (1966), present a similar problem. They draw too rigid or static a
distinction between proairesis, or what Barthes characterizes as the “already done”
(1975: 19), the mere sequentiality of events, and the subjective hermeneutics of a
subject’s having to endure a particular sequence of events. Proairesis does imply
the meaningfulness of events that constitute sequentiality. But we are mistaken
if we imagine, as I believe Barthes risks inviting us to imagine,10 that proairetic
knowledge is in any way separable from the questioning of that meaning; that is,
from prompting the question “What really happened?” In other words, the fullest
appreciation of proairesis requires both that the choice that ordains the sequence
of events takes place within matrices of nature and culture that are reasonable
and that the subject undertake the active work of discerning and contributing to
their reasonableness. The subject must question how meaningfulness is specifi-
cally available to her or him in this situation. Hermeneutic intelligence specifically
plot 379
licenses this questioning. Proairesis understood as mere sequence seems to solicit

hermeneutic intelligence, if only by manifesting its own interpretive impover-
ishment as an intractable finitude. Or, to put it more precisely, under the rule of
proairesis alone, we are inclined to be less responsive to the essentially hermeneutic
principle that I believe governs the Aristotelian understanding of plot in its induce-
ment of reason giving. We become less responsive to the ways in which Aristotle’s
emphasis on activity always invites the questions “Why did it happen?” and “What
must therefore happen next?”
It is telling that according to Roland Barthes the proairetic code is best epito-
mized by the picaresque plot and the hermeneutic code by the detective plot, for
these plot types exhibit complementary limitations at their extremes: the pica-
resque becomes atomistic, inhibiting the posing of large enough questions to
produce a peripety with significant conceptual torque; the detective plot reduces
all questions raised along the episodic path of plot development to one answer.
Sophocles shows us, in Oedipus Rex, how the interdependency of the proairetic
and the hermeneutic codes bestows the greatest authority upon plotted knowl-
edge: such knowledge reveals how character intent and corrective, subsequent
self-understanding participate in a drama of learning to dwell in the midst of the
incomprehensible—without capitulating to incomprehensibility or irrationality.
The persistence of tragedy is the persistence of human activity as Oedipus himself
attests by his surprisingly self-conferred power to dictate the terms of his own
exile at the conclusion of Sophocles’ play. When Oedipus stipulates the conditions
under which he will accept his exile from Thebes, Creon’s reply, “Do not presume
that you are still in power. Your power has not survived you” (lines 1521–22), belies
itself, for Oedipus has indeed survived himself, so to speak, by exercising a power of
adaptation to new conditions of self-understanding. Contrary to Barthes’s appar-
ent understanding that analysis of plot must subsist upon a typological knowl-
edge (1975: 20), which he construes as a programmatic matrix of narrative codes,
Sophocles keeps faith with a process: one that sustains human activity, despite
what coded fatalism it might seem to portend.
IV
While the Aristotelian insistence upon activity, as I have glossed it, seems essential
to a use of plot that would be coordinate with the pursuit of knowledge, we should
not conclude that such activity is tantamount to a mere energetics. This is an idea
about plot that takes off from principles of Freudian metapsychology. Freudian
thought has had fruitful impact on literary analysis of plot. But the literary crit-
ic’s temptation to construe plot as an impersonal matrix of interlocking dynamic
forces, on the model of instinct, ego, superego, is, I believe, no more responsive
to the hermeneutic gratifications of plot making than the Russian formalist or
French structuralist taxonomic orders proved to be. Furthermore, the Freudian’s

emphasis on the conservation of energy as a human end poses an obstacle to fully
appreciating the knowledge-producing aspect of emplotment. Specifically, Freud’s
positing of the “death instinct” or the “death drive” has been taken up by literary
analysts as diverse as Walter Benjamin, Jean-Paul Sartre, Brooks, and many Anglo-
American Lacanians, as a corollary of the drive toward narrative closure. If, as
Freud says in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1990: 6), the instinct is a human need
to restore an original state of inertness, then narrative event can be construed as a
kind of existential chaos that can be quelled only by mastery of the differences that
erupt within it. The narrative drive of plot subsists on the binding of disparate acts
to a single purpose. The activity inherent in this binding is paradoxically bound
in turn to a principle of cessation. The energetics of balancing difference against
resemblance or unity turns out to be as static as taxonomies or typologies of plot,
despite Freud’s insistence that the modalities of energy and inertia are relational.
The flood of stimuli with which the self desirous of death must contend is ren-
dered, ironically, too abstract in the drive toward equilibrium that subsumes it.
Brooks intimates this point in a way that deepens my skepticism about the
Freudian model and ultimately my sense of the liabilities that inhere in Brooks’s
own reliance on a Freudian interpretive matrix: “The organism must live in order
to die in the proper manner, to die the right death. One must have the arabesque
of plot in order to reach the end. One must have metonymy in order to reach meta-
phor” (1992: 107). The hypostasis of a principle of continuity between metonymy
and metaphor makes the “dynamism” of what Brooks calls Freud’s “master-plot”
less conducive to the cognitive demands upon human agency that I’ve suggested
inhere in the Aristotelian trajectory of plot. Perhaps the limitedness of the applica-
bility of Freudian thought to a fully ethical comprehension of plot is best indicated
in the often-cited “fort/da” game from Beyond the Pleasure Principle. This is the
germ of Freud’s close identification of desire and repetition with the death drive.
The anecdote is famously succinct. Freud observes his 18-month-old grandson
solacing himself for his mother’s absence by tossing a wooden reel—to which a
string is attached—from his crib and uttering the word fort (gone). The infant
then draws the object back within his grip joyfully uttering the word da (there).
The symbolic recuperation of the absent mother, the reconciling of one moment
with another in the grasp of the symbolic object, does capture one aspect of plot:
its rescuing the human subject from the chaotic flow of temporal moments. Freud
characterizes the child as compensating himself by “staging the disappearance and
the return of the objects within his reach” (:1990: 6). And no doubt Brooks is cor-
rect in his characterization of the dynamic as a rough corollary of what sets up the
tensions within the episodic structure of plot, what he calls “the vacillating play
of the middle where repetition as binding works toward the generation of signifi-
cance, toward recognition and the retrospective illumination that will allow us to
grasp the text as total metaphor” (1992: 108). The totality of metaphor denotes
something like compensation for the loss of the mother or, more generally, a rescu-
ing of the cogency of resemblance from the irrationality of difference.
plot 381
So, it might seem that on a descriptive register the Freudian model is reason-
ably close to the integrative or structural order of plot. But, in the end, Freud’s
emphasis on the recuperation of knowledge rather than the growth of knowledge
compromises its usefulness for understanding plot in a way that embraces plot’s
farthest reaching work. The Freudian model lacks the speculative momentum that
the open-ended work of emplotment sustains: recognition that the plot maker
must reason beyond what he already knows in order to give full expression to the
productive or making self. I am, of course, suggesting in this respect that plot is
a kind of phronesis. What distinguishes phronesis from sophia is the practicality
of judgment, the constraint of time as an ongoing condition of human activity.
I’ve argued elsewhere that phronesis is conditional upon a deliberative process (see
Singer 2003: 47–48). Indeed, the practicality of phronesis follows from its situated-
ness in a crisis that demands action.
Aptly enough, Kermode explicates the modern concept of crisis by reference to
the punning dimension of the word in Greek: meaning judgment and separation.
That is to say, where there is a break in continuity of knowledge, there is a demand
for judgment, knitting the act of judging more closely to act qua activity (2000: 25).
Or, as I’ve already noted, the end is “[n]o longer imminent, the end is immanent”
(25). Every moment is ripe with the mandate for explanation of its significance in
relation to the end. In other words, this end is no longer merely eschatological but
now logical. It warrants the assertion of reasons both for positing it and for believ-
ing in the prospect of attaining it. Aristotle seems to recognize the importance of
this speculative trajectory when he argues that the arts call for more deliberation
than the sciences because they take as their field of deliberative activity that which
happens when “the event is obscure and with things in which it is indeterminate”
(Ethics 3: 1112b5; 1941: 971), that is, when the right course is not clearly defined.
Brooks himself betrays a sympathy with this line of thought in his apprecia-
tion of a very late essay by Freud titled “Constructions in Analysis” (1937). Here
Freud does intimate a significant contribution to the understanding of plot that is
compatible with Aristotelian activity, for he characterizes the relationship between
the analyst and the analysand in terms that open a deliberative field of play. The
deliberative threshold is crossed in Freud’s reminder that analysis involves two
people, one of whom is trying to bring to light what the other has forgotten. Freud
emphasizes the point that the work of the analyst to recuperate what is lost to
memory entails a constructive activity. This constructive activity is strikingly
analogous to the artifice of plot I have been characterizing here as a deliberative
métier. By insisting upon discussing plot in relation to a protocol of reason giving,
I am courting the proposition that the discourse of plot itself is charged across the
poles of two viewpoints marked as distinct temporal moments. In this respect,
it is important to observe with Brooks that for Freud the exchange between the
analyst and the analysand requires an alternation, or what I have been teasing
out as a dialectical play between interpretation and the production of new knowl-
edge. Brooks points us to Freud’s stipulation that when the analysand assents
to the analyst’s constructions, the gesture has no value “unless it is followed by
indirect confirmations, unless the patient, immediately after his ‘yes,’ produces
new memories which complete and extend the construction” (Freud 1964: 262;
Brooks 1992: 322). In other words, the analysand goes on by acknowledging previ-
ously unacknowledged frameworks of significance. So, despite the essentially con-
servative trajectory of the death instinct, late Freudian thinking does seem to hold
out the prospect for a modality of emplotment that is not merely recuperative or
end-stopped in the determination of ends. There is the suggestion that whatever
it is on the part of the analysand that “produces new memories which complete
and extend the construction” of his discourse therefore portends something like
a positing of new ends. It is this Freudian prospect that bears most directly on the
ethical dimension of plot making.
V
Earlier in this essay, I suggested that plot is pathos driven. It embodies an exigency
whereby the mind must reflect upon itself when events have defied expectations.
As a result, I suggested that the plot maker is invested in the subject’s change of
state as a “hopeful enterprise.” It is with respect to this point that tragically plot-
ted action could be said to portend a positing of new ends. This brings us back
to a consideration of the way in which plot entails character transformation. The
difficulty of possessing character as an intrinsic quality of one’s existence in time
has been powerfully attested to by St. Augustine in his almost agonizing search
for a human orientation to eternity in chapter 11 of his Confessions. This medita-
tion has been influentially appropriated by Paul Ricoeur in his magisterial three-
volume work, Time and Narrative (1984 1985, 1988). Ricoeur reveals how plot and
the positing of ends with which we are caught up in the act of plot making broaden
the scope of our reflection upon character.
Though one does injustice to Ricoeur’s achievement by addressing his text in
anything but its threefold entirety, there is some compensatory merit in featur-
ing his concept of a “threefold present,” or distentio animi. He finds the focus for
this project in a single passage from Augustine wherein the saint’s meditation on
the recitation of a well-remembered psalm reveals an unexpected plot dynamic.
Augustine confronts the enigma of time by scrupulously noting that in the reci-
tation of the psalm one seems to move in the medium of a present that is always
already past, even as its disappearance into the past depends upon the anticipation
of the future. One remembers the psalm. As such, it is already an artifact of the
past. But one’s recitation brings it back into the future by anticipating what words
come next in the act of serving memory. The anticipation is nonetheless an artifact
of one’s presentness with respect to what has not yet been recovered to memory
through speech. The dialectic of expectation, memory, and the attentiveness that
marks the presentness of one’s act of accommodating the future to the past exhibits
plot 383
a distention, what Ricoeur describes as “the shift in, the non-coincidence of, the
three modalities of action” (1990, 1: 43).
Ricoeur makes the point that Augustine has exposed a conundrum of human
temporality that seems to demand resolution: how does one reconcile the seem-
ingly incommensurable moments of time that are the occasion of our apprehen-
sion that time is, that is, that time is our passing through it? Augustine himself
finesses the problem by concluding that what one wants is a fi xed moment or
reference point by which one can measure the passage of time as a differential
of expectation, memory, and attention. The breakthrough for Augustine comes
with the realization that such a fi xed point can only inhere in the distended mind
itself (Ricoeur 1990: 21). Ricoeur promotes Augustine’s insight by observing that in
Poetics Aristotle has seen that the most significant goal is not to resolve the conun-
drum of human temporality but to put it to work by, as Ricoeur puts it, “produc-
ing an inverted figure of discordance and concordance” (41). Ricoeur has in mind
the way making, emphatically the making of plots, is necessarily a reordering of
events independent of any expectation of adequacy to a transcendent systematic
order (52).
Ricoeur’s/Augustine’s orientation to the burdens of emplotment with respect
to reconciling differences thus contrasts favorably with the orientation of nar-
ratologists, structuralists, and Freudians. Both Ricoeur and Augustine hold out
the prospect for character change and the positing of new ends insofar as these
are understood to be the salient stakes of the human investment in plot (Ricoeur
1990: 7), for distentio animi is acknowledgment that the mind—stretched in three
directions at once—necessarily entails a transition from one state to another. This
is the underpinning of Ricoeur’s strongest assertion of the “primacy of the activ-
ity that produces plots in relation to every sort of static structure, achronological
paradigm, or temporal invariant” (30). To be fair, Augustine’s account defers ulti-
mately to the unachievable concordance of human time with divine eternity. But
Ricoeur’s Aristotelian inflection of Augustine’s meaning with respect to disten-
tio animi comprehends the fate of character as roughly equivalent to the slippage
between the present of the future, the present of the past, and the present of the
present (38).
This slippage for Ricoeur is linked to muthos, the activity of composing, which
he claims constitutes an inseparable pair with mimesis (1990: 30). Imitation is only
ever the composition/composing of events into an organizational pattern. Its rep-
resentational power is indistinguishable from its figurational power. Accordingly,
Aristotle’s venerable anatomy of the six parts of tragedy (spectacle, thought, song,
etc.) in “chapter 6” of Poetics is construed by Ricoeur “not as parts of the poem but
of the art of composition” (1990: 30). This phenomenological approach to plot per-
haps surprisingly refers us once again to the topos of eudaimonia, where character
is subsumed to activity. Aristotle’s rigorous subordination of character to plot now
becomes the stage for an ethical project11 in which personhood is not merely the
content of action, a mechanism for the fictional distribution of good persons and
bad persons in the world, but an occasion for human self-reflection. It ordains the
capacity of “persons engaged in action” (Poetics 48A1; Ricoeur 1990: 35) to know
themselves better. This, after all, motivates St. Augustine’s struggle in relation to the
Divine, for the threefold present, or the distentio animi of plot, denotes an internal-
ization of dramatic action. It portends a reconciliation with one’s differences over
time that makes personhood beholden to the necessity of adaptation and change.
If, as Ricoeur strongly suggests, Aristotle’s marrying of the pair mimesis-muthos is
the real theoretical accomplishment of Poetics, and if Aristotle thereby establishes
an equivalence between representation of action and the organization of events
(Ricoeur 1990: 30), the idea of character would seem to be devoutly wedded to the
practice of self-representation. The task of self-representation would consequently
involve a continuous reckoning with the warrant for new reasons or justifications
vis-à-vis the actions that accrue to a person over time and without which there
would be no compelling pretext for representation at all.
Not surprisingly, the idea that plot has ethical force, by dint of the organiza-
tional and structurational capacities of mind, is most strikingly concordant with
Aristotle’s insistence that plot exhibits intelligence per se. As Ricoeur and many
others have attested, this is integral to the proposition that the internal connection
of the plot is logical, not chronological. Though the term “logic” does not appear in
Poetics, precisely because Aristotle’s focus is phronetic, not theoretic—the emphasis
is always on doing/making—intelligence is the sine qua non of phronetic activity.
Or, at least, this would seem to be the case wherever phronesis entails cognizance
of a change of state and mandates an accommodation of new evaluative commit-
ments. The evidence for this claim is perhaps even stronger in our acknowledg-
ment of something that Samuel Taylor Coleridge remarked upon centuries later in
his own poetics, “On the Principles of Genial Criticism Concerning the Fine Arts”
(1814)12—that all kinds of realities that would ordinarily be repulsive in our actual
experience of them are rendered pleasurable when incorporated to the organiza-
tional mandate of the imagination. Or, to put it back in strictly Aristotelian terms,
in plot our contemplation of images of the basest animals or putrescent corpses is
rendered coherent with “the experience of learning and reasoning out what each
thing represents,” for example, that “ ‘this figure is so and so’ ” (1448b12–17, cited
in Ricoeur 1990: 21).
Just as Aristotle privileges poetry over history for its emphasis on probable
impossibilities rather than possible improbabilities, so the imaginative activity
of choosing prospects takes precedence over the prospective knowledge of what
choices are known to be possible. In effect, plot is the art of the possible. Or per-
haps it would be more precise to formulate its purpose as the art of “making possi-
ble,” especially in light of Ricoeur’s emphasis on the agency of mimesis. Within the
scope of Ricoeurian/Aristotelian mimesis, all making—temporally constrained
and temporally enabled—makes us ever more scrupulously aware of the fact that
possibility itself is a variable of deliberative process. Where our evaluative commit-
ments are challenged by new knowledge/unprecedented circumstance, we must
reckon with the mandate for making plans that will prove more compatible with
the hitherto unacknowledged contingencies of our situation.13
plot 385
Plotting is planning, but it is planning awry, so to speak. It is a mode of planning

that remains cognizant of the reversibility of intentional action and is intentionally
or deliberatively responsive to that cognizance. Ricoeur epitomizes its dynamic in
the proposal that while plot is always a striving for concordance, particularly in the
case of tragedy, the vicissitudes of tragedy in real time constrain us to accommo-
date a “discordant concordance” (42). This he treats as a counterpart to distentio
animi. Aristotle, of course, values the quality of completeness14 in plot action, for
which concordance is a correlative principle. And, in this way, he tantalizes us
with a prospect for the stability of character achievable through action. But this
prospect invites the very mistaken privileging of character over act that Aristotle is
so consistently bent upon correcting elsewhere in Poetics. The idea that character
is the proper end of action would, of course, render discord a punctually resolv-
able problem of the human experience of time. Alternatively, Ricoeur’s discordant
concordance keeps faith with a possibility that I believe Aristotle never abandons:
that discord is absolutely constitutive of the human experience of time, that is,
an ineliminable element of the dynamics of plot. Thus, whatever our idea about
character, it is bound to sustain itself through a recognition of its own discordant
concord. This is to say that character is not the end of the plot per se. Rather, it is
what accrues to the activity of plotting as increments of knowledge.
Within this purview, we should not fail to recognize the conceptual contours
of the Conradian predicament of “living in the midst of the incomprehensible,”
or the relevance of Kermode’s notion of human character as living in “perpetual
transition” or of Freud’s prescription that the sustaining of the relation between
analyst and analysand depends upon the production of new memories that “com-
plete and extend” the discourse. Nor should we fail to recognize that each of
these glosses on human experience is resonant with the eudaimonian spirit of
Aristotelian plot that, recall, Nussbaum characterized as “essentially active, of
which praiseworthy activities are not just productive means, but actual constitu-
ent parts” (1986: 6). In all of this there is the suggestion that if we want to under-
stand the relation of character to plot, we must countenance the dependence of
character on what, in the vicissitudes of action, determines the human propensity
to ask “Why?”—that is, on what is here, now, not reconciled, recuperated, and
already known. We might therefore be prompted to think more broadly of plot as
an ongoing response to whatever it is about human activity that determines the
interrogative mode.
VI
And yet, at this juncture, one might reasonably ask the question, “Why should we
think of plot as having to do with asking why?” After all, given the vast interpre-
tive tradition featuring literary plot as little more than a stage for the exhibition
of character, we might imagine that certain plot structures or plot types are pro-
grammatically vehicles of characterization. “Who” explains everything. Samuel
Johnson’s “Preface to Shakespeare” (1765) is the most authoritative exemplar of
this tradition. The Johnsonian ideal of “General Nature” prompts us to consider
how the hubristic ego determines the plot of tragic suffering in Sophocles or how
the lack of the servant’s official social power in Plautus determines the plot of his
or her wiliness, or how the senility and impotence of the senex in Roman comedy
generally produces the perverse marriage plot that threatens an unnatural pairing
of the young and the old. Or merely consider how Othello’s jealousy dooms him to
self-destruction with such compelling logic that we are impelled to generalize that
all action is essentially characterological. In such cases, plot seems to illustrate per-
sonality and its consequences. As I’ve already suggested, all of the questions that
plot can answer seem to be already presupposed in the nature of character. The
“why” of the interrogative mode seems to be mooted as a crux of emplotment.
Of course, we have been repeatedly warned by Aristotle not to trust such
appearances, that is, not to treat character type as a cause of action. Such thinking
violates the strict priority Aristotle assigns to activity over character. We would
fall into the trap of seeing plot itself as effectively inactive. And yet it could be
argued that this objection, in turn, seems to beg the question of who acts. Despite
Aristotle’s ample discussion of character and the variety of character types, as if
the source of character in activity were self-evidently explicable, he risks a kind of
circular logic: he does not clarify how the agency of action is related to the agency
of character such that one is clearly anterior to the other. All of this raises a sus-
picion that the “why” of the interrogative mode is both central to and somewhat
incoherent with respect to the meaning of plot when we try to sort out its bearing
on character.
And yet, I think the conundrum that emerges here is opportune since it gives
renewed urgency for us to see plot and character in some more productively dia-
lectical relation. As I have been suggesting, it is this impetus that reveals most
intimately how plot fosters a notion of character as self-investigation, and how this
framework for comprehending plot might dovetail with an investment in ethical
personhood. The interrogative mode may indeed be countenanced as the motor
of emplotment when we understand that activity and personhood are reciprocally
determined. After all, the interrogative mode is a pretext for reason giving with-
out which ethical personhood is virtually unimaginable. I have proposed a link
between plot and rational practice with an eye toward this condition. Along these
lines, it is important to remind ourselves that in the Ethics Aristotle affirms that
“Reason, more than anything else, is man” (1178a). Each person seems to be reduc-
ible to his faculty of understanding. Aristotle is grasping the fact that one’s sense
of one’s own protagonistic identity is typically a function of critical distance from
oneself.
It is quite true that we implicitly alienate or negate ourselves in taking up a
critically reflective vantage point with respect to the actions that hitherto grounded
our identity. But Aristotle seems to make the point that one’s capacity to reason or
plot 387
understand (without which critical distance is unachievable) follows one across

the episodic threshold of one experience after another that is the material substrate
of contemplative being. Persistent self-investigation does not preclude the self. In
other words, Aristotle preempts the idea, popularized in the wake of poststructur-
alism, that in crossing such thresholds, gaining new critical vantage points, one has
to give up on the proposition that character or subjective identity endures, even and
especially through the rigors of peripety. The continuity of understanding through
the vicissitudes of experiences that qualify or revise the self we seek to understand
would seem to presuppose the interrogative mode. If “Reason, more than anything
else, is man,” his personhood is a continuous inquiry into the springs of whatever
action one takes that occasions one’s knowing better than to have taken it. This
amounts to something like a Kantian apperceptive I, rendered as a métier of learn-
ing instead of as an ontological ground.
But it might be even more useful to describe Aristotle’s point about the per-
sistence of understanding—the impossibility that understanding could negate
itself—as a prescient Hegelian insight. That would certainly help to advance my
interest in seeing plot and character in a more dialectical relation, for Hegel’s
account of self-consciousness, in the Phenomenology, and also in his meditations
on the tragic, hinges on the way in which the mediations of worldly experience
augment self-consciousness. Hegelian negation itself might be said to prompt the
interrogative mode if we focus on the fact that Hegelian self-consciousness is plot-
ted, so to speak, by casting doubt on self-certainty. This doubt propels the dia-
lectic of self-consciousness in a way that determines character as based on one’s
circumstances and the conditionality they embody rather than on some ontologi-
cal predicate of one’s personal nature.
VII
Character is seen to be less typological in light of this dialectic with plot, and it
might therefore be more properly characterized as situational and rationalisti-
cally pragmatic. Philosophical and psychological theorists seeking to promote an
empirically based ethics are frequently disposed to see situationalism as a way out
of the labyrinth of psychological groundings of action, thus preempting a view
of character as independent of action. Rather than plumbing depth psychology,
they have recourse to strategies of “narrative” integration15 as means of accounting
for unconscious motivations. Such unconscious motivations are signaled in the
incoherencies that grow out of situations where one’s desire to take responsibility
for one’s self-understanding is frustrated. Situationalists argue that an agent can
come to terms with this “unconscious” by reflecting on what motives one embraces
when one integrates acts into a coherent story or what reasons one can adduce to
support motivational accounts of action.
In The Possibility of Practical Reason (2000), J. David Velleman gives us motive

for thinking that situational rationality and plot making are complementary activ-
ities, by insisting that one’s self-knowledge is inescapably a knowledge of what one
is doing. For Velleman, the human propensity to ask why can be consummated
only in furtherance of the question “What am I doing?” This is consistent with the
Aristotelian precept that plotted action is what makes us recognizable to ourselves
as significantly human, that is, as distinct from animals. After all, for Velleman,
knowing what we are doing is different from simply being able to describe our
movements. Rather, “[t]o know what we’re doing is grasping our bodily move-
ments under concepts that set them in an explanatory context of motives and cir-
cumstances” (2000: 27). He stipulates, accordingly, that the interrogative “What
am I doing?” (29) is a prerequisite of acting autonomously. Even more important, it
is the condition under which gaining cognizance of a lack of self-knowledge—such
that an agent might become aware of the choice to do something else—is originally
possible. One is thereby rendered open to the possibility that there are other and
possibly better reasons for acting.
What I referred to above as crossing the episodic thresholds of one experience
after another potentially yields what we might now call a better story or plot if
one understands the reasons for what one is doing as better than other reasons.
The ability to discriminate those reasons is in turn dependent upon our ever more
scrupulously registering the succession of episodic moments out of which our com-
prehension that we need motivating reasons in the first place arises. As Velleman
puts it: “[R]easons for acting are the elements of a possible storyline along which
to make up what we are going to do” (2000: 28).
On this basis, it may be said that as plot makers we are naturally predisposed to
respond to the necessity of producing a better story line, one that will always make
us more responsive to what will not suffice to convince us that we know what we
are doing. That is, a better story line will always be one that makes us more respon-
sive to interruptive incidents that have undermined the authority of a prior story
line to reassure us that we know what we are doing. Velleman’s sense that know-
ing what we are doing is “grasping our bodily movements under concepts that
set them in an explanatory context of motives and circumstances” intimates how
self-explanation, or the kind of self-manipulation that such deliberative reflection
prompts, might give us the most illuminating of view of plot as an ethical under-
taking. The broader horizon of human reflection to which we are referred when
we acquire consciousness of our Aristotelian hamartia—our lack of knowledge
in unique situations—is encompassed by heeding the interrogative “What am I
doing?” as if it were an imperative. The interrogative itself must therefore be coun-
tenanced itself as a mode of doing or acting. In this respect, plot commits us to a
form of attention to the world.
Unstinting attentiveness is, after all, what Samuel Beckett’s Unnamable reck-
ons with as a going on, even in the face of a failure of the will to go on: “[P]erhaps
they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on
my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where
plot 389
I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on,
I can’t go on, I’ll go on” (1965: 414). The Unnamable testifies to a form of attach-
ment to the significance of life even before he knows the reasons he might possess
to sustain that attachment. The Unnamable’s mode of reasoning is one that does
not depend upon seeing preformulated reasons as necessary or sufficient to make
sense of things, because for him making sense of things is an ongoing and self-
sustaining proposition.
Indeed, plot, or the emplotment of narrative experience, produces what might
be called a therapeutic effect with respect to the possibility of going on, and per-
haps “going on” by way of a better story line, for we have seen how it intimates a
capacity to integrate reasons or motives that we may not have “noticed” or paid
sufficient attention to in telling a story, but whose significance becomes apparent
as the story unfolds. The point can be made even more explicitly. In John Doris’s
Lack of Character (2002), a book that is interested in establishing the situational
determinants of character as the basis for an empirical ethics and has no stake in
the literary value of plot per se, we nonetheless recognize a striking concordance
with Aristotle’s privileging of the conditions of action over characterological traits.
More important, the author explicitly speaks of plot, predicated on this situation-
alist view of character, as a form of reasoning whereby we can compensate our-
selves for blind spots of reasoning or for our ignorance of motives that we might
otherwise need to take responsibility for. As Doris explains, plot, or narrative,
potentiates human self-scrutiny, a discipline of taking notice, so to speak. It can
show us the evidence of identifications or evaluative commitments that amount
to unconscious motives. It does so “even where the narrative’s subject disavows
the motive in question by illuminating the ways in which the motive expresses
operative priorities” (2002: 142). Like Velleman, Doris gives us a reason to think
that plot is related to the practice of reason giving, especially where reasons are not
spontaneously forthcoming or self-evident. If Velleman and Doris lead us to imag-
ine that plot is in many ways driven by the question “What am I doing?” we might
now surmise that the best answer mandates the sustenance of plot making. This is
not a mandate for plots to be open-ended as much as it is an admonition to recog-
nize that plots must be studied for the ways they prompt us to pay attention to the
world; they foster forms of attentiveness that our already settled characterological
dispositions do not allow or entitle us to.
In Velleman and Doris’s rationalistic efforts to stretch the capacity of plot mak-
ing to accommodate unforeseen knowledge, they keep faith with the eudaimonian
stakes of plot making that Aristotle affirmed for the sake of illuminating a literary
enterprise. It is important to remember that the study of plot is originally motivated
within the framework of an artistic practice. But it is equally important to realize
that it was a philosopher who first took that motive seriously, in large part because
the literary enterprise of tragedy was already perceived to be integral to the life of
the agora where philosophical attitudes joined social practices in the enterprise of
human making, the formal arena of human agency. The continuity of philosophical
and literary interests is sustained most meaningfully in the kind of recent thinking
about plot exampled by Velleman and Doris when it reminds us that as plot mak-
ers we are preeminently subjects who wish to interact productively and responsibly
with a civil order—one in which human nature can decisively take the initiative
of self-justification. The Greek tragedies that served as the warrant for Aristotle’s
Poetics still testify to this aspiration. I think there would be little argument against
the claim that self-justification, that is, some small mitigation of Conrad’s knowl-
edge that we “dwell in the midst of the incomprehensible,” has been the source of
our most enduring interest in plot since the time of its most seminal literary pro-
genitors. There is arguably no example of plot that does not bear heavily upon the
prospects of humans for sustaining the purposiveness of their being as agents. After
all, we are agents in a world where agency is always challenged by the obscurity of
human motives, embedded as they are in temporal situation of change and trans-
formation. On this account, plot is perhaps our most trusted compass for finding a
human direction in the temporal wilderness of our Natural existence.
NOTES
1. Brooks sees narrative, as distinct from plot, as a uniquely literary or aesthetic

proposition. I would not mark the distinction in these terms and would ultimately make
less of it.
2. In book 7 of the Ethics, Aristotle gives appearances, the “observed facts”
(phainomena), a methodological status: we can’t work through the puzzles of perception
and thus attain the truth of beliefs on any other basis. See 1145b1ff.
3. See, e.g., the Phaedo, where Socrates does not countenance physical ills as serious
liabilities of human existence because they are mere bodily effects.
4. Nussbaum identifies this as “animal activity” (1986: 273).
5. In a famous retort to a natural scientist who would reduce the meaning of an
act or event to its rudimentary physical elements, Socrates insists upon “deliberation
and rational choice” or intellect as the legitimate basis of learning (Phaedo 99A4–5).
Nussbaum comments that, given the choice between two patterns of explanation (one by
physiology and one by reason or intellect), we see that “only actions . . . fit the latter . . . by
which he means rational actions understood as the products of intellectual activity, that
are said to be inadequately explained by the former” (1986: 272).
6. See the discussion of Rowland Mallet’s consciousness in James 1972.
7. See Kermode’s reliance, followig James T. Barr, on the Biblical scholars
Cullmann, Marsh, and Tillich (2000: 47).
8. French narratological structuralism deploys the terms histoire and discours.
Émile Benveniste explains this subtle shift of emphasis by referencing the fact that
French has two systems of past-tense verbs: one designates narration of past events; the
other is reserved for oral utterance assuming a speaker and a hearer. See Benveniste 1971:
205–15.
9. Nussbaum 1986: 270 is a useful discussion of the distinction between Democritus’s
view of animal movement and Aristotle’s (in De Anima) in order to emphasize Aristotle’s
stake in some kind of sorting out or focusing on the pieces of the world.
plot 391
10. Barthes’s exposition includes the assertion that the “proairetic sequence is never
more than the result of an artifice of reading: whoever reads the text amasses certain data
under some generic titles for actions (stroll, murder, rendezvous), and this title embodies
the sequence” (1975: 19).
11. Of course, the irony, as Ricoeur admits, is that in the Nicomachean Ethics
(110a30ff), where ethics is the proper end of the discourse, the subject precedes the action
(1990: 37).
12. See the discourse on the beautiful in this essay, Coleridge 1966: 372–77.
13. John Doris, in Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior (2002), conducts
an extremely interesting investigation into the nature of character on this basis, thereby
appreciating how characterological traits might be reconceived as more profoundly
situational than natural or constitutional; see esp. 136.
14. Tragedy is deemed to be an imitation of action that is “serious” and “complete”
(Poetics 49b25).
15. Doris’s Lack of Character is one example of this style of theorizing. But much
of this work arose out of the famous “Milgram situations” and other instances of a
longstanding situationist research tradition in experimental social psychology that
Doris examines. Researchers in this field wish to demonstrate that, as Doris himself
says, “situational factors are often better predictors of behavior than personal factors”
(2002: 2)
REFERENCES
Aristotle. (1941). The Basic Works of Aristotle (R. McKeon, ed.). New York: Random
House.
Barthes, R. (1975). S/Z. New York: Hill and Wang.
Beckett, S. (1965). The Unnameable. In Three Novels. New York: Grove Press.
Beneviste, E. (1971). Problems in General Linguistics. Coral Gables: University of Miami
Press.
Bremer, J. M. (1969). Hamartia: Tragic Error in the Poetics of Aristotle and Greek Tragedy.
Amsterdam: Hakkert.
Brooks, P. (1992). Reading for the Plot. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Caserio, R. (1979). Plot, Story and the Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Coleridge, S. T. (1966). “On the Principels of Genial Criticism Concerning the Fine
Art.” In E.Schneider (ed.), Selected Poetry and Prose. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and
Winston: 372–77. (Original work published in 1814.)
Conrad, J. (1995). Heart of Darkness. New York: Penguin. (Original work published in
1899.)
Doris, J. M. (2002). Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior. Cambridge:
Eldridge, R. (2001). “How Can Tragedy Matter for Us?” In Eldridge, The Persistence of
Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Freud, S. (1964). “Constructions in Analysis.” In J. Strachey (trans.), The Standard Edition
of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud., Vol. XXIII. London: Hogarrh.
Freud, Sigmund (1990). Beyond the Pleasure Principle. (J. Strachey trans.). New York:
W W. Norton. (Original work published 1in 920.)
Jackson, J. J., and J. R. J. Jackson, eds. (1995). The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, Vol. 11, Shorter Works and Fragments. Princeton: Princeton University
Press.
James, H. (1972). “Preface” to Roderick Hudson. In J. E. Miller, Jr. (ed.), Theory of Fiction.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Kermode, F. (2000). The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. Oxford:
Ricoeur, P. (1990). Time and Narrative (Volume 1), In. Time and Narrative (3 vols.).
K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer (trans.) Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
(Original works published 1984, 1985, 1988).
Singer, A. (2003). Aesthetic Reasons: Artworks and the Deliberative Ethos. University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press.
Todorov, T. (1971). “Transformation of Narratives.” In R. Howard (trans.), Poetics of Prose
Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
—— . (1975). The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. (R. Howard,
trans.). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. (Original work published in 1970.)
Velleman, J. D. (2000). The Possibility of Practical Reason. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
 
CHARACTER
stanley bates
In every agreement to buy or sell, there’s also the proviso,

acknowledged or not, that says “unless, of course, I don’t
want to anymore,” or “that is, unless I change my mind,”
or “assuming my yoga instructor doesn’t advise against it.”
The hallowed concept of character was invented to seal off
these contingencies. But . . . are we really going to say that
this concept is worth a nickel or a nacho? Or, for that matter,
ever was?
—Richard Ford, The Lay of the Land
Whether the “hallowed concept of character” is a fiction we shall have occasion

to consider, but there can be no doubt that there are fictional characters. There
are a number of different levels at which character can be considered reflectively,
philosophically. One might, for example, reflect on particular styles of the rep-
resentation of character, and of the character of characters. This could involve a
historical account of the development of different modes of representation, such
as Erich Auerbach offers in his classic Mimesis (2003). One might try to develop
an account of why certain fictional/mythical characters seem to develop a pres-
ence that exceeds the texts in which they appear—Don Juan, or Faust, or Falstaff,
for example. One might also attempt to untangle the relationship between what
we believe about the character of actual human beings, and how those beliefs are
involved in our relationships to literary characters. I begin at this very general level
before moving to some more specific issues.
From a certain, usually unarticulated, philosophical perspective, fictional
characters raise a number of puzzling issues. Why do we (those of us who do)
concern ourselves with fictional characters? This is an only slightly narrowed

version of the question of why we concern ourselves with imaginative literature
at all. “What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?” Why do readers invest their
emotions in fictional beings? Why did so many cry at the death of Little Nell?
(Oscar Wilde once suggested that one would have to have a heart of stone to read
the death of Little Nell without laughing.) It would be worth some investiga-
tion to try to understand why these questions have been believed to be puzzling.
From what perspective is concern for fictional characters found to be paradoxi-
cal? Throughout the long history of fictional literature (and drama and narrative
fictional fi lm), the vast majority of readers (and viewers) have been emotionally
invested in the actions and fates of fictional character. Hence, it would seem
more promising to attempt to construct an account of imaginative literature
(and drama, and fictional narrative fi lm), which at worst accommodates, and
at best accounts for, this vast body of phenomenological data. Any view that
implies that there is something impossible, or irrational, or false, or wrong, at
the root of the emotional concern for fictional characters must be wrong. What
I have just articulated is, of course, an aspect of a “traditional” view of litera-
ture—and sophisticated “theories” of the last century and the present have come
to challenge it. Kathryn Sutherland quotes A. C. Bradley, a prominent traditional
critic of the early twentieth century, as writing of Jane Austen, “It is a great merit,
that is, in a story that, besides admiring the characters as studies, you care for
some of them as persons, and care very much for at least one.” Sutherland then
comments:
The strength of Austen’s novels, like Shakespeare’s plays is to be found, Bradley
argues, in characters who exhibit a habit of life beyond the function of the plot.
Hence the conviction that there is more to Elizabeth Bennet, that her textual life
is only a part of what is knowable. Though long unfashionable as a professional
protocol for reading, the idea of “knowing” or identifying with fictional
characters remains important when it comes to explaining why we read novels
for pleasure. (2006: 12)
The implication of her last sentence is that a professional protocol for reading at
least for the last century or so must have been unconcerned with why we read
novels for pleasure. This seems to me more or less accurate. Why should this have
been so?
In the professionalization of any field or academic discipline, certain prem-
ises about the values of the objects and methods of study will have been built
into the construction of that field or discipline. Reflective questions about those
premises will generally not be a part of the field itself.1 Later in this chapter
I return briefly to a consideration of what makes possible both postmodern-
ist theories about literature and postmodernist literature. Here, in consider-
ing the issues of the role of character and characterization in human fictional
constructions, I locate these issues against a wider background of my own
assumptions.
character 395
Setting
My own perspective is broadly naturalistic. Literature and, more generally, fic-
tional narratives are human constructions made within a human practice.2 (This
denies a supernatural origin for sacred texts. Sacred texts are created by humans
for humans—though, of course, their human creators may believe them to have
been inspired by the divine. Hence, if one believes that a text is sacred, and not just
believed by some to be sacred, my discussion is not intended to be applicable to it.)
Why has there ever been a human practice of making up fictional narratives that
represent the actions of fictional characters? (From the point of view of certain
representationalist theories of language, such narratives are simply lies—intended
to deceive.) It seems to me that an answer to this question that operates at the right
level, and that is right as far as it goes, is given in the first great work of the analysis
of literature in the western tradition, Aristotle’s Poetics. Before he begins his analy-
sis of tragedy, Aristotle gives a general characterization of “poetry in general”—
what we would call literature. Famously, he claims that all the kinds of poetry are
forms of mimesis probably best translated as “representation” but often translated
as “imitation.” But then he takes up the issue of why there is poetry at all—why do
human beings engage in mimesis? Aristotle asserts:
In general, two causes both inherent in man’s nature seem to have led to the
birth of poetry. Imitation is natural to man from childhood; he differs from
the other animals in that he is the most imitative: the first things he learns
come to him through imitation. Then, too, all men take pleasure in imitative
representations. Actual experience gives proof of this: the sight of certain things
gives us pain, but we enjoy looking at the most exact images of them, whether
the forms of animals which we greatly despise or of corpses. The reason is
that learning things is most enjoyable not only for philosophers but for others
equally, though they have but little experience of it . . . . Next, Imitation and
melody and rhythm are ours by nature . . . so men were naturally gifted from the
beginning, and progressing step by step they created poetry out of their random
utterances. (1958: 7–8)
Aristotle’s claim that imitation is natural to human beings seems to be correct.

(Any parent involved in the care of a very young child knows this very well.) Of
course, in a time when the Darwinian consensus defi nes biological science, we are
required to go further than Aristotle in explaining why imitation and the plea-
sure in imitative representation is “natural.” We must believe that these human
capacities have attained their place in human nature through a process of bio-
logical evolution. Obviously, these features of human existence have a selection
advantage, since they make possible a social transmission of what becomes the
body of culture. As Aristotle notes, these capacities are crucially involved in learn-
ing, and learning is naturally pleasurable. The human species has a particular need
for learning in infancy because of the extended period of dependency of human
babies. (Human newborns are at a relatively undeveloped stage compared to what

they will eventually be capable of because of the physical limits—set by the size of
the birth canal—to the size of the infant head.) This greater period of dependency
is compensated for by the greater flexibility of adult human behavior that becomes
possible because of the kind of learning of which we are capable.
The acquisition of a native language by a child is a complex process that
requires several years, and imitation is the central part of its initial stages. Human
parents invariably talk to newborn infants who are, at birth, incapable of under-
standing any language at all. Human parental figures reinforce certain sounds
that are spontaneously produced by babies, usually by themselves making the
same sound in order to get the baby to repeat it. Eventually, very young children
“catch on” in the vast majority of cases. However, the acquisition of a language is
simultaneously the acquisition of a vast amount of information about the world.
This is true of the vocabulary we acquire, but it also true of our initiation into
various linguistic practices that are associated with our social practices. From
very early on, in all cultures most children are told stories—family stories, fairy
tales, traditional myths, cartoons, Sesame Street stories, stories in children’s
books, and so forth. (How the general substitution of television shows and video
games for oral transmission, or for reading, affects the development of brain and
personality is an ongoing, complicated, and ominous story.) From very early on,
children are taught about and understand pretending, playing, “being a horse,”
“being a mother,” and so on. They understand the stories they are presented, and
very early on they learn that these are stories, that is, that they will not encounter
talking groundhogs and mice and rabbits. This seldom diminishes their pleasure
in these fictions. A part of the process of learning what stories are is learning
the difference between “truth” and “fiction” (whatever the metaphysical status
of that distinction is finally judged to be). Stories have always been used to trans-
mit the self-understanding of a culture. Traditional myth, religious traditions,
sagas, epics, and eddas involve narrative accounts that explain the origins of a
people and of its practices, institutions, and values. I have rehearsed some of these
familiar general features of human biology, psychology, and cultural evolution
as a context within which we might pursue an understanding of character and
characterization in literature as it now exists.
Characters and Words

Though there are many philosophical and critical references to problems about
fictional characters in the history of criticism and the history of philosophical
reflection on literature, “character” seems to me be a relatively undertheorized
concept in recent work.3 This might be because a concern for character would seem
to betray a commitment to a traditional view of literature and a kind of naive
character 397
response to it that would be incompatible with a professional protocol of read-

ing. I think that it might also be because the fictional representation of character
would seem to be parasitic on some prior conception of character in actual human
beings. It might seem that this prior conception needs to come from “folk psychol-
ogy” (a term for some kind of ordinary human understanding of other people—
usually used pejoratively in contemporary philosophy, or the less pejorative term
“mind reading”) or psychology or psychoanalysis or philosophy. Some more recent
theories seem to believe that once we self-consciously reflect on the tautological
assertion that fictional characters are fictional, we will understand that they have
nothing in common with actual human beings or, alternatively, that the character
of actual human beings is itself fictional, illusory, or mythical. The former posi-
tion is sometimes expressed by the suggestion that fictional characters are “verbal
constructions” or made out of words. I examine this presently. The latter position
raises, I believe, some interesting issues to which I later return.
In one sense, the claim that fictional characters are made out of words is obvi-
ously true. We need some text to provide the locale of a fictional character. I do
not want to engage directly the issue of the ontological status of texts, or works of
art in general, in this chapter. Almost certainly, there are significant differences
between, say, the ontological status of characters in novels, in plays, and in fictional
narrative fi lms. The claim that a fictional character is made out of words seems
most obviously true in the case of the novel (though the texts of plays, and fi lm
scripts, seem to be necessary elements of the characters in those forms). However,
the claim that characters are verbal constructions seems often to be accompanied
by a “merely.” There seems to be an idea that this claim about “words” offers
a reductive analysis of fictional characters—a kind of revelation that ordinary
readers have been mistaken about them. It is the “merely” that I wish to con-
test. I believe that it rests on a confusion about what words are. If one mistakenly
believes that words are identical with types or tokens of inscriptions, physical
markings on a surface, or aural manipulations of sound waves, then it will indeed
seem reductive to assert that fictional characters are “made out of words.” Words,
however, are not reducible to their physical manifestations, any more than human
actions are reducible to bodily movements, or money reducible to pieces of metal
or paper. Words are what they are because of their uses in a complex system of
expression and communication. The many possible uses of language depend upon
the complex set of intentions and expectations of the users of the language (and
what those intentions and expectations can be are, conversely, inscribed within
language). The uses of language involved in fictional narratives about fictional
characters will hence depend upon the human intentions and expectations of
those who are involved in the practice of fictional literature (of both the produc-
ers and consumers of such literature) and, more generally, in the practice of any
art that involves fictional characters. I now turn to the originary philosophical/
critical discussion of character in Aristotle’s Poetics to get some sense of literary
practice with regard to character as near the beginning of the tradition as we are
likely to get.
Aristotle on Character
Aristotle’s most extended discussion of character in general comes soon after he
has presented his definition of tragedy as “the imitation of a good action which is
complete and of a certain length, by means of language made pleasing for each part
separately; it relies in its various elements not on narrative but on acting; through
pity and fear it achieves the purgation (catharsis) of such emotions” (1958: 12).
Every part of this definition would need serious discussion in an investigation of
Aristotle’s account of tragedy. We, however, need it as the background for his pre-
sentation of what he calls the elements or aspects of tragedy.4 There are six such ele-
ments—plot, character, diction, thought, spectacle, and music (13). Note that these
are all abstractions from tragedy itself, which exists only in actual performance
when all of these elements are present together. Most of Aristotle’s discussion of
the general nature of character (ethos) occurs in connection with his argument
that plot (mythos) is the most important element of tragedy, in particular, that plot
is more important than character.5 His leading argument for this claim is that
tragedy is an imitation, not of men but of action and life, of happiness and
misfortune. These are to be found in action, and the goal of life is a certain
kind of activity, not a quality. Men are what they are because of their characters,
but it is in action that they find happiness or the reverse. The purpose of action
on the stage is not to imitate character, but character is a by-product of the
action. (13–14)
We should consider what Aristotle might mean by this claim. What is “action”?
In defining tragedy as the mimesis of an action, Aristotle is claiming that tragedy
(and, no doubt, epic and comedy) give us a narrative account of some chain of
human action (with perhaps an admixture of divine action—famously, the action
must be complete, having a beginning, a middle, and an end). Presumably, then,
only characters are capable of such actions; the existence of a represented action
requires a represented agent—a character. Hence, every tragedy will have a cast of
characters. There is, of course, a further step to take to reach the assertion that the
character of a represented character must, or ought to, be represented. We might
call this the issue of “characterization.” Differentiating character from character-
ization would help make sense of Aristotle’s claim that “[w]ithout action there
could be no tragedy, whereas a tragedy without characterization is possible. The
tragedies of most of our recent poets have no characterization” (1958: 13–14). Obvi-
ously, he cannot mean that there could be a tragedy without the representation of
agents performing actions. He is referring to the extent to which the character of
those represented agents is delineated. But what does Aristotle mean by ethos, the
term being translated as “character”? It is useful to be reminded that
[t]he dominant interest in Aristotle (and in most ancient thought and literature)
is in analyzing ethically good and bad character, i.e. virtue and vice . . . .
Strikingly absent from the ancient thought-world is the interest in unique
character 399
individuality and the subjective viewpoint which figures in modern western

thinking about character. (Hornblower and Spanforth 1996: 317)
In an excellent article, Mary Whitlock Blundell writes, “The interrelation between

ethos, dianoia [the term translated “thought” in Aristotle’s list of the elements
of tragedy] and praxis [action] in the Poetics can only be understood against the
background of the Ethics” (1992: 155). This seems to me to be entirely correct, but
we should notice that we are moving from an issue about the representation of
character in a literary form to the issue of the nature of the character of actual
human beings. This is a perfectly natural move to make in considering Aristotle.
As Blundell continues:
[H]e treats tragic characters as indistinguishable in important respects from
living people. In the Poetics he often speaks of dramatic figures as if they were
real persons, who must have appropriate qualities of character and intellect in
order to undertake purposeful action. Conversely in the ethical and rhetorical
works he regularly illustrates his argument with characters from literature,
especially epic and tragedy. (156)
I do not attempt here to review Aristotle’s Ethics in its entirety, but it is useful
to recall that it involves a massive analysis of human purposive action—that is,
exactly what is to be represented in tragedy according to the definition quoted
above. When Aristotle takes up the issue of the good for human beings (eudaimo-
nia, often translated as “happiness” but perhaps better translated as “flourishing”),
it is clear, given his understanding of “good,” that he must provide an account of
the essential nature of human being. When eudaimonia turns out to be “the soul’s
activity that expresses virtue,” he must produce accounts of both the soul and of
virtue. When “moral” virtue turns out to involve the propensity to choose actions
in accordance with a mean, it follows that he must give account of the human
capacity to choose, to act voluntarily or involuntarily, of the intellectual virtues,
of the role of phronesis (practical wisdom) in virtuous action, and so forth. This
simply is an account of human character (in the relevant sense of that word in
English).6 It is clearly implied by Aristotle’s account that we should understand the
characters in tragedy, in the same way, and using the same terms, that we under-
stand actual human beings—while at the same time being aware that the charac-
ters in tragedy are part of a mimesis, that is, a representation of human action.
This becomes even clearer in his subsequent discussion of the appropriate
character of the protagonist of a tragedy. Aristotle considers various ways in which
the good or the wicked can be represented as experiencing a change of fortune, and
he rejects several of them as inconsistent with tragedy. He then goes on, “We are
left with a character in between the other two; a man who is neither outstanding
in virtue and righteousness, nor is it through wickedness and vice that he falls into
misfortune, but through some flaw” (1958: 24). Aristotle is not concerned with
psychological realism in the characterization of the character of the protagonist.
(Indeed, psychological realism in the performance of Greek tragedy would have
been difficult to achieve given the nature of the fairly distant viewing of the action
by the audience, the necessity for vocal projection, and the use of masks for the
actors.) Rather, he is concerned with the establishing of the moral character of the
protagonist so that that character can be at the center of a plot that achieves a tragic
effect. Such establishing may not need to involve much of what we would normally
call characterization because ordinary members of the audience bring their ordi-
nary views of character and morality into the theater (of Dionysus, in Athens) with
them. Hence, not only characters, but also some expectations and beliefs about the
character of those characters, cannot be removed from tragedy. When Aristotle
argues for the greater importance of the abstraction “plot” over the abstraction
“character” among the elements of tragedy, he writes, “The purpose of action on
the stage is not to imitate character, but character is a by-product of the action.”
This cannot mean that tragedy could dispense with the representation of charac-
ters who can be characterized and who perform actions. After all, in the previous
sentence he had written, “Men are what they are because of their characters.” The
explanation of action involves reference to the character of the agent.
Not surprisingly, at least since Nietzsche, discussions of Greek tragedy have
tended to focus on its ritual origins, its place in the civic life of Athens, and its
distance from our contemporary modes of literature. My remark about the lack
of “psychological realism” belongs in this more modern vein. No doubt, there is
less interest in the individual’s subjectivity in ancient literature than in modern—
but it is difficult for us moderns not to bring our ideas of character to our read-
ing of Aeschylus, or Sophocles, or especially Euripides. (Euripides is implicated in
the death of tragedy, according to Nietzsche, because he aimed for, and achieved,
a modicum of psychological realism—he brought the spectator on stage.) Pro-
metheus, and Oedipus, and Medea are representations of suffering, acting, human
beings, and it is in their familiarity as well as their alienness that we apprehend
them. The literature in which they appear is appropriately designated by Bruno
Snell in the title of his classic work The Discovery of the Mind (1960). These works
represent an early stage in the development of a self-conscious understanding of
what it is to be human.
On the Difference between Ancient

and Modern Mimesis: Schiller, Hegel,
Kierkegaard
Let us now turn to a late-eighteenth/early-nineteenth-century discussion of the
relationship of the way in which literature both portrays characters and enters into
the formation of character. Along the way, we will consider what might be called
the Ur-plot of romantic literature, as an account of the development of the char-
acter of the self.
character 401
For our purposes, we need not attempt to locate the origin of the modern
with precision in the Renaissance, or the Reformation, or the seventeenth-century
explosion of modern philosophy and modern science. Presumably, we all know
that the hallowed divisions of intellectual periods under such terms as “Renais-
sance” or “Enlightenment” or “romantic era” are both indispensable and flawed—
starting points, and not conclusions, of analysis. Nonetheless, I want to explore
a very general way in which a number of philosophers and critics have tried to
characterize the difference between ancient and modern literature with reference
to characters—in part, because these analyses have themselves entered into the
history of modern literature.
Perhaps the best starting point for this discussion is Friedrich Schiller’s mag-
nificent essay “On Naive and Sentimental Poetry” (“Über naive und sentimen-
talische Dichtung,” 1795–96). The title in English simply uses English words that
are cognates of the German terms used by Schiller. Unfortunately, the normal
understanding of the terms “naive” and “sentimental” does not correspond to
the distinction about which Schiller is writing. (For instance, both of the words
in English normally carry a deprecatory connotation, whereas Schiller uses their
German cognates to characterize both distinctions between fundamental modes
of experiencing the world and between corresponding modes of poetry.) We
should remember that Schiller’s essay was an intervention in the ongoing discus-
sion within the emerging German literature and culture in the latter part of the
eighteenth century of the significance of ancient Greek literature and culture for
Germany.7 Schiller is not, of course, simply characterizing ancient literature as
naive and modern as sentimental. He does, however, find that the dominant mode
of surviving Greek literature, especially Homer and the early poets, is naive, and
the dominant mode of modern literature is sentimental, and he seeks to explain
why this is so.
What then is the “sentimental” mode of experiencing the world? It is first
introduced as a way of experiencing nature—nature as contrasted with art.
“Nature, considered in this wise, is for us nothing but the voluntary presence, the
subsistence of things on their own, their existence in accordance with their own
immutable laws” (Schiller 1985: 180). Hence, nature itself is naive, but being able
to conceptualize nature as naive is a precondition of being able to experience it
sentimentally. The naive mode of being of nature and, according to Schiller, of
some set of comparatively unreflective and unalienated human beings does seem
like a metaphysics of presence, but for us moderns the fall into self-consciousness
has already taken place. Schiller stresses that this naive mode is not aesthetic, but
rather moral: “They are what we were; They are what we should once again become”
(1985: 181, emphasis original). He distinguishes the naive existence in nature from
the sentimental response to it very sharply. It is precisely because we moderns
have lost our naive relationship to nature that we can experience it sentimentally.
Rather than being in nature, we are able reflectively to make nature an object
of our thought and emotion. Why, then, do the modern poets offer tribute to
nature?
It is because nature in us has disappeared from humanity and we rediscover

her in her truth only outside it, in the inanimate world . . . . The feeling of which
we here speak is therefore not that which the ancients possessed; it is rather
identical with that which we have for the ancients. They felt naturally; we feel the
natural. (190)
Shakespeare is the more recent writer whom Schiller associates with the naive
mode of being in nature that allows for a kind of direct expression in naive poetry.
We do not find him in his works despite the inevitable desire, both in Schiller’s
time and in our own, to do so. The naive mode of being in the world depends
upon the functioning of a human being “as an individual sensuous unity, and as a
harmonious whole” (Schiller 1985: 193). However, Schiller claims that in a state of
civilization such as his own, this sensuous harmony has been broken. He seems to
mean roughly what T. S. Eliot more recently meant by dissociation of sensibility.
For Schiller, this means that, for the disrupted human being, the correspondence
between feeling and thought that actually existed in the naive mode exists now
only as the goal of her or his striving; hence, it has become ideal. He summarizes
his argument as follows:
This path taken by the modern poets is, moreover, that along which man in
general, the individual as well as the race, must pass. Nature sets him at one
with himself, art divides and cleaves him in two, through the ideal he returns
to unity. But because the ideal is an infinitude to which he never attains, the
civilised man can never become perfect in his own wise, while the natural man
can in his . . . . But . . . the goal to which man strives through culture is infinitely
preferable to that which he attains through nature. (194)
Schiller is among the first of those who adopted a secularized version of the Chris-
tian three-stage salvational narrative (innocence in the garden/fall into history/
redemption and salvation). His version of this “natural supernaturalism” adds the
particular twist that the third stage requires an infinite striving and exists as the
ideal but unrealized (and perhaps unrealizable?) goal of that striving.8 Here, surely,
is one of the earliest formulations of romantic aesthetics.
I now want to turn briefly to Hegel’s use of these ideas in his characteriza-
tion of the difference between ancient and modern literature (especially tragedy).
Hegel locates the origin of dramatic poetry in Greek culture. He says that in this
classic type of art “individuality is only so far asserted as it directly demands the
free animation of the essential content of human aims. That which pre-eminently
is of valid force in ancient drama, therefore, whether it be tragedy or comedy, is
the universal and essential content of the end, which individuals seek to achieve”
(1962: 60). He goes on to claim that in tragedy “this is the ethical claim of human
consciousness” and that the main interest does not “resolve so much around the
fate of individuals.” He contrasts this to modern romantic poetry in which “[i]t
is the individual passion, the satisfaction of which can only be relative to a wholly
personal end, generally speaking the destiny of some particular person or charac-
ter placed under exceptional circumstances, which forms the subject-matter of all
character 403
importance” (60). This priority of the individual over the “universal and essential
content of the end” is what Hegel takes to be the defi ning characteristic of roman-
tic literature. This further produces in that literature an “idiosyncrasy” of action
as well as of individual character:
[I]n contrast to the simple conflicts which characterize more classical dramatic
composition, we now meet with the variety and exuberance of the characters
dramatized, the unforeseen surprises of the ever new and complicated
developments of plot, the maze of intrigue, the contingency of events, and, in a
word, all those aspects of the modern drama which claim our attention. (62)
Of course, these remarks of Hegel’s would be entirely irrelevant unless we see in

them a characterization of the history of narrative imaginative literature that cap-
tures something important. Does the rise of the European novel in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries not require some such explanation? Naturally, like all
such generalizations, it will have local exceptions, and we do not need to think of it
as a denial of other historical factors that would go into a full account of something
as complex as the development of, for example, the novel. And yet, the development
of the Bildungsroman seems to confirm Hegel’s view that a central line of literature
will concern the formation and development of an individual consciousness in a
variety of contingent circumstances. Hence, character in this kind of literature is
both a component and a topic of the work of art. These works are about more than
how a given character responds in a particular set of circumstance, those circum-
stances constituting a fate for him/her. They are representations of how a character
is developed and constituted. A general characterization of this plot line is given in
the subtitle of Nietzsche’s immodestly titled intellectual autobiography Ecce Homo:
How One Becomes What One Is (1888).
To my mind, the best literary history of the developments noted above is still
M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revelation in Romantic Lit-
erature (1971). This magisterial work is, of course, selective, being mainly concerned
with certain lines of English romantic poetry and its relationship to some concur-
rent developments in German philosophy and, more selectively, to German litera-
ture. Nonetheless, Abrams performs an enlightening act of intellectual jujitsu, by
reading Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) as itself an instance of the secular-
ized version of the Christian salvational narrative mentioned above. (Of course, as
Abrams notes, Hegel himself acknowledges this connection in his own analysis of
the level of “truth” of Christianity.) The Phenomenology is not a work of systematic
philosophy, as Hegel himself warns. (This may account for the fact that, into the
twenty-first century, it continues to be by far the most influential of Hegel’s works.)
Here is Abrams’s characterization of the Phenomenology:
It is organized primarily in accordance with literary principles of structure,

and persistently deploys typically literary devices. Hegel’s narrative has a
protagonist, whom he denominates as das allgemeine Individuum or der
allgemeine Geist—“the general individual” and “the general spirit”; that is,
the collective human consciousness figured as a single agent. The story he
tells also applies however, to particular minds, for each reflective individual
is able to recapitulate the educational journey in his own consciousness.
(1971: 278)
Of course, to recognize the Phenomenology as a kind of Bildungsroman is not to

classify it as novel. It does, however, bring out the way in which the relationship
between plot and character is more deeply imbricated in a certain kind of litera-
ture than even the usual acknowledgement that both “plot” and “character” are
abstractions from actual fictional narratives implies. In this kind of literature, the
plot is the character—the representation of “how one becomes who one is.”
Traditional philosophy, unlike fiction, seeks explicit generalization—and no
philosophy more than Hegel’s, which claims to achieve the ultimate reconcilia-
tion that is the goal of the journey of spirit in an absolute self-reflection of spirit.9
Kierkegaard, in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), accuses Hegel and
modern philosophy of “having forgotten, in a sort of world-historical absent-
mindedness, what it means to be a human being” (1968: 109). Fiction, good fic-
tion, anyway, tends to particularize rather than to generalize. This is no doubt
why Kierkegaard, in his anti-Hegelian critique, leaves behind the traditional
forms of philosophical writing and instead presents works of fiction—with an
entire apparatus of fictional authors, editors, and narrators of his so-called “aes-
thetic” works. Interestingly, it is one of these fictional authors, “A” of the fi rst
volume of Either/Or (1843), who putatively writes an essay, “The Ancient Tragi-
cal Motif as Reflected in the Modern,” that takes up the comparison of ancient
and modern literature from Schiller and Hegel noted above. As is often the case
in Kierkegaard’s works, he operates within a Hegelian idiom in his criticism of
Hegel. The double-sided nature of the Phenomenology seems to make this pos-
sible. Here are some of the (unsurprising) contrasts that Kierkegaard (or “A”)
presents:
The peculiarity of ancient tragedy is that the action does not issue exclusively
from character, that the action does not find its sufficient explanation in
subjective reflection and decision, but that the action itself has a relative
admixture of suffering [passion, passio] . . . . The reason for this naturally lies
in the fact that the ancient world did not have subjectivity fully self-conscious
and reflective . . . in modern tragedy the hero’s destruction is really not suffering,
but is action. In modern times, therefore, situation and character are really
predominant. (1959: 145)
In this essay, the fictional “A” sketches a modern version of the tragedy of Antigone
to illustrate his claims. This fiction within a fiction finds the modern Antigone
with a secret that she cannot disclose to anyone, which collides with her love rela-
tionship, which demands full openness and disclosure to her beloved. As anyone
familiar with Kierkegaard’s biography would immediately recognize, this situa-
tion is the one in which Kierkegaard is believed to have thought himself during
his engagement to Regina Olsen. If one accepts this biographical hypothesis, it is
character 405
Søren Kierkegaard who is the modern Antigone. In any case, the literary analysis
in the passage above is nicely self-referential, since it would apply directly to the
text in which it is set forth.
All of this literary analysis by Schiller, Hegel, and Kierkegaard is intended to
make sense of the undeniably new developments in European literature, and the
reaction of the (partly new) reading public to that literature, in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. One thinks of the phenomenon of the supposed poems
of Ossian, a phenomenon pictured in Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther
(1774), which was itself a marvel of European literature. Whether or not we
accept the mythic claim that Goethe’s novel inspired a wave of suicides among
the young of Europe, there seems in modernity to be an intensely felt response
by the literary public to the accounts of the suffering development of literary
characters. The phenomenon of the response to the novels of Jean-Jacques Rous-
seau has been studied in some detail.10 Rousseau himself asks to be read in a
particular way and gives descriptions of reading practices in, for example, Julie
(1761) and the Confessions (1782). He wanted, and got, emotional identification
of his readers with his characters. The novel was, of course, a suspect genre,
which is why Rousseau said of his Julie that it was, and was not, a novel. Robert
Darnton says of Rousseau that he “demanded to be read as if he were a prophet of
divine truth . . . . What set Rousseauistic reading apart from its religious anteced-
ents . . . was the summons to read the most suspect form of literature, the novel,
as if it were the Bible” (1984: 252). Rousseau wanted his readers to respond with
passionate intensity to his characters and to be brought closer to true virtue by
this response—and many of his readers claimed that he had succeeded in this
aim. Darnton wrote:
Something happened to the way that readers responded to texts in the late
eighteenth century. How many readers? How many texts? The quantitative
questions will not admit of answers. One can only assert that the quality
of reading changed in a broad but immeasurable public toward the end of
the Old Regime. Although many writers prepared the way for this change, I
would attribute it primarily to the rise of Rousseauism. Rousseau taught his
readers to “digest” books so thoroughly that literature became absorbed in
life. (251)
The accounts of the emotional responses of Rousseau’s readers are paralleled by the
reports of the responses of Dickens’s readers in the nineteenth century—a response
perhaps heightened by the initial serial publication of his novels. These are famil-
iar events in the history of literature, and explanations of them will no doubt be
complex. However, the setting of this new reading phenomenon, certainly a crucial
dimension of the development of romanticism, was against the broad background
of the secularization of much of European culture. It is hard to believe that this is a
coincidence. From the viewpoint of Hegel, the narrative(s) of Christianity must be
understood as fictions conveying a deeper truth. How natural from this Hegelian
viewpoint to look self-consciously for the truth about the human condition in
what are recognized to be fictions.
Self-Consciousness and the

Practices of Art
It is important to separate several different levels of inquiry about art and litera-
ture. Since Aesthetics, as a field of philosophy, began in the eighteenth century, it
has been intertwined with the philosophy of art. There are obvious reasons why
this has been so: given the new philosophical analyses of beauty (and the sub-
lime) and the new systematization of the “fine” arts (associated perhaps with a
new concept of “art”), it was natural to think of the fine arts as activities intended
to produce objects that could elicit the response (judgment or feeling) of beauty
(or sublimity) in the “spectator” (viewer, listener, reader).11 It was also natural for
many to think that the first important task of the philosophy of art is to give a
definition of this new sense of “art.” Many supposed that such a definition might be
useful for understanding art, or for the criticism of art. In a similar way, some have
also attempted definitions of the individual arts that make up the “modern system
of the arts.” I do not attempt to criticize such attempts directly, but I do sketch a
different approach to understanding what art and literature are, and have been,
and might be. Here, I am guided by Nietzsche’s aphorism, “all concepts in which
an entire process is semiotically concentrated elude definition; only that which has
no history is definable” (1992: 516).
If the view that the modern concept of “art” arose in the eighteenth century is
correct, we must still be careful not to draw unwarranted inferences from that fact.
It does not mean that we, equipped with that modern concept, cannot identify
“art” that goes back to prehistoric times. It is perfectly appropriate, for example,
that H. W. Janson should begin his widely read History of Art (1978) with cave art
from 1,500–10,000 b.c.e. at Altamira and Lascaux (23–24). The necessary implica-
tion, rather, is that those who created the cave paintings cannot have thought of
themselves as “artists” or as engaged in creating “art,” but this seems unsurprising.
Even if those creators were influenced by what we would call “aesthetic” consider-
ations, they were engaged in something different from art. Some anthropological
theories suggest that “religion” might be the appropriate categorization of their
work. However, the term “religion” itself has undergone a history as complex as
the history of “art”; we need to think of the “religion” of those cave artists as a
comprehensive way of organizing their relationship to the world and to others that
was not distinguished from science, philosophy, politics, or art in the way that we
would now distinguish them.
Similarly, we could attempt to sketch an account of the development of “lit-
erature” that would begin before any self-conscious conception of “literature”
character 407
had been formed. Of course, such an account, like any account of the origin of
language itself, would have to be highly speculative. One thing we can be sure of
is that anything we could call “literature” would contain representations of the
actions of actors, that is, characters. The tales of a tribe, of its ancestors, of its
“history,” or its gods develop into what we would call a mythology passed on in an
oral tradition.12
When we get to the time of the writing down of the legends, myths, and epics
of peoples, we are on firmer, well-trodden ground, and what we recognize as his-
tories of literature can be written from the surviving evidence and works of lit-
erature, tracing the developments of the various genres. Throughout this process,
we are dealing with the development of a complex and varied human practice.
Here I adapt Alasdair MacIntyre’s sketch of what is involved in a human practice.
MacIntyre deploys this account of “practice” in his development of the concept of
“virtue” in After Virtue (1981):
By a “practice” I am going to mean any coherent and complex form of socially
established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that
form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards
of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of
activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human
conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended . . . the
range of practices is wide: arts sciences, games, politics in the Aristotelean
sense, the making and sustaining of family life, all fall under the concept.
(1984: 187–88)
Of such a practice, one can always raise the question: Why did human beings
engage in it? The answer will have to be given in terms of a conception of human
nature and of the already existing whole body of human practices that are rooted
in fundamental human forms of life. For our purpose, Aristotle’s account of why
there is mimetic literature (fictional narrative whether dramatic or epic) seems sat-
isfactory. This is, remember, meant to be an account of why human beings develop
literature as what we call “art” (as opposed to writing and narrative for utilitarian,
or economic, or business, or war waging, or religion). Aristotle, we can recall, gives
two reasons: human beings are naturally mimetic, learning from mimesis, and
they take pleasure in mimesis. Notice that these claims, if correct, would be used
to explain the emergence and development of the practice of a literature consisting
of the fictional representation of the actions of represented characters. The theo-
rizing about this practice begins, in the West, at least as early as the work of Plato
and Aristotle in the fourth century b.c.e., but the practice itself was already very
old by that time.
The usefulness of MacIntyre’s account of a “practice” given above is that
it allows us to distinguish the question of origin from the particular questions
about the variety of ways in which the representation of fictional characters can
be accomplished, and for what purposes they may be used. Nietzsche draws this
distinction in his discussion of the fallacy of attempting to account for the origin
of the practice of law with punishment in terms of its present purpose:
The “purpose of law,” however, is absolutely the last thing to employ in the
history of the origin of law; on the contrary, there is for historiography of any
kind no more important proposition than the one it took such effort to establish
but which really ought to be established now: the cause of the origin of a thing
and its eventual utility, its actual employment and place in a system of purposes,
lie worlds apart; whatever exists, having somehow come into being, is again and
again reinterpreted to new ends, taken over, transformed, and redirected by
some power superior to it. (1992: 513)
The crucial point in MacIntyre’s account is the idea that practices extend the range
of possible human aims and goods. Practices may have both external and inter-
nal histories. In their beginning periods, whatever brought them into existence—
now to be thought of as external to the practice itself—determines the nature of
the practice. However, in the complicated historical development of any complex
practice, new purposes and ends may emerge for it. A certain class of games might
have emerged because they amused and interested children and provided them
with some physical exercise that was thought to be healthy. Later, perhaps, some
games might have been thought to be useful because they modeled the social value
of competition within rules. However, the excellences that can be achieved in the
playing of games include those that have no purpose outside of the playing of
the game itself—excellences that are determined relative to the internal nature of
the game. Another example might be the stylization of human movement that
becomes dance. It may have begun as a component of the fi xation of ritual, or per-
haps earlier, out of the mating behavior of our ancestors, and it may have therefore
served some external purpose, However, the excellence of, for example, a perfor-
mance of Balanchine’s ballet Agon is determined by standards that are internal to
the developed practice of dance.
Let us return to the practice of a literature of fictional narration of the actions
of represented characters. In this chapter I have already indulged in some specu-
lative consideration of its origins, and have tentatively accepted an Aristotelian
account of why such a practice could have come into being—what preexisting
(or “external”) human purposes it would have served. However, what could or
would be made of this practice can only be described historically, and that his-
tory will involve both of what I have called “internal” and “external” factors. In
general, as a practice is developed the standards for evaluating actions taken, or
objects created, in accordance with that practice develop with it. The “essence”
of a human practice is always temporary and provisional, subject to inevitable
change. Such changes cannot be predicted in accordance with any general laws of
social science.13 Though such change is inevitable, such change presupposes some
continuing identity of the practice—without such continuing identity nothing
could count as “change.” The descriptive and normative are necessarily con-
nected in the concept of a practice, but neither can be captured in timeless rules
or specifications.
All of this implies that there are no general truths about the function of
character in literature, about methods and styles of characterization, about
character 409
the way in which fictional characters relate to, and affect, a reading (or view-
ing) audience. There are, of course, generalizations that can be made about
historical literary movements, or literary styles—these are commonplaces of
criticism. Such generalizations depend neither on abstract definitions of lit-
erature nor on social scientific claims about human character. They depend
upon careful reading of historically and culturally particular texts. Thus, the
historical example I gave above about the new way of reading for (a part of)
the audience for literature at the end of the eighteenth and the nineteenth cen-
tury does not give us a general truth about “literature” but, rather, the exact
opposite—an account of particular works and of a particular audience at a
particular time.
The existence of a practice of the narration of fictional actions of repre-
sented characters initially depends upon a representation of them as exceeding
the bounds of the fiction. (Of course, they do not literally exceed the bound of
the fiction, but that is the illusion that is sought. In general, the reader knows
that it is an illusion, but that knowledge does not dispel the illusion. There is a
“willing suspension of disbelief.” Thus, in a limited sense the default position of
traditional literature is a kind of realism. This is not the claim that characters
have to be “realistic”—rather, that they have to be representations of imagined
persons who are also imagined as having a “reality” that extends beyond the
narration.) There are many purposes for works of fiction. They can be used
to amuse, to educate, to provide models of virtue, to instruct about the pos-
sibilities of character, and so on. The traditional defenses of poetry stressed the
capacity to provide moral instruction, but since the development of the modern
senses of “art” and of “belles lettres” in which the autonomy of art has been
supposed to be established, such defenses have become rarer. Indeed, the rela-
tionship between literature (or, more generally, art) and morality has become
mightily vexed, even up to the present time.14 One might argue for a kind of
minimal defense of traditional literature that it encourages and instructs the
human capacity to “think of oneself as another”—the capacity that underlies
the possibility of morality and sociality in human beings.15 Human selfhood is
always already developed in a social context, and the sociopathic incapacity to
recognize the selfhood of others results in the impoverishment, indeed mutila-
tion, of the self. A number of recent writers have stressed imaginative fiction’s
capacity to help develop the empathetic sense of other selfhoods that is neces-
sary for the development of one’s own selfhood.16 The argument is not that all
literature contributes to the creation of “good” or “virtuous” people, but that
at least some literature (and, perhaps, most of what has been thought to be the
best) opens up the moral dimensions of life to readers, makes them aware of the
existence, and the difference, of others, shows them the possibilities and variet-
ies of love and heroism, gives them an understanding of the nature of human
desire and human suffering. (Naturally, the claim is not that all imaginative
literature does this, but that it is this capacity of the practice that gives it an
important place in human life.)
Literature without Characters—or

without Characterization?
Once we have an autonomous practice of fictional narratives of the actions of repre-
sented characters, that practice is subject to internal developments that may move
it away from even the default “realism” that I mentioned above. The histories of all
of the arts are histories of change, and some of the change is driven by the desire
of new generations of artists to challenge the traditions of the practice of their arts.
This is perhaps most obvious in the visual arts, and in music, but it is also true
for literature. This has become an acute issue, variously in the different arts, in
modernity. If we take Hegel’s work as a rough summation of lines of thought that
had been growing strong during the eighteenth century, we might take it also as a
rough marker of the time of a self-conscious awareness of one’s artistic tradition
as historical—as containing change, and even “progress.” Kant’s formulation, in
the Critique of Judgment (1790), of the necessity of “genius” for artistic creation,
could be seen to be realized in Beethoven, the nineteenth century’s paradigm of an
artistic genius capable of originality, and the exact contemporary of Hegel. There
had, of course, always been originality in the history of art (and, no doubt, lack of
originality), but it seems not to have been a self-conscious requirement for an art-
ist before the late eighteenth century. When we consider, for example, Beethoven’s
relationship to Haydn and Mozart, we must think that he was moved to surpass
them (not, of course, to obliterate them). Similarly, Wordsworth thought himself
called to be a bard, in the tradition of Milton, but in a new time when the tradi-
tional Christian mythus no longer sufficed.17
One line that is opened up for an artistic practice with a history is to produce
work that is, as it were, concerned with the artistic practice itself. In the case of
the practice of fictional narration, this possibility might be realized in what have
been called “metafictions.” Such fictions might very well reject what I have called
the minimal realism of traditional fictions. They might self-consciously undercut
the illusion of the reality of characters, calling attention in the work itself, to the
author’s creation of the fictional characters. (This would be roughly equivalent to a
form of painting that calls attention to the work as a painting rather than concen-
trating on the represented subject and striving to make the technique of represen-
tation invisible. This characterization needs to be formulated carefully for it might
seem to assume, incorrectly, that all painting had aspired to the condition of trompe
l’oeil.) Perhaps one might want to say that almost all of the moves of metafiction
are already present early on in the history of the novel. Laurence Sterne’s Tristram
Shandy (1759–69) is often given as an example. However, the prime examples cited
are usually more recent. Some of the novels of the nouvelle roman in France, for
example, those of Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Butor, Claude Simon, and Nath-
alie Sarrraute, work against traditional modes of characterization, though they do
not dispense with characters. In American fiction, the inventions of John Barth
and Donald Barthelme can be cited. Another kind of example would be characters
character 411
lacking in “depth,” that is, without affect, deliberately inscrutable, depsychologized.

Some of the early works of Ann Beattie represent characters who are as lacking in
depth as cardboard cutouts. The fiction of Paul Auster often challenges traditional
conceptions of character. Some of the genres of modern fiction retain characters
without pursuing issues of identity or character formation. The traditional English
detective story, because the form is so tightly defined, restricts what can be done
with characters. For example, in an Agatha Christie story, because any of the main
characters might turn out to be the murderer, the readers cannot be given a lot of
characterization. Famously, Christie’s use of an unreliable narrator in The Mur-
der of Roger Ackroyd (1926) outraged aficionados of the genre. Science fiction can
utilize nonhuman characters—machines, aliens, galactic clouds—but these must
always be attributed powers of thought, perception, decision, and action to some
extent to be conceivable as characters: they must be anthropomorphized.
Interestingly, in the periods of modernism and postmodernism the most radi-
cal formal innovations (characterized by José Ortega y Gasset as “dehumaniza-
tion”) have been in the visual arts and music. Perhaps this is because the use of
language is optional or peripheral in these arts. The novel, poetry, drama, and
narrative film drama are much more closely tied to language and the structure
of meanings that it makes available. Of course, there are formal innovations and
experimental traditions in recent literature. Indeed, a characteristic feature of
modernism in all the arts has been great formal innovation. James Joyce in Ulysses
(1918–20; 1922) engaged in a large number of literary experiments. In his decisions
about the overall structure of the novel, and in his adoption and adaptation of a
variety of literary techniques and styles for different parts of the book, he can be
seen as perhaps the greatest formal innovator in the history of the European novel.
But think of the rich, richly specific, characters he created in this work. There are
no more thoroughly “real” characters (in the minimal sense of realism that I speci-
fied above) than Leopold and Molly Bloom and Stephen Dedalus. At first, Ulysses
was incredibly hard to read, for a general public. Joyce’s literary reputation, based
on Dubliners (1914) and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914–15; 1916), was
very high with a limited but elite group of literary figures, so his work was taken
seriously. Gradually, after issues of obscenity were resolved and the work became
widely available, it entered into the canon of modernism. At the turn of the twenty-
first century, when the Modern Library editorial board constructed its list of the
100 greatest novels in the English language of the twentieth century, Ulysses topped
the list (Lewis 1998).18 The point is that Ulysses, which probably did not look like a
novel at all to most readers when it became widely available, is now at the center of
the idea of an artistic work of literature. It is widely studied in English Literature
courses, and it continues to sell. Compare this to Joyce’s final work, Finnegan’s
Wake (1939). There are Joyceans who revere and study the book, but it has never
found the general, high literary audience that Ulysses has. In addition to the formal
and linguistic experimentation of Joyce’s writing in this book, he experiments with
the concept of character to a very high degree. Perhaps it is still an open ques-
tion whether this kind of experiment can be shown to be a successful narrative
fiction in the way that Ulysses is. How much of an audience does a novel need? One
incontestably great twentieth-century writer, Samuel Beckett, in his latest works in
pursuit of nothingness, eliminated traditional elements of character to as great an
extent as he could. Whether these works succeed would have to be investigated in
an act of criticism. It seems to me that these works need to be read in conjunction
with the whole body of his work, to understand their significance in the light of
the trajectory of his development as a writer. Whether they succeed as individual
works is more problematic.
Perhaps the closest literary experiment to the complete abstraction achieved
by painting in the twentieth century would be the dada and surrealist experiments
with “automatic writing.” The issue is not whether any of their productions can
be counted as “works of art” or as “poetry.” Of course they can—the twentieth
century has taught us that anything can brought under those rubrics. The issue is
whether any of these works can count among the high achievements of literature.
There is no a priori argument that they cannot. The issue can only be engaged at
the level of criticism of specific works. Such criticism is necessarily involved in a
version of the hermeneutical circle, since it will depend upon assumptions about
the nature of the practice of literature that the work in question may reject. The
only point to be remembered is that such rejections are not guaranteed “success”;
the would-be artist is not the sole determinant of the quality of her or his work.
What it means for a work of literature to “succeed” may change because someone
is able to make a new kind of work in a new way, and it can be accepted by some
audience as a genuine work. In the case of a particular work, one looks for a kind
of critical appreciation in which it can somehow be shown how this work succeeds.
Another possibility would be to take what seems to be a work of literature to be a
work of some kind of new graphic art. Again, such a claim cannot be ruled out a
priori, but one would have to engage in an act of critical appreciation in consid-
ering the experiencing of such a new art form to see if such a claim could seem
plausible. For a long time in the twentieth century, it seemed implausible to most
people, and to many serious critics, that film or photography could be new art
forms. Presumably that question has been settled by the work that has been done
in those media.
The obverse of the possibility of a depsychologizing that calls attention to
the fictionality of a character would be the phenomenon of characters who seem
actually to exceed the works in which they are represented. For figures like Don
Juan and Faust and the Wandering Jew, this is almost certainly because they
were already legendary before they were represented in their most famous liter-
ary incarnations. No doubt an analysis of the specific mythical background of
these characters can help explain their cultural resonance at particular moments.
They exemplify great themes of human possibility and human limitation. Some
of Shakespeare’s characters seem to exist at this level, too, and though he used
historical and traditional sources for his stories, his characters so far exceed their
prototypes in the sources that they seem entirely to be his inventions. Hamlet,
character 413
Falstaff, Othello, and Prospero (and others) are inventions who seem almost to
justify Harold Bloom’s attribution to Shakespeare of the “invention of humanity.”
In any case his characters have proven useful “to think with,” to use the anthro-
pologist’s phrase.
Indeed, the sociological or anthropological perspective might be useful in
considering the ways in which some literary characters interact with the social
reality of the audience of literature. MacIntyre discusses dramatic traditions with
a stock of fi xed characters in developing a concept of character in relationship to
social reality that he distinguishes from social role. Here is the passage:
[Certain] characters partially defi ne the possibilities of plot and action. To
understand them is to be provided with a means of interpreting the behavior
of the actors who play them, just because a similar understanding informs the
intentions of the actors themselves; and other actors may defi ne their parts
with special reference to these central characters. So it is also with certain
kinds of social role specific to certain particular cultures. They furnish
recognizable characters and the ability to recognize them is socially crucial
because a knowledge of the character provides an interpretation of the actions
of those individuals who have assumed the character. It does so precisely
because those individuals have used the very same knowledge to guide and to
structure their behavior. Characters specified thus must not be confused with
social roles in general. For they are a very special type of social role which
places a certain kind of moral constraint on the personality of those who
inhabit them in a way in which many other social roles do not. I choose the
word “character” for them precisely because of the way it links dramatic and
moral associations. (1984: 27)
Characters in Literature and Life

The question of which comes first—the character (in MacIntyre’s sense) or the
literary representation of it—is not decidable since both the character and the
various representations (or incarnations) of it emerge from the same interactive
process. That process can be understood only retrospectively, and since it is one
of mutual influence, there will be no clear foundational moment for either. The
interesting thing for us about MacIntyre’s discussion is that he finds examples of
such characters both in sociological accounts of contemporary reality and in fic-
tion. The “bureaucratic manager” he finds portrayed in Max Weber’s sociology.
The character of the “rich aesthete” is realized in two characters, Ralph Touchett
and Gilbert Osmond, in Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady (1881). This doesn’t mean
that Henry James invented the “rich aesthete” and then some individuals mod-
eled themselves on his invention, nor that James simply represented realistically
what he found in his contemporary society. It means that James most significantly
discerned and represented, in fictionally “real” individuals, an emerging form of

social life and brought it to his and his reader’s self-consciousness. The fictional
representation of, say, Ralph Touchett is not an abstract moral proposition but a
representation of the way an individual life, moved by particular desires and pos-
sibilities, can go.
In general, it seems that the products of the practice of narrative fiction can
offer readers ways of conceiving the range of human possibilities, as well as the
specific pleasures internal to the practice of reading and writing fiction. All of this
corresponds roughly to Aristotle’s claim that we learn from mimeses and that we
enjoy them. There need not be any general conflict between these utilitarian and
aesthetic features of the representation of characters in fictional narratives. The
relationship between the “external” effect of a work of fiction and its “internal”
literary, aesthetic nature is not to be captured by any exceptionless general truths.
It would require an argument based on a wide-ranging survey of the history of
the European novel to show that the greatest fiction helps form our character or
enlarges most our view of the world. Similarly, it would require a critical argument
to attempt to establish that the greatest literature need not do this sort of thing.
Again, there can be no a priori arguments based on definitions or universal prin-
ciples about what art or literature can accomplish.
If it is the case that literature (or, more broadly, any art that represents the
actions of characters in fictional narratives) is a historically specific social practice
that is related to the whole body of social practices, then it seems obvious that it
will provide a major example of human self-understanding. Our understanding of
who we are as human beings will be partly constituted by our literature—both for
the cultural community and for the individual. It is not clear that there is an “ordi-
nary” conception of human character that exists independent of the representa-
tion of characters in fictional narratives. Philosophical attempts to give an account
of the “true” or “real” nature of the human self have often attempted to abstract
entirely from social practices to find some core entity that the self really is. These
attempts have been complicated by being involved in metaphysical and religious
issues that arise within any framework that draws a sharp ontological distinction
between the soul and the body, or the mind and the body.19 Among philosophers
as diverse as Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Peirce, James, Dewey, Heidegger, Sartre, Wit-
tgenstein, Cavell, Rorty, Derrida, and many others, there is a general agreement
that such attempts must fail. The point of noting this is that if this philosophical
consensus (which, of course, is not universal) is correct, then we need to attend
both to our ordinary concept of character and the variety of ways in which it can
be represented, and also to the ways in which these representations affect character
as we see it embodied in other human beings and ourselves. If fictional representa-
tions of character can affect the actual character of human beings, we may need
to attend more thoughtfully to the general cultural phenomena of what the rep-
resentations are (on television, in video games, in the tabloid press, in films) that
are most powerfully present today. Often these representations of character are
replacing those of literature and traditional storytelling.
character 415
How does all of what I have been claiming comport with the supposed insights
of postmodern critical theory? Though I haven’t room to try to answer this ques-
tion in any systematic way, I do want to make a comment on it in relation to
the “deconstructionist movement.”20 In literary criticism, this “movement” was
inspired by the early work of Derrida. Richard Rorty draws a clear distinction
between Derrida’s own philosophical writing and the literary theory that took
itself to be inspired by that work. Rorty reads Derrida as extending the antimeta-
physical line of modern thought, with an engaging self-awareness of the difficulty
of rejecting metaphysics without falling into metaphysical assumptions or claims
oneself. Nietzsche thought he could manage such a rejection, but Heidegger finds
that Nietzsche is still captured by metaphysical categories. Heidegger in Sein und
Zeit (1927) thought he could manage it, but Derrida finds that he, too, fails. “Der-
rida thinks of Heidegger’s attempt to express the ineffable as merely the latest and
most frantic form of a vain struggle to break out of language by finding words
which take their meaning directly from the world, from non-language” (Rorty
1995: 172).
Notice that all of this involves either traditional philosophical issues—the
question of being, the nature of human being, the relationship of language to
the world—or the “metaphilosophical” issue of how philosophy can encounter
those issues. Derrida is often taken to have presented views about the general
nature of language; for example, he is supposed to have rejected the possibility of
a transcendental signified, a presence outside of language that is the guarantor of
meaning. Whether or not Derrida actually held this view and whether this view
is correct are not my concerns here. The question is, what implications does this
general view have for literary criticism? Once again, I state what seems to be the
obvious truth. Anything that is true of all language cannot yield principles of
literary criticism useful for understanding particular texts, or ways of represent-
ing character, or groups of texts, or literary movements. (The exception might
be texts that attempt general characterizations of language.) What we know in
advance about all texts cannot help us in understanding the individuality of any
particular text. Hence, if there are brilliant deconstructive readings of particular
texts (as I believe there are), they cannot be based on some general thesis about
language.
Derrida’s views seem to belong to a familiar strain of postmodern philosophy
(where the phrase “postmodern” means roughly “since Kant”). This is antimeta-
physical, above all in being antifoundational. The idea is that language, knowl-
edge, and morality are not secured by some reality that is independent of all of
our human practices. Philosophers as various as Hegel, Peirce and Nietzsche,
Heidegger and Wittgenstein, Davidson and Derrida might all agree on that. Such
a conclusion does indeed mean a rejection of a great deal of the tradition of West-
ern philosophy. Plato and Aristotle, and their inheritor traditions, and modern
rationalism and empiricism can all be read as seeking the kind of foundation that
this postmodern philosophy denies. However, this does not undercut the possi-
bility of language being meaningful (since it obviously is), nor does it show the
impossibility of knowledge (though perhaps what Descartes thought knowledge

had to be is impossible) or of morality.21 If one were to accept Derrida’s famously
formulated early claim that there is nothing outside the text, what follows is that
we would need to redescribe all of the traditional dichotomies (fact/fiction, real-
ity/appearance, true/false, belief/knowledge, writing/speaking, etc.) in terms of
our actual human practices, since these are all meaningful contrasts that we do, in
fact, use. Recognizing that they may not have the nature that some philosophers
have thought does not undercut them. Any view that implied that the role of liter-
ary characters in human life is, in general, based on a mistake must be based on a
mistake.
NOTES
1. Often, such reflective questions will be pursued under the rubric of “the
philosophy of ___.” (An exception to this generalization must be made for the field
of philosophy itself, which will always include reflection on its own nature.) Physics,
for example, does not generally deal with the issue of why we might want to know
the truth about the nature of physical reality. The development of the modern
university curriculum, hence, incorporates a vast number of assumptions about
the values of what is to be studied and how it is to be studied, and these values are
usually self-consciously considered (and then only partially) at infrequent moments
of curricular revision. Of course, there have been much more frequent occurrences
of such occasions in the past 50 years or so in literary studies, and in the humanities
more generally, with varying assaults on the “canon” or on “canonicity” and with the
importation of literary theory into British and American university departments of
literature.
2. I discuss the idea of a “human practice” in some detail below.
3. E.g., in the immense Literary Theory: An Anthology (2004) edited by Julie Rivkin
and Michael Ryan, though many of the pieces are relevant to issues about character, there
is no entry for “character” in the index.
4. One can consult such a discussion, e.g., in Kaufmann 1992.
5. For an extended discussion of Aristotle’s view of plot, see chapter 16.
6. The Oxford English Dictionary (1971) lists 8 literal and 12 figurative senses of
the word “character.” The 11th of these 19 senses is the “sum of the moral and mental
qualities which distinguish an individual or race, viewed as a homogeneous whole;
the individuality impressed by nature and habit on man or nation; mental or moral
constitution.” The 16th (also figurative) sense is a “person regarded in the abstract
as the possessor of specified qualities; a personage, a personality.” The 17th (also
figurative) sense is a “personality invested with distinctive attributes and qualities,
by a novelist or dramatist; also, the personality or ‘part’ assumed by an actor on
the stage.”
7. E.g., Nisbet 1985 includes essays by Winckelmann, Lessing, Hamann, Herder,
and Goethe, in addition to the Schiller essay. It was to this ongoing conversation that
Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy (1872) was a contribution.
character 417
8. The quoted phrase is Carlyle’s, famously used by M. H. Abrams as the title

of his study of European romantic literature. This book is discussed in the text that
follows.
9. For a detailed discussion and critique of this Hegelian view, see Bates 1996.
10. See Darnton 1984, whose notes contain numerous references to the literature on
the eighteenth-century reader response to Rousseau.
11. Some of these matters are discussed in Kristeller 1965.
12. Oral language always precedes written language. Presumably, Jacques Derrida
was acquainted with this well-known fact and was criticizing what he took to be
illegitimate philosophical inferences from it that had privileged “speaking” over
“writing” because of a presumed guarantee of linguistic reference by the “presence” of
the referent. We need not make that presumption.
13. For an extended series of arguments in favor of this claim, see MacIntyre 1984,
chap. 8.
14. There is no space to review the past two centuries of debate on this topic with
contributors such as Marx, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Lukács, Sartre, Camus, Iris Murdoch, and
dozens of others. There has been an explosion of interest by analytical philosophers of art
in the topic of the ethical criticism of art and literature. This has been nicely described in
Carroll 2000.
15. An interesting discussion of this can be found in Ricoeur 1992.
16. Here I am thinking of such works as Eldridge 1989 and Nussbaum 1992 and
2001. In my view, the most insightful work on the understanding of fictional characters
and their relationship to their audience is in Stanley Cavell’s two books on genres of
Hollywood fi lm, Pursuits of Happiness (1981) and Contesting Tears (1997). His recent
publication of Cities of Words (2004) provides a specific linking of particular fi lms with
particular central texts of the Western philosophical tradition—many of the same films
that are discussed in the genre books are given extended discussion.
17. Harold Bloom has famously identified this as the anxiety of influence, and he
reads it in Freudian terms. Such readings may be persuasive when critically articulated
in particular cases, but if the thesis is generalized to all poets or writers, it becomes
unpersuasive unless it is converted into a tautology by using it to pick out “the”
tradition.
18. Of course, the idea of such a poll is somewhat bizarre, and it was used as a
kind of advertising ploy for Random House. The point, though, is that the result of the
poll, even for those who disagree with the ranking, could not be unexpected or totally
inappropriate. Compare that outcome to the results of an online reader poll organized
at the same time that found three of Ayn Rand’s novels to be among the seven greatest of
the twentieth century.
19. A very useful account of the development of ideas about the self in European
modernity is given in Taylor 1989.
20. This phrase is itself problematic. I adapt it from Rorty 1995. Insofar as there was
such a movement in literary criticism, it took itself to be inspired by the work of Derrida,
who claimed neither to have invented a “theory” nor to have established a movement.
I use a number of Rorty’s characterizations of Derrida in what follows since I am not
dealing with Derrida directly but rather with the issue of what can be properly inferred
for literary criticism from what were widely regarded as his views on language and
textuality.
21. Here I join what Rorty (1995: 175) calls a “somewhat milder line of criticism of
Derrida”—milder, that is, than that of those who take him to be a linguistic idealist. In
fact, I take this milder line not necessarily to be criticism of Derrida at all, but rather to
be critical of how he has been interpreted. I think this despite the fact that John Searle,
whom Rorty presents as the example of this line, did indeed have many substantive
criticisms of Derrida.
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Nisbet, H. B., ed. (1985). German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Nussbaum, M. (1992). Love’s Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
—— . (2001). The Fragility of Goodness (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
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Ricoeur, P. (1992). Oneself as Another. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Rorty, R. (1995). “Deconstruction.” In R. Selden (ed.), The Cambridge History of Literary
Criticism (vol. 8). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Aesthetic and Literary Criticism, pp. 180–232. Cambridge: Cambridge University
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Sutherland, K. (2006). “On Looking into Chapman’s Emma.” Times Literary Supplement,
January 13, 12.
Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. Cambridge, Mass.:
 
STYLE
charles altieri
If my remarks do not bear a stamp which marks them as

mine,—I do not wish to lay any further claim to them as
my property.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
Artists never fail to resent the fact that they have a style.
(Which is not to say that they wouldn’t also resent the
allegation that they didn’t have one.)
—Richard Wollheim, “Style in Painting”
Foregrounding the “how” invites the grammar of “as.”

“Style as the Man”
—Charles Altieri1
I do not think anyone in the heyday of modernism could have imagined how little
style matters now as a topic in academic discourse in the arts and in philosophy.2
Of course, they also could not have imagined that ideals of impersonality would
become “the death of the author” or that ideals of intuition and resistance to uni-
versals would become a demand that works of art honor every mode of otherness
and resist hierarchy at all costs. Nor could they have imagined having to figure
out why the concept of style might still matter—for literary study, in particular,
but also for how literary study might influence the application of the concept in
other disciplines. But given current trends in criticism, it is imperative now to ask
style 421
the Wittgensteinian question, What do we lose if we are blind to style or unable to

establish a workable concept of style as an aesthetic means of individuation? What
would we not be able to appreciate, and therefore what concepts and models would
be lacking to us, when we try to characterize the values at stake in the arts?
I am overgeneralizing. Not all concepts of style have gone out of style. Style as
fashion retains a strong hold on contemporary imaginations—but as something
embraced and as something that dominates the individual agent. But by some
academic version of Gresham’s law, these concepts have had the power to drive
out other work on style. They either deny the significance of individual agency
or reduce that individuality to stylization while ignoring the more complex and
elaborate modes of individual purposiveness that style constitutes in ambitious
literary work as well as work in the other arts. Now, according to an article in
the Wall Street Journal, capitalism’s endless inventiveness has produced “lifestyle
designers” who advise about “lifestyle goods” such as jewelry and furniture, help
“those who have made unexpected business fortunes and don’t have the time or
natural inclination to conquer the basics of gracious living,” train persons in the
visible choices that will earn them kudos for stylishness, and plan events where one
can exhibit those choices and the character traits that are designed for them. The
Journal reports that “the pressure to be stylish has reached the point where even
some ordinary working professionals are hiring designers,” and it lists five of those
designers with their hourly rates (Hughes 2005).3
While fashion is probably the most important feature making it difficult now
to talk about style as a distinctive feature of high art and ambitious writing, it is
decidedly not the most important one in creating internal difficulties for anyone
foolhardy enough to turn to that topic. Those difficulties emerge largely from the
fact that such discussions follow a period in which the study of style flourished in
both philosophy and the arts. If we take up the topic, we have to account for why
decades of intense labor left us only with this contentious and confused mélange
of concepts incapable of producing adequate agreement except on the impossibil-
ity of agreement. So it is not surprising that even critics today who are willing to
learn the necessary linguistics tend not to be interested in the study of literary style
because they have no operating concepts they can trust.4
The flourishing I refer to occurred in the United States after the Second World
War until about 1990 as such German writers as Leo Spitzer and Erich Auerbach
became available and as linguistics went through several stages of seeming to offer
the humanities new paradigms for speculative work. As one measure of the age,
three major anthologies on literary style came out within three years, 1967 to 1970
(Chatman and Levin 1967; Love and Payne 1969; Freeman 1970). Other measures
might be art historical work by such figures as Meyer Schapiro, Ernst Gombrich,
and David Summers and the theories of style produced by philosophers such as
Nelson Goodman, Arthur Danto, Berel Lang, Jenefer Robinson, and Richard
Wollheim. Since this heritage still affords the only framework for contemporary
engagements with the topic, I spend considerable time here outlining why I think
the lines of reasoning explored there have not born much fruit. Only then can
I even try to propose an alternative approach to literary style that may avoid some
of the difficulties pervading this heritage by developing two basic claims—that
style be seen as purposive activity inseparable from the aesthetic shaping of the
work as a whole, and that the best way of modeling this activity is to take the fore-
grounding of style as what I shall call “a demonstrative speech act.” The demon-
strative is a category describing what can be achieved by foregrounding individual
activity within language, and so it contrasts with J. L. Austin’s performatives that
accomplish something by invoking institutional practices.
In all the relevant disciplines, theory of style after the Second World War had
as its first priority to establish significance for the artists’ individual manners of
making meaningful work. This, after all, was the great age for ideology stressing
the individual. For the first half of the twentieth century the prevailing models
had been Hegelian. What mattered then were the differences making possible what
Schapiro called “a manifestation of the culture as a whole, the visible sign of its
unity” and “the inner form of collective thinking and feeling” (1998: 143). Each
age and each culture had dominant forms of expression, and one culture in each
epoch would most fully realize the possibilities of spirit that could appear in its
stage of development. In literary history, there were groundbreaking studies of the
differences between the Ciceronian styles that dominated the Renaissance and the
plain style accompanying the scientific revolution, with its preference for paratac-
tic rather than hypotactic syntax and its efforts to supplant rhetorical afflatus with
concrete description. Even more influential was the work of art historians such as
Heinrich Wölfflin, who developed five compelling general indices of differences
in style between “the [classic] art of the Cinquecento and the [baroque] art of
the Seicento”: “the development from linear to painterly,” “the development from
plane to recession,” “the development from closed to open form,” “the develop-
ment from multiplicity to unity,” and “the absolute and relative clarity of the sub-
ject” (Wölfflin 1932).5 Wölfflin even took these categories as a reason to break with
the Hegelian model of the spirit’s progress. Instead, he took a hermeneutic position
honoring each culture’s distinctive possibilities and regarding normative compari-
son between cultures as “arbitrary.”
When this generalizing work prevailed, the promise of illuminating forces and
patterns basic to cultural life made it seem trivial to insist on paying careful atten-
tion to what distinguished an individual style from others within the same general
dispensation. But the excitement could not be sustained. Critics soon emerged to
accuse such work of being merely taxonomic and so, in the words of Louis T. Milic,
stuck in “specious and minor similarities among authors”; such work takes us away
from “what is really significant, the author’s own peculiarity, his difference from
his contemporaries, which is what is truly his style” (1973: 450).6
But calling for attention to individuality is very different from putting that study
on secure grounds. Studies of individual style face two obvious problems. First,
how central a role will one give stylistics—the analysis of style on the basis of prin-
ciples developed within linguistics—in determining what claims we make about
the manner of the author’s work in producing a distinctive aesthetic experience?
style 423
Linguistics and aesthetics give quite different accounts of authorial agency and
have quite different disciplinary constraints about what counts as significant inter-
pretation. Second, exactly how does a writer characteristically manipulate his or
her medium? That is, how does the writer make local choices and produce variants
capable of sharpening or realizing some particular experience?7 But having names
for these features does not help a great deal in deciding how to characterize any
particular aspects of writing. Linguistics affords statistical or formal models that
are simply not equipped to characterize the modes of intentionality that character-
ize individual purposiveness.8 But without specifying and analyzing repeated lin-
guistic elements, we have no way to determine which features of a text’s language
count as significant in shaping a style for the work and for the author. Linguistic
patterns by themselves may be empty, and aesthetic judgment vain, without a
foundation in systematic description.
These problems affect any discourse on style. They were exacerbated by the
fact that in this postwar period three major models emerged for determining what
counts as the force of style in particular literary works, and all three raise serious
problems.9 Most studies of individual style early in this period were based on the
idea of deviance. Writers were seen as breaking norms and making such breaks the
basis of effects that were unavailable within the norms. But what makes either a
linguistic norm or its breaking count aesthetically? Did most people have to use the
expression to make it a norm, or was a norm determined by a society or moment
in time? Or perhaps the authors themselves established norms from which they
could then break with significant force. And does the breaking of a norm count as
a stylistic device or as a means of sharpening content—since style and content have
a way of folding into each other? Then there is the persistent problem that if we try
to make the relevant distinctions on an ad hoc basis, we in effect admit that we are
only impressionistic critics rather than linguists seeking a coherent theory.
The next two waves in studies of literary style turned to more flexible linguistic
principles more sensitive to aesthetic interests, but ironically, they also selected
more difficult linguistic methodologies that critics were reluctant to take on with-
out firmer guarantees about their value for aesthetic and for existential questions.
First, there were several ways of shifting away from deviance as the determination
of style to a stress on how the writer deployed patterns and also strategically broke
from them. Roman Jakobson provided what would become the motto for these
approaches when he defined the poetic function in language use as projecting “the
principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination”
(1966: 358). The axis of selection determines choices exclusively by considering
their effect on the message conveyed. When agents want to create a work that has
a distinctive body or materiality in its own right, they turn to the axis of com-
bination, mining these resources for internal relations that it affords. But while
Jakobson’s method considerably thickened our sense of what style is, it did little
for the ability of stylistics to deepen our appreciation of the uses to which style
was being put. As is evident from his classic essay with Claude Lévi-Strauss on
Baudelaire’s “Les Chats,” the axis of combination affords virtually infinite possible
connections. So stylistics still has to be supplemented by claims about purposive-

ness that pull against the purity of sheer linguistic description and, again, that
license charges of impressionism.
The third powerful of model of stylistic analysis was more promising because
it relied on transformational grammar and hence could focus on two distinctive
levels of style: deep structure and surface structure. This focus concentrates on
features that from the start are basic units of meaning; one does not have to project
significance on to linguistic elements that typically do not function semantically.
Because there are deep structures to sentences, and variations on how to employ
those structures, the choices composing a style are active selections that directly
shape how one forms meanings. The deep structure might be noun phrase, adverb,
verb, and noun phrase: “John quickly finished his work.” Repeated variations on this
kind of structure, say, passive constructions or more elaborate adverbial structures,
would reveal particular habits of thinking that constitute how a person handles the
axes of selection that language affords. Studying such selections “implements” bet-
ter stylistic descriptions, “better in that they isolate more fully, economically, and
demonstrably the linguistic features to which a perceptive reader responds in sens-
ing one style to be different from another” (Ohmann 1970: 268). And by demon-
strating how meanings get made, theorists such as Richard Ohmann could insist
that style is not ornament but a display or refinement of “conceptual orientation, a
preferred way of organizing experience” (1970: 271). With transformational gram-
mar, one could use formal models rather than impressionistic ones to do much of
the interpretive work of explaining how works cultivate distinctive styles.
But does it suffice to treat style in terms of the cognitive orientations providing
preferred ways of organizing experience? One might notice that this model will
have difficulty distinguishing dispositional from occasional aspects of style. That
means it will have difficulty identifying the most dramatic or climactic individual
passages. And that means there will always be a substantial gulf between the study
of style that explains how experiences are organized and those that explain how
writing intensifies and deepens those experiences. Ohmann’s cognitivist orienta-
tion makes style too pragmatic by emphasizing only cognition and ignoring how it
can involve other values not directly cognitive, such as rhythmic values or modes
of engaging affect. He is not interested in reasons for making that pursue aesthetic
rather than cognitive values. And he fails to provide a significant dramatic context
for such individual makings because he proposes no threatening other, no sense
that an individual style is always at risk of becoming merely a style and so involves
struggles to establish agency that extend well beyond the cognitive.
While all these models specify useful ways to look at uses of language, none
of them seems to me to provide a sufficient picture of the kinds of acts individu-
als perform by foregrounding what style can do. While they tell us how style
works, they fail to articulate sufficiently why we might care about that work-
ing. We have to look to philosophy for full engagement with issues of how to
value what agents do with the medium.10 Consider, for example, the difference
that is established by Lang’s elemental defi nition of style as “the instance of an
style 425
act that manner qualifies” (1998: 318; see also Lang 1983). He concentrates our
attention on the actions that provide purposiveness for what language shows,
and therefore he can establish ways of moving beyond lists of stylistic traits to a
dramatic notion of style as the manner modifying what might count as matter
for an audience.
But what are the sources of dramatic manner, and what is its value? To address
these questions, we need deeper accounts of human subjecthood and subjectivity,
so I explore probably the two most representative ways of talking about individ-
ual style in philosophy so that I can sketch a third alternative: I contrast Danto’s
emphasis on style as the presentation of a way of seeing, with Wollheim’s case for
style as ultimately a way of demonstrating feelings that have “psychological real-
ity.” Then I argue that neither pays sufficient attention to how artists and writers
emphasize sheer self-reflexive mastery of the medium as the vehicle for a wide
variety of purposes. I want to connect the simple fact of having to struggle for rec-
ognizable stylistic effects not swallowed by cultural generalizations to the deploy-
ment of manner to modify the matter in many registers. For the basic problem
with prevailing views of style is that they are not sufficiently abstract on how style
achieves the force it does to allow themselves sufficient variety on the uses to which
that force can be put.
I begin with Danto because his is the most straightforward version of seeking
individuality and because his is the most egregious effort to align the individuals
with their cultures without acknowledging any dialectical struggle. His argument
begins with what seems a useful separation of style from mere “manner,” so that
he can cast style as a distinctive way that individuals address history from within
(1981: 200). Then, it seems, he has a choice: he could say that style is a way of
employing the resources of manner, or he could try to stress aspects of style that
are quite separate from manner. He chooses the second, with unfortunate results,
for this denial of dialectic requires him to argue that “style is what is done without
the mediation of art or knowledge” (201). And that decision forces him to associate
style with something that is not based on traditions of making or modes of think-
ing. This, I think, is the logic that underlies his identifying style with seeing how
one is seeing: “What, then, is interesting and essential in art is the spontaneous
ability the artist has of enabling us to see his way of seeing the world—not just
the world as if the painting were like a window, but the world as given by him”
(207). We are back with Ohmann’s cognitive orientation, but without the formal
method.
This emphasis on the individual spontaneously making visible his way of see-
ing allows Danto two advantages. He can easily equate his agent, stripped of art
and thought, with other historical agents in the same period. The stress on seeing
in a certain way makes it feasible to identify individual manner with general man-
ner while being confident that there is something left to individual difference. And
because style becomes inherently self-reflexive, he can make style the measure of
value. He can turn to the famous statement “style is the man himself” and flesh out
how “the structure of a style is like the structure of a personality”:
It is not merely what a man represents, but it is the way in which he represents
it, which has to be invoked to explain the structures of his mind . . . . Of course
we speak as well of the style of a period or a culture, but this will refer us
ultimately to shared representational modes which define what it is to belong
to a period. The conceptual structures of periods and persons are, I proposed
above, sufficiently similar that we may speak of a period as having an inside and
an outside, a kind of surface available to the historian and a kind of inwardness
belonging to those who live in the period in question, which is pretty much like
the inward and outward aspects of the human personality. (1981: 207, 205)
“The greatness of the work” becomes “the greatness of the representation the work
makes material. If style is the man, greatness of style is greatness of person” (207).
But if style is the man, style affords only a thin and depleted version of the man
when it is based only on seeing, especially on seeing that is “without the mediation
of art or knowledge.” The structure of style is not the structure of personality but,
at best, the structure of chosen constructs of personality. Compare Danto on style
is the man to Wittgenstein’s treatment of the same topic: “ ‘Le style c’est l’homme,’
‘Le style c’est l’homme méme.’ The first expression has cheap epigrammatic brev-
ity. The second, correct version opens up quite a different perspective. It says that
a man’s style is a picture [Bild] of him” (Wittgenstein 1980: 78).
Danto wants to naturalize style by rendering it as fundamental to experience
as a way of seeing might be. But at best, this claim is circular: all style has to be con-
figured to what can be claimed as a kind of seeing. To get that claim to work, Danto
has to neglect how style can establish modes of hearing and feeling and thinking.
Wittgenstein, on the other hand, wants to distinguish two aspects of individual-
ity—the way we identify the agent and the way we project the agent identifying
self-reflexively with the possibility of willing or affirming that agency—hence his
stress on the significance of the reflexive “meme.” That second model entails not
separating style from the mediation of art and knowledge but rather treating style
as the mediation by which art and knowledge take concrete distinctive shape.
Danto’s limitations create the challenge of our having to characterize style as
something more capacious and differently self-reflexive than making visible one’s
own ways of seeing. This is precisely what Wollheim offers, at least for painting, so
I turn to his work as providing almost the opposite case for how individual style
might be envisioned. Wollheim does not locate style in any specific model of men-
tal activity like Danto’s seeing (which is doomed to vacillate between literal and
metaphoric uses). Rather, the fundamental feature of style is that a variety of activ-
ities all have a distinctive “psychological reality.” What matters is how artworks
make specific investments in particular intentional states and corresponding atti-
tudes explicit. I am not sure quite how to translate what Wollheim means by “psy-
chological reality,” but I am sure that this reality emerges because style manifests a
commitment on the part of a subject to what is being created. That is why Wollheim
is such a virulent opponent of any taxonomic approach to style, since that kind
of approach can cannot handle the affective intensities and corporeal specificity
that individual manner produces as thematizing intentions.11 “Individual style has
style 427
reality” because its possession makes a difference for a painter. The reality that dif-
ference makes is psychological because “the difference that having a style makes is
a difference in the mind of the painter . . . . An individual style is acquired through
being formed . . . , not learnt” (Wollheim 1995: 41). Learning may play a part in that
formation, but the artist is individual to the degree that he or she does something
with that learning.
Viewers can locate this individual psychological reality by tracing the emergence
of two distinctive practical capacities: the first, the “schemata of the artist’s style,”
consists in segmenting or conceptualizing the elements of painting in a certain pre-
ferred way; the second “consists in evolving rules or principles for operating with
those schemata” (1995: 42) in order to give shape to them and to form internal rela-
tions for those shapes. Taken together, these capacities “encapsulate” style in how
the artist’s body appears in the work as the fine-tuning of the eye. Style, then, “puts
within reach of a painter the fulfillment of his intentions” (1995: 43). Fulfillment is
not merely making work that is “suggestive of, or evidential for, his intentions” (1995:
43). Rather, it affords the kind of realization that allows us to speak of the expres-
sive force possessed by the work. Style brings to bear “figurative elements: that is,
elements that not only require for their detection seeing in [which is the process by
which visual art represents aspects of the world] but are then identified through
concepts” (1995: 44) that involve tonalities and hence expressive force. Style is what
allows the particular work exemplary status as the actual manifestation of a par-
ticular way a mind can be invested in a segment of the world.12
But Wollheim pays a considerable price for giving style this kind of psychologi-
cal reality, for either style reinforces the strict identity conditions established by the
artist’s schemata, or it encounters traumatic conflict where its ability to pervade
bodily manner creates total crises for that identity. Such conflict emerges when a
painter’s style becomes threatened by a fascination with another foreign but pow-
erfully inviting style. When Titian submits to the muscular style of Michelangelo
or when Picasso enters another stage in his metamorphoses, “[t]he artist’s own
style and those around it will be conceptualized as bits or parts or products of the
body, and by this stage the scene is set for any one of the great dramas of projection,
introjection, projective identification that deep crisis precipitates” (Wollheim 1995:
49). Only psychoanalysis then possesses the necessary methodological resources to
explain the damage and make efforts to repair that damage.
Wollheim is reduced to these two options because he insisted “one artist, one
style” (1995: 49): “[T]he characteristics associated with individual styles do not alter,”
even if art historians “will come up with formulations that fall short of this ideal” so
they differ among themselves in describing those styles (1987: 26). Cases when one
is tempted to challenge that equation fall for Wollheim into one of three categories:
instances of the prestylistic, the poststylistic, or the extrastylistic (29–32). So, when
differences emerge, the critic has either to posit crises or to argue that the case is a
case of the failure of style to emerge at all. Such moves obviously tempt one to circu-
lar arguments, since it is tempting to treat any problem with one’s own account—of
style and of identity—as the result of style not being fully present.13
The result is an approach that can be as reductive as Danto’s equating style

with a stable mode of seeing. Wollheim’s need to populate the art world with “non-
styles” derives primarily from two features of his argument—one involving too
strong an assertion of identity, and the other a relatively inflexible psychology.
Unlike Danto, he can capture the moi-même that makes style self-reflexive and
perhaps involves something like will. But because he needs to base identity on
something as persistent as schemata, he repudiates the possibility that style can
actually become a means of imaginative flexibility, allowing or even encouraging
experiments in what manners one can identify with. He treats changes in habits of
investment as only causes for a sense of crises. The work of style has to adapt long-
standing investments rather than provide a sense of discovering new possibilities
in scenes and objects that call upon somewhat different dispositional traits and
libidinal economies, or that call on letting the making dictate what dispositional
traits emerge. For Wollheim, schemata shape what making can be, thereby block-
ing the possibility that style itself can adjust to concrete questions about how best
to realize an experience or produce distinctive affective force.
Danto’s style as seeing provides cognitive force but cannot account for any
individual psychological factors, while Wollheim’s emphasis on style as psycholog-
ical reality traps artists within schemata and minimizes the force of the occasional
adjustments they make in that very sense of identity in order to realize specific
aspects of experiences they care about. Therefore, a third alternative is necessary
that can be flexible about the modes of purposiveness—practical and psycholog-
ical—that can be embodied by the foregrounding of labor made visible as style.
In my view, this flexibility can be created if we are highly abstract, or perhaps
metapsychological, about the basic satisfaction for a writer or artist in developing
a style for a given work, for then we can acknowledge several different ways this
satisfaction can be produced, and we can indicate some of the values realized by
adapting manner to matter. So, I propose going to the level of abstraction charac-
terizing Wittgenstein’s version of the “moi-même” that attention to style allows an
agent. This moi-même factor points to how individual style can function as the
self-conscious celebration of the dialectical work of making a manner that cannot
be subsumed under general styles. And dwelling on this level of self-consciousness
seems to distinguish having a style from merely displaying linguistic habits,
because style becomes an aspect of an authorial act with shaping intentions and
with a sense of effects the style might produce in its audience.
In addition, Wittgenstein’s formulation helps us see how the manner of a work
can incorporate something like a willing, a self-reflexive taking of responsibility for
how art links to life. The relevant means of making can range from various ways of
producing the surprise of defamiliarization to emphasizing how the art medium
can produce vivacious and precise renderings of experience. Taking of responsibil-
ity then extends that activity in two ways. Obviously, it stages the self as feeling that
its concerns are represented within the manner displayed. Then, because the man-
ner becomes objective through the making, style becomes a force that takes on a
kind of social existence. The taking of responsibility is not a mere subjective claim
style 429
but an accomplished fact because it enacts what ownership of one’s actions entails.
Style makes ownership not an abstract claim to a right but an overt exemplifying of
a path for realizing values for anyone who cares to identify with it. Conceiving the
topic in this way also allows us to move from painterly to literary examples as the
strongest evidence for the complex judgments style invites of its audience.
Danto and Wollheim both seem to me to naturalize style. That is, they directly
connect it to certain cognitive or psychological traits that become conditions of
experience antecedent to the work. Therefore, these philosophers cannot suffi-
ciently attend to the sheer madeness, the sheer production of the differences from
ordinary practices that make art and artifice such strikingly different phenomena
from other kinds of experiences, yet they clearly are right that style is not just
artifice. Individual style has at least two complex continuities with the world avail-
able for experience: it has qualities of giveness, and hence of limitation, that it
shares with how we experience our bodies and our situations in the world; and it
has qualities of expansiveness of spirit, of making available a purposiveness that
distinguishes, concretizes, realizes, and intensifies what is available for experience.
How can we conceptually capture both dimensions?
First, we have to recognize that individual style in art involves the moi-même
because it is a fundamentally second-order phenomenon. Style is a mode of realiz-
ing particular first-order qualities. It is also a mode of taking second-order respon-
sibility for how those qualities are realized. Speaking of style as a mode of making
helps us to account for this taking of responsibility because it avoids collapsing
style into a feature of the content of the work and insists on the author’s purposive
activity. Style becomes a dramatic phenomenon in its own right. We set terms
like purpose and purposiveness against terms for the difficulty that these terms
face—difficulties caused by the limitations of the medium, or by the triumphs of
past practitioners in the medium, or by what it takes to defamiliarize or otherwise
surprise audiences in relation to the experience being addressed.14
Let me describe individual style, then, as the statement by the artist that “this
is what I can make to bring about the kind of presence for the object so as it to give
it expressive force in the world that goes beyond art.” The expressive force is estab-
lished by equating style with specific powers of seeing, or cognizing, or realizing
one’s way of making investments. But if we see that these fi rst-order relations have
the task of fleshing out a second-order domain established simply by the overt
madeness of the object, we can both honor the sheer labor of style and recognize
the variety of terms that are required to establish how that labor affects what we
can experience through the made object. Style is not just seeing or cognizing, but
the objectifying of possibilities of seeing that a person wants to convey as matter-
ing for an audience.
The best way I know to keep visible both first- and second-order dimensions
of literary style is to develop the possibility that there is a significant category of
speech act that theorists have yet to elaborate, primarily because it gets subordi-
nated to the performative. I refer to what I will call the “demonstrative,” a concept
that applies not only to style but to a variety of ways that we deal with showing how
things are possible or how things might be accomplished. Let us take as demon-
stratives those speech acts that refer to themselves as displaying something signifi-
cant that can modify behavior or instruct about the resources of a model.
Typical demonstrative speech acts include instances of the following language
games (that can occur by gesture as well as in actual speech):
“This is done like this.”
“Try it to perform the piece in this way.”
“The story of that can be told in this way.”
“In this kind of situation I am likely to respond in this way.”
“In this language the phrase is usually used in this way.”
“This is what I can do when I get a chance.”
“It hurts here not there,” or more generally, “this is how I feel.”
These examples function in one or more of three related ways—to emphasize how
actions can be accomplished, to clarify various uses of things (especially uses of
language), and to provide a means for agents to display various capacities, espe-
cially capacities for feeling and for making. Demonstratives do not propose asser-
tions that something is true but instead show that something is happening or is
possible.15 The fundamental demonstrative claim is that I am showing you how
I do something so that you can do it or at least understand how it is done. Style,
then, becomes the display of possible uses of a medium—as innovation in relation
to tradition and as shaping possible ways that manner effects matter.
Why not just treat style as evoking a performative speech act, and so as the
performative dimension of imaginative activity? The idea of performativity gives
a rationale for attending to manner and, more important, marks a crucial differ-
ence between activity that is essentially geared toward description or argument
and activity that is aware of what can accomplished by an emphasis on the doing.
But there are at least two reasons for rejecting this model. First, Austin’s treat-
ment of the performative emphasizes social functions that are almost the exact
opposite of anything one might want to claim for style. The performative matters
less as a model of doing or making in its own right than as a model for how that
doing might be “felicitous” and so satisfy certain social conditions that make the
speech act count in an official or at least in an interpersonal context. Saying “With
this ring I thee wed” is a paradigm for doing something in language if one meets
the appropriate conditions. In such situations, it is crucial that what one intends
simply does not matter. If you satisfy the conditions and speak the words, you are
married.
Therefore, my first reason is negative—Austin’s concept of the performative
has insufficient scope to handle many of the things we do with language, especially
the things that individualize utterances. My second reason is positive: if we call
attention to demonstratives as speech acts, we can substantially reduce the burden
on the concept of the performative to cover all emphases on what an activity does
rather than on what meanings describe. And then we can see such philosophers
as Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler who complain about Austin’s narrowness as
style 431
if they were reenacting how Kant’s heirs responded to his speculations about the
thing-in-itself. Kant’s heirs were convinced that such a powerful notion could not
just be a limit concept but had significant positive ontological and religious work
to do. In both cases, the contemporary and the romantic, the eagerness to make
concepts do too much work ends up substituting vague and ambiguous concepts
for ones that are extremely useful precisely because of the constraints that could be
put upon them. Positing the demonstrative allows us means of characterizing two
contrasting ways of acting in language, and hence two ways of framing the con-
stative assertions concerned with observation and description. One way of acting
manages affairs by means of acts in language; the other makes particular displays
offering examples of what can be done with words.
The demonstrative is irreducibly a term stressing an action being carried out
for a purpose or, in the case of aesthetic orientations, for a display of what pur-
posiveness can establish. Where the performative defines an agent as satisfying
certain conditions, the demonstrative presents the deed of making or offering a
model. Affectively, one demonstrates what one is feeling; semantically, one pro-
vides a model for how some aspect of the language can operate; and stylistically,
one exemplifies possible powers of a medium to intensify or realize what the agent
is engaging. By using the category of the demonstrative, we show how intentional
qualities can be attributed to making and how that intentionality can be conveyed
so as to afford possible identifications. And we can at least introduce questions
about how and why responsibility is taken for what style accomplishes.
Finally, stressing the force of the demonstrative also clearly connects style
in art with the values people have placed on style in other domains—from
Baudelaire’s dandy to the craftspeople idealized by William Morris. The demon-
strative makes clear the possible connection style affords between pleasure and
labor. Labor becomes a means of making articulate the purposiveness of a given
activity, so labor becomes the necessary means for various kinds of satisfaction
that communication and personalization afford. More specifically, most acts
of foregrounding style promise a distinctive mode of being within social space
because pleasure becomes wound up in the activity itself rather than only in any
practical results the activity might produce. In talking about style in art, we are
perforce talking about how the making of objects foregrounds what subjects can
do to shape the very objects that display their powers. And we are examining how
that shaping invites our taking on possibilities of seeing in, seeing as, and see-
ing otherwise. The work demonstrates the making of differences that can make
a difference, if only in the attitudes we take toward the experiences engaged by
the artist.
This theorizing begs for examples, so I illustrate the utility of my model by
exploring three quite different ways poets invite us to attribute purposiveness to
what is foregrounded about the making of the text. These examples should at least
show why it matters for theory to stress how making is clearly a second-order oper-
ation that then leads us to examine and test what is being demonstrated. (I do not
take any examples from prose fiction or drama because they would take too long
to develop. But to the degree that such texts emphasize the labor of making, they
also function as similar demonstratives—either locally in specific paragraphs or
structurally to give the entire narrative demonstrative force.)
My first example, from Alexander Pope, highlights the possibility that the
manner of a work need have nothing directly to do with the psychological reality
of a specific person, and everything to do with sharpening or realizing of what is
asserted as content. Pope identifies style with purposive thinking, and he treats
purposive thinking as necessarily turning the empirical subject into a subject com-
pletely invested in producing “[w]hat oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed”
(2001: line 298). The other two examples will become progressively more expres-
sive of distinctively subjective processes—the first as an elaborately self-conscious
identification with traditional lyricism put to expressive purposes, and the second
as an effort to have style serve as affirming the power of will within an overall rep-
resentation of utterly bleak conditions. In each case, the moi-même of individual
style opens into an invitation for all to see and think as the artist does in articulat-
ing what certain choices make possible.
The first example literally speaks for itself by demonstrating what it also
asserts. These lines are from Pope’s “Essay on Criticism” (1711):
While expletives their feeble aid do join

And ten low words oft creep in one dull line
While they ring round the same unvaried chimes
With sure returns of still expected rhymes . . . (2007: 14, 11. 346–49)
On one level, these lines can be read as instances of Pope’s basic disposition toward
style. Pope accepts the heroic couplet as period style. But that mode takes on in his
hands a characteristic swiftness of association, intricacy of balance, and precision
of phrase, all delivered as vehicles for a biting wit. And he is an absolute master of
varying the couplet to emphasize different weights of words and phrases, so that
moments of flat sing-song iambics are almost nonexistent. Yet to remain with such
generalizations is to ignore how Pope rises to individual occasions by having his
making sharpen our focus.
Each line seems to choose a different aural key, especially in the contrast
between the e’s dominating the first line quoted and the sonorous o’s marking the
center of the next one. Then there is the semantic register. “Do” in the first line
exemplifies the addition of expletives; the “ten words” in the second literally creep
in one dull line because the line is uncharacteristically without internal variety;
and the last two lines provide the expected rhymes they refer to, although they also
stage those rhymes within elegantly balanced phrases. In other words, the triumph
of style here in how Pope makes the language refers to itself, to its own manner of
making choices about diction. This rhetoric exemplifies exemplification. Yet at the
same time as the rhetoric exemplifies the vices to which it refers, it also insists on
the power of poetry to contain such criticism while celebrating its own absolute
opposition to the world of hackneyed expression.
style 433
This sense of poetry’s triumph over the spirit of dullness tempts me to invoke
the concept of will. Style clearly moves us out of the empirical order of descrip-
tion into the order of avowals. Yet these avowals cannot be treated as simply the
expressions of affective attitudes toward habits of verse making. Rather, they self-
consciously celebrate what is involved in being able to treat an attitude as one’s own
while literally confining the self to sheer miming. Will here is the affirmation of
the ability to render common sense uncommon without denying the responsibility
to orient that freedom to public use.
William Butler Yeats’s “A Drinking Song” (1910) puts style to work in another
kind of situation where it is asked both to realize and to transform a quintessential
popular form:
Wine comes in at the mouth

And love comes in at the eye;
That’s all we shall know of truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh. (1983: 93–94)
Ironically the popular nature of the form provides the substance for an acutely
self-conscious affirmation of the artist’s adapted manner. It is almost as if no one
before has quite heard the potential for form within the drinking song. And it is
almost as if once one does hear that potential, one’s response cannot but appropri-
ate the very form itself for a metaphoric level capable of bringing out the full sad-
ness perhaps at the core of most song.
Notice how the song structurally depends on a powerful contrast. The fifth
line converts the opening reference to wine into a kind of action. But then the
correspondences change because that same kind of conversion for the second line
takes only four syllables of the last line. This is enough to seduce into trying to
figure out how the remaining elements fit this possible structural motif of match-
ing actions to states: after all, “I sigh” parallels the other transformations of non-
human subjects into human actions. This figuring out is not difficult—the poem,
after all, is “only” a drinking song. Yeats breaks standard symmetry in order to
emphasize how the expansive third and fourth lines produce the simple corre-
sponding action of the “sigh”—as if that were the only action that might correlate
with such verbiage. All those words not only provoke the sigh but explain it. What
else can one do with the temptation to let the language of despair take over except
find the one physical gesture that can at the same time interpret and mock the
pathos. This sense of pathos may even be the underlying cause of the desperation
provoking the drinking song. But this sense also provides a way of valuing how the
poem fills out the triple rhyme. The “sigh” becomes a measure of power as well as
of pathos, since in fact it does correspond to discursive language, in the same way
that lifting the glass and looking at you respond to the sentiments that provoke
them. Through self-conscious manner, this poem transforms the drinking song
into a surprising affective register, all the more striking by its recuperation of a
distinctive formal symmetry.
My third example is somewhat more elaborate since I want to concentrate on
how style might negotiate what can be done with negation—as a linguistic and as
a psychological phenomenon. In the late work of Wallace Stevens, such negotiation
does not take place in the typical way of simply finding a positive assertion to con-
trast with the negative. Rather, Stevens manipulates the processes of negation so
that he can render what can be affirmed within the very consciousness elaborating
the negations. This is his “The Plain Sense of Things” (1954):
After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to the end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.
It is difficult even to choose the adjective

For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.
The great structure has become a minor house
No turban walks across the lessened floors.
The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.

The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.
A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition
In a repetitiousness of men and flies.
Yet the absence of imagination had

Itself to be imagined. The great pond,
The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,
Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence
Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,

The great pond and its waste of lilies, all this
Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,
Required, as a necessity requires. (1997: 428)16
These quatrains closely echo in style much of Stevens’s late poetry. Gone is the “essen-
tial gaudiness” of his early work as well as the speculative dazzle and scope of his
extended meditations on such themes as the imagination and major man. This is the
unadorned world rendered in a basically simple referential mode where simple qua-
trains try to make peace with everything that causes this sense of impoverishment.
But the greater the simplicity, the greater the burden on style—both to elaborate
the significance of this plain sense of things and to mark how the subject can care
for this world. Here I want to concentrate on the force of one figure, the “rat come
out to see,” as an emblem for what Stevens seems to think style has to accomplish
in order to serve as a significant force in the poet’s confrontation with everything
style 435
in modern life that threatens to make “desire . . . too difficult to tell from despair”
(Stevens 1997: 286). Almost all of Stevens’s late poems provide figures for the “mind
of winter” capable of bearing witness to this bare scene. But this particular choice
of the rat both extends and transforms the negatives shaping the poem in deep and
exciting ways. First, let us count the negatives defining this plain sense of things.
The scene is sad; the great structure has become “a minor house”; there is “no tur-
ban” walking across the “lessened floors”; and there is a sense of failure everywhere
reinforced by the awful thought that every negation is only a repetition of what seen
from distance seems only “a repetitiousness of men and flies.” Above all, the sense
of that “we have come to the end of the imagination” cannot stand by itself but
seems condemned to issuing the further negations that conclude the first stanza.
Yet Stevens is keenly aware that at some point excessive negation has to turn
into something else. The basic question here is not whether the poem will shift
gears but how it will shift gears without having both the buildup and the conclu-
sion seem self-indulgent fantasy. He responds to that challenge in three elemen-
tal ways. First, there is something odd about the reference to “no turban walks
across the lessened floors” because, unlike the other details, this is not a standard
image for depression: no one would expect a turban to walk across those floors.
So we have not quite come to the end of the imagination. Then there is the explicit
demand that opens the fourth stanza: “Yet the absence of imagination had / Itself
to be imagined.” Here simple negation will no longer do because the poet insists
that he cannot rest in isolated observations. The poem must establish another level
on which it synthesizes what the negations have wrought. Here, then, the sense of
absence of imagination becomes the imagination’s feel for its present situation, and
the poem must take responsibility for its own analogizing.
But how will it do that? Deploying the rat provides Stevens’s answer. After
the generalization opening the fourth stanza, the poem returns to what seems a
concrete situation. Yet “the great pond” in fact hovers between an additional detail
of the scene and a metaphor for how the absence of imagination can be imagined.
Projected description and self-referential metaphoric reach become strangely iden-
tical. This strange identity then evokes the “rat come out to see.” The rat’s task is
to observe the actual plain sense of things while also serving as the mind’s figure
for its own pushing itself on the scene so as to find ways to figure the absence of
imagination. The rat parallels the mind’s uncomfortable but somehow fated pres-
ence as witness to this desolation, and as one more feature of the desolation that
has to be imagined. Now, though, “imagination” is no longer an abstract term. It
becomes just what enables the poet to identify with how this rat emerges in this
situation. The rat suggests that, confronted with this scene, the most the mind can
do is compose an emblem for its own estrangement in a bizarrely intimate way. By
having a figure of consciousness that is also a figure of nonidentity with the self, the
poem can encompass the scope of the poverty it confronts. This scope then turns
to include not only the plain sense of things before the mind but also the necessity
that makes this such a challenge for the mind: “all this / Had to be imagined as an
inevitable knowledge.”
It seems that only imagination can establish the theatrical terms by which there
can be figures for the viewing of this poverty. And only imagination can bring to bear
a sense of this poverty as inseparable from our destiny as human beings. Needing to
pursue a plain sense of things in this most unplain way is the price we pay for having
the investments we do in recognizing and appreciating our situations. But this price
seems worth paying, as long as we can imagine imagining a quasi identification with
this rat as a basic aspect of that poverty. Such imagining provides an instrument for
coming to terms with a fatality too comprehensive and abstract to be engaged by
discursive reasoning. Figures prove absolutely necessary for dealing with the plainest
possible sense of things. And figures require a version of agency capable of directing
what they present—both cognitively and affectively—hence the role that the second-
order considerations about consciousness have to play in the poem.
This is why the concrete figure of the rat gives way to the purely syntactic
power of the “as” as the ultimate example of the imagination’s power. The repeated
invocation of “as,” that grammatical figure for figures, brings to bear a range of
interpretive contexts that seem inseparable from the process of self-reflection, even
as they become sufficiently abstract to prevent any single image of the self from
taking form. First, there is the simple assertion of what we might call a mode of
vision: all this had to be imagined in the mode that necessity requires. But this
sense of necessity cannot be encompassed by description. We have to reflect on
what is afforded by the series of “as” expressions as they connect the contingent
and the necessary. Our thinking and our figuring all become aspects of our recog-
nizing that we are not so much describing the absence of imagination as ritually
manifesting where we are positioned when we make that attempt. We have to align
entirely with necessity, but at a distance, in another tree, provided by everything
that our ability to use “as” makes visible.
Such use proves most important for its giving substance to the “we” that
begins as only a hopeful assertion in the poem’s first stanza. This “we” evokes a
transcendental ego’s power to adjust to necessity, and it embodies the power to feel
what one shares with others even as one is most sharply confronted with one’s own
isolation. The power to generalize proves inseparable from the second-order power
to see that it takes generalizing in order to stage the absence of imagination in
its full theatrical presence. (One’s own absence of imagination would be banal in
comparison.) Yet for all this generalization, this power can only be realized by the
individual’s accepting the condition of our fully fleshing out the worlds that “as”
produces—namely, that each of us align with the sense of necessity. “All this” in
the last stanza provides in elemental form the necessary synthesis. Then the final
figures can give the feeling for what the scene had lacked—not as a fiction but as
a bleak assessment that satisfies because it raises the level of transparency that can
be taken into intimate being. That may be all that is left viable as a concept of the
will, and it may suffice.
I think what ultimately matters in all three examples is how treating them as
demonstrative acts makes clear how art objects elicit and reward identifications.
Style constitutes a process by which the subject pervades the situation and makes
style 437
the situation inseparable from the qualifications (what I call the “as-ness”) by
which it becomes articulate. For the artist, concern for this as-ness makes the man-
ner inseparable from the matter, and it allows the work to suggest that it establishes
certain possibilities of enactment as elemental features of the empirical world. And
for audience participating in the work, the demonstrative force of style can modify
their sense of possible attitudes that can be taken toward the material. Style in
Pope’s lines suffuses a critical commonplace with a witty presence opening into
a world where instruction and pleasure can fuse. Style in Yeats’s poem manages
to find in the most banal rhetoric a powerful expression of pain that is insepa-
rable from understanding the banality. And style in Stevens’s poem exemplifies the
imaginative energy it takes to align what a subject demands as a condition of feel-
ing its own vitality with how objects can elicit the withdrawal of all the illusions
that typically nourish this mode of feeling.
Therefore, one can argue that style matters, in art and life, because if we fail to
establish manner as substance, we have only picture thinking. And if we are reduced
to picture thinking, we lose any language either for the variations in intensity afforded
by aesthetic experiences or for the capacity to make discriminations that having that
repository of examples might afford. The danger of reducing style to fashion, or to
evidence of a style, is that style then becomes only something to be pictured: style
loses all its roles as a demonstrative act. And the audience loses all the subtle ways
that consciousness can respond to what can only be shown and not said.
NOTES
1. One reason I include myself in my epigraphs is to call attention to a dilemma

often facing older critics. I have to assume that I was invited to write this essay because
of two other essays I have written on the concept of style (Altieri 1989, 1995). I must have
had something useful to say then; now I put myself in a position where my alternatives
seem repeating myself or arguing extensively with myself (or both)—none of which is
appealing. So I subscribe still to the detailed arguments I made there while treating this
essay as a more general treatment of the topic within which my earlier arguments might
be contained with a little recasting.
2. My Google review of this critical literature on style over the past 10 years turned
up two books, very few essays on the general concept of style, and not much more on
style in relation to individual authors or artists. But I have to mention a very recent
essay by Richard Neer (2005), which begins with the same gambit I do about “the
relative neglect of stylistics in recent historiographic work.” However, it turns out that
connoisseurship is not a very good model for stylistics because it has to emphasize
“the inference of an artifact’s spatial and temporal point of origin on the basis of
morphological (stylistic) criteria” (3). “Possession of a style on the one hand, and the
status of being an artifact are synonymous” (5). However, I treat individual style as
different from possessing “a style” because individual style indicates not only point of
origin but also the point of the originating. Neer is not concerned with intentionality or
purposiveness because he sees the primary task of the connoisseur as establishing causal
evidence for attributions of provenance, so the individual is an analytic construction
“which is not necessarily the same as a particular human subject” (12). I see the critic’s
interest in style as establishing evidence for how and why particular choices are made
within the individual work.
3. Taken by itself, this example might be trivial, but it indicates a dilemma for those
who want critical leverage from the concept of style against such mainstream aspects
of cultural fashion. There is always the possibility of drawing on the theorizing of the
Frankfurt School to show how mainstream capitalist culture continually absorbs what
had been concepts with critical potential into narcissistic logic that produces a “near-
perfect circuit of production and consumption.” As Hal Foster puts it, “this ‘designed
subject’ ” might be “the unintended offspring of the ‘constructed subject’ so vaunted in
post-modern culture”: “Contemporary design is part of a greater revenge of capitalism
on postmodernism—a recouping of its crossings of arts and disciplines, a routinization
of its transgressions” (2003: 18). But then, it is difficult to escape the charge that such
criticism only follows academic fashion and so reduces to a kind of grumbling about
change. The more we use the past for critical leverage, the more we might be encouraging
in younger critics the sense that, rather than turning on mass culture, they should
embrace it and treat style only in its terms. The other alternative is to find other concepts
not so corrupted by nostalgia.
4. These critics are not likely to get any help from the poststructural models in
philosophy that are still the most influential on literary study because these philosophers
are not willing to countenance any form of idealization in which such concepts as
mastery play a part. The entire conceptual field of such philosophy pulls against
honoring the energy and labor it takes to make one kind of object stand out as an
exemplary act of overcoming both the indifference of nature and the ways fashion allows
us to conceal that indifference.
5. My remarks have been substantially influenced by the case made in Summers
1998.
6. Wollheim offers richer, more penetrating critiques of parallel taxonomic
movements in art history. He shows convincingly that these generalizing categories are
only ideal entities that have no reality, no particular images or verbal formulations that
allow increasing depth and richness to a given analysis. This model of style developed
for the visual arts “cannot explain why paintings in a given general style look as they
do”; “on the contrary they are in whatever general style they are in because of how they
look.” (1995: 47). Generalizing theory cannot even begin to explain the difference we
commonly make between being in a style and having a distinctive style. And because the
characterizations are ideal constructs, they allow no dialectic, no way of having attention
to individual examples change the repertoire of cultural terms.
7. Wollheim (1987: 42–43) uses “schemata” and “principles” or “rules” to describe
the same difference, but his choice is costly because none of these terms allows for the
flexibility that the notion of occasion provides.
8. My favorite essay on literary style, Watt 1973, is terrific on the tensions between
linguistic and literary explanation of style and on what it takes to justify an aesthetic
approach.
9. In his great “Generative Grammars and Literary Style” (1970), Richard Ohmann
identifies 12 critical approaches to stylistics.
10. To engage the philosophers, one must be willing to focus on visual art and
be content to extrapolate what one can for literary cases. All but two of the influential
style 439
philosophers engaging questions about style work exclusively on visual art because it
is probably easier to focus on the action that manner qualifies. Everything about the
visual medium seems to manifest style, whereas in writing, attention to the instrument
is likely to be torn what the meaning is and how that might be qualified by style. Of the
two exceptions, only Robinson works on literary examples; the other, Lang, concerns
himself with how philosophers rely on manner to challenge the primacy of impersonal
method that is an aspect of the Cartesian heritage in philosophy. To be concerned with
individual actions for Lang is necessarily to set them in resistance to everything that can
be handled in impersonal terms. Literary critics, on the other hand tend, to assume that
what matters is the individual and then go too quickly to specific questions about how
language per se reveals that individuality, without worrying about how language can be
the vehicle for distinctive actions.
11. I am combining two of Wollheim’s treatments of the concept of style. The idea
of thematization on several levels is brilliantly worked out in Painting as an Art (1987:
21–25), while the list of attributes claimed for style is developed in “Style in Painting”
(1995: 41–44). I should note that in the later work, the essay, Wollheim is careful to say
that style is “psychological only in the way in which vision or language-competence is
psychological. It interacts with other psychological phenomena at some level” (48). But
then, on the very next page (which I take up in a few moments), he offers his version of
how the body gets involved in style, and that provides a clear link between psychological
and psychoanalytic. It is this link that justifies my treating Wollheim within a language
of expression and investment that he does not explicitly sanction.
12. Specifying style depends largely on l’ésprit de finesse because it is always a
matter of reconciling two somewhat different concerns. Stylistic descriptions analyze
given works, while style descriptions clarify the schemata and the rules that govern an
individual’s style in general. For in any given work, the artist’s style is not likely to be
“employed in its entirety,” while from the style description there is no way to predict
what shape individual works will end up taking.
13. But such determinations will be circular because they depend on deciding from
the start what will count as style. For example, Wollheim argues that Cézanne had a
long period where he did not develop a style because a lack of confidence forced Cézanne
to be emphatic and so he could not “allow his work to be tentative” (1987: 29). To make
his point, he compares the panoramic and “prestylistic” View of Auvers (1874) with the
“fully stylistic” View of Medan (1880), with its dense, abstracted relation among shapes
and color units. But if we expand the definition of style to include attributes other than
“tentativeness,” the earlier painting is clearly signed by Cézanne: the very high vantage
that in turn brings the background up and forward and forces constant adjustments in
our sense of place. More important, if we turn to other paintings like Lutte d’Amour from
the 1860s, we find a characteristic violence that Cézanne’s later work struggles to put to
work as an intensity of apprehension. In other words, personal style need not be just a
listing of attributes but can comprise a characteristic mode of struggle in which one’s past
gets taken up and transfigured. Attributions of nonstyle simply avoid the challenge an
artist might present, even to himself or herself, of finding ways to carry on conversation
within various stylistic features.
14. I follow Kant in treating “purpose” as following the rules of understanding
and “purposiveness” as “a thing’s harmony with the character of things that is possible
only through purposes”: purposiveness is what the reflective power of “judgment
prescribes not to nature … but to itself,” a law for its reflection in nature (1987: 20). Then
I use Wittgenstein’s distinction between following a rule and the condition where an
unstatable intentionality in an object keeps intimating where I have to go. See Kant 1987:
20, 21–22, 28–29.
15. In making these attributions about the demonstrative, I am trying to work out
a way to elaborate one of Wittgenstein’s central ideas—that a great deal of discourse is
not in the language games of making observations and forming propositions but is about
evaluating samples supplying the framework of language for what they can and cannot
make possible for practical use. See Wittgenstein 1958.
16. There is another version of this reading in Altieri 2005.
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Contemporary Literary Criticism. Boston: Little Brown.
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 
EMOTION, MEMORY,
AND TRAUMA
glenn w. most
I
In the very first scene of Salman Rushdie’s novel Fury (2001), the central character,
“Professor Malik Solanka, retired historian of ideas, irascible dollmaker” (3) goes
out one hot summer day, foppishly dressed, for his customary afternoon walk on
the Upper West Side of New York, and is asked by a beautiful young neighborhood
woman in a friendly, teasing, certainly rather nosy, but also slightly flirtatious way,
why it is that he is always walking alone and where he is going. This is his reaction:
“Sudden anger rose in him. ‘What I’m looking for,’ he barked, ‘is to be left in peace.’
His voice trembled with a rage far bigger than her intrusion merited, the rage which
shocked him whenever it coursed through his nervous system, like a flood. Hearing
his vehemence, the young woman recoiled, retreating into silence” (5).
Irascible indeed—Rushdie is careful to point out that although the girl’s
intrusion might well have legitimately provoked some degree of irritation, it does
not seem worthy of the fury that is now welling up in Solanka’s spirit. Nor is
this an isolated incident: as Rushdie indicates, this is a repeated occurrence in
Solanka’s psychic life, and it shocks him every time it happens—although each
shock does not prevent it from happening again. Over and over, something is
happening, to him and within him, and he can recognize its effects but cannot
understand their causes or control them. We might say that he is at odds with
himself, that he is the locus of a discord that is his only because it is no one else’s,
but with which he cannot identify himself and that therefore strikes him as alien
and frightening.
emotion, memory, and trauma 443
Only a few pages later, Solanka is returning to his apartment building from
another walk and encounters in the lobby a copywriter who wants the advice that
he, as a genuine Englishman, can be supposed to be able to give him about a pro-
posed advertising slogan. Solanka tries to fend him off with banalities, but the
advertiser insists. And then:
Professor Solanka felt huge irritation rise up in his breast. He experienced a
strong desire to screech at this fellow with the damn-fool alias, to call him
names and perhaps actually smack him across the face with an open hand.
It took an effort to restrain himself . . . . Then he hurried into his apartment,
shut the door with his heart pounding, leaned against the wall, closed his
eyes, gasped, and shook . . . . [W]here was all this anger coming from? Why
was he being caught off guard, time and again, by surges of rage that almost
overwhelmed his will? (36)
Solanka has good reason to be alarmed: he is repeatedly reacting with excessive

anger to trivial annoyances, and his reactions are slipping further and further out
of his control. He is thrown out of a café because he has been yelling angry obsceni-
ties without even being aware of it; his cleaning lady tells him that he has fired
her in a violent rage, but he has no recollection of this whatsoever; when he walks
through the park with a beautiful woman and a young man approaches to compli-
ment her:
A great roaring rose in Malik Solanka’s breast. It would be good now to tear this
young man’s tongue out from that vile fleshy mouth. It would be good to see
how those muscled arms might look when detached from that highly defined
torso. Cut? Ripped? How about if he was cut and ripped into about a million
pieces? How about if I ate his fucking heart? (147–48)
Wanting to eat his enemy alive—should this not remind us of someone?

What is more, all around him, New York seems to be repeating on a larger
scale his own paroxysms of rage. The Islamic taxi driver in whose cab he is riding
suddenly starts screaming foul racist insults against Jewish drivers. And some-
where in the city, a nameless serial killer is murdering nice young women one after
another by bashing their heads in with pieces of concrete. As we learn in the course
of the novel, the refined, highly cultivated Professor Solanka had fled his English
home because one night he found himself standing above the bed of his sleeping
wife and child, holding a murderous carving knife. Now, uncontrolledly furious,
recurrently amnesiac, compulsively peripatetic, can he be entirely certain that this
terrifying anonymous murderer is not in fact himself?
Rushdie’s novel was published in 2001 and has a sophisticated, complexly ironic
relationship to the Western literary tradition of which it is one of the most recent
products. That tradition begins for us with the Iliad, and the Iliad, too, opens
with a scene of suddenly ignited, swiftly proliferating, and almost uncontrollable
anger. Rage is named as the poem’s very first word, mênis, and different forms
and degrees of wrath skip at its beginning like a rapid brush fire from character
to character, from Apollo, who “quaked with rage” (Iliad 1.44; Homer 1990: 79)
because Agamemnon has scorned his priest, to Agamemnon himself, who reacts
wrathfully to Calchas’s advice that the god be appeased by returning Chryseis to
her father—“furious, his dark heart filled to the brim, blazing with anger now,
his eyes like searing fire” (1.103–4; 1990: 81)—to Achilles, in whom Agamemnon’s
decision to take Briseis makes the ambient fury rise to a terrifying climax:
anguish gripped Achilles

The heart in his rugged chest was pounding, torn . . .
Should he draw the long sharp sword slung at his hip,
thrust through the ranks and kill Agamemnon now?—
or check his rage and beat his fury down?
As his racing spirit veered back and forth,
just as he drew his huge blade from its sheath,
down from the vaulting heavens swept Athena.
(1.188–95; 1990: 83–84)
No human being could possibly assuage a wrath as fierce as Achilles’—by intro-

ducing Athena as dea ex machina to swoop down and calm him, Homer can both
allow his hero to go to the very furthest limits of his anger without, boringly, hav-
ing to yield to the considerations of common sense, and at the same time can save
him from the inevitable consequences of succumbing to that emotion. This time
Athena will indeed succeed in placating Achilles’ wrath, but he will remain subject
to various forms of that emotion, directed to various objects, throughout the poem
almost until its very end—indeed, at one point he will notoriously say to the dying
Hector, “Would to god my rage, my fury would drive me now / to hack your flesh
away and eat you raw” (22.346–47; 1990: 553).1
II
We might say that both Solanka and Achilles are reacting to situations with inap-
propriate emotions. In both cases there is an unpleasant external stimulus, in the
form of a disagreeable modification in their world caused by the intervention of
some other person, and they react to this stimulus, but they do so inappropriately.
We can distinguish three kinds of theoretically possible inappropriateness that
might be involved: they might feel the emotion in the total absence of any stimulus
whatsoever (they might be fully delusional); they might react to a real stimulus
with the wrong emotion (e.g., with fear instead of anger, or love instead of envy);
or they might react to a real stimulus with the right emotion, but in the wrong
quantity (too much or too little). In all three cases, but especially in the latter two,
what counts as inappropriate will, of course, vary widely from period to period,
from culture to culture, and even among different segments of the same culture.
In the two texts we are considering, it is evidently above all the third case that is
in question: Achilles and Solanka are reacting to the right kind of stimulus with
the right emotion, anger, but with the wrong quantity, too much of it. The stimuli
involved are ones that none of us would be likely to find agreeable; Solanka’s causes
for anger are admittedly quite trivial, but we can certainly understand that we our-
selves might well be somewhat irritated, too, if they happened to us, while, as far
as Achilles goes, if Agamemnon’s public humiliation of him did not indeed make
him very angry, we would surely think there was something wrong with him (and,
in fact, the evidence suggests that many ancient Greeks failed to recognize that
Achilles’ reaction was at all inappropriate). But the crucial point is that Solanka
and Achilles react to these stimuli with an excess of anger: nothing in the banal
New York situations Rushdie describes justifies the intensity of Solanka’s rage, as
he himself recognizes (indeed, daily life in New York is made up in large part of
precisely such minor irritants, and the city would become far more difficult to
enjoy if its inhabitants tended to react to them with murderous rage), while it takes
only a minimum of reflection to recognize that for Achilles to attempt in his fury
to kill Agamemnon is the worst possible way for him to try to keep Briseis and to
secure his standing in the Greek army.
We may hazard the generalization that much, though not all, of ancient Greek
philosophy, especially as represented by Plato, at least some Stoics, and probably
Epicurus, tended to oppose all kinds and degrees of emotion per se as a dangerous
factor that interfered destructively with the rational capacities that they considered
to be man’s noblest feature.2 For recent philosophical investigation of the emo-
tions, this radical approach has not proved to be very productive: the emotions are
simply too deeply embedded within human nature for us to be able to rid ourselves
of them, and too importantly involved in much of what we consider best about
human beings for us to wish to try to do so. Hence, most of the recent work on the
philosophy of emotions that has reconsidered the ancient roots of this discussion
has tended instead to focus on a broadly Aristotelian approach that considers emo-
tions to be reactions, often reasonable ones, to certain kinds of situations.3 For such
an approach, the question of inappropriate emotions is particularly interesting, in
that it raises the issue of the degree of correspondence, or lack of correspondence,
of the reaction to the stimulus that provokes and, in the best of cases, justifies it.
Given that, of the three kinds of inappropriateness distinguished just now, the
former two (absence of any stimulus at all and reaction with a qualitatively wrong
emotion) seem obviously pathological, it is not surprising that it is the third kind
of inappropriateness (too little or too much of the right kind of emotion) that
has attracted most attention—and this applies not only to the increasing number
of recent philosophical analyses of emotion, but above all to the many literary
treatments of emotions suitable and unsuitable. Authors of literary texts, after all,
want us to empathize to some degree with their characters, and if these are simply
delusional or radically pathological in some other way, our interest in identify-
ing with their vicissitudes and our capacity to do so will be much reduced.4 To be
sure, authors are also interested in telling stories that are new and interesting, and
a story about someone who reacted to some real stimulus with exactly the right
quantity of just the right emotion would surely be no less boring than a detailed
and extensive narrative about a perfectly happy marriage. So we might be inclined
to dismiss the existence of stories about inappropriate emotion as a merely liter-
ary phenomenon, one that tells us more about our tastes in fictions than about the
makeup of our emotional life. Yet that would be a mistake: people like stories for
many reasons, but also because these tell them, indirectly, about certain features of
their own lives, and of the persons who matter to them, which they are particularly
eager to think they understand more fully than they feel they can on their own;
and conversely, people often understand their own lives in large part on the basis
of the stories they have heard about people, themselves and others, real, fictional,
and otherwise. What is more, in the case of successful and influential authors such
as Homer and Rushdie, the stories they tell about their fictional characters seem
plausible to us not only because they correspond in their general ethical structure
to the ideas that we already had about the behavior of human beings before we
came to their texts, but also because their fictions have helped to shape the ways
we understand ourselves and one another even before we encountered them: they
are not only canny observers of the social world, but also important contributors
to its self-understanding. It might be said that we moderns live in a world that is
Rushdiean, at least in part (which of course does not mean that Rushdie’s novels,
including this one, have not been the subject of vigorous criticism for all kinds of
reasons), but also, to a certain extent, still somewhat Homeric, whereas the Greeks
lived in a world that was largely Homeric and not at all Rushdiean. So Homer and
Rushdie may both be writing what we (but not the ancient Greeks) would regard
as fictions, yet their fictions both document and help to create social realities. Per-
haps, then, considering how Homer and Rushdie deal with the inappropriate anger
they contrive for their heroes may teach us something about the larger differences
between Homer’s world and ours.
III
We have already seen Professor Solanka asking himself in anguish, “Where was
all this anger coming from?” Solanka sees obvious and terrible effects, but he can-
not easily discover their hidden causes; not understanding the causes makes him
find these effects even more worrisome, in part because this ignorance implies a
troubling opacity of the self to itself, in part because to know the causes might
help him to remove them and thereby to abolish their effects. So where is all
his anger coming from? The question is not one that we can imagine bothering
Achilles very much, and in fact, one of the main differences between Rushdie
and Homer in this regard is that Rushdie, unlike Homer, treats his protagonist’s
excessive anger as a kind of illness that ought to be liable to diagnosis, etiology,
and therapy and appears to consider it part of his duty as storyteller to do his best
to provide these.
I return to this important difference further below; for the moment I focus
instead upon Rushdie’s presentation of Solanka’s “case history.” Solanka’s out-
breaks of excessive rage are the counterpart to a diminishment of his libido;
his acute bouts of “too much” in an aggressive direction balance a chronic “too
little” in an erotic direction; in both cases he seems to be considering some-
thing external as a menace to his well-being and trying to protect himself against
exposing himself to it. Yet the present threats that he thinks he perceives in his
actual day-to-day life, when measured against any kind of realistic standard (of
the sort he is quite capable of adopting in his more lucid moments), turn out to
be far too trivial to explain the extremity of his reactions. But what other kind
of threats might be disturbing him? The only hint that Rushdie supplies us is
that Solanka becomes particularly distressed whenever a woman with whom he
is erotically involved takes hold of his head, especially during the sexual act:
under such apparently trivial (or perhaps even, for some people, rather agree-
able) circumstances, the sudden increase in his rage entirely blocks what is left
of his diminished libido. Though Solanka wishes to cure his mental ailment,
he refuses the two remedies that (at least in New York) are the standard ones,
psychotherapy and chemotherapy; instead, he prefers, heroically, to combat his
demons himself, but he does not seem to be having much success in doing so—
until, that is, he is rescued, not for the fi rst time in world literature, by the love
of a good woman. At the most furious moment of a violent altercation between
Solanka and his lover Neela, she suddenly reaches out and caresses his forbidden
hair: “The spell broke. He laughed out loud. A large black crow spread its wings
and flew away across town, to drop dead minutes later by the Booth statue in
Gramercy Park. Solanka understood that his own cure, his recovery from his
rare condition, was now complete. The goddesses of wrath had departed; their
hold over him was broken at last” (219).
The intersection of mythical and therapeutic language here is extraordi-
nary: it is clearly intended to mark this scene as a climactic moment in the
novel. And indeed, immediately after, Solanka can go on fi nally to tell Neela,
and us, and himself, his “true” story: how as a child he had repeatedly been
abused sexually by his stepfather, Doctor Sahib, who had dressed him as a girl
and made him perform fellatio upon him while he held the child’s head. Any
trace whatsoever of the painful memories themselves had apparently vanished
altogether from Solanka’s consciousness, but their indirect effects had lingered
on (in his passion for doll making, in his sexual difficulties, and in his bouts
of rage), and their devastating pain had remained quite undiminished in their
domination of his psychological makeup—until, by the very act of telling his
“story” (219) and making his “confession” (223), he somehow manages to free
himself—suddenly, entirely, defi nitively—from their tyranny. Now, we think,
we understand: we can diagnose Solanka’s excessive anger as the result of a
childhood trauma that he had repressed rather than working through; now his
recognition of its cause has permitted him to free himself from it once and for
all by narrating it in a talking cure.
IV
I return later to the structure and history of the kind of account Rushdie provides
for Solanka’s ailment. But first consider once again the ancient case that certainly
is like it in some ways but no less certainly is vastly different in others: Homer’s
Achilles. Some (not all) ancient Greeks and Romans were able to recognize that, at
least in certain regards, Achilles’ anger was sometimes excessive and hence inap-
propriate, but no one in antiquity ever seems to have suggested that Achilles was
simply ill. What is more, no one in antiquity ever even hinted that Achilles’ noto-
riously excessive anger might have been the result of his having had an unhappy
childhood—indeed, the very notion that some Greek or Roman might have even
imagined making such a suggestion seems just as ludicrous to us as such a sugges-
tion would doubtless have seemed to them.
And yet, if people had sought to explain Achilles’ behavior as an adult by
linking it with the experiences they could have supposed he had as a child, Greek
myth would in fact have supplied ample material to support all kinds of plau-
sible diagnostic hypotheses.5 Achilles’ parents, Thetis and Peleus, had a famously
unhappy marriage: Thetis never reconciled herself to Zeus’s forcing her to marry
a mortal, and many sources report that she fi rst transformed herself into every
possible shape in a desperate attempt to foil Peleus’s courtship and then, having
failed to repulse him, abandoned her husband soon after Achilles’ birth. Accord-
ing to the author of the archaic epic Aegimius, attributed to Hesiod or Cercops,
Thetis had the disagreeable habit of throwing the children she bore Peleus into
a cauldron of boiling water, presumably in order to fi nd out whether they were
immortal or not (i.e., whether they took after her, in which case they would
survive, or after him, in which case they would not); eventually Peleus became
annoyed at this behavior, and so he intervened, stopping her just as she was about
to drown Achilles and thereby saving him. Once he managed to survive infancy,
Achilles did not have a much easier childhood: he was raised not by his father (let
alone by his mother), but by the centaur Chiron in the wilds of Mount Pelion,
and what little socialization he acquired he owed to a tutor who, though certainly
far gentler than his ferocious fellow centaurs, was nonetheless half horse. During
his adolescence, when Thetis concealed him among the daughters of Lycomedes
of Scyrus in order to save him from the military service in the Trojan War, which
she knew would be fatal to him, he indulged in a bit of transvestitism, wearing
a girl’s dress, until Odysseus found him out by offering him splendid weapons,
a boy’s toys. And he was painfully aware, for much of his brief life, of just how
brief that life would be.
For eyes that can see, all the materials necessary in order to construct Achil-
les’ psychoanalytic family romance are abundantly available: we can easily envi-
sion how the parents’ acrimonious marriage and their neglect and maltreatment
of the child, compounded by his upbringing at the hooves of an inhuman cen-
taur in the desolate wilderness of Thessaly, by his uncertainties about his sexual
identity, and by his obsession with his own mortality might well have created
psychological traumas resulting in the extraordinary mixture of narcissism,
uncontrollable rage, lack of self-restraint, vindictiveness, violence, unswerving
loyalty to his friends, and boundless pity for himself that make up the charm-
ing personality of Achilles as an adult.6 To be sure, it is the very same corpus of
Greek myth that tells of Achilles’ adult character that also offers these materials
about his childhood, and, to be sure, Achilles’ childhood was often imagined
in ancient artistic representations, especially in later antiquity. Yet no ancient
Greek or Roman, as far as we know, ever made this specific causal connection
between Achilles’ childhood sufferings and his adult personality. Instead, when
they imagined Achilles as a child, they imagined him as being just like the adult
Achilles, only rather smaller. The most extensive and detailed portrayal extant
of Achilles as a child is provided by Statius in his Achilleid,7 and however deli-
cately ironic and subtle the interplay is between the childish Achilles, on the one
hand, and the foreshadowings of his future greatness, on the other, it is evident
that Statius conceives even the childish hero as being in essence only a some-
what diminutive version of the adult one. Chiron tells Thetis that his fellow
centaurs often come to complain to him about how baby Achilles has devastated
their homes and flocks and driven them in fl ight across the fields and rivers,
setting ambushes for them and waging precocious warfare against them (Achil-
leid 1.152–55), and when Thetis sees her child approach, even she turns pale in
fear—he is covered with sweat and dust, for he has just killed a lioness and,
having left her body behind, he is carrying her whelps with him and is playing
with their claws (1.158–70).
V
If Statius sees little Achilles as being just like big Achilles, only somewhat smaller,
the reason is not that he lacked the mythic information that would have enabled
him to envision a different kind of childhood for the irascible hero, but instead
that he had a very different conception of the relationship between childhood
and adulthood from Rushdie’s. Let us call Statius’s model of imagining Achilles’
childhood continuous. Throughout antiquity, the adult Achilles was thought to
have had a fi xed and unmistakable character—as Horace puts it in his advice to
the aspiring poet, “celebrated Achilles” must be depicted as being “inpiger, iracun-
dus, inexorabilis, acer [tireless, wrathful, inexorable, ferocious]” if he is to be at all
recognizable as Achilles (1999: 99–101). On the basis of this personality structure

of the adult Achilles he knows so well, Statius imagines what kind of child such an
adult must have been like, and he is guided in his imaginative reconstruction by
principles of resemblance and continuity: baby Achilles must be supposed to have
been as similar to adult Achilles as possible, so that the development from child to
adult can be gradual, linear, and uninterrupted. What makes baby Achilles baby
Achilles is that at this tender age he already possesses, to a much larger extent
than normal babies do, all the natural capacities that he will later display as adult
Achilles—only that he does so in a somewhat reduced degree, as befits, more or
less, a child.
We may presume that the ancients usually had little or no authentic infor-
mation about what those who later became their great men (or, rarely, women)
had really been like as children. Hence, they had to reconstruct such childhoods
imaginatively if they wished to envision their heroes as children, and the con-
tinuous model told them how to do so, encouraging them to fi nd the very same
traits in the child that made the adult so remarkable—as it were, for them, if not
in Wordsworth’s sense, the child was father to the man. Statius’s baby Achilles,
the ferocious lion-slaying tot, is of a par with the many other miraculous infants
who populate the imaginary kindergarten of ancient culture. Homer, already
as a small boy, we are told, surpassed all the other children in the grammar
classes taught him by his teacher Phemius, and he soon reached the level of Phe-
mius himself, so when the teacher died, he left everything he possessed to his
star pupil—not surprisingly, given that it was Homer’s poetry that was required
reading in grammar classes throughout the Greek world. When Hesiod was an
infant in his cradle, a swarm of bees came to settle in his mouth, either because
his breath was already so sweet or because his singing would one day be so (and
exactly the same miracle was later reported of Lucan, in whose ancient biogra-
phy this story about Hesiod is found). When Pindar was a boy, he went hunting
near Mt. Helicon and fell asleep from exhaustion; as he slept a bee landed on his
mouth and built a honeycomb there. Plato was born on the 7th of Thargelion,
the traditional date of Apollo’s birth on Delos, and while he was an infant bees
came and either sat on his lips or made honey on them. And so forth, down to the
miracles ascribed to the baby Jesus in apocryphal gospels and infancy accounts,
and well beyond.
Of course, in all such stories, the point is not to explain the specifics of adult
misbehavior by linking it in some causal way to some particular negative childhood
experience, but rather, in more general terms, to establish a connection consisting
of a larger continuity between exceptional adult capacities (whether positive or
negative) and exceptional childhood ones. But it seems undeniable that these tales
all participate in the same structural model identified just now. Their similarity to
accounts of the miraculous infancies of the Greek gods—for example, the Hermes
of the Homeric Hymn, who still in his swaddling clothes can outwit his big brother
Apollo, or the Apollo of the Callimachean Hymn, who can utter prophecies while
still unborn in his mother’s womb—is evident, though we should be careful not
to consider these biographies of mortals to be mere secularizations of the divine

accounts; rather, both kinds of story are products of the same continuous model.
Even in political biography, like Plutarch’s (1914–26), where, despite the impor-
tance given to education in forming character, surprisingly little attention, if any,
is paid to the great man’s childhood, what little evidence we are supplied invariably
adheres to this continuous model. Already as a child, Philopoemen is the consum-
mate soldier: “For from his very boyhood he was fond of a soldier’s life, and readily
learned the lessons that were useful for this, such as those in heavy-armed fighting
and horsemanship” (X, 261). By contrast, little Themistocles is already the perfect
politician:
However lowly his birth, it is agreed on all hands that while yet a boy he was
impetuous, by nature sagacious, and by election enterprising and prone to
public life. In times of relaxation and leisure, when absolved from his lessons,
he would not play nor indulge his ease, as the rest of the boys did, but would
be found composing and rehearsing to himself mock speeches. These speeches
would be in accusation or defence of some boy or other (II, 5).
Little Cato the Younger is already the stern Stoic sage:

We are told that from his very childhood Cato displayed, in speech, in
countenance, and in his childhood sports, a nature that was inflexible,
imperturbable, and altogether steadfast. He set out to accomplish his
purposes with a vigor beyond his years, and while he was harsh and repellent
to those who would flatter him, he was still more masterful towards those
who tried to frighten him. It was altogether difficult to make him laugh,
although once in a while he relaxed his features so far as to smile; and he
was not quickly nor easily moved to anger, though once angered he was
inexorable. (VIII, 237).
Alcibiades, finally, by contrast, was already displaying on the playground the very
same mixture of charm and vice that made him notorious as an adult:
He was naturally a man of many strong passions, the mightiest of which were
the love of rivalry and the love of preeminence. This is clear from the stories
recounted of his boyhood. He was once hard pressed in wrestling, and to save
himself from getting a fall, set his teeth in his opponent’s arms, where they
clutched him, and was like to have bitten through them. His adversary, letting
go his hold, cried, “You bite, Alcibiades, as women do!” “Not I,” said Alcibiades,
“but as lions do” (IV, 5–6)
VI
Doubtless, it may seem tempting to dismiss these observations about the contin-
uous model as trivial or self-evident. A biographer may be pardoned for citing
evidence from childhood that seems to confirm his diagnosis of the ethical char-
acter of the adult, and as for his sources, we can readily imagine how easily, once a
man of a certain sort became famous, his relatives, teachers, and childhood friends
might have colored their fading memories of his early years by projecting back onto
them the vivid impressions that his adult virtues and vices made upon them. Even
in our own days, the secular hagiography of an Albert Einstein, a Marie Curie, or
a George Bush tends to run along similar lines. Yet the fact that this continuous
model is not a monopoly of the ancient world but continues to remain viable in
certain contexts even in our modern one does not mean that we can afford not
to take it very seriously, for this ancient biographical tendency is in fact deeply
complicitous with some very basic views about the nature of human beings that
seem to have been quite widespread in the ancient world and that are anything but
self-evident.
Above all, for the most part human beings seem in antiquity to have been
thought to be equipped at birth with a fi xed natural endowment consisting of a
set of ethically relevant capacities and weaknesses; it was the business of educa-
tion to enhance the capacities and to minimize the weaknesses, to detach the child
from his pursuit of the satisfaction of his immediate appetites, and to point him
in the general direction of society, reason, and the good. The specific practical
details concerning the methods of education, and the overarching metaphysics of
the human soul, that Plato provides in the Republic and Laws, and Aristotle in the
Nicomachean Ethics and Politics, are no doubt significantly at variance with the
realities of most Greek pedagogy, and deliberately so; but their fundamental view
of the relation between nature and education is in fact an attempt to conceptual-
ize systematically views on this topic that we have every reason to believe were
deeply entrenched and widely disseminated in their culture. Surprises could hap-
pen; people, sometimes, could change. But most people seem to have been thought
to have received their character dealt to them like a hand of cards at birth; then,
education gave them a single chance to better their hand by weeding out their
poorer cards (and whether they were able to take advantage of this opportunity
depended in part upon social class, family, and luck, in part upon the very same
ethical cards they were already holding)—after that, their success or failure was
due to the interaction between this natural endowment, modified by education,
and the chances of life. In short, for the ancients, circumstances were contingent,
but character was not; for us, character, too, can be contingent.
This does not mean that the ancients were quite indifferent to reports about
childhood character or experiences, only that they do not seem to have been
inclined to cite and analyze such reports as sources of information in order to shed
causal light on the hidden wellsprings of adult personality and behavior: either the
extant childhood data simply confirmed the adulthood findings by their similarity
to them, per miraculum if in no other way, or else they seem to have been invoked
merely as curiosities, as a form of gossip. Suetonius is a good example of this very
general tendency. His biographies of the 12 Caesars are remarkable for the amount
of detailed attention he pays to the adult behavior (or, more usually, misbehavior)
of his subjects: he is prepared to report the most extraordinary excesses of vice or

crime, and even sometimes small deeds of relative kindness or moderation, and
he also not infrequently applies general moral categories to explain imperial per-
sonalities by fitting them into the standard lists of vices and virtues. Along the
way, he sometimes also provides potentially interesting information about their
childhoods—but while we ourselves might want to inquire into how the specific
events of that particular childhood might have led to the specific deeds and char-
acteristics of that particular adulthood, Suetonius never displays even the slight-
est indication of wishing to do so himself. The childhood episode remains, in
explanatory terms, a foreign body within his account, isolated and inert: it may
be of interest for itself, but it does not serve to explain anything at all. Suetonius
describes Augustus’s nursery but does not tell us what happened there (§6; 1957: 53),
and he tells us that Augustus lost his father at the age of four but does not wonder
what effect this loss might have had upon the child or upon the adult (§8; 1957: 54);
later in his biography, Suetonius begins the section of his account dedicated to
Augustus’s “private life, his character, and his domestic fortunes” not with any
information about his childhood, but with the loss of his mother when he was 20
and of his sister Octavia when he was 54 (§61; 1957: 84). The only incidents reported
from his childhood are three miracles that foretell his future greatness (§94; 1957:
101–2): as an infant he vanished from his cradle and climbed a tall tower to face the
sun; when he was learning to talk he told some frogs to stop croaking, and since
then, according to the locals, no frog had ever croaked again; and one day when
he was eating lunch on the Appian Way, an eagle swooped down, stole some bread
from his hand, carried it off—and then flew back in order to restore to him what
it had stolen. When he comes to Tiberius, Suetonius tells us that “his childhood
and youth were beset with hardships and difficulties, because Nero and Livia took
him wherever they went in their flight from Augustus” (§6; 1957: 112); of Caligula,
that he suffered from epilepsy as a boy (§50; 1957: 174); of Claudius, that “nearly
the whole of his childhood and youth was so troubled by various diseases that he
grew dull-witted and had little physical strength” (§2; 1957: 183); of Nero, that he
lost his father at the age of three and, despite inheriting one third of his estate, lost
it all to Caligula and grew up in poverty (§6; 1957: 212); of Otho, that “his early
wildness earned him many a beating from his father” (§2; 1957: 256); of Domitian,
that his youth was “poverty-stricken and rather degraded” (§1; 1957: 295). In all
such cases, surely at least some modern readers are tempted to try to establish some
form of causal connection between the child and the adult, in order to attempt to
explain later monstrous behavior as in some way motivated by episodes or patterns
of childhood suffering.8 But Suetonius himself, who is the very one who provides
the information, shows not the slightest interest in using it for that purpose: he
registers such details about childhood no differently from facts about clothing, or
diet, or sexual behavior, and moves on.
As the case of Suetonius suggests, the ancients, in considering the relation
between child and adult, seem either to have subscribed to the continuous model
or to have had no other alternative model available. On the continuous model,
Achilles’ rage as an adult is due to his having been born with an especially fierce
natural disposition and to his parents’ having failed to mitigate this defect ade-
quately by means of education. Aristotle’s words in the Politics could easily apply
to him: “Again, those who have too much of the goods of fortune, strength, wealth,
friends, and the like, are neither willing nor able to submit to authority. The evil
begins at home; for when they are boys . . . they never learn, even at school, the habit
of obedience” (1295b14–17). When Achilles imagines one of his Myrmidons com-
plaining behind his back, “your mother nursed you on gall!” (Iliad 16.203; Homer
1990: 419), his point is much the same: according to his imagined critics, who sub-
scribe to the continuous model, his mother should have mitigated his innate feroc-
ity by giving him gentle milk; instead, his inhuman savagery as an adult proves
that it must instead have been fierce bile that she put into his baby bottle, thereby
enhancing the natural cruelty of his character.
In a certain sense, then, the unsatisfactory explanations for character lamented
by many readers of Plutarch and the other ancient biographers is built into the
very structure of the continuous model, for by deriving character from the natural
endowment at birth and giving education only one chance massively to modify it,
this model in effect forecloses the very possibility of detailed and highly specific
explanation, by locating the cause immediately in a realm of necessity that it is
impossible for us to inspect and assess. “Why was A as an adult x?” “Because A was
already x at birth.” Or, alternatively, “Because A was born as y, but education made
him x.” Neither answer provides much scope for further investigation.
VII
Rushdie’s presentation of Professor Solanka’s curious psychological condition
could not be more different. Rushdie apparently is convinced that it is important
to find a precise and comprehensive explanation for his character’s bouts of fury,
and he seems to believe that it is possible, in principle, at least, to discover such an
explanation and, in fact, not only one and just one explanation but also precisely
the right one. But the most evident difference between Rushdie and the ancients,
at least in this regard, is that the model that Rushdie uses to guide his investigation
is in certain crucial regards not at all like the continuous one.
We might term Rushdie’s model, instead, a traumatic one. How does Rushdie
explain Solanka’s anger? It is not difficult to imagine many possible explanations
that he might have proposed—perhaps the most plausible in such cases being a
quite recent accumulation of entirely unrelated minor irritants that explodes when
some particularly annoying (or particularly safe) incident finally provides a suf-
ficiently effective catalyst. Instead, Rushdie’s traumatic model presupposes that,
whatever some person’s initial makeup at birth, his character as an adult comes
to be decisively influenced by some terrible psychic injury that he has suffered as
a child and whose consequences continue to haunt him, and to make him, for the
rest of his life. For Rushdie and his readers, not only are circumstances contingent;
character is, too. If the ancient view of human character is like a game of poker—
you are dealt your hand, you get one chance to improve it, and after that it is up
to you to make the best of the opportunities that chance affords you—Rushdie’s
model seems to be much more like a game of 52 pickup: whatever the cards you
have been dealt, some terrible disaster can sooner or later throw them all in confu-
sion onto the floor, and if so, you will end up spending the rest of your life trying
to bring them into some kind of order, if possible and necessary, with the help of a
professional psychoanalyst.
Obviously, Rushdie’s model is not just Rushdie’s model. The plot of Fury is
certainly bizarre in many regards—though it must be admitted that Rushdie’s
analysis of Solanka’s anger forms one of the weakest aspects of what is, all in all, a
quite interesting novel. And there is no doubt that the fictional nature of Fury, its
novelistic requirement of enhanced intelligibility and closure, leads to a certain
degree of artificial oversimplification in the presentation of Solanka’s case and of
his cure—indeed, precisely this drastic reductiveness makes the novel particularly
transparent and hence useful for the purposes of this argument, for this renders
all the more striking the fact that Rushdie’s rather crude account of Solanka’s quite
strange psychology is likely to seem intuitively plausible, if not to all readers, then
at least to many.
If so, this is probably because Fury deploys psychological concepts and devices
in a way that ultimately goes back to Sigmund Freud’s work on hysteria and neuro-
sis but that has gone on to become a vague and all-pervasive psychoanalytic koine
typical of much of our contemporary culture. Freud had begun his psychoana-
lytic work with Josef Breuer in the 1890s, working especially on cases of hysteria—
mostly young women, to be sure, rather than men, and mostly involving phobic
fear rather than furious rage, but all the same, no less obviously cases of inappro-
priate emotions (too much of an emotional reaction to the right, if trivial, stimu-
lus) than Homer’s Iliad or Rushdie’s Fury. Freud’s young patients were overreacting
badly—with deep phobias, with furious aggression, with acute bodily pains, with
threatened and attempted suicide—to the most banal events: a boy who touched
her hand during dinner, an off-color joke. Freud discarded the hypothesis that these
young women simply had some inborn disposition to become hysterical—that is,
he considered the continuous model as a mode of explanation but decided to reject
it—and instead developed the theory that they had been the subject of some form
of sexual abuse during their very earliest years of childhood, long before their repro-
ductive organs had matured and they could have any idea of what was happening
to them. So traumatic and so incomprehensible had such an event been that it had
been repressed altogether from consciousness—and thereby had been consigned to
the unconscious, where it did not vanish at all but went on to fester for years in an
intermediate period of latency. Finally, when the girls’ sexual maturity developed as
they reached puberty, some new slight incident could release all the dire energy that
had been stored up during the intervening years, and what had been repressed could
return, with an explosive violence that was quite inexplicable if one took account
only of the most recent, paltry event that had acted as catalyst.
Over the years, to be sure, Freud modified his initial hypothesis in a number
of crucial regards, in particular, coming to doubt the reality of at least some of the
scenes of childhood seduction whose existence he had once postulated as neces-
sary, and coming to attribute to even the smallest children a much more lively
and sophisticated sexuality than he had first imagined. Nonetheless, three basic
concepts determined his thinking on this subject from the beginning to the end of
his working life:
1. Repression (Verdrängung): A trauma is not forgotten but repressed. It
is removed from consciousness, yet does not in the least thereby cease
to exist. Instead, it persists in the unconscious, continues to produce
effects, and can be called back into consciousness, though not without
difficulty, at a later time. For Freud, nothing that has become part of the
unconscious ever dies.
2. Deferral (Nachträglichkeit): Events produce effects not only when they
occur, but also much later. A childhood experience may completely escape
the child’s conscious understanding at the time, but it remains latently
powerful and can produce neurotic symptoms decades later. In the end,
the events themselves can matter less than their memory traces, which can
cause effects many years later.
3. Overdetermination (Überdeterminierung): As a result, no event in psychic
life has only one effective cause. For any effect to happen, a multitude of
partial causes must concur to produce it. The task of the psychoanalyst is
to move from the manifest causes to the latent ones: only when the very
last of these has been brought to full consciousness, by means of a second,
therapeutic return of the repressed, is the work of psychoanalysis complete
and the patient cured.
Even in the first years of his work, when Freud was treating an extraordinarily
small number of cases of extremely unusual hysteria (only about a total of 13 cases
by the mid-1890s), he was still inclined to consider his patients as being typical
of much more widespread psychic structures rather than as being anomalous or
exceptional—this was one reason he sought to explain their ailments not in terms
of some exceptional hysterical predisposition but as a result of childhood sexual
experiences of whose frequency he was, oddly, fully convinced. As time went on,
Freud broadened the scope of his explanatory model until, with his introduction
of the Oedipus complex, he came to locate the origin of neurotic ailments in sexual
conflicts characteristic of apparently healthy children as well as of sick ones; and
in his later, even more ambitious writings, such as Beyond the Pleasure Principle
(1920) and Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), he sought to locate these irrecon-
cilable conflicts in the universal founding structures of the human psyche and of
all human civilization.
VIII
One convenient measure of just how profoundly the post-Freudian understanding
of the importance of traumatic childhood experiences in helping to shape adult
human character differs from the pre-Freudian one can be found in the contrast
in this regard between tragedies written by the ancient Greeks and tragedies on the
same mythic subjects written by twentieth-century authors who stood under the
influence of Freud and had studied his works. After all, it was Greek myths and
tragedies that provided Freud with some of his most important labels for various
widespread psychic phenomena—the Oedipus complex, the Electra complex, nar-
cissism9 —and, given the manifoldly dysfunctional families that populate Greek
tragedy, it is hard not to imagine that children raised in the peculiarly difficult
circumstances of the house of the Labdacids, the palace of the Atreids, or in other
unhappy dynasties would have grown up to manifest signs of all kinds of psychic
distress. Imagine having Atreus as your grandfather and Thyestes as your second
cousin, or Clytemnestra as your mother and Iphigenia as your sister; or imagine
having Oedipus as your father, and brother, too, and Jocasta as your mother, and
grandmother too—might you not be expected to grow up, if at all, with all kinds
of neuroses crying out for psychoanalytic treatment?
And yet there is not a single passage in all of Greek tragedy in which the psycho-
logical suffering of a child is used to explain the later behavior of that child when
he becomes an adult. For that matter, there are very few passages in all of Greek
tragedy where a child’s psychological suffering is ever mentioned.10 When children
suffer in Greek tragedy, it is usually not because they get abused but because they
get killed and, sometimes, eaten; and if so, they are not likely to grow up to become
adults at all, let alone troubled ones. And when, as happens very frequently, charac-
ters in Greek tragedies are shown to have been traumatized by their experiences—
Orestes above all, but also Electra, Hecuba, or Medea, to name only a few—it is the
traumas of adulthood from which they suffer, not those of childhood.
Even at those rare moments when the characters in Greek tragedies seem to
come closest to thinking about their childhoods in a way somewhat like our own,
the difference that separates them from modern attitudes is unmistakable. Thus,
the aged Oedipus in Sophocles’ Oedipus in Colonus takes great pains to justify his
notorious actions, and in so doing he even refers in one passage to what his parents
did to him as a child:
And yet, how was I evil in myself?

I had been wronged, I retaliated; even had I
Known what I was doing, was that evil?
Then, knowing nothing, I went on. Went on.
But those who wronged me knew, and ruined me.
(Grene and Lattimore 1959: 91, 11.270–74)
Oedipus’s point here is precisely not that what he suffered as a child was what led
him to do what he did and to become who he was as an adult—on the contrary,
Oedipus means that, on the one hand, he himself bears no blame for having slain
his father Laius at the crossroads, partly because he was acting in justifiable self-
defense, partly because he was quite ignorant of who the old man was; whereas
on the other hand, his parents, who had exposed him as an infant on Mount Cit-
haeron, had known full well who he was and therefore could be excused by no
mitigating circumstances. Oedipus is precisely not saying that he was punishing
his parents for what they did to him when he was a baby or that his character as an
adult was a consequence of his sufferings as an infant; he uses this episode not to
provide a causal account of his actions or personality but to illustrate axiologically
what he sees as the enormous difference in moral value between his own qualities
and those of his apparent victims. Oedipus sees himself as responding with per-
fect legitimacy to the outrage committed upon him as an adult by his father at the
crossroads; if anyone in his story is evil, he is suggesting, it is not he, but his par-
ents, who exposed him when he was a baby. The childhood incident, like the one
in adulthood, exposes moral qualities; there is no causal link between them. How
close Oedipus seems to come here to suggesting that as an adult he was avenging
himself, consciously or unconsciously, for the fact that his parents exposed him at
birth—and yet he does not at all actually say this, and in fact how absurd it would
have been if he had!
In the case of Oedipus as in general, ancient Greek tragedy leaves no room,
between adult payback and primordial curse, for childhood trauma as an expla-
nation for adult suffering. How different matters are when we turn to tragedies
on Greek themes written by modern dramatists who cannot help but read Greek
myths through the lenses provided them by Freudian psychoanalysis: now adults
are haunted by childhood memories, blame their parents for sufferings that express
themselves in all kinds of neuroses in later life, seek therapy, and, at best, find
catharsis. Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Elektra (1903) emphasizes far more explicitly
and prominently than do the play’s Greek models the heroine’s absorption in her
past, which makes it impossible for her to live fully in the present. Twice, arguing
with her more normal sister Chrysothemis, she claims that she, unlike brute ani-
mals, is incapable of forgetting (1954: 20–21); and when she confronts her mother,
she gives voice to an obsessive terror and hatred fueled by fantasies of her earliest
infancy:
I know in the whole world

Nothing that makes me shudder, like thinking
That this body was the dark gate out of which
I crawled to the light of the world.
On this lap I lay, naked?
To these breasts you raised me?
So indeed I crawled out of my father’s grave,
Played in diapers on my father’s place of execution. You are
Like a colossus, out of whose bronze hands

I have never leaped forth.
(26–27) 11
Indeed, so much is Elektra trapped in the sufferings of her past that she cannot
survive Orestes’ vengeance, which, by slaying Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, might
have been supposed to put an end to them—at the very end of the play, when her
past dies, she collapses and dies, too.
The concern with childhood traumas is even stronger in Eugene O’Neill’s
adaptation of the Oresteia, Mourning Becomes Electra (1929–31). Here the domi-
nance of the past over the present, which in Aeschylus had been limited to the con-
scious action of vendetta and the theological dimension of curse, comes to fill the
conscious and unconscious life of the characters in the form of obsessions, com-
pulsive repetitions of their own and of their most hated enemies’ actions, and all
kinds of adult resentment, anger, frustration, and helplessness. Brant cannot free
himself from his memories of childhood violence and humiliation, and as an adult
he seeks only to avenge himself on those who had abused his mother and himself
when he was a child. Lavinia (Electra) tells her mother Christine (Clytemnestra),
“So I was born of your disgust! I’ve always guessed that, Mother—ever since I was
little—when I used to come to you—with love—but you would always push me
away! I’ve felt it ever since I can remember—your disgust! (Then with a flare-up of
bitter hatred) Oh, I hate you! It’s only right I should hate you!” (1959: 249). As for
Orion (Orestes), he was always susceptible to fantasies of his past—at one point he
and his mother lovingly share a morbid, detailed memory of the ferocious Oedipal
tensions between baby Orion and his parents (300–1)—and in the last play of the
trilogy, Orion retreats altogether into what Lavinia calls his “incessant brooding
over the past” (352), devoting all his time to writing a history of the family (354),
asking his sister once, “Can’t you see I’m now in Father’s place and you’re Mother?”
(356), and eventually, out of obsession with the past and incapacity to accept the
present, shooting himself (367).
In such cases, as in other modern tragedies, one cannot help suspecting that
early and systematic application of a vigorous program of family counseling and
psychoanalytic therapy might well have spared these characters a considerable
amount of unpleasantness.
IX
This is not the occasion to examine in detail the complexities of the development
of Freud’s thought, or the variety of interpretations, schools, and approaches to
which it has given rise. Nor is it necessary, since my argument has been pitched at
a sufficiently high level of generality, to show in what ways the traumatic model of
a Rushdie or an O’Neill or a Freud is significantly different from the continuous

model that appears to have been so widely diffused in the ancient world. In conclu-
sion, I can point out some of the most obvious of these differences in a very sum-
mary fashion.
The continuous model proposes a basic unbroken connection between the
child and the adult beginning from birth, while the traumatic model generates
a narrative of ruptures and breaks, during the course of which the roles and
characters of the various figures involved shift radically. Hence, in dealing, for
example, with excessive emotion, the continuous model locates its source in a
strong innate natural capacity that has not been sufficiently modified by edu-
cation, while the traumatic model explains it as the consequence of repressed
childhood suffering that finds a compromise expression in later life. As a result,
the continuous model assigns the responsibility for these faults of character to
a presocial nature, while the traumatic model lays the blame on the structure
of family or society and the operation of other persons. Or, to put this another
way, the continuous model praises socialization as a good and necessary pro-
cess without which we remain animals and cannot become fully human, while
the traumatic model sees socialization as an inf liction of violence and a cause
for suffering.
Another fundamental difference between these two models resides in the fact
that the traumatic model is ultimately directed toward diagnosis and therapy, the
continuous one merely toward instantiation. The childhood experiences narrated
by the traumatic model are indispensable causal factors without which the adult
personality structure would remain unintelligible; those told by the continuous
model are merely one example among others that reveal a particular character,
if they were left out, no one would notice. The continuous model does not really
explain inappropriate emotion but merely moves the explanandum back one step
from the adult to his inborn nature, whereas the traumatic model takes great pains
to find the specific causes for what it takes to be such ailments, since it hopes to
derive a cure for them from their recognition. If the continuous model seeks at all
to cure excessive emotion, then it can only do so by bringing the adult to recognize
the truth of certain universally valid philosophical doctrines, whereas the trau-
matic model tries to bring to consciousness, in the form of a detailed narrative of
the self, the specific contents of the patient’s repressed memories of his individual
childhood experiences. As a consequence, the continuous model tends in the direc-
tion of generalization, trying to teach people to subsume their case under a univer-
sal rule, while the traumatic model tends in the direction of particularity, teaching
them to recognize and understand the most specific and individual circumstances
of their personal history. It is not surprising, then, that the traumatic model has
achieved widespread currency in the age of the realistic novel and cinema, which
have elevated the detailed account of the vicissitudes of unique individual experi-
ence to the highest form of art.
In conclusion, I am well aware of just how rough and crude some of these
distinctions are. I can only hope that my readers will not suspect that this chapter
was designed as some sort of fiendish psychological experiment to stimulate feel-

ings of excessive rage among them by reminding them of the scenes of their most
painful suffering as children. I should emphasize that it has not in the least been
my intention to suggest that these two models, which I have called the contin-
uous and traumatic ones, are at all as monolithic or as undifferentiated as, in
this brief chapter, they may seem, or that our society as a whole is in any simple
sense a Freudian one (indeed, Freud himself strikes many of our contemporaries
as being very outdated in crucial regards, and all kinds of post-Freudians and
non-Freudians are waging battle with one another nowadays), or that the kind
of analysis sketched out here is in any way self-sufficient and would not benefit
greatly from extension to other cultures (especially Asian and African) and to
other periods (especially the Middle Ages). Instead, it is my hope that readers
will find these reflections useful in helping them to see not only how peculiar the
ancients were in their understanding of human beings, but also how we ourselves
are no less peculiar and may, in fact, be far more so. A culture like ours, in which
astonishingly many people are convinced that their problems as adults are in large
measure due to events that they believe happened to them as children but the real
existence of which they can never obtain any kind of proof—a culture in which
astonishingly many people suppose that the way to cure the problems they have
as adults is to immerse themselves in the details of what might or might not have
occurred during their earliest years and to put the blame for their afflictions upon
their nearest relatives and friends: this is a culture that the ancients, and not only
they, would most likely have found very strange indeed. A story like that of Pro-
fessor Solanka would probably have completely baffled them. How strange that it
does not seem so strange to us.
NOTES
1. On the development of Achilles’ anger and its relation to pity, see Most 2003.
2. Excellent recent surveys of ancient philosophical views of the emotions and their
later transformations are provided in Sorabji 2000 and Knuuttila 2004.
3. Two representative authors are David Konstan (see, e.g. 2001, 2006) and Martha
Nussbaum (see, e.g., 2001).
4. A very interesting recent exception is MacEwan 1997, which explores a case of
egregiously inappropriate emotion in which all three kinds of inappropriateness seem to
be involved, in a complex and perplexing mixture.
5. Of little help in this regard is Latacz 1995.
6. MacCary 1982 provides a remarkable psychoanalytic analysis of Achilles’
character but does not really touch upon the questions of childhood trauma that
I focus upon here. Shay 1994 thinks that Achilles’ personality problems derive from his
battlefield experiences rather than from his childhood.
7. See, on this remarkable poem, Heslin 2005.
8. Precisely this kind of psychological and explanatory approach is one of the

features of most modern novelistic treatments of ancient celebrities, including the Roman
emperors; see, e.g., Graves 1934; Yourcenar 1951. It would be an interesting exercise to
examine in detail how such novels make use of their ancient sources to modern ends.
9. On Freud’s use of Greek myth, and of the myth of Narcissus in particular, see
Most 2002.
10. See Sifsakis 1979. Usually, children’s psychological suffering in tragedy is
designed to increase the pathos of the physical sufferings of adults, e.g., in Euripides’
Alcestis.
11. “Ich weiß auf der Welt / Nichts, was mich schaudern macht, als wie zu denken, /
Daß dieser Leib das dunkle Tor, aus welchem / Ich an das Licht der Welt gekrochen
bin. / Auf diesem Schoß bin ich gelegen, nackt? / Zu diesen Brüsten hast du mich
gehoben? / So bin ich ja aus meines Vaters Grab / Herausgekrochen, hab gespielt in
Windeln / Auf meines Vaters Richtstatt! Du bist ja / Wie ein Koloß, aus dessen ehernen
Händen / Ich nie entsprungen bin.”
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part iv
CONTEXTS AND USES

 
LITERATURE AND
KNOWLEDGE
john gibson
I is common to claim that in works of literature we find some of the most power-
ful representations of reality our culture has to offer. This claim is central to the
general humanistic conception of the value of the literary work of art: it is at least
partly in the business of revealing to readers something of consequence about the
nature of their shared world. According to this view, the literary perspective (and
the artistic perspective more generally) is the definitive human perspective: the
standpoint from which we are best able to bring to light the range of values, desires,
frustrations, experiences, and practices that define the human situation. On this
view, works of literature, at least when they live up to their promise, represent cog-
nitive achievements: they embody ways of knowing the world.
But in developing a literary tradition, we have come to devise a rather curious
way of going about revealing our world. As the saying goes, literature is “the book
of life.” And what is curious, simply put, is that when we open this book we find it
to be filled with fictions. That works of imaginative literature—the sort of literature
I discuss here—speak about the fictional rather than the real is hardly news. To be
sure, one would think that literature’s use of the creative imagination constitutes
rather than refutes its claim to cognitive value: it is the tool with which literature
builds its vision of our world. But the challenge the philosopher of literature faces
is one of explaining just how this may be. How is it, exactly, that a textual form
that speaks of fictions can tell us something of consequence about reality? Why is
it that we have come to find that writing about fictions can be a powerful way of
opening up a window on our world? We tend to think that it can be, of course. But
as with all philosophical challenges, explaining this with a respectable degree of
sophistication turns out to be a difficult affair.
468 contexts and uses
The problem runs deeper than literature’s interest in the imaginary and the
unreal. It is not only that when we look between the covers of a novel we find
descriptions of fictions. We also notice a conspicuous absence of all those tools,
devices, and techniques we commonly take to be essential to the search for truth
and knowledge: argumentation, the offering of evidence, the setting forth of “the
facts,” the proffering of premises, the derivation of conclusions, and so on (see
Stolnitz 1992; John 1998; Lamarque and Olsen 1994; Diffey 1988). Needless to say,
the ways in which works of history, philosophy, and science—paradigm cases of
works of inquiry—make use of these devices and techniques vary considerably.
It may even be the case that they are all, like literature, irreducibly narratologi-
cal in form—this is a fairly popular claim in contemporary postmodern culture
(see White 1978; Fish 1980). But works of inquiry weave their narratives in ways
very unlike literature, and it is the particular way a narrative is woven that makes
the difference here. Literature standardly constructs fictional narratives that have
dramatic structures; works of inquiry standardly attempt to construct factual nar-
ratives that have argumentative (or evidentiary) structures. This would seem an
important difference. And the challenge is to show that literary works can have a
claim to cognitive value in the absence of those features of writing commonly taken
to be the stuff of the pursuit of knowledge. For in their absence, precisely what
aspect of literary works do we point toward that justifies treating them as players in
the pursuit of knowledge? What do we find in works of literature that even entitles
us to think that they wish to be read for knowledge? Again, we tend to think that
there is something, but identifying precisely what is the challenge.
It is also now generally understood that to call into question the view of liter-
ary works as vehicles of knowledge is not thereby to embrace a form of literary
philistinism, namely, the picture of literary works as entertaining but ultimately
trivial playthings. Since the rise of various brands of literary formalism and aes-
theticism in the past century, philosophers and literary theorists have done much
to show that there is a powerful alternative to this so-called “cognitivist” tradition
of speaking about literature, one that has an equal claim to being a defense of the
value of literature, of why we take literature so seriously. Philosophers and liter-
ary theorists of an anticognitivist bent do not deny that literary representations
are very often profound, perceptive, awe-inspiring, and so forth. The thought is
rather that while we will have a very hard time accounting for this profundity
(etc.) in cognitive terms—say, a profundity of insight—it is altogether easy to do
so in aesthetic terms. It is also likely more natural, for literary works are, after all,
works of art. Indeed, an aesthetic view of literature can even urge that it is to com-
mit what Gilbert Ryle would call a category error to try to account for the value of
literary representations in cognitive terms: it amounts to a silly desire to carry over
to aesthetic domains terms meant to account for the value of representations in
philosophical and scientific domains.
Whether or not one quite agrees with this, it does have a certain intuitive
appeal, for we have a vocabulary that works perfectly well for talking about works
of art—an aesthetic vocabulary—and it is not altogether ridiculous to think that
literature and knowledge 469
to apply the vocabulary we use to account for the value of works of inquiry also to
literature is simply to misunderstand the nature of what we are talking about. At
any rate, the possibility of offering a fully aesthetic theory of literature marks the
presence of a more direct, and certainly less challenging, way to account for the
value of literature. It is hard to imagine a literary cognitivist who has not at one
time felt its appeal, who has not at least for a moment thought that she may have
taken the wrong route to arrive at her defense of the value of literature.
This is the challenge I address in this chapter. I hope to give a sense of how pow-
erful the arguments against the cognitivist view of literature are, but also to bring
to light how the philosopher beholden to it might respond to them. More precisely,
I argue that we must accept that literature’s particular manner of engaging with
reality is sui generis, so much so, in fact, that it constitutes its own form of cognitive
insight. This implies, among others things, that we abandon what we might call the
philosophy-by-other-means view of literature, and in general any defense of literary
cognitivism that attempts to model literature on a theory of how other sorts of texts
can have cognitive value (e.g., by showing them to mimic philosophical works,
perhaps by being a thought experiment in literary guise, a sort of dramatic “proof,”
an exercise in moral reasoning by example, and other like things we in no obvious
sense find when we look inside the majority of literary works). I also hope to show
that literature’s cognitive achievements are intimately bound up with its aesthetic
achievements. The humanist need not turn her back to the aesthetic dimension of
literary works when defending the cognitive value she believes many of them store.
Rather, the humanist must embrace it, for it is here that literary works effect their
particular enlightenment.
Before beginning, note that the debate on the cognitive value of literature does
not concern a mere epistemological puzzle. It begins with this, but it brings some-
thing much more important to the attention of the philosopher of literature. It
opens up a discussion of the general cultural significance of the literary work of
art. Perhaps the issue of whether literary works can offer a precise sort of knowl-
edge is not even what is really at stake in this debate. In asking whether works of
literature can offer knowledge, we are asking to have the worldly interest we take in
art vindicated. What is at stake here is our ability to articulate what amounts to a
satisfactory account of the interplay of art and life itself. I do not attempt anything
as grand as this here. But I do hope that what I say about the epistemological issue
will give a sense of how one can use it as a tool for exploring the variety of ways in
which literature and life take an interest in one another.
The Textual Constraint

We can learn any number of things from works of imaginative literature, though
many are trivial and of little literary relevance. From a master stylist, I might learn
how to write with wit and grace; from an Elizabethan drama, I can gain insight
into the English of an older age; from a novel of dazzling inventiveness, I can
acquire knowledge of possibilities of description and conceptualization. The list is
nearly endless. If the problem of literary cognitivism were simply one of identify-
ing something—anything—we can learn from literature, it would be a very dull
debate, for it is impossible to imagine how one could fail to arrive at a positive
response to the question. But the challenge is not merely to find a way of showing
that we can leave our literary encounters with “more information,” so baldly put.
We do, in countless ways. Rather, the challenge is to reveal literary works them-
selves to have as one of their goals the offering of a form of understanding, and
this is a quite different and much more difficult matter. The claim to cognitive
acquisition on the part of a reader is of little literary relevance if not tethered to
a complementary claim to the effect that what the reader has learned is a lesson
the literary work actually puts on offer. It is only in this sense that the question is
a proper literary one, that is, a question that stands to reveal something about the
nature of the literary work of art.
This is not always as appreciated as it should be. One finds much ink spilt on
how works of literature might help improve our faculty of imagination (Currie
1998; Harold 2003), develop our cognitive skills (Novitz 1987), discover what we
would think, feel, or value if in another’s shoes (Walton 1997; Currie 1998), become
more sympathetic and adept moral reasoners (Nussbaum 1990), and so on. These
are genuine cognitive achievements, and literature can certainly help us in our
pursuit of them. But, like the above examples, they tend to say too much about
readers and too little about literary works. Since literary works are for obvious rea-
sons rarely about the imagination, cognitive skills, or emotions of their readers, to
gesture toward these things in an attempt to defend the thesis of literary cognitiv-
ism is to gesture toward the wrong thing. The question is primarily textual: it con-
cerns the nature of the literary, of what we find of cognitive significance when we
look inside a literary work. It is only about readers—about the ways in which their
minds and morals can be improved through their encounters with literature—in
a secondary, derivative sense.
Consider a classics student who, having been asked to read Plato’s Sym-
posium, returns to his teacher and claims to have learned much from it. The
teacher asks the student to explain exactly what he has learned, to which he
replies, “a considerable amount of Attic Greek and some fi ne metaphors for
drunkenness.” He very well may have learned this—one can fi nd all of this in
Plato’s dialogue—and he might be all the better for it. But naturally the teacher
will think that the student has missed the point of the assignment. The student
has learned something, but he has not learned it from Plato. This is because what
he claims to have learned makes no reference at all to what we might describe
as the cognitive labor of Plato’s dialogue, to the lesson it wishes to impart, to the
insight it struggles to articulate—assuming, as I am, that Plato intends in that
dialogue to illuminate the nature of love and not the grammar of Attic Greek
or our capacity to speak in metaphors. Indeed, the student’s response fails to
show an understanding of the text, which is what we expect a claim of cognitive

acquisition to reveal.
Likewise, responses to the problem of literary cognitivism that put all of the
emphasis on how readers might become more successful imaginers, emoters, and
reasoners are, in the end, much more sophisticated versions of the mistake of the
classics student. It is valuable to have accounts of how engagements with the lit-
erary affect readers in morally and intellectually positive ways. We do live in a
culture in which art is at times thought to be of no more significance than its abil-
ity to amuse, and these accounts do much to counter literary philistinism of this
brand. But as a response to the question of whether literary works themselves have
cognitive aspirations, they are not very satisfying. In fact, they are largely silent on
this matter.
It is true, as Berys Gaut argues, that we are able “to apply the imaginative world
of the fiction to the real world, and thereby to discover truths about the world”
(2006: 123). We do this often when moved by a work. We turn from it and find
ourselves now capable of seeing the world in its light, and this can be an important
source of cognitive insight. After we read George Eliot’s Middlemarch or Shake-
speare’s Henry IV, for example, we find ourselves able to identify all the Casaubons
and Falstaffs who inhabit our world. These characters are, in their proper literary
mode of presentation, creatures of pure fiction and so without any intrinsic cogni-
tive value. But we can use these characters as tools for approaching reality, treating
them as lenses through which we can attempt to perceive human character more
clearly. This, in turn, can open up a way of acquiring truths about human nature,
of coming to discover something about it. But while this may be a significant fea-
ture of what we do with literary works, it is not a particularly good strategy for a
defense of literary cognitivism. If the acquisition of truth depends on the reader
applying aspects of a fictional world to the real one, then presumably that truth is
not given expression in the work itself, and so the work cannot quite put it on offer.
We may come to learn about the world when we do what Gaut claims we do. But
we haven’t quite come to learn about the world from literature. And this is what we
want answered: Can literature itself record, document, or bear witness to some-
thing about our cognitive relation to reality? We miss the point if we try to explain
this by describing ways in which readers rather than literary works perform the
cognitive labor here.
This is a problem with many popular versions of the so-called propositional
theory of literary cognitivism (for a discussion of its history, see Lamarque and
Olsen 1994). In an influential and clever defense of this, Peter Kivy writes:
Now if one thinks, as I do, that part of the reader’s literary appreciation consists
in confirming and disconfirming for himself the general thematic statements he
perceives in fictional works he reads, sometimes unaided, sometimes through
the help of literary critics, one will see why it is quite compatible with the
Propositional Theory that such confirmation and disconfirmation are part of
appreciation, and that appreciation is the job, if I may so put it, of the reader,
not the critic qua critic. The critic’s job, qua critic, is, among other things,
to make available to the reader whatever hypothesis the fictional work may,
directly or indirectly, propose. It is the reader’s job to appreciate them, in part
by confirming or disconfirming them for himself. (1997: 125, emphasis original;
see also New 1999: 116–20)
When we find ourselves struck by a literary representation, we tend to find a sug-

gestion in it, a clue as to how we may view the real world. Though the characters we
find in a literary work are fictional, the particular ways in which an author invests
their lives with meaning, their actions with urgency, their relationships with con-
sequence, always suggest to the reader a way of regarding actual human affairs.
The production of these visions and suggestions is typically a matter of literature’s
thematic rendering of its subject, say, the way in which a certain work configures
“suffering,” “jealousy,” or “joy” as this sort of experience. Through the force of its
thematic representation of a region of human concern, literature is able to hold up
for appreciation a finely wrought vision of human experience and circumstance.
And we tend to have an interest in subjecting these visions to cognitive scrutiny, in
asking whether our world is really like that, or whether it would be better if it were.
Much of this is surely right, and to this extent positions such as Kivy’s capture an
important dimension of our appreciation of literary works.
Note, however, that Kivy (and this line of thought more generally) accepts
that literary themes are of no intrinsic cognitive significance. To build the bridge
to truth, we have to engage in an activity that is rather suspicious from the literary
point of view. We (or the critic) must convert a literary theme into a philosophical
claim, a “hypothesis”—this is the act of rendering a theme in propositional form—
which we can then go on to scrutinize for truth (e.g., by casting the representation
of jealousy in Othello in terms of a claim to the effect that “jealousy can destroy
what we hold most dear”). If this is so, it is hard not to be left with the feeling that
the process of conversion that is the mechanism of cognitive acquisition here illic-
itly replaces literary content with philosophical content, and that in so doing, it
moves the object of appreciation from the text to what is ultimately outside it. We
do not in any literal sense find these “hypotheses” in literary works, and thus our
appreciation of these hypotheses, though occasioned by our encounters with the
literary, cannot itself be properly literary. When we convert a theme into the form
of a hypothesis (or proposition), we are already once removed from the work, and
when we begin scrutinizing this hypothesis for truth, we soon fi nd ourselves twice
removed. It seems clear that the labor put into forging the connection to truth is,
again, performed almost entirely by the reader rather than by the work, and thus
we face the old problem.
What these reflections bring to view is a basic constraint on what can count
as a response to the problem of literary cognitivism. We might call it the “textual
constraint” and treat it as telling us that a satisfactory account of a proper feature
of a literary work requires that whatever property we attribute to a text—say, the
property of being cognitively valuable—be an actual property of the text: some-
thing we come into contact with when we explore the interior of the work. It must
be a part of its content, broadly construed. So if a certain point or insight is not
in the work, then, according to this textual constraint, we cannot claim to have
learned that point from the work. Of course, novels, at least good ones, make us
think. But the important question from the literary standpoint is what we think
about when we think about a work. And if it is something not quite in the work,
then that something cannot be invoked to explain a value of that work. If we fail
to respect this, we are ignoring the text, much as the classics student ignored Plato.
We are merely commenting on how we can enlist the text in our personal intel-
lectual pursuits and ultimately saying nothing about how the literary work of art
itself might embody knowledge of the world.
The Loss of the World

It is here that the problem begins to take the form of a proper philosophical chal-
lenge. According to the textual constraint, we must limit our search for cognitive
value to the work itself, looking inside rather than away from it. And what we
find is that virtually all the resources contemporary philosophy has given us for
describing the “inside” of literary works appear to make impossible the claim that
we can find in them something sufficiently real to give support to the thesis of
literary cognitivism.
Prior to the twentieth century, the tradition of broadly humanistic philoso-
phizing about art—beginning with Aristotle and extending through the German
and English romantic traditions—was canonical, though always with the occa-
sional detractor. When philosophers spoke of art, there was, in addition to com-
pulsory observations on the nature of beauty and other aesthetic features of art,
almost always an important word offered on art’s general cultural significance, on
the ways in which works of art articulate an insight into our capacity to achieve
freedom, attain moral selfhood, reveal the universal implicit in the particular,
fi nd meaning in a world without much of a point, and so forth (see Davis 1996;
Weston 2001).
But when philosophy took its initial steps toward the so-called “linguistic
turn” of the twentieth century, discussions of the nature of literature began to
focus on the semantic and referential features of literary language rather than
on its power of cultural articulation, and a very different habit of speaking about
literature began to emerge in philosophical circles. Perhaps the decisive first step in
this shift was Gottlob Frege’s 1892 publication of “Über Sinn und Bedeutung” [On
Sense and Reference], in which we find the following claim:
In hearing an epic poem we are . . . interested only in the sense of the sentences
and the images and feelings thereby aroused. The question of truth would cause
us to abandon aesthetic delight for the attitude of scientific investigation. Hence
it is a matter of no concern for us whether the name “Odysseus” has reference,
so long as we accept the poem as a work of art. (1970: 63)
What we find announced here is a view of the language of literary works that has
the consequence of severing whatever internal connection we once thought might
exist between literary works and extraliterary reality. Works of imaginative litera-
ture retain the “sense” of our terms, and thus the words we find in them preserve
their standard meanings. Literature and what we might call “world-directed” texts
(e.g., historical works, which attempt to refer to or otherwise represent reality)
share the same language, generally put; they both participate in the same Sinn.
But literary language stays on the level of Sinn, whereas in its standard (empirical)
uses, language takes the extra step of applying these words to the actual world.
Thus, literature is, if not quite self-referential, at least not interested in referring to
anything real, to anything beyond itself. And if this is so, then, as Frege puts it, the
“question of truth,” central to so much of the humanist tradition, is barred from
our appreciation of literature.
There are few Fregeans around today, but the very general orientation toward
literature we find in “Über Sinn und Bedeutung” is still with us. Frege’s view of
literature as a sort of pure “sense” language has not aged well. (In fact, it may not
even be Frege’s view, since it is often argued that there can be no genuine sense
without reference on Frege’s model, but this is how contemporary literary aesthet-
ics has received him.) Literature does, on many views, have truth and reference,
just of a rather deviant sort. What we find in the tradition that arose after Frege is
that the notions of truth and reference have been relocated to the fictional dimen-
sion of literature, in order to explain the ways in which works of literature function
to generate and state “truths” about fictional worlds. Thus, these notions no longer
serve the traditional humanistic purpose of marking the means by which literary
works speak about reality. In this respect, while philosophers have recovered from
Frege a notion of “literary reference,” the wedge Frege drove between literature and
truth is very much still in place. The consequence of this, of course, is that litera-
ture is made mute about the stirrings of extraliterary reality.
To give a sampling of prominent recent theories of fiction, in so-called speech-
act approaches it is argued that writing a work of fiction is a form of nondeceptive
pretense in which authors pretend to state as fact what is known to be untrue (Searle
1974–75; Beardsley 1981). In this sense, literature speaks, simply with a wink, about
what is not, and so, while not in the business of telling lies, does not go about stating
worldly truths. Or we find accounts that claim that literary works project a special
class of possible worlds, namely, fictional worlds (Lewis 1978; Pavel 1986; Doležal
1998). The problem of fiction in literature here becomes somewhat like the problem
of counterfactuals in the philosophy of language, a matter of describing the mecha-
nism that allows a writer to describe actions and events that never actually occurred
(or allows a reader to understand statements made about them, e.g., how we are able
to make truth-valued and referential statements about nonactual states of affairs).
And we have the extraordinarily influential “make-believe” account of fiction (Wal-
ton 1990). Here it is argued that just as children use sticks and stones as swords
and bombs in a game of make-believe, when adults read literature they use words
in much the same way. We do not believe what we read in a work of imaginative
fiction, since we cannot believe a sentence (or a text largely composed of sentences)
we know is not true. But we can make-believe them, and so we treat the descriptions
in a literary work as props for our imaginative involvement in the story line, using
nonepistemic attitudes (e.g., “imagining that”) to ground the possibility of appreci-
ating a fiction as a something though we know all the while that it is really nothing
at all. (For a survey of contemporary theories of fiction, see Davies 2000.)
One should notice that none of these theories proposes the patently absurd idea
that works of imaginative literature speak exclusively about the imaginary and the
unreal, a claim that would imply that when William Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying
he invented not only Addie Bundren but also Mississippi, wagons, and death. The
picture we get from these theories is that the bits and pieces of reality we find woven
into works of fiction play a nonepistemic role in these works. They are used to give
texture to the fictional world of the work rather than to represent or state truths
about actual states of affairs. We do criticize a novel that uses, for instance, New
York as its setting yet fails to get straight the difference between Downtown and
Uptown. But this is a critique of the setting’s accuracy, and it is done along the lines
in which we criticize a set in a play rather than an argument to the effect that the
literary work attempts to make truth-claims about the world and fails in so doing.
Saying so much—claiming that accuracy of worldly background and setting in
works of imaginative fiction is straightforwardly truth-functional or referential—
would be akin to saying that the set in a production of A Street Car Named Desire
functioned to make truth-claims about New Orleans, which is plain silly.
What we find in this shift in twentieth-century literary aesthetics from tra-
ditional humanistic concerns to an overriding interest in the logic and semantics
of fictional discourse is that philosophy has developed a vocabulary for speaking
about literature that has made it even more difficult to give sense to the thesis of
literary cognitivism. There are other theories of fiction around than those just sur-
veyed. But in virtually all of them we see a commitment to the old Fregean move
of denying that literature has real-worldly truth and reference. The consequence is
that it gives an air of nonsense to the idea that literary language might actually be
able to tell us something of cognitive significance about the world. For if it does not
speak about reality—if it sends its words and description to fictional rather than
real addresses—how could it possibly be revelatory of reality? In this respect, the
problem for the literary cognitivist is not merely that literary works refuse to use
the tools of inquiry to build support for their claims, as discussed above. Literature
does not even make claims, so there is really nothing for it to support.
This is likely one of the reasons that attempts to defend literary cognitivism
such as Gaut’s and Kivy’s are so prominent. At first glance, the sort of insight they
argue works of literature can offer may seem odd from the literary point of view,
arguing as they do that readers rather than literary works perform the lion’s share
of cognitive labor. But given the notion of fiction with which so much contempo-
rary philosophy operates, we can also see why moves such as theirs are so alluring.
If what we have to say about literary fiction is that it concerns possible worlds, or
that it casts the content of a literary work as an object of make-believe, then the
idea of fi nding reality disclosed through a literary work is made utterly mysterious.
If this is so, then it appears obligatory to look outside the text to establish a connec-
tion with truth and knowledge.
And so we arrive at the heart of the problem: according to the textual constraint,
we must look within the work to ground literary cognitivism, and this seems to be
precisely what we cannot do. Literary language has no declarative power, and thus
it is not in the business of telling us about the nature of our world. It is true that
works of fiction can embody a vision of aspects of human experience and circum-
stance: Bartleby the Scrivener is among the most potent representations we have of
alienation; Othello, of jealousy. But visions are, from the epistemic point of view,
just that: mere pictures, representations of life that are often powerful, moving,
even beautiful, but for all that, cognitively neutral. Thus, something outside the
work must be invoked to build the bridge between these visions and worldly truth.
But the moment we look outside the work to build this bridge, we have implicitly
conceded the defeat of literary cognitivism. We might console ourselves by remark-
ing on the ways in which we can enlist literary works in our extraliterary cognitive
pursuits—as we saw above, this is rather easy to do—and so we needn’t fear that
literary philistinism is a consequence of this. But given what philosophy tells us it
means for a text to be fictional, for a use of language to be literary, it is hard indeed
to see how we might give life to the thesis of literary cognitivism.
Moving the Debate Ahead

Those of us who still feel drawn to the idea that literary works are sources of
worldly illumination will likely think that in all of this something crucial has
been left unmentioned, and that this something is essential to the thesis of literary
cognitivism. I think that this is right, and for the remainder of this chapter I try to
identify just what this something is.
What should strike one as initially suspicious in the way the problem is set
up in the debate is that it seems to make the case for literary cognitivism hang
on whether we can apply to literature the vocabulary we have for explaining how
works of inquiry illuminate reality. Though this is rarely made explicit by the major
players in the debate, one does have a sense that the discussion gets afoot by look-
ing at standard sorts of text with cognitive value—scientific, philosophical, and
so on—and then wondering whether works of art can do what they do, at least at
some level and to some extent. This is a questionable way of approaching the mat-
ter. I assume that painting is a paradigm case of art. But I also assume that no sen-
sible person would try to account for the artistic value of music by asking whether
what we find in paintings can also be found in symphonies. We are likely guilty of
a similar sin if we hear the question of whether literary works have cognitive value
as asking us solely whether they can offer truth and knowledge. What I think we
see in the above arguments for anticognitivism is the poverty of the vocabulary of
truth and knowledge when applied to literature (for similar critiques see Lamarque
and Olsen 1994; Lamarque 1996, 2006). But perhaps the literary cognitivist does
not need this vocabulary.
Yet what is meant by “truth” and “knowledge” here? What these anticognitiv-
ist arguments deny that the literary work possesses is a standard (and significant)
sort of knowledge. This standard sort is often called “propositional” or “concep-
tual” knowledge, depending on the particular spin one gives it. If literature were
able to offer us this sort of knowledge, then the story we should be able to tell about
it would be something like the following. If we were to acquire what appears to be a
potential candidate for knowledge from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s presentation of, say,
suffering in Notes from Underground, then this work would in one way or another
have to assert something about what suffering is. This would be done by offering a
proposition—implicitly, in the case of works of art—to the effect that suffering,
or a species thereof, is “thus and such a thing,” say, a condition of mind in which
one’s world and one’s self appear at once alien and revolting. If this happened, we
would then be given epistemic access to a new concept of suffering or, at any rate, a
refinement of the one we already possess. Literary works, however, lacking declara-
tive power, and much else in addition, are not in the business of articulating truths
of this variety, and thus they cannot be (or do not wish to be) vehicles of the sort of
propositional-conceptual knowledge tied to it.
In recent years there has been a steady proliferation of philosophers who have
noticed that art has an important power to offer forms of insight that in no obvi-
ous way rest upon the proffering of knowledge of this standard sort—in fact,
that do not consist at all in the stating of truths about the way our world is. And
this, I think, offers the literary cognitivist an important clue. Metaphors, as Ted
Cohen has argued, can give expression to a new way of feeling and thinking about
a familiar subject of human concern. When I offer you a successful metaphor,
the metaphor holds in place a certain cognitive and emotional orientation toward
the world (rather than states a truth about it), and it thus functions to “invite you
to join a community with me, an intimate community whose bond is our com-
mon feeling about something” (Cohen 2004: 236). Noël Carroll has argued that
the ethical value of art is a matter not of its offering a body of moral knowledge but
of its capacity to enrich the knowledge we already possess: “[I]n mobilizing what
we already know and what we already feel, the narrative artwork can become an
occasion for us to deepen our understanding of what we already know and feel”
(1998: 142). And Richard Eldridge has argued at length for art’s capacity to present
to us “materials about which we do not know exactly how to feel and judge” (2003:
226). Works of art do not resolve this material—say, a striking representation of
a morally ambiguous practice—into a proposition that tells us what to feel and
think about it. The force of their presentation of this material resides in the very
act of working through it, for in so doing works of art bring to light the “complex
texture of our human lives” (230). (For a similarly spirited accounts, see Graham
1995; John 2003; Harrison 1991; see also chapter 10 this volume.)
There is much to admire in these positions. In each of them the insight is

tied to an artwork’s aesthetic handling of its content. Works of art, thus conceived,
illuminate the world not by pausing from their artistic pursuits and mimicking a
work of inquiry (e.g., by arguing, acting as a thought experiment, or dealing out
claims about the nature of this or that). Rather, this illumination is inseparable
from the metaphoric and narratological dimensions of works of art. These phi-
losophers urge that if we look deep enough, we can discover a certain cognitive
force in these features of art, which has the attractive consequence of showing us
how to allow art to be just that yet find ground upon which to build an account
of its cognitive value. Like Carroll, I want to argue that literature’s cognitive value
resides in its ability not to offer knowledge but rather to act upon the knowledge
we already possess. And like Eldridge and Cohen, I want to claim that the form of
insight we get from this concerns not truth, properly so-called, but a certain cogni-
tive orientation toward the “texture” of human experience and circumstance. Like
all three, I hope to show that literature’s ability to do this resides in the work itself,
in the power of the visions of life it holds in place.
Before I can explain how this is so or precisely what this means, I need to
introduce the sort of understanding I shall argue that literature is especially able to
offer. The intuition I want to exploit is that there is much more to “understanding”
than the possession of knowledge of the propositional or conceptual variety. This
is perhaps obvious: there is a great variety of ways of understanding and knowing
the world that cannot be captured exclusively in terms of conceptual knowledge
(knowing-how is one example). But I have a specific sort of understanding in mind.
It is not an alternative to conceptual knowledge. It is rather a sort of understand-
ing that must be added to it if we are to understand certain aspects of our world
fully. The aspects I have in mind are of a broadly moral import. They are those that
designate sorts of human practice and experience in which questions of value, of
response, of feeling, come into play: joy, jealousy, suffering, love, as well as racism,
exploitation, self-fulfillment, trust, and the like—many of the things that are given
expression in literary works of art. Let me explain.
Understanding and Merely Knowing

To hurry my discussion along, I offer a few examples, all rather far-fetched, but
I will bring them down to earth in a moment. Each of the examples concerns a cer-
tain failure of response. These failures in turn raise a question about the conditions
under which we are willing to attribute genuine understanding to an agent.
Imagine that you are crossing a busy midday intersection when a large bus
speeds past the red light and into the crowd of people directly in front of you. Bod-
ies are thrown and lives are lost; quite a few people are clearly in a bad way. Next
to you is a man who quickly produces a cell phone. He begins to dial. A sense of
relief, if that is the right word, begins to wash over you: help will soon be on its
way. But when the person the man has called answers, you hear the man say, “Hey
Pete, I just saw the damndest thing . . . ” Now imagine the same scene, but after
the accident the man turns to you and says, in absolute sincerity, “someone really
should call for help.” But he starts walking off, intently navigating his way round
the wounded, his cell phone tucked securely in his pocket. Last, imagine not the
accident but the moment before it. You and this odd man see the bus approaching.
There is just enough time. You rush to push the people ahead of you out of harm’s
way. The man, however, pulls you back to safety and says, with a hint of tough
knowingness, “it ain’t worth it.” You reply, “Of course it is!” But it is too late. In all
three cases, assume, the man does not strike you as fully aware of what is wrong
with his responses. When he notices the look of disgust on your face, he appears
not embarrassed (or defiant or amused) but genuinely nonplussed. His expression
is one of, “What?”
There are many things wrong with this man. Most are of the standard moral
variety: he is likely in possession of a rather vicious character; he seems not to care
much for what one should care for greatly; he turns a tragedy into an anecdote—
and much else besides. But while these examples raise moral issues, my interest
here is not quite in their moral dimension, narrowly conceived. Rather, I am espe-
cially interested in how the moral failure here suggests a certain cognitive failure. It
is a failure of moral understanding, to be sure. But it is the issue of understanding
itself that I wish to explore.
The first, perhaps obvious, point is that in each of these cases the failure we
find in the man is not a failure of knowledge, at least in the minimal sense in which
we ascribe knowledge to someone. He, like you, knows what has happened. If he
did not know this, his responses would have been of an altogether different nature.
He would have done nothing instead of an odd thing. He knows that there has been
an accident, that there is a question as to whether one should risk one’s safety to
help others, that those suffering are not actors or automatons but people made of
flesh and blood, and so on. If these are among the “truths” of the matter, then the
man is in possession of these truths. If you were to put them to him in the form
of propositions (“Do you see that there are people who are hurt, that they require
help . . . ?”), then he would assent to them. He knows, in this basic epistemic sense,
what you know.
The question we naturally want to ask is this: Given that the man knows all
this, how could he respond as he did? The strangeness of his response, of his par-
ticular way of acknowledging the knowledge he shares with us, gives us a reason
to think that the difference between you and this man is not only moral but also
intellectual: there is something he just does not get (or that the two of you get very
differently), for if he understood the event as you did, he would have responded to
your look of disapprobation not with confusion but a snarl, a mischievous grin—
something that would have revealed that he is aware of how one should act in such a
moment and that he just did not care to act thus. But this is precisely what you do
not find in him. In a crucial respect, he seems oblivious, over and above the respects
in which he appears simply callous. His failure to lead his knowledge though the
appropriate channels of response suggests that at some level there is a significant
divergence in cognitive orientation toward the same event. He either does not
understand something you do, or he understands it in a way that is fundamentally
different than you do. Either way, there is something in your mind that cannot be
found in his. What might it be, exactly?
There are many ways one could explain this, and I do not want to wander off
into arcane corners of epistemology and cognitive philosophy in search of them.
For the sake of simplicity, I distinguish two basic sorts of understanding this exam-
ple suggests, with the hope that they will suffice in a general way to bring to view
an interesting point about cognition. Each form of understanding concerns a grasp
of what, one might say, “counts” (in this and the following, I draw from Mulhall
1994 and especially Cavell 1969).
In the first sense, call it the criterial, to know is to know what counts as an
instance of something: one thing a stone, another a table, that an expression of
suffering, this of joy. Understanding in this sense is made evident by our success in
extending our concepts out into the world and correctly placing particulars under
their scope. This sort of understanding records a facility with dividing the world
up accurately and correctly describing its particulars, a grasp of “what something
is” as a success of identifying this as that sort of thing. It is a matter, simply put,
of the individuation and identity of the bits of the world before us. The man’s
behavior meets this condition for ascribing understanding to him. He shows by
his elementary success of identification—that what you and he witnessed is of the
kind that it is, that the wounded are in the state that they are, and so forth—that
he is in possession of this sort of awareness.
But the example also gives us reason to think that, without supplementation,
this form of understanding is decidedly incomplete. Indeed, there is something
rather “mere” about it. It is necessary, of course, for without the capacity to repre-
sent the world aright, we have no chance of responding to the world as we should.
As a designation of a form of cognitive awareness, this criterial understanding
marks one of the most basic orientations we can have toward our world, that of
simply being able to identify its furniture correctly. To meet this condition for
counting as a knower, all one must do is reveal that one is in possession of the
relevant concepts and that one can relate them to the world in a certain way. We
expect much more from a knower than this. To count as genuinely understanding
what one knows in this “mere” sense, one must grasp something else.
To borrow an ugly term from ethics, for a moment at least, we might call the
second sense in which understanding is linked to a notion of what counts axiologi-
cal. It is in this respect that the odd man does not quite understand what you do.
Here “counting” is, broadly put, a matter of value—of how something counts as an
object of concern, as a site of significance, of how and why it matters. If the crite-
rial sense emphasizes our ability to represent the world correctly, the axiological
sense highlights the capacity to see the consequence of those aspects of the human
world so represented. This sort of understanding designates an awareness of what
is at stake when we represent the world in certain ways; it reveals a grasp of how
an object or event should function to engage us with the world when we describe it
as thus and such. To this extent, it is a distinctly cultural form of understanding,
for it has as its target not merely “objects” and their identity conditions but also
the values, cares, and concerns that define the character of our particularly human
practices and experiences.
Understanding is never value-neutral, is never merely conceptual, at least not
when it concerns human reality. To count as possessing full understanding of
something, we must reveal not only that we have the relevant concepts and rep-
resentational capacities. We must also show that we are alive to those patterns of
value, significance, and meaning that are woven into the aspects of the world we
otherwise “merely” know. We do this not by revealing that we are in possession of
the right propositions or descriptions, say, by asserting, correctly, “an ambulance
is needed” or “these people are in pain.” In fact, when we attempt to elaborate this
sort of understanding, to bring into full view just what it is, we tend to do so by
depicting not what one says but what one does when one knows something. We offer
examples of how one invests oneself in the particular scene one knows (or refuses
to, e.g., in characters such as Bartleby). That is, we describe a type of response, a
kind of gesture, that embodies this understanding. We give an account of how one
acknowledges what one knows, of how a piece of knowledge should function to
configure the knower as certain sort of agent. And for this, a picture, a vision, of
human activity is necessary, not the elaboration of a concept or principle.
Note that a moral response, an act of acknowledgment, is a kind of dramatic
gesture and that the understanding it embodies itself has a certain dramatic
structure. An act of acknowledgment is a way of giving life to what it is that we
know, of bringing it into the public world, not unlike the way in which an actor
gives life to a character, or an artist manifests an inner emotion through a perfectly
rendered expression. Indeed, understanding, if fully possessed, establishes a type
of dramatic relation between a knower and the world. It places us in the world as
agents who are responsive to the range of values and experiences that are the mark
of human reality. Recall that the term “drama” itself comes to us from the Greek
for “action” or “deed” (drama; adj. dramatikos), and “dramatic” has in its more
contemporary usage the sense of doing something with a certain emotional invest-
ment or charge (see Shusterman 2001 for a discussion of this). These are, in effect,
the markers of the form of understanding I have tried to outline here.
Literature and the Embodiment of

Understanding
So what does all of this allow us to say about the thesis of literary cognitivism?
How might this offer a foundation for developing our intuition that literary works,
while not in the business of stating truths about the world, still have much to show
us about it?
I think that the first thing we should want to say is this: what literary represen-
tations are able to do especially well is take the concepts we bring to our reading
of a work and present them back to us as concrete forms of human engagement.
When we read Notes from Underground or Bartleby the Scrivener, we see suffering
and alienation presented not as mere “ideas” but as very precisely shaped human
situations. And this contextualization of these concepts, this act of presenting
them to us in concrete form, is literature’s contribution to understanding, the par-
ticular light it has to shine on our world. Literary works do not embody conceptual
knowledge, if by this we mean that they offer an elaboration of the nature of some
aspect of our world, delivered, as it were, in a propositional package. Nor need they,
if they are to have a claim to cognitive value. If they embody a form of understand-
ing, it will consist in a more literal act of embodiment, namely, in the capacity of
a literary narrative to give shape, form, and structure to the range of values, con-
cerns, and experiences that define human reality.
The vision of life we find in literary narratives shows us human practice and
circumstance not from an abstracted, external perspective but from the “inside”
of life, in its full dramatic form. And if the argument I gave in the last section
is convincing, we can now see how this dramatic presentation of life might be
a very important cognitive achievement. This achievement does not consist in
the stating of truths or the offering of knowledge of matters of fact. It is rather a
matter of literature’s ability to open up for us a world of value and significance
and of all that this implies about our capacity to understand fully the import
of various forms of human activity. Literary works’ mode of engaging with the
world is never narrowly or purely cognitive. Literature would not be dramatic
if it were. But it is precisely this drama we need if we are to have a textual form
that is capable of documenting our particular way in the world. And this is not
a minor accomplishment from the cognitive point of view. It shows literature to
be among the richest, most potent media we have for the articulation of cultural
understanding.
When literary works are successful dramatic achievements, it is always in part
because they fashion a sense of what is at stake in the specific regions of human cir-
cumstance they represent. In this respect, there is an interesting parallel between
literary narratives and moral responses. Just as a moral response does not so much
convey knowledge of an event as it gives expression to an agent’s awareness of its
significance, literary works, rather than stating truths about our world, bring to
light the consequence, the import, of those aspects of reality they bring before us.
Put differently, literary works represent ways of acknowledging the world rather
than knowing it (see Gibson 2003, 2008; Cavell 1969). A literary narrative is in
effect a sustained dramatic gesture, a way not only of presenting some content
or material but also of responding to it. What we see distilled into the narrative
perspective is a vision of how and why this content counts, the precise respects in
which it might matter.
These patterns of significance, value, and meaning we find in literary works

are patterns to which we tend to have no cognitive access in our in less dramatic,
quotidian lives. We simply do not see what Eldridge felicitously calls the “complex
texture of our human lives” with such precision of detail and depth of vision in our
everyday encounters with the world. We very likely knew what racism is, or that a
lynching is among its most brutal manifestations, before reading James Baldwin’s
short story “Going to Meet the Man.” But unless we have engaged in the very prac-
tices Baldwin depicts in his story—and one would hope that few of us have—we
have not been granted an understanding of the form they may take as specific types
of human activity. Baldwin’s manner of representing the desires, repressions, pur-
suits, and relationships of the characters he imagines for us—indeed, the precise
manner in which he develops racism as a theme that structures the story itself—is
itself a way of acknowledging what racism is. That is, it constitutes an attempt to
render explicit its significance and import in the context of our cultural practices.
And in following the story, we too are forced to acknowledge something about the
nature of racism, for instance, that it can have its source in something other than
just hatred and ignorance, contrary to what we were often told in school. It might
reside in something much more primitive and pervasive, something that reaches
all the way to the core of our social and sexual natures. For this reason, Baldwin’s
story forces us to see racism as more complex, and so more terrifying, than we had
once thought, or were willing to think.
Literature does not treat the world as an object of knowledge but as a subject
of human concern. And this itself is a cognitive accomplishment, a way of bearing
witness to the world. Indeed, this gives us reason to speak of literature as engaged
in a form of worldly investigation, just of a sort that is markedly different than
we find in works of inquiry. It is a dramatic investigation. But human life itself is
dramatic in nature, and thus literary works, in their uniquely literary form, are
perfectly built for its exploration. Literary works needn’t cast aside their literary
pursuits and mimic works of philosophy if they are to engage in this form of inves-
tigation. They simply need to go about their usual business.
If this is so, then we can respect the textual constraint when defending liter-
ary cognitivism, for the form of insight literature trades in is bound up with the
internal structure of a literary work—in fact, it is inseparable from it. The insight
into life we find in a great novel is the novel itself. It is woven into the fabric of the
story, the specific ways in which it configures and gives dramatic expression to its
subject matter. Thus, we should not ask whether literary works might be able to do
what standard works of inquiry do if we wish to defend literary cognitivism. They
do not, nor should we wish them to. We can leave them be as they are, without
worrying that we will thereby make them cognitively trivial on account of it.
Instead of asking whether literary works might be able to offer us what other
works of inquiry do, a more interesting way of putting the matter is to ask what
aspects of our world would be left undocumented, unaccounted for, if we had no
literary works. If we think of texts as archives in which we store the various accounts
we have to offer of the nature of our world, what would be missing if there were no
literary works? The question itself is likely imponderable, for if literary works play
an important role in the articulation of cultural understanding, then our sense of
our world is itself at least partly literary in origin. At any rate, what we would lack
without literary works (and works of art more generally), what would be missing
from our archive, is not a body of knowledge but a certain perspective. It would be,
of course, the human perspective, that purchase on the world that reveals not what
we know about it but how we go about living in it. Without this, we really wouldn’t
have much to show for ourselves.
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 
LITERATURE AND
MORALITY
ted cohen
T idea that art has or can have something to do with morality is an old and
enduring idea, beginning at least as early as the disagreement between Aristotle
and Plato over the moral acceptability of fiction. In the current literature, the idea
appears in at least two continuing discussions, and these are the topics of this
chapter. Some other topics are mentioned but left largely unexamined.
The two continuing discussions revolve around two questions: (1) Does or can
acquaintance with works of art have a moral effect upon an audience? (2) Is the
moral character of a work of art relevant in its “aesthetic” assessment?
I
It may be thought that literature is an aid to morality in the sense that appreciative
reading of literature makes one a morally better person. As plausible as this may
seem, surely it is dubious. Taken as an empirical claim, it collapses immediately
under the weight of anecdotal evidence. University and college departments of lit-
erature are full of people skilled and practiced in the reading of literature, and it
is obvious that these people are morally no better (or worse) than other people.
It is perhaps just as obvious that those philosophers who specialize in ethics also
tend to be morally no better or worse than other people. (Perhaps it is true that
those who spend much time reading have less time in which to do bad things, but
it is then equally true, one supposes, that they have less time in which to do good
things.)
literature and morality 487
Suppose it is true that reading literature at least can be morally uplifting and
improving, presumably by exposing readers to human situations—their complexi-
ties and necessities—that they would otherwise not be aware of. If so, then it must
also be true that reading literature can be morally degrading. If one might learn,
say, from Charles Dickens’s Hard Times that unrestrained capitalism is morally
vicious, then one might learn that free-market capitalism is essential to the eleva-
tion of the human spirit by reading Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged.
If one can learn the horrors of racism and the need for tolerance by reading Har-
riet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Richard Wright’s Native Son, then one
can learn of the unredeemable and implacable depredations of the Jews from T. S.
Eliot. If one can acquire sympathy for the plight of women in the modern world
from Henrik Ibsen and Gustave Flaubert, then one can learn of women’s deep need
for sexual subjugation from Pauline Réage’s The Story of O.
In the cases of some significant works, it is far from clear what is to be learned.
From Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) do we learn the obtuse and culpa-
ble racism found in it by Chinua Achebe, or do we learn that the arrogant sophis-
tication of white Christian Europeans has robbed them of that morally essential
instinct for restraint, an instinct still alive in native Africans? And in Mark Twain’s
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), what do we learn from Huck’s argument
with Jim about the acceptability of a Frenchman’s failure to speak English, an
argument in which Huck has the right conclusion but Jim has the better logic, an
argument Huck leaves, saying, “I see it warn’t no use wasting words—you can’t
learn a nigger to argue. So I quit”? (2005: 74).
Plato’s seeming objection to fiction is that it has nothing to do with knowledge,
and thus Aristotle’s reply includes the assertion that one can learn from such “imi-
tations.” The Platonic reply to this, surely, is that there is no guarantee that what
may be “learned” is the truth. Should we chance it, hoping for the best? John Rawls
once noted, in an informal lecture, that as a very rough characterization one might
think of a conservative as someone who, despite acknowledging current imperfec-
tions, is so troubled by how much worse things might be that he refuses to initiate
changes without a strong guarantee of what will result from change, while a radical
is so appalled by the present situation that he is willing to exchange it for virtually
anything. The Platonist, thus, is so worried by fiction’s capacity to “teach” the wrong
things that he would prefer not to risk being taught by fiction at all. And, of course, it
may be not that the author-teacher happens to be wrong, but that he may intention-
ally purvey what he takes to be false. He might be like the author of this poem:
They asked me: Wise one, who is it who doesn’t

distinguish between what’s right and wrong,
and sings in praise of his day’s elect
while his heart has long seen through his song?
And I answered them: My friends, it is I—
I am the poet who lies.
(Meshullam Depiera, “The Poet,”1 in
Cole 2007: 230)
Still, the idea that literature at least can be morally beneficial is an idea of long
standing, and some have thought literature even more effective than philosophy in
this regard. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, wrote this:
Moral Philosophy. I think it lost time to attend lectures on this branch…. State
a moral case to a ploughman & a professor. The former will decide it as well, &
often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules.
In this branch [moral philosophy] therefore read good books because they will
encourage as well as direct your feelings. The writings of Sterne particularly
form the best course of morality that ever was written. (1984: 901)
If literature can affect a reader’s morality—whether for better or for worse—how

does this happen? There seem to be at least two ways. The first was described by
Aristotle in his claim that dramatic literature—specifically tragedy—can present
human life and action exhibiting a kind of necessity, a necessity not always con-
spicuously exhibited in human affairs when those affairs are simply confronted in
ordinary life or presented in nondramatic historical narration. Thus, an ancient
Greek tragedy, or perhaps any work of fiction, might teach us that when a man
or a woman acts in certain ways, there will be consequences for which that actor
is responsible. It will do this by presenting the acts and their sequels as linked by
what Aristotle calls necessity, and this will reveal the implicit moral significance of
those acts, something the audience might not otherwise have realized.
But even if literature can exhibit the moral dimensions of human life, presum-
ably by firing the imagination of its audience, the question of how the audience will
itself then behave will remain open. One sees this in a remark of Virginia Woolf’s:
“The reason why it is easy to kill another person must be that one’s imagination is
too sluggish to conceive what his life means to him” (quoted from Woolf’s diaries
in Sittenfeld 2005). Surely this is right as an explanation of the ease with which
some can kill, but it fails utterly to recognize that it may be exactly one’s ability to
imagine the cost to another that makes it possible to wish to kill him. Thus, if a
literary work made clear to a reader just what someone’s life might mean to him,
this could lead to murder as well as to compassionate restraint. My desire to kill
someone might well be increased by my imagining that he will then be unable
to enjoy his grandchildren or to profit from his pursuits. And, of course, I might
think I will relish the pain it will cause those who love him.
Perhaps the right moral to draw from this is the one Peter Kivy has drawn when
writing of the possible moral effects of music: “Of course a human life guarantees
neither a good life, nor a happy one. The best that we can hope from music, it
seems to me, is that it help to humanize. Happiness and goodness we will all have
to work out for ourselves” (1993: 31). Similarly, then, if literature can enrich one’s
imagination and sensibility, it remains an open question just what actions that
might lead to.
Just how is it that literature achieves a morally significant effect, if it does? Per-
haps it is that some moral distinctions are so fine that they may go unrecognized
in real life and thereby lose what ought to be their felt significance. Literature can
have the power to bring these distinctions forward and induce a sense of their
moral urgency. A reader of Herman Melville’s Billy Budd (1924) who is careless or
too quick to judge springs to the conclusion that Captain Vere is right to effect the
execution of Billy. Or he is sure that Vere is wrong to do it. Either way, such a coarse
reader is obtuse. Is it right that Billy is hanged? Yes. And no. Who is responsible
and perhaps to blame for Billy’s fate? No one. And everyone. But how can this
be—how can there not be what Kant thought of as a virtual formula for calculat-
ing moral rights and wrongs, or a utility principle that would do the same? Perhaps
Billy Budd teaches us—if “teach” is the right word—that, given a good man in an
imperfect and imperfectable world, the unavoidable and inescapable moral agony
of Vere awaits every human being with the moral wit to rise to it.
It is useful to have a closer look, if a brief and oversimplified one, of how Billy
Budd presents its terrible vision, taking note of how exquisitely and poignantly
Melville creates the moral dimensions of his situation. When provoked or attacked,
Billy’s response is to strike out, and thus he kills Claggart. A singularly ill-conceived
response, one supposes (although it is not clear that Billy has done any “conceiv-
ing”), and yet, when Billy served on the merchant ship The Rights of Man, this was
exactly how Billy responded to provocation, and that response was a great success.
So one cannot easily indict Billy for a failure to learn from experience. Things are
different on the warship, however, one says, and when Billy joined that ship he
entered a different kind of society. Yes, but remember that Billy did not join the
crew of the warship: he was conscripted, whereas presumably he had earlier freely
joined the crew of the merchant ship.
It is not easy to exonerate Billy, but nor is it easy to condemn him. The person
who must decide whether Billy is to be condemned, or exonerated, or have his
punishment mitigated is the captain of the warship, Vere. What is Vere to do? It is
commonly supposed that Vere’s reason and justification for having Billy executed
are roughly this: the relevant naval regulations prescribe capital punishment for a
crew member who strikes a superior. They do this because any lesser penalty might
be insufficient to deter mutinous activity. Mutinous activity must be deterred
because such activity obviously would be detrimental to the success of the British
Navy. And, of course, the success of the British Navy is vital to the very sovereignty
of Britain. More could be said, but this is enough to suggest the apparently utilitar-
ian justification for Vere’s decision to have Billy hanged.
To pay respect to the subtlety and complexity of Melville’s work, it should be
noted that this reasoning may or may not represent Vere’s reason for killing Billy.
It is through this reasoning that Vere persuades the drumhead court to deliver a
death sentence, but that does not establish that it is Vere’s personal conviction. Per-
haps Vere has another reason for thinking Billy must die. But we will not go into
that, for this chapter is not concerned with the depths of interpretation of literary
works.
Let us suppose that the reader of Billy Budd, intent upon finding moral signifi-
cance therein, is led to entertain this reasoning. Does he find it compelling? Billy
is killed to forestall a mutiny, or so the junior officers of the court believe, and
yet the one and only occasion upon which the crew show signs of disobedience is
when they have been summoned on deck and apprehend that Billy is about to be
hanged.
The officers must consider two propositions:
P1. Let Billy get away with killing Claggart, or at least not hang him here and
now, and this crew (and possibly others, hearing the news) will be more
likely to disobey.
P2. Undertake to hang Billy and this crew will protest violently.
In deciding what to do with Billy, is it thus just a matter of deciding which propo-
sition is more likely to be true? This seems an unspeakably vulgar way of under-
standing the moral question of whether to kill a man. But is it?
Now, of course, if you believe in the completeness and consistency of Kant’s
categorical imperative, or of the utility principle advanced by J. S. Mill and his
followers, then you may think that what Billy Budd teaches is not a truth. That is
exactly as it should be, for, as noted above, if literature is capable of casuistry or
assertion, or otherwise able to affect the imagination and motivation of a reader,
that capacity as such is neither good nor bad, and can lead to either, and the litera-
ture itself gives no moral assessment.
It may be that actions and judgments of moral significance require being able,
as it were, to see and feel from the point of view of another. This need can be realized
easily when one considers the inadequacy as a major moral principle of the so-called
golden rule. When I consider doing something that will affect another person, if
I ask myself only how I would like having that thing done to me, I may well indulge
my own eccentricities and idiosyncrasies. Thus, as the saying goes, from the stand-
point of the golden rule, a masochist is justified in indulging in sadism.
What seems to be required of me is not that I sense how I would feel if the action
were perpetrated upon me, but how the actual recipient will feel. For instance, sup-
pose I contemplate making a joke at Jack’s expense. Will I be (morally) acceptable
if I do that? If I ask myself only how I would feel and judge if the joke were made at
my expense, I may fall short of an accurate appraisal. What I need to know is how
Jack will feel if I make him the butt of a joke.
Now if this is right, then morality requires what might be called “empathy,”
and however that term is understood, it might be argued that the capacity for
empathy, for empathic understanding, can be augmented by experience in dealing
with literature. Fictional literature, after all, virtually invites, requires, and facili-
tates such “identification,” such efforts to grasp the experience of others.
Surely there are other ways of amplifying people’s capacity for empathy—if
there were not, then nonreaders would invariably be morally incompetent—but
even if the reading of fiction were the only way, such reading would be a best a nec-
essary condition for moral competence. It certainly would not be a sufficient con-
dition because, as noted above, the capacity fully to appreciate the consequences
to another person of one’s action might lead to dreadful acts precisely because the
agent has a vivid sense of the pain he wishes to cause.
Still, one should not underestimate the critical need for empathetic under-
standing and the capacity of fiction to stimulate this capacity. It seems to do so by
presenting characters and their situations so vividly and unignorably as virtually
to compel the reader to “feel” what it would be to be such a character in such a
situation—no small achievement, and one of no small moral significance, espe-
cially if one’s experience of fiction can be thought of as a kind of exercise whereby
one’s capacity for interpersonal understanding is strengthened and then activated
in the contexts of real life.
There is an oddity here, what might be thought of as a paradox of moral
instruction. Suppose that some fictional work displays a subtlety or complexity
of moral relevance, and that it might profit someone to have an experience of this
work. How much moral acumen is required of a reader to discern this content? If
it requires a great deal, then any reader is either one already capable of bringing a
heightened moral sensibility to matters in her real life and thus has no need of this
work, or she is morally obtuse and is thus incapable of benefiting from the work.
If the moral significance of a fiction were exactly as difficult to apprehend as
the moral significance of matters in real life, then the fiction would be either use-
less or superfluous. It seems to follow that in order for the fictional work to be effi-
cacious, it must be accessible to someone currently unable to respond adequately
to events as they unfold in real life but still able to react competently to the work. It
is as if the work must present, as the saying goes, real life but with better lighting.
And perhaps that is how some fiction does its work of moral instruction.
II
The second topic of this entry is the question of whether morally objectionable fea-
tures of a fiction count against its aesthetic merit. If Billy Budd or Atlas Shrugged or
Heart of Darkness is morally reprehensible, is it a lesser work for that reason?
It is extremely difficult to formulate this question with enough precision
and specificity to permit even a coherent answer. In the first place, it is unclear
how a fiction can have a moral dimension. It is commonly complained of various
works that they say that Catholics are superstitious, that black people are innately
incompetent, that Jews are mendacious, that war is a good and noble undertak-
ing, that homosexual behavior is disgusting and dangerous, and that women are
best satisfied when they are dominated by men. Such complaints, obviously, are
based on the conviction that these assertions are false. But even if it were possible
to credit the idea that fictions say anything, it would be almost unaccountably
mindless to blame a fiction for saying something false. A fiction, virtually by defi-
nition, is exactly a collection of falsehoods. If we should object to falsehoods as
such, then how can we avoid rejecting “Vere was the captain of a British warship,”
“Charley Marlow piloted a steamboat up the river into the Belgian Congo,” and
“Huckleberry Finn was born in Hannibal, Missouri, and grew up with a friend
named Tom Sawyer”? We would reject such statements as false only if we did not
know what a fiction is.
Questions regarding the truth-value of fictional sentences and regarding the
possibility of linking a fictional work to any assertion whatever (as if a fiction
might assert something) have no place in this chapter, but it will be assumed that
the question of the morality of fiction cannot usefully be addressed in terms of
“fictional truth.”2 There remains room for a moral dimension in fiction if, as con-
sidered above, fiction can induce in its readers a heightened moral sensibility, an
awareness of subtle significances, perhaps a new conviction about the rightness or
wrongness of something, and possibly even new or altered forms of behavior. If a
work of fiction could do those things, then should that fact count in an assessment
of the work’s literary merit?
If a literary work has a moral component, even a casuistic one, does that fact,
regardless of just what the morality is, itself count for or against the work? The his-
tory of literature, constituted by both writers and critics, shows different opinions
about this, as noted in a recent review: “ ‘We hate,’ ” wrote John Keats, ‘poetry that
has a palpable design upon us;’ but Stowe was born into the age of Dickens and
the Brownings, when high imagination and a moral message were felt to be com-
patible” (Bromwich 2007: 51). The question is whether the moral characteristics
of a literary work count in assessing the work’s literary or artistic merit. That is
the question, and it sounds like a clear, answerable question, whatever the correct
answer may be, and yet asking the question brings up another question whose
answer is hard to find.
The late Frank Ramsay offered a suggestion for dealing with long-standing
philosophical debates in his The Foundations of Mathematics and Other Logical
Essays (1931). When philosophers are positioned on both sides of a debate that has
stood unresolved for a long time, Ramsay counseled looking for something both
sides agree to, and denying that. Is its morality relevant to the literary, aesthetic
merit of a work of fictional literature? Some philosophers (and others) have said
yes, some have said no, and some have pronounced, with nuance, sometimes and
in some ways yes, otherwise no. The positions and arguments of these thinkers
have been canvassed fairly, diligently, and accurately by Richard Eldridge (see
2003: chap. 9). Virtually all participants in this debate must suppose there to be
some at least tolerably serviceable distinctions, on the basis of which one might
take the true statements that can be made about a fictional work and sort them into
a group of statements concerning the work’s morality, another group that concern
the work’s literary merit, and, no doubt, a number of other groups (e.g., statements
concerning the work’s genre, or its provenance, or its author). And then the ques-
tion is whether members of the first group belong in, or entail members of, the
second group. Whether there is such a distinction is the question that has been, so
far, ignored.
The question inspired by Ramsay, then, is this: How reasonable is it to suppose
that the moral-relevant statements can be distinguished from other statements
about the work and, in particular, from nonmoral relevant statements that con-
cern the work’s literary merit? One might think that surely there are features of
a literary work that are exclusively of aesthetic or literary significance and have
nothing to do with morality, and among those features, perhaps, are ones having
to do with what, broadly, is called “style.” But even these features are not so obvi-
ously morally innocuous. Apart from questions of grammar and syntax, consider
simply the question of word choice. Is there no moral significance in the author’s
choice of a lexicon?
Commenting on Ernest Hemingway’s prose, William Faulkner famously (or
notoriously) said: “He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader
to the dictionary.” Whether or not this is a fault in Hemingway’s writing, it seems
a fair description, as exemplified, for instance, in the opening lines of A Farewell
to Arms (1929):
In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across
the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were
pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and
swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down
the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of
the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops
marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze,
falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except
for the leaves. (1995: 1)3
Compare this kind of writing with that found in the works of Vladimir Nabokov.
In his short novel Pnin, which runs to fewer than 150 pages in the 1996 Library of
America edition, one finds these words: pyrographic, felted, downcome, amphoric,
vagitus, volitation, mangosteen, skiagrapher, cathetus, tumefied, scholiast, gla-
bella, soubrette, calvity.4 Such writing surely sends a reader to the dictionary.5
Certainly there are good questions about these two very different kinds of
literary achievement. In Nabokov we find an exuberant, nearly ecstatic joy in
the fabulous riches of the English language. His strange, wonderful words stand
out like the sound of an oboe in a full orchestra. In Hemingway, by contrast, we
find only common, pedestrian words, although their composition is stunning.
The occurrence and recurrence of the words “troops,” “dust,” and “leaves,” for
instance, figure in a kind of polyphonic pattern resolved in the phrase “except for
the leaves,” where the final word also suggests the ending of the paragraph itself.
A student of literature could work on these texts with profit, trying to understand
how language works in each, whether one linguistic practice is somehow better
than the other, and whether they simply appeal to different sensibilities. These
would all be matters of literary or aesthetic merit, presumably, and would have
nothing to do with morality.
But is this true? Does the question of lexical proclivity have nothing to do with
ethics? Might one argue that Hemingway’s prose is far more democratic, that indeed
the term “demotic” is made for such prose, while Nabokov’s lexicon of arcana is
elitist? The meaning of many Nabokovian sentences is simply inaccessible to any
reader who does not either already possess an incredible vocabulary or find access
to reference materials—and at that, he will need far more than common diction-
aries: nothing short of the Oxford English Dictionary will turn up all of them, and
even that will leave some doubt about a few.
One distinguished philosopher who thought there to be a connection between
art and morality and, indeed, that the making of art is itself a moral activity was
R. G. Collingwood (1938).6 He argued that successful art—all art, and certainly
including literature—succeeds in telling the truth about oneself, one’s feelings,
and the world. He often writes as if failed attempts to do this were moral failings—
an extreme idea, no doubt, and an extravagant one, but well worth going into.
It is sometimes argued that the full aesthetic achievement of Leni Riefenstahl’s
movies is available only to those viewers with at least a tolerance for myths of
Nordic beauty and superiority, and that tolerance seems a matter of moral signifi-
cance.7 Then isn’t Nabokov’s literary achievement likewise available only to those
with a fondness for, or at least a tolerance of language that escapes the ken of the
vast majority of English speakers?
If even something as seemingly innocuous as word choice can have a moral
bearing, then perhaps even the most isolated, formal characteristics of literature
are available for moral appraisal, and if that is so, then in the continuing debate
over the aesthetic relevance of moral concerns, both sides have been assuming a lit-
erary/moral distinction that itself is either dubious or question-begging. There will
be no clear distinction between one set of sentences all of which refer to a work’s
moral quality, and another set whose members refer only to literary features of
the work, and thus no question as to whether members of the first set are aestheti-
cally relevant. Instead, there will be just one set, those sentences referring to the
work, and the question will be, for instance, whether the morally elitist character
of Nabokov’s prose affects the aesthetic quality of the work. It will take at least
some literary or aesthetic awareness to detect the oddity of Nabokov’s lexicon, and
then a decision will be required as to whether this is a matter of moral significance,
and then, finally, a newer aesthetic question, namely, whether that moral matter
itself is relevant in appraising the literary quality of the novel. I take no stand on
these matters, but hope only to have made them somewhat clearer.
NOTES
1. This poem was written about 700 years ago.

2. For the question of whether fiction can have anything to do with the truth, see
chapter 20 this volume.
3. A very useful meditation upon the paragraph is found in Didion 1998.
4. The words can be found, respectively, on pp. 312, 312, 320, 326, 330, 349, 362, 367,
377, 388, 396, 409, 421, and 424. A less than laudatory note about Nabokov’s use of such
words is in Stern 1993.
5. A typical computer spell-checker finds only three of them in its dictionary. The
small, paperback version of the American Heritage Dictionary lists none of them.
6. A slight introduction and guide to a part of this work is Cohen 1989.
7. An excellent discussion of this topic, with specific attention to Riefenstahl, is
Devereaux 1998.
REFERENCES
Bromwich, D. (2007). “The Fever Dream of Mrs. Stowe” [a review of The Annotated Uncle
Tom’s Cabin]. New York Review of Books, October 25, 51–53.
Cohen, T. (1989). “Reflections on One Idea of Collingwood’s Aesthetics.” Monist 72(4).,
581–85.
Cole, P. (2007). The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain,
950–1492. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Collingwood, R. G. (1938). The Principles of Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Devereaux, M. (1998). “Beauty and Evil: The Case of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the
Will.” In Jerrold Levinson (ed.), Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection.
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Didion, J. (1998). “Last Words.” New Yorker, November 9, 74.
Eldridge, R. (2003). An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Hemingway, E. (1995). A Farewell to Arms. New York: Scribner. (Original work published
in 1929.)
Jefferson, T. (1984). “Letter to Peter Carr, written in Paris, August 10, 1787.” In Merrill
D. Peterson (ed.), Thomas Jefferson, Writings. New York: Library of America.
Kivy, P. (1993). “Music and the Liberal Education.” In Kivy, The Fine Art of Repetition.
Sittenfeld, C. (2005). “Review of Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life by Julia Briggs.” New York
Times Book Review, November 20.
Stern, R. (1993). “Pnin’s Dust Jacket.” Reprinted in Stern, One Person and Another. Dallas,
TX: Baskerville. (Original work published in 1957.)
Twain, M. (2005). Huckleberry Finn. Cheswold, DE: Prestwick House. (Original work
published in 1885.)
 
LITERATURE AND
POLITICS
fred rush
P discussion of the topic “literature and politics” can take many forms.
For instance, one might be concerned to argue for or against the claim that literature
must be understood as a product of the social and political forces that are at work
when it is produced. Or, one might be concerned to assess the claim that literature
is a form of political critique, perhaps even a preeminent form of it. Or, one might
argue that literature can induce political change, that is, can be revolutionary—per-
haps that it should be. Further questions involve how political and aesthetic proper-
ties interact in works. Does the presence of both sorts of property in a work create
difficulty for aesthetic judgment? If one thinks that aesthetic judgment requires sep-
arating aesthetic from political properties in some strict way, the presence of politi-
cal properties in the work will be problematic for aesthetic judgment. The problem
might go as well to the heart of artistic production—that is, formalism of various
stripes holds that one isn’t “really” creating art, if one is creating political “art.” Or
one might be concerned that political and aesthetic properties are so intertwined
that strongly negative or positive political judgment might spoil aesthetic judgment.
Recent cases in the literature often are drawn from music or cinema, for example,
Richard Wagner’s Ring and Parsifal and Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens,
which are admired by some for their technical innovations and formal composition
but reproached for their political content. Many questions of this sort have been
asked about literature, as well—to take, again, the standard cases of Shakespeare’s
The Merchant of Venice, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Louis-
Ferdinand Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit, and Knut Hamsun’s Hunger.
Typically, issues of the political nature of art center on conceptions of artis-
tic content, even where content is considered in relation to aesthetic form. In this
literature and politics 497
chapter I focus instead on the idea that literary form itself is political. More specifi-
cally, I investigate claims that literature can criticize and alter political belief by
being experienced in terms of its form.
I
Dating the inception of modern literature with any claim to exactness is foolhardy.
But a strong indication of its onset is when writers and critics begin to think of
themselves in contradistinction to “the ancients” or what is “classical.” This coin-
cides roughly with the time when writers begin to produce literature that is for-
mally reflexive.1 What I mean by “formally reflexive” literature is literature that
takes the conditions for its own possibility to be thematic and that makes ques-
tions of its basis part of its own formal constitution. That is, one of the main ways
to reflect these conditions within the work is to make the formal nature of the
work difficult to take for granted—to make form thematically “problematic” for
the work. Modern literature is especially aware of its conventions and willing to
embed this awareness in works quite explicitly. “Formal,” as it is often used in dis-
cussions of aesthetics, pertains to perceptual properties of an object. Restricting
“aesthetic” in this way is certainly arguable, but let it stand for now. While some
formal properties of modern art are undoubtedly of this sort, many are not.2 It is
not stretching the term “formal” too much, I think, also to admit to its extension
structural properties of works that otherwise “make them possible.” For instance,
the structural properties of a work that allow for the recognition of narrative rela-
tions of beginning and ending might count as “formal,” even though the aware-
ness of them is complex and not a matter of “mere perception.”
Self-reference or even reflexivity in literature, then, does not originate with
the high modern literature of the mid-nineteenth through mid-twentieth centu-
ries. Parabasis was a standard element of Attic “Old Comedy”; internal narrative
self-reference, essential to Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, and so forth. Nor, at the
other end of things, is self-reference sufficient to divide modern literature from
literature often thought to be reacting to deficiencies in modernism, for example,
“postmodern” literature of various sorts. One might say that what is singular about
high modern literature is that it takes formal self-reference to be almost a require-
ment on art worth the name—that is, to make formal self-reference constitutive
of what literature at the cutting edge consists in. Innovation in narrative tech-
nique in Joyce, Proust, and Woolf or the exploration of phonetic value in Stéphane
Mallarmé are exemplary. Still, there is probably no sustainable hard-and-fast dis-
tinction between modern and postmodern on this score. Inventing new forms of
formal self-expression is less pressing in the “metafiction” of postwar America,
for example, in Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, and Don DeLillo. Yet, one might
consider the envelope-pushing prose and poetry of, for example, Georges Perec’s
lipogrammatic novel La Disparition (1969) or, for example, Paul Celan’s “meridi-
nal” verse to be modern in spirit. Is Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian or Toni
Morrison’s Beloved, almost certainly the two most important works of fiction in
English over the past quarter century, premodern, modern, or postmodern? It is
probably not possible to tell.
The claim that aesthetic form has the power to influence belief is also not new
with modernism. That has been a potent idea from the beginning of the history of
philosophical reflection on art. The problem with mimēsis for Plato is not merely
that “likenesses” are cognitively inferior to “knowledge.” It is also that likenesses
can cause beliefs and actions to imitate them. Likeness begets likeness for Plato,
which is never a good thing in the abstract. Indirect discourse should be favored
over direct address in poetry; otherwise, the identification of rhapsode and audi-
ence with what is said is much more immediate and potentially problematic. Even
so, there is an increase in concern over the intersection of politics and the formal
properties of works of art in the modern period. This is understandable, given that
modern art makes its own formal nature thematic.
One particularly interesting modern strand of thought at this intersection is
one that focuses on the claimed power of formal innovation to change political
belief. This claim was pressed mainly by a group of Marxist critics operating in
Central Europe beginning in the 1930s and is put in its most complex and compel-
ling form by two of them, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. I discuss the
views of both Benjamin and Adorno, but treatment of Benjamin comes in and
out of the analysis, not because Benjamin’s views are not interesting in their own
right—Benjamin is pertinent for this chapter to the extent that he provided the
young Adorno with important components for his views on the interconnection
of art and belief. But Adorno, simply put, is the thinker who most rigorously pur-
sued the idea that interests me here, that literary form is political in itself, and is so
because of its cognitive effects. Although one would not want to treat Adorno as
the last word on this, understanding his version of this claim is unavoidable.
Cleaving to the standard meaning of “form” mentioned above—that is, as
having to do with perceptual awareness—one way to discuss aesthetic experience
historically has been in terms of its connection to “preconceptual” or “nonconcep-
tual” experience.3 These terms admit of all sorts of interpretation. The first thing
to notice is that they are not synonymous or, at least, they needn’t be. There might
be all sorts of nonconceptual experiences that are not anterior to conception. But,
in fact, the two concepts have been conflated in traditional treatments of aesthetic
form. Moreover, since Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten inaugurated philosophical
aesthetics as a discipline, what interpretation one adopts of preconceptual experi-
ence will depend in great measure on what account of conceptual experience one
opposes to it. If one is a sense-impression empiricist, where concepts enter one’s
experience after an initial unmediated reception of the data of that experience,
what is preconceptual will be a brute, unstructured (by human means) continuum
of sensation. This means that preconceptual experience will be a species of feel-
ing with no conceptual import in itself. Emotivism in aesthetics results from such
views. It is not very interesting from the point of view of the question posed here.
The most that one can say is that literature can enflame (or cool) political belief.
II
But appeal to the inchoate, churning push-pull of sensation is not the only ave-
nue open to interpret the category of the “preconceptual.” Benjamin and Adorno
favor an entirely different tack, one that has its roots in Kant’s epistemological
and aesthetic writings. Kant holds that aesthetic experience is “preconceptual” in
the special sense that it implicates processes of concept and belief formation. That
is, it involves processes antecedent to the actual formation of a concept or belief
(or to its actual application in a judgment), but ones that are necessary for the
emergence of the concept or belief in question. I cannot fully go into the techni-
calities of Kant’s account of how this is so, but I canvass some general features of
the Kantian picture of aesthetic, preconceptual experience that are important as
a contrast for Benjamin’s and Adorno’s views on aesthetic form. Benjamin and
Adorno argue that the experience of form can interrupt and reconfigure belief for-
mation processes logically prior to their being “locked into” accepted understand-
ings of the social and political roles of the concepts in question. They hold, with
Kant, that art is experienced most properly as being conceptually indeterminate.
“Indeterminate” here does not mean entirely without structure or amorphous; it
means, rather, “undetermined” by concepts, where “determination” by a concept
would be to “fi x in meaning” in terms of the concept in question. And, thus, “pre-
conceptual” does not mean “prior to any conceptualization,” but rather “without
conceptual fi xity.” That is still vague, and I qualify it a bit later, but let it stand here
unqualified for expositional reasons.
For Kant, beliefs are results of predicative judgmental processes, most of which
are, psychologically speaking, implicit or unconscious, which require the unifica-
tion of two or more concepts. All experience of objects, in the broadest sense of
“object,” involves judgment; therefore, concepts figure at every level of experience
(or, at least, at every level of experience of which one can be aware). Kant differen-
tiates two basic “powers” of judgment: “determining” (bestimmende) and “reflect-
ing” (reflektierende) (Kant 1908: 180). Determining judgment subsumes particulars
under concepts already at hand. Some of these concepts may be quite precise, per-
haps even stipulated or defined, as one often finds in mathematics or the physical
sciences. Empirical concepts are not so exact; in fact, Kant denies that they can
be given a definition sensu stricto. Even so, they categorize the world in relatively
fi xed ways. By so doing, determining judgment orients one in the world by group-
ing things according to their shared properties. This orientation might be called
“instrumental,” not in any necessarily pejorative sense, but rather to mark the fact
that orienting oneself in the world conceptually is a precondition for discovering
regularity in the world and for making the rational predictions that underwrite
successful pragmatic interventions in the world. It is best to think of concepts,
then, as being on a continuum—no empirical concept is wholly determinate (it
can always be adjusted by subsequent judgment), and none is so amorphous that it
lacks all categorial force. Because judgments functionally relate concepts, they may
be thought of along similar lines.
Determining judgment takes empirical concepts at their face values and is
therefore not in the business of adapting such concepts, discarding old ones, or
forming them anew. Kant arrogates this later function to reflecting judgment.
When it reflects, judgment looks to itself and to imagination, to search out among
the multiplicity of experience unity where none is pregiven and to form new ways
of thinking together particulars. Reflecting is much closer to what Aristotle called
phronēsis (Aristotle 1986: 1104a7–10) and to what Kant calls Mutterwitz (Kant
1990: A133/B172), that is, a capacity to search for and discover affinities and dif-
ferences among particulars that provide the logical building blocks for concepts.
Kant argues that reflecting judgment has many important and even necessary uses,
but the one that concerns the question of the political salience of literary form is
aesthetic judgment. Aesthetic experience is “preconceptual” for Kant in the same
sense as reflective judgment is. It is a synthetic process in which particulars are
put in comparative relations without any one relation being determinative. This
is not nonconceptual experience because being conceptually indeterminate does
not mean being outside the ambit of concepts—any way of grouping things, even
if it is so highly defeasible or multivalenced that it can be called indeterminate, is
still indeterminate conception. The issue, to repeat, is conceptual pliancy, not the
lack of concepts altogether. The core idea here is that there are innumerable ways
to categorize any given array of particulars. Aesthetic experience is the experience
of, simultaneously, that multiplicity and its cognitive potential. Any deploying of
concepts aesthetically in a work of art will leave vastly underdetermined any spe-
cific ways that the work can be interpreted. This does not mean that “anything
goes”—there can be constraints that operate within interpretative plurality—but
works that promote this special sort of response must leave the plurality in place.
Adorno’s main idea, one that he takes over almost without alteration from
Benjamin’s early writings, is just this Kantian one—that is, that the experience of
aesthetic form does not require and, indeed, is defeated by too much conceptual
fi xity.4 The conceptual indeterminacy of the work of art will allow the inherent
particularity of things to precipitate out of its multivalence. Accordingly, the work
of art does not show the particularity qua particularity “nakedly”; it is rather that
the impossibility of definitive understanding of the work displays particularity by
that fact that there is always an aspect of the work that cannot be rendered, as yet,
generally. Again following Benjamin, Adorno calls the conceptual nexus that is
the work of art as it stands in relation to its interpretations a “constellation.” The
“idea” of the work, in contrast, is what always outstrips potential interpretation
and can only be approached conceptually asymptotically. Following Benjamin,
Adorno chooses the term “constellation” to denote the sort of systematicity that a
work of art possesses in order to emphasize the dependency of form upon human
interpretative intervention.5 There are no constellations of stars, if what one means
by that is natural groupings of them. There are stars that can be arranged in vari-
ous ways—for mythological purposes, in order to navigate, and so forth—but
these arrangements are human inventions, subject to change or reordering, given
different human needs or desires. To “constellate,” if that is not too precious a way
to put it, is to conceive of a group of particulars under a description, which, like the
idea of a constellation, wears on its sleeve the fact that it is not a fi xed, systematic
rendering of phenomena that tracks their inner natures.
This understanding of the fundamental ontology of the work of art allows for
two complementary ways to characterize the experience of aesthetic form relative
to concepts. The first I have already stressed: works are preconceptual and bases
for potential coeval interpretations. That is, works are preconceptual because their
use of concepts reflects, at a conceptual level, protoconceptual indeterminacy and
multiple interpretability. One brings one’s prior experience to a work and, if it is
“serious” art, the work transforms that experience by re-presenting those concepts
“prismatically,” that is, in new contexts or with new connotations that encour-
age one to question the content of the concept in question, as well as the way the
concept might figure in emergent alternative ways of thinking. A second way to
gloss the relevance of concepts to aesthetic experience is to say that such expe-
rience is “superconceptual.” Because there are so many ways to conceptualize a
work of art, none of which can lay claim to the sort of verification native to more
fi xed forms of conceptualization, one might say that the work of art presents an
excess of meaning: works of art are works in which the base-level requirements of
generic conceptualization are so exceeded that their effect is due to this fact, that
is, that they exceed run-of-the-mill conceptualization. Calling aesthetic experi-
ence superconceptual may sound like it is at odds with aesthetic experience being
“preconceptual,” but it is not. As long as one does not make the error of identifying
preconceptual with nonsynthetic or entirely noncategorical experience, the two
formulations amount to the same thing: aesthetic experience of form is experience
of the irreducibility of the aesthetic object to any single category.
Benjamin and Adorno’s candidate for the base preconceptual state in terms of
which aesthetic experience has implications for belief formation and revision—
“mimesis”—is quite different from Kant’s. And their analysis of the structure of
modern art is also a radical departure or, perhaps better, a radical reworking of the
idea of organic form—or, even more classically, unity in multiplicity—that lies at
the base of Kant’s account of beautiful art. Kant identifies a number of synthetic
processes short of full conception that allow for similarity to be registered subjec-
tively. One thing that unites these various processes is the idea that subjective cog-
nitive “labor” on what is given to synthesis proceeds according to the demands
of form and not of what is formed. Matter is responsive to synthesis and not the
other way around. For Kant, these base states, from which fully conceptual states
evolve, are constructive and minimally reflective, that is, such states are always
quasi judgmental. For Adorno, however, basic human orientation in the world of
objects is much more reactive and not representational. And, in that sense, mime-
sis is only qualifiably a type of “imitation” (1970–86, 7: 109). Adorno conceives of
mimesis at its early stages somatically, and he stresses a continuum between this
capacity on the part of other animals and humans. In particular, here following
Benjamin, Adorno finds such a capacity at work in children’s play make-believe.6
Humans in the first instance respond to environments in terms dictated by what
are to become objects for them. Encountering a thing as an object presupposes
having partly withdrawn from one’s immersion in the world. In virtue of mime-
sis, a subject differentiates herself from an object by attempting to form itself
according to the form of the object (1970–86, 7: 169; see also 1972–86, 2.1: 204–13).
The cause for this minimal distancing is self-preservation; mimesis is thus a kind
of cognitive camouflage in which an encounter with “an other” is neutralized by
submitting oneself to it by becoming more like it.7 Mimesis is also invested with
conative as well as cognitive aspects. As mimesis becomes more complicated and
evolves under social and natural pressures into determining judgment, the cog-
nitive dimension gains the upper hand. But the conative dimension—what one
might call the expressive rather than the representational dimension of mime-
sis—is never lost altogether. There are perhaps senses in which mimesis at this
base level is intuitional, but it is, nevertheless, rational. It is precisely because of
its inherent rationality that Adorno can hold that mimesis is what makes art a
unique form of “cognition” (1970–86, 7: 88). The idea that intuition itself is ratio-
nal is an inheritance from late-nineteenth-century neo-Kantianism, many forms
of which were familiar to Adorno (see Rush 2004).
Adorno does not, at least in his better moments, think of mimesis entirely
atavistically. Within this state one has one’s most immediate experience of the
particularity of the thing, although that state is still mediated, as it were, by the
minimal distance required for the initial reaction of self-preservation. Even base-
level mimetic mediation can be social and is at least incipiently “instrumental.” It
is not supposed to be a pristine, unfraught relation to things. But the fact remains
that, for Adorno, what I am calling base-level mimesis is the closest one comes to
encountering things with minimal human cognitive overlay. That said, mimesis is
also not atavistic for Adorno because it is not paradisaical; that is, mimesis is not
an irrational Eden that one might work oneself back to by stripping away concep-
tual thought, and once that is done (if it could be done), all would be well. While
mimesis is minimally invasive in relation to a thing’s particularity, it is also the
beginning of the cognitive control that undercuts an experience of particularity.
So, in some moments of utopian speculation, thinkers like Adorno will not so much
yearn for a return to Edenic or infantile mimesis as much as wish mimesis had
never taken place at all. Synthetic subjective processes and concepts proper enter
at a later cognitive stage where, in a compensatory moment, the subject is in a posi-
tion to reinterpret the distance resulting from the initial differentiation between
subject and object in terms that allow for more instrumental control of the thing at
hand in terms of categories. But—and this is crucial for Adorno—concepts always
contain within them traces of the prior noncategorial, noninstrumental mimesis.
This is Adorno’s version of Kant’s claim that art always outstrips actual conceptu-
alization, here broadened to an assertion about all things. Aesthetic form preserves
this balance between concept and mimesis at the conceptual level; Adorno is even
more intent on not falling into noncognitivism in art than is Benjamin. This is the
epistemological basis for Adorno’s claim that art can engage audiences without
conceptual “hardening” in order to suggest other ways to understand a given array
of phenomena conceptually. This is the way that experience of aesthetic form is
more true to the particulars, not because it affords an immediate window upon
things beyond description, but because it allows one to experience a thing in terms
of its being a possible object of reexperience.
The status of mimesis vis-à-vis art is oddly two-faced. On the one hand, as
the core of human responses to things “other,” it is both alienating and the staple
for technology and other instrumental orientations in the world. To that extent,
mimesis is not something ulterior to instrumental or “identity” thinking that
can be developed artistically into a way to avoid instrumental thought. It is the
problem, not the cure. Max Horkheimer seems especially to have registered this
“negative” element of mimesis, writing that the struggle for freedom was the, in
some sense, impossible task of becoming nonmimetic8 (1974: 115–16), and Herbert
Marcuse (1978: 47), at the polar extreme, urges that freedom is id-like and “beyond
mimesis.” On the other hand, mimesis in its earlier stages is less instrumental than
its developed forms just because it has not undergone systematic socialization in
favor of “judgment.” In this way “childlike” or “primitive” mimesis preserves as
much of the particularity of the thing that is its object as is possible consistent with
a slight categorial distance from it. In this vein, mimesis holds open to the artist
ways of making objects that do not ask for univocal judgment.
Adorno’s debt to romanticism means that he does not think that one can dis-
cursively limn such a state. Rather, the “purely” mimetic is shown as a kind of
“shadow effect” of progressively modern art. It is the lag between “the new” in art
and its formal convention, appearing for but a moment before being assimilated
into instrumentally based art. Much like the Kantian category of “the sublime” or
the romantic one of “the absolute,” the mimetic is experienced as a residue of the
effect of a thing that has superseded definitive conceptualization. Art is the tension
between the conceptually indeterminate potential of mimesis and what Adorno
calls “spirit” (Geist), that is, socialized categorization. The way that this is so—the
cognitive structure in virtue of which that tension is present in the work—is a kind
of second-order, reflective representation of that potential. That is, the only way to
represent mimesis qua nonrepresentation at the conceptual level is to reconstruct
it conceptually by emphasizing what is most mimetic at the conceptual level—
that is, the radical underdetermination of the work by its possible interpretations
(1970–86, 6: 14). This is perhaps why Adorno rarely averts to the term “precon-
ceptual” to denote the mimetic component in an artwork. He prefers instead the
description “nonconceptual.” This word resonates historically with similar uses
in early German romanticism, for example, in Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel. But
the point of using “nonconceptual” instead of “preconceptual” is, presumably, to
make clear that nondetermining mimesis is present even after concepts have taken
hold. It is what concepts seek to exclude, which, ironically perhaps, is their own
enabling conditions.9
Having to add so many qualifications to the uses of the terms “preconceptual”
and “nonconceptual” may make one wonder why I retain the terms at all. The
main property of the states or processes to which those terms refer is the degree
of fi xity of conceptualization and not conceptualization tout court, so why not put
the point in terms of fi xity and pliancy within conceptualization? My answer has
expository and conceptual dimensions. On the expository side, Adorno and Kant
express their accounts in those terms, and it is important to track their language.
Second, and more important, retaining the terminology, with appropriate qualifi-
cation, captures that these states and processes are antecedent to more full-blown
“theoretical” uses of conceptual capacities, even though they need not eventuate in
those more articulated forms of experience. Deploying the standard terminology
helps to keep this structure front and center. This is especially important because,
according to Adorno, what is reflected in the sort of art that arrogates to “primary,”
conceptually indeterminate mimesis a central role is precisely the slippage between
lower and higher “levels” of conceptual fi xity.
III
As it stands, this account of mimesis may seem too ahistorical to be a view that
Adorno would embrace. But Adorno does not think that the reflection of some-
thing like “mimetic residue” in art is an attempt to graft onto discursive experi-
ence a soupçon of the nondiscursive that is not itself a product of socialization.
Perhaps in the case of the child, this might be so, but even there Adorno can see
through the Proustian gloaming in which Benjamin bathed his memories in his
Berliner Kindheit um 1900 (1938). Adorno is committed to the position that histori-
cal and cultural constraints impinge on even initial mimesis. Keeping this in mind
helps to explain why Adorno is overwhelmingly concerned to explicate the political
function of artistic form in terms of modernism. Modernism is the current state
of play in which Adorno writes. One must assess the continuing cognitive pros-
pects for art, including its political wherewithal, against this background. Adorno
is extraordinarily pessimistic about the prospect of art or anything else telling one
the way the world affirmatively should be. This attitude is rooted in Benjamin’s
messianic form of Marxism, which prohibits the idea that redemption of any sort,
political or otherwise, can be achieved in the secular sphere.
History for Benjamin is a squalid accretion of suffering that itself cannot yield
reconciliation; it can, however, in its very morbidity express a potential kind of
salvation apart from history. History does this by consisting in social products—
for example, artwork—that hammer home the abject baseness of the secular. This
is why Benjamin prizes the neglected genre of the Baroque Trauerspiel. Drama in
this tradition is not important because it is “great”; both Benjamin and Adorno
grant that no modern art can really compare in greatness to Homer, Dante, or
Shakespeare. Rather, such art is important art because it is banal. The Trauerspiel is
such a hollow stand-in for real ethical or religious value that it provides a powerful
negative indicator of how unthinkable salvation is in history and of a barely imag-
ined possibility that profane salvation is not the only salvation there is. Allegorical
works such as these deploy correspondences between finite and infinite realms
that are, unlike symbolic works, fungible. This fact underlines the utter, profane
distance at which this world stands from any world suitable to human freedom.
Modern art, for Benjamin, therefore, functions negatively. It displays in its form
the ruination and fragmentation of the world and is itself, since part of the world,
a ruin. But the work of art, now understood as itself a formal fragment, also has a
positive function. In the world of shard-signs of the holy that admit many interpre-
tations just because humans are too distanced from unsullied original particulars
to be able to reconstruct their Adamic “names,” the fact that works are multivalent
can be marshaled in order to achieve a second-best reconstituted meaning for art
and society. Somewhat confusingly, since he has just claimed both that it is impos-
sible to redeem oneself in a secular world and, thus, one would suppose, in art,
Benjamin calls this sort of criticism “redemptive.” What he means, however, is not
that criticism adds to the fragmented work some extra component that vaults it
into the realm of nonfragmentary social product. Rather, interpretation is a mat-
ter of the conceptual dismantling of what is left of the semblance of unity in the
work. Criticism is then a process of decomposition that “redeems” the work as
the ruin that it is. In doing so, one not only shows that work to be the fragment
that it is and the society that it is expressive of as equally disjoint, but also partly
reconstitutes the work in a particular way. Because any work of art, perhaps more
than other cultural products, will bear traces of its original particularism no mat-
ter how bankrupt it has become, interpretation of the work, if pushed far enough,
will limn meanings of the work that would be repressed both by the instrumental
conditions under which the work was produced and by standard modes of instru-
mentalized criticism.
The question naturally becomes: What is “enough”? Benjamin favors an
almost unbridled interpretative scope, under the view that the more outlandish an
interpretation may seem, such an interpretation, by juxtaposing itself starkly with
the accepted status quo understanding of the work, will liberate new meanings
of the work. Adorno would come to have doubts about this view of the scope of
permissible criticism; it seemed to him to leave no room open for judgment of art.
Adorno nevertheless accepts the basic idea that criticism and art go hand in hand
as reciprocally reinforcing components in the modern experience of art, where
that mutual reinforcement is not meant to shore up the idea of stable aesthetic
form but is rather set upon making aesthetic form problematic while retaining the
idea that form is indispensable. For some Marxist critics, literature can seem to
have a merely symptomatic value: contradiction in the text is emblematic of larger
cultural forces and thus valuable as data for social theory, but is not valuable as art.
This is just another way of saying that, for many Marxist critics, the category of
“the aesthetic” is essentially bourgeois. In contrast, Benjamin and Adorno do not
subject the idea of aesthetic form to criticism in order to dispense with it. They
think that the critique of aesthetic form must be immanent. This means (1) that
the idea of form cannot be dismissed as a potential vehicle for freedom and (2) that
the social meanings of artistic form must be explicated in terms of the problem of
form itself.
IV
The term “content” is often used in everyday discussions about art, as well as in the
philosophy of art, to denote something like “thematic” or “narrative” elements in the
work of art. This is the way I have been using this concept thus far. This does not rule
out that there might be formal elements of art that constitutively relate to contentful
elements. Indeed, it is probably impossible to make a bright-line test for a division
between such elements, but the distinction surely is possible between, for example,
a fictional event of Buck Mulligan shaving (story-content) and the way Joyce inter-
weaves this episode with the rest of Ulysses (narrative form). Adorno’s terminology
does not track this distinction very precisely, and unless one is careful to make some
distinctions between different senses in which art has content for him, the way he
deals with issues of the relation of form, content, and politics will be lost.
Adorno is perfectly willing to use the term “content” (Inhalt) to refer to the-
matic content or the political “message” of a work. But, if he were a bit more sensitive
to everyday usage, he would stress more than he does that “content” in this sense is
but a kind of content for him or, better yet, a particular way that content is present
in a work. At a deeper philosophical level, Adorno deploys the concept of content
to refer to whatever flows into the work via the artist from the world. In many ways
this is a terribly inexact formulation, but the concept of content for Adorno’s aes-
thetic theory is so basic that it is hard to be more precise. Perhaps a slightly better
way to attempt to come to grips with it is to list the sorts of matter that can make up
content: social surroundings, biography, relation to prior art history, unconscious
experiences, involuntary memories, and so forth. In effect, content is one of two
main components of mimesis in art. It is the unruly and conceptually outstripping
expression of experience by means of art. The other element of mimesis is form. It
is the way in which content hangs together in the work, however precarious (and
Adorno thinks that all art worth the name is somewhat precarious in this way).
Form is not supposed to be a subjective mental contribution to art, as it would be,
in a special sense, for Kant. It is rather whatever unity is brought to content through
the artist’s intervention. Form, too, is social; artists don’t operate as creative surds
for Adorno. Forming is a human act that has a history, and this history is the basis
for the history of formal aesthetics. So, content and form are dialectically related in
this way. The tension that results from their interrelation is also what Adorno calls
its “content” (Gehalt). It is this second sense of “content” that is closer to the every-
day use of the term in connection with art for him.10 But it is still not coextensive
with it. “Content” here means “dialectical content,” which is a very abstract way to
talk about the general structure of any work of art. Gehalt is the work as it holds
together a certain volatile relation of the uptake of the artist (Form) with a certain
mimetic “content.” This radically underdetermines possible “content” of particular
works, that is, their themes. To repeat: there are three distinct senses of content
relevant to discussion of Adorno’s philosophy of art:
(A) Mimetic content (Inhalt)—what of the world the artist, in her art,
receives in her making of the art
(B) Dialectical content (Gehalt)—what the artist does in that making, that
is, how that making is hers
(C) Thematic content (Inhalt)—what “happens” in the work, what the work
or the artist “says,” and so forth11
Adorno cannot consider (A) and (B), that is, mimetic or dialectical content, to
be problematic counterparts to form, since there must be “content” of a work in
order for there to be a work at all. It is the relation of form to (C), that is, thematic
content, that is at issue.
Given this rehearsal of Benjamin and Adorno’s main claims concerning the
ontology of the work of art, the standing importance of the category of aesthetic
form and the role of criticism in engaging that form, how does the experience of
the artistic form of truly modern literary works amount to political criticism? Here
Benjamin and Adorno diverge. Benjamin holds that the commodity form can be
harnessed to produce politically critical art and, in some ways, may even be tailor-
made for that purpose. Commodity form is already divorced from inherent value.
While Benjamin sided with Bertolt Brecht on the issue of whether explicitly politi-
cal art is revolutionary, Adorno never abandoned the dichotomy between artifact
and commodity. This is another way of saying that “autonomy” is an important
category in the philosophy of art for Adorno, whereas for Benjamin it is not.
Adorno charts the progression of modern form-reflective works in terms of
two related arcs: (1) in terms of continued innovations in self-reflective form that
are disorienting to the status quo, and (2) in terms of an increasingly shrinking
margin of “the new” from which such innovation can be drawn. As late capitalism
becomes even more efficient, a good part of its efficiency consists in the capac-
ity to appropriate and reintegrate what is new into what is expected, thereby rob-
bing what were once innovations of whatever aesthetic and political potential they
might have once had. Adorno holds that the lapsed time between true innovative
art and its rendering into ersatz commodity versions of “the new” is nearing zero,
and he is openly concerned with the available resources for true formal innovation,
as well as about the production of illusory versions of innovation (e.g., “indepen-
dent film,” now entrenched as a genre concept and marketing vehicle).
Adorno claims that it is aesthetic form that registers and expresses the contra-
dictions of late bourgeois modern life with heightened impact. Dickensian preach-
iness or Orwellian hectoring is not as effective a device for changing political
outlook as is the fractured musical undertow of a late modern lyric. For Adorno,
the formal properties of the modern artwork are under the same social pressures
as its content. The technical formal devices that Joyce deploys in Ulysses are prod-
ucts of social forces just as much as are his characterization of Molly and his use
of myth as a framing device for the novel. Now, on the face of it, there would not
seem to be a problem with insisting that a work of art (1) have political content and
(2) revitalize the imagination in the way Adorno takes the experience of avant-
garde literary form to enable. Nor is it any argument against explicitly engaged
literature that formal innovation is the best vehicle for aesthetic inclusion into
political belief, unless, that is, one holds that explicitly engaged content nullifies or
blunts the formal impact on belief. Works might do best on this score when they
push formal boundaries and upset general formal expectations, but they might
usefully supplement this with political themes. What, precisely, is Adorno’s objec-
tion to “engaged” art (1965, 3: 109–35; 1970,-86 11: 409–30)?
The political import of Adorno’s conception of aesthetic form depends on the
relationship he holds form to have with the emergence of concepts and beliefs. Art
of any period reflects both formally and as a matter of content the conventions of its
day. This does not mean that art merely represents such conventions as a matter of
“superstructure,” as some more traditional Marxist critics held. Rather, art expresses
these conventions and thus is a base constituent of how humans understand their
social being at different points in history. Much, if not most, art is highly conven-
tional. If it is highly conventional, art can suffer from the same conceptual fi xity
that hamstrings the political potential of instrumental thinking. The structure of
conventional art, that is, precludes the kind of “open texture” that would implicate
imaginative and interpretative encounters with it, which encounters might open
up new ways to think about conventional social life. While all art has some level of
conceptual fi xity, and thus begins to work within conventional modes of artistic
production and expression, only art that transforms those conventions has pro-
gressive political potential. For Adorno, “serious” art effects this transformation by
breaking down conceptual fi xity while remaining attentive to it. But even serious
art does not offer determinate political answers. Prima facie, this may seem like
pretty weak tea; the political effect of art via its form is very indirect and ephem-
eral. Although there is a temptation either to deny the indirectness or to dismiss the
political effect of form as minimal at best, the temptation should be resisted—at
least it should be resisted as a temptation, for Adorno’s point is that the political
effect of serious art in virtue of its form is indirect and the effect may also be quite
difficult to pin down in individual cases. But that is the nature of the phenomenon
and is not particularly a problem—that is, it is not a problem unless one expected a
more direct and directly traceable political effect from literary form. Adorno’s view,
however, is that it is wrong to expect that. It is, after all, art that is in question, not
a bunch of political arguments. Adorno’s analysis of just this point—of the indirect
and negatively critical nature of the transformation of political concepts and beliefs
through formally innovative literature—is wed to his discussion of the role that
“truly” modern works play in preserving art’s critical edge.
V
For Adorno, modern literature truly begins with Charles Baudelaire. Following a
line established in Benjamin’s essay “Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire” (1972–89,
1.1: 605–54), Adorno celebrates the author of Tableaux parisiens as a thoroughly
social poet, who is perhaps the fi rst writer to be in a position to register formally a
uniquely modern alienation, one that is torn between the extremes of the illusory
unity of bourgeois life and its disintegration (1961, 2: 162; 1970–86, 11: 260). Samuel
Beckett is the culmination and state of the art in expressing by aesthetic indirec-
tion how far this core modern experience has “progressed” (1961, 2: 188–236; 1970–
86, 11: 281–321). Adorno places great stake in the stuttering near-speechlessness of
characters in works like Fin de partie. Even more important to him, however, is
the character of hope in the face of hopelessness that he alleges fi nds unparalleled
expression in much of Beckett’s work.
Adorno’s defense of the political potential of aesthetic form is honed against
two main adversaries, both of whom at one time Adorno counted among his intel-
lectual allies. The most important case is György Lukács. Two of Lukács’s early
works, The Theory of the Novel (1920), written while he was still an adherent of
Wilhelm Dilthey, and the collection of essays History and Class Consciousness
(1923), the book that virtually invented humanistic Marxism, were seminal for
Adorno. Lukács had in the meantime renounced his earlier work and embraced
more materialistic forms of Marxism, reformulating in the bargain his philosophy
of art along Soviet party lines. There will likely always be a difference of opinion
about the degree to which Lukács actually embraced these views, but no matter
what sort of allowances are made on his behalf, it is difficult to read the prefaces to
many of his works collected in Werke and not cringe. It was certainly difficult for
Adorno. But Adorno’s reactions to later Lukács go well beyond disappointment in
a heroic figure from his youth. Lukács’s views are seriously misguided, according
to Adorno, precisely because they extolled the revolutionary potential of literary
content over modernist form.
Neither Adorno nor Lukács holds that there is any promise for politically pro-
gressive art in adapting the structure of commodity objects in artistic ways. Both
are also quite wary of the idea that socialist revolution could emerge from the pro-
letariat. Art, if it is to be politically progressive, must hold itself above both com-
modity form and common taste. Lukács’s much cited reproach that Adorno had
taken extended residence in the “Grand Hotel Abgrund,” from whence could take
rarified, sublime enjoyment in the shipwreck of modern times, is not a scolding
administered from a “man of the people” to an aesthete (Lukács 1971: 16). It is

rather a charge from mandarin to mandarin concerning the question of the stand-
ing of the category of aesthetic form. The immediate provocation for Adorno’s
negative assessment was a series of lectures Lukács gave in 1956 on the subject of
the “contemporary significance of critical realism” (1971:4, 457ff.)12 Lukács argues
that literary modernism is nothing but an extension of late capitalism that shrinks
from true critique back into a shell of self-implicating “idealistic” subjectivity. The
central progressive strand of literature is found instead in “realism.” Realism in
this sense is not naturalism—which Lukács holds merely reflects the surface deg-
radation of modern social life—but rather a depiction of the forces behind that
degradation in terms of the narrative content of the work. For Lukács, bourgeois
literature can be realistic and critical to a degree, which accounts for his endorse-
ment of the critical potential in a writer like Honoré de Balzac, who is for Lukács a
kind of nonmelancholic Giacomo Leopardi—a royalist who, nonetheless, witnesses
with resignation the implacable passing away of the nobility. It is the haut bourgeois
novelist, Thomas Mann, who is the terminus ad quem of Lukács’s tale of critical
realism. Mann, who had nontrivial connections to both Lukács and Adorno,13 is
important because he is the same kind of transitional writer, in this case marking
time between the ultracultured Großbürgertum of Wilhelminian Germany and the
advent of its dissolution. Mann’s Buddenbrooks (1901) and, especially, the novella
Tonio Kröger (1903) thus are cardinal instances of the sort of realism that Lukács
has in mind. An author like Franz Kafka, crucial for both Adorno and Benjamin, is
lumped into the category of “regressive irrationalism” that Lukács further develops
in his Destruction of Reason.14 This emphasis on critical realism might have been
enough to set Adorno’s formalist teeth on edge, but it must have been Lukács’s
insistence that what he calls “socialist realism” is the paramount type of politically
progressive literature that most exercised him. Lukács cites Maxim Gorky as the
key figure here.15 Socialist realism builds into itself a historically accurate portrayal
of life in capitalism combined with a basic optimism for univocal politically pro-
gressive change and exhortation to such change. Embracing such literature reflects
Lukács’s basic view that Hegel was correct that one can under the right circum-
stances fully specify and realize the requirements for freedom. Put more abstractly,
Lukács holds that “totality” (Totalität) is an indispensible critical concept. Adorno
rejects this outright. Any “totalizing” literature is for him stipulative, propagan-
distic, and, in effect, regressive. Moreover, such literature is easily reabsorbed by
the cultural status quo. This is not just because the message of such literature can
be soft sold or otherwise contorted to the aims of mass culture, although Adorno
no doubt holds that as true. Rather, such works are dangerously malleable because
they can be ignored dialectically. Unlike progressive form, which operates at much
more incursive preconceptual levels and much more immanently, directly the-
matic works are generally superficial and foreordained to operate at the margins
of social change.
A second target of Adorno’s claim that explicitly political content spoils the
political impact of literature is Brecht. Brecht’s plays promote a certain relationship
between actors, play, and audience. Classically, at least if one takes the dramatic
theory of Aristotle, A. W. Schlegel, and Friedrich Schiller to be “classical,” drama
has its effect on an audience either by arousing certain emotions in them or in
virtue of a metaphysical effect provided by the interplay between the knowledge
that the action is fictional and the discounting of that knowledge in “identifying”
with aspects of the play.16 Brecht contrasts this “dramatic” approach with his own
“epic” theater.17 The Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt, though hardly practiced univo-
cally across his many works, destroys this delicate balance, which Brecht treats as
indicative of traditional dramatic art. The audience is meant to realize starkly that
the action on the stage is real, and this is brought about by a number of techniques.
Some have to do with literary structure, for example, plot interruptions (e.g., in
Die Elefantenkalb (1926), where the actors walk offstage and order drinks), mon-
tage effects, direct address (e.g., offstage narration in Der kaukasische Kreidekreis
(1944), opening address to the audience in Die Mutter (1931), Die Dreigroschenoper
(1928) and other plays, etc.). Others involve acting technique, for example, deliver-
ing dialogue as reportage (Frau Yang in Der gute Mensch von Sezuan [1943]), use of
nonprofessional actors, and so on. And still others have to do with stagecraft; for
example, in the early days of the Berliner Ensemble, Brecht required stage lighting
to be full up, even directing that the apparatus be visible to the spectator.
While some of his works might be classified as propagandistic and even “realis-
tic” in Lukács’s sense of the term,18 most of Brecht’s theater is not jam-packed with
political tirade. From his theoretical writings, it is fairly clear that Brecht denies
that political messages, indirectly delivered from playwright to audience, are goals
of his theater. The aim of Brechtian theater seems to be, rather, getting people to
reflect critically by experiencing the action of the play as the characters experience
it, that is, self-consciously.19 That is—and this is a feature of Brecht’s practice that,
curiously, often goes unremarked—epic theater invites a kind of identification of
the audience with the characters (or even a kind of empathy with them), but this
identification is not passive, because the characters whose experience the audience
is meant to share are already at a critical remove from the narrative events of the
play. So, the alienation effect is not or, at least, not always promoted by prohibiting
all types of identification or affective response on the part of the audience.
So, why is Brecht’s theater insufficiently formal for Adorno? The commonplace
that Brecht put aesthetic faith in the proletariat while Adorno did not does not go
very far in explaining the source of Adorno’s complaint. Nor does the formalism/
antiformalism debate illuminate the scene, as it did in the case of Lukács. What
Benjamin, for instance, saw as revolutionary about Brecht’s theater was precisely
its formal innovation. Adorno does not disagree that Brecht’s concerns are formal.
One aspect of the problem from Adorno’s perspective is that the result of Brecht’s
formal innovation, if it works at all (and Adorno believes it sometimes does not
work), only manipulates belief intellectually. Brecht’s work is simply not “aesthetic.”
But this is not all. Adorno’s overall aesthetic project is to allow nonintellectual
determinants to mingle with intellectual components of world-views without laps-
ing into the dreaded “irrationalism,” which would argue for formative, intuitional,
and univocal aesthetic effect in political life that is not subject to rational critique.
Brecht’s formalism is not only overintellectual, but also overdeterminate. Only if
form leaves content radically underdetermined does art produce interpretation,
which is, in many ways, the basic epistemological category for Adorno. Autono-
mous art for Adorno is not art that intends to change political belief in one way or
another. It is essentially negative—it shows the tension between the unity of soci-
ety as it is, as that is expressed in the work in terms of form (and content) and the
form barely being able to contain the disintegration of that world. Like Socrates’
daimonion, autonomous art does not say “do this or that,” but rather cautions sim-
ply “not this” (Apology, 1903: 31d). As Adorno puts it, perhaps a bit dramatically,
artwork shoulders the “burden of wordlessly asserting what is barred to politics”
(1965, 3: 135; 1970–86, 11: 430).
VI
The idea that there is an important connection between formal aesthetic prop-
erties of art and political belief merits further investigation. More precisely, the
claim that art is uniquely political because it is useless deserves philosophical
attention. This idea runs contrary to both the typical claims of formalism (i.e., art,
in its highest vocation, is useless and therefore not political) and didactism (art in
its highest vocation is useful and useful politically). Up to this point, Adorno has
developed most systematically these ideas, but his formulation of the problem is in
many ways idiomatic. As is appropriate whenever one encounters a treatment of a
particular issue that is embedded in a heavily systematic philosophical framework,
it is worth asking what one can take away from Adorno’s account by abstract-
ing from technical questions involved in the interpretation of his overall aesthetic
theory. I cannot undertake that task here; I have tried merely to clarify and recon-
struct some of Benjamin’s and Adorno’s basic thoughts in nontechnical ways as a
preface to such work. I can indicate, however, three areas for further consideration.
Adorno and Benjamin are interested in how art enters into the process of emerging
order, political among other sorts. One aspect of Adorno’s account that may seem
unsatisfactory is that he offers no independent argument for the conclusion that
the presence of express political content necessarily defeats the power of aesthetic
form to trigger political imagination, even if that power is, in some way, superior
to the power of express political content to effect such change.
In my view, Adorno’s most important insights survive this failure. Nothing
conceptual hangs on what I have called the “exclusionary claim.” What requires
discussion, then, is how formal aesthetic imagination can be politically relevant
in works that may or may not also have political content. Awareness of the dan-
ger of conceptual fi xity (i.e., “identity thinking”) is one thing, but it must be bal-
anced critically against a stifling immersion of art into extravagant subliminalism.
Second, even if one grants that formal innovation can allow for revision of political
belief by allowing for alternative conceptions of the political at basal conceptual
levels, there is nothing about formal innovation in itself that guarantees that such
changes will be changes for the better. Political conservatism, not to say fascism,
is well represented in the history of the avant-garde in Europe, for example, futur-
ism, the Georgekreis, Pound, and Eliot. Perhaps ironically, this is especially true
of forms of modern avant-gardism that share Benjamin and Adorno’s substantial
connections with romanticism. Reactionary primitivism is just as much in need of
liberated imagination as is socialism. Something more has to be added to the idea
of aesthetic innovation—something that gives it a progressive direction—even if,
like Adorno, one wishes to be very careful about prescribing particular reforms
through art. For Adorno, this is achieved by application of a suitably “humanized”
Marx; that may be a very good resource indeed. But the issue of the formal impact
of art on politics will be a good deal more interesting philosophically if Adorno’s
own brand of Marxism is not a prerequisite to development of the idea. Third, one
will have to decide whether the issue of the formal political impact of art requires
accepting something like a standing role for a generally modernist conception of
the significance of art. The challenge comes directly from Adorno’s pessimistic
account of the possibility of continued innovations in the face of ever-shrinking
margins of what can count as “new”—one might call this the “problem of disap-
pearing form.” Is Adorno more-or-less correct about this or not? Is most mass art
not “autonomous”? And should that matter?
To the analytically minded philosopher of art, the issue of cognitive form and
especially the complex and speculative treatment that Adorno gives it, may seem
like quite a lot to take on board. This is entirely understandable, but if one is to
take the idea that the formal elements of art may be a source for its political effect,
as Plato certainly appreciated, one will have to have an account in place of art’s
general cognitive form. Moreover, one will have to take seriously, or at least seri-
ously investigate, claims that some art has a unique cognitive force that is not rule-
governed that is proper to it, and perhaps to it alone. This need not commit one to
essentialism about art, or even about “serious” art. Art, and literature, no doubt
plays many roles. But, it may commit one to the position that some literature has
important political ramifications that are passed over if the literature in question
is not formally innovative. And, no matter how one precisely comes down on the
question of the political potential of aesthetic form, at some point complexity is
likely to take hold and force one’s speculative hand.
NOTES
Many thanks to Richard Eldridge, Lydia Goehr, and Gregg Horowitz for their very
helpful comments on an earlier version of this chapter.
1. In this chapter, I use the terms “modern” and “modernism” roughly in the
way that literary theorists use it, i.e., to refer to a period in the history of literature and
its criticism that begins in the mid-nineteenth century after romanticism. I am not
using the term as it is used in the history of philosophy, where the seventeenth-century
Descartes would count as “modern,” or as historians of science use the term to refer to
Galileo and Bacon.
2. In this chapter, I use the terms “form” and “aesthetic form” interchangeably.
This should not be taken to commit me to the idea that “aesthetic” means “perceptual.”
3. This, of course, also tracks the meaning of the Greek word “ aisqhtika¢,” from
which the term “aesthetics” is formed.
4. See Buck-Morss 1977: chap. 1 for a good account of Benjamin’s early influence on
Adorno.
5. Adorno tends to understand the term “idea” in a more Kantian way than does
Benjamin.
6. For Benjamin’s views, see 1972–89, 2.1: 210–13. Halliwell 2002: 178–79 and
nn. 4–5 points out that Aristotle had a similar understanding, a point that is not often
appreciated.
7. Compare Nietzsche’s remarks in Die fröhliche Wissenschaft §§ 354–55, 1873:
590–95. What I mean by “self-preservation” here is obviously not preservation of oneself
as a self. The idea of a discrete self is a product of the distance, not its cause. I also do
not mean “self-preservation” in the much more conceptually developed sense that Max
Horkheimer and Adorno think is basic to various forms of modern moral philosophy
(see Horkheimer and Adorno 1969: 113ff). All I mean by “self-preservation” here is
the minimal idea that humans, once buffeted by natural forces in ways that cause
them to recoil from sensual immediacy, overcome that dislocation at first by somatic
reassimilation. One might canvas the same idea in terms of the concept “suffering,” as
Horkheimer sometimes does.
8. Adorno certainly allowed that certain other base-level human aspects of human
experience are nonmimetic, nonreactively somatic, but this category does not play a
major role in his aesthetic theory.
9. This is why “conceptual art” need pose no barrier as a matter of principle for
Adorno (although there may be other reasons for rejecting some of it).
10. It is difficult to capture the difference in force in German of the words Inhalt and
Gehalt. Ordinarily, they both mean simply content. But it might be argued that Inhalt
is a “container” term that refers to what is held inside a structure. Gehalt, it might also
be argued, is an “orientation” term that refers to the way a thing stands in relation to its
environment, i.e., how a thing “holds forth.”
11. In his writings on music, Adorno contrasts form with “material” (Material
or Stoff ) (see Paddison 1993: 149–52). This brings up the question of whether material
is “content” in one or more of the three senses I have distinguished or whether it is a
fourth category of content. “Material” means something like “prior musical practice,”
and “form” means the inventing, on the basis of that past practice, of novel musical
expressions.
12. The lectures were first published in 1957 as Wider den mißverstandenen
Realismus. Lukács had engaged in a similar debate over expressionism with
Ernst Bloch in the 1930s, which, Lukács characterizes, with a certain saturnine
resignation, as “something of a grotesque situation in which Ernst Bloch polemicized
in the name of The Theory of the Novel against the Marxist Georg Lukács” (Lukács
1971: 12).
13. It is well known that Mann consulted Adorno on technical musical points in
the preparation of Doktor Faustus (1947). But not even Adorno could claim a turn as
a character in a Mann novel. This Lukács might have done; he was the model for the
fanatical priest Naphta in Der Zauberberg (1924), who spouts pseudo-Nietzscheanisms,
challenges the humanist Settembrini to a duel, and, when the latter fires into the air,
shoots himself in petulant satisfaction of “the Will.” Of course, no one would want to
claim the honor of such a portrayal, and it seems that Lukács never recognized himself
(at least publically) in the portrait.
14. “Irrationalism” was something of a brickbat du jour back then; many critical
theorists, most prominently Horkheimer, also deploy it.
15. Russian literature, and especially the modern Russian novel, is a rather special
case for Lukács. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, for instance, is a figure who survives remarkably
intact in Lukács’s critical estimation from his early expressivism in Theorie des Romans
(1920) into his later systematic aesthetics. The polar opposite of Lukács in this sphere
would be the patrician Vladimir Nabokov, who had no time at all for Dostoyevsky and
for whom Nikolai Gogol was the measure.
16. Bentley 1946: 256–57 usefully points out the Wagnerian idea of the
Gesamtkunstwerk as a foil for Brecht. Put another way, Die Dreigroshenoper is “Oper” in
Wagner’s own sense of the term and not “Musik-Drama.”
17. For classic statements, see Brecht 1957: 13–28, 60–73. Adorno puts particular
emphasis on statements in what many consider Brecht’s main theoretical work,
“Kleines Organon für das Theater” (1957: 128–73). Adorno seems to have taken Brecht’s
theoretical works very seriously, demanding from them a good deal of philosophical
rigor and coherence. This is probably not the most promising way to approach
Brecht’s dramaturgy. Brecht was no philosopher and seems to have had a very healthy
appreciation of the “loose grain” of his ideas. He was primarily concerned to promote a
certain type of theatrical practice and not with theory as such. He can thus be excused
for his myopic understanding of Aristotle’s views on katharsis, for instance. What is
important for Brecht is the kind of general foil Aristotle can become for modern epic
theater, and selectivity of his reading of Aristotle is part of that “casting” decision. In
any event, episch is a good deal less genre-specific than the English “epic.” Das Epische
includes the novel and narrative poetry, as distinguished from lyric poetry and drama.
Much that Brecht means to flag by the distinction between “dramatic” and “epic” theater
simply is that the former is “dramatic” in the everyday sense of “exciting” or “arousing,”
while the later is not, allowing for distance and reflection.
18. I have in mind pieces like Die Maßnahme (1930) or Die Ausnahme und die Regel
(1937), written during Brecht’s time in Moscow. It is impossible to divide Brecht’s work
into chronological periods on the question of whether the plays are propagandistic.
The two above are fairly clear cases, I believe, but are written in the same years that one
finds some of Brecht’s more nondidactic works. Even a work as savaged on this score as
Die heilige Johanna der Schlachthöfe (1932) hovers complexly between didacticism and
alienation-effect. The best general rule in the periodization of Brecht’s theater is perhaps
to treat the plays up to Die Dreigroschenoper (1928) as “expressionistic” and thus in some
sense as nonepic and somewhat didactic. The didacticism bleeds over into Brecht’s work
from 1930 to 1945 in some plays, but not all. Work including and after Leben des Galilei
(1943) seems to instantiate Brecht’s ideal of epic theater most comprehensively.
19. Brecht was not entirely consistent in his views on the superiority of reflection over
affect. See, e.g., the remark: “ein schlechter zuschauer im theater: wer zu viele und zu genaue
meinungen über das hat, was auf ihn wirkt” (Brecht 1973: 797, lowercase nouns original).
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Index
Abrams, M. H. 167, 403–404, 417n8 Bakhtin, M. 115n3, 177n1, 266

Achebe, C. 323, 343n1, 487 Bakker, E. J. 135n2
Acknowledgment 72, 78, 82, 91, 189, 196, 209, Baldick, C. 293n1
216, 217, 218n12, 253–254, 261, 337, 339, 383, Baldwin, J. 483
481–483 Balanchine, G. 408
Adorno, T. W. 91n5, 200–201, 204, 208, 210–211, Balzac, H. de 176, 280–282, 287, 294n8, 510
213, 247–248, 252–253, 267n7, 298, 313, 317, Banfield, A. 305
498–513, 514n4, 514n5, 514n7–11, 515n13, 515n17 Barber, C. L. 96, 99, 101
Aeschylus 36, 400 Barth, J. 410, 497
Ahmad, A. 325–326 Barthelme, D. 410
Alain 190 Barthes, R. 164, 222, 226, 292, 376, 378–379, 391n10
Alcibiades 451 Bate, W. J. 42n28
Alexander, J. 88, 93n15 Bates, S. 417n9
Alexander, M. 65n2 Baudelaire, C. 45, 63, 64, 259, 266, 282–283, 423,
Allegory 51, 52, 505 431, 509
Allen, T.W. 41n12 Baumgarten, A. G. 498
Alpers, P. 120, 125, 136n5 Beardsley, M. 474
Altieri, C. 420, 437n1, 440n16 Beattie, A. 411
Anselm, St. 53, 66n14 Beckett, S. 5, 63, 96, 135n4, 183, 207, 210–215,
Aquinas, St. Thomas 57 388–389, 412, 509
Aristophanes 4, 22, 36, 48, 97, 99, 100, 102–105, Beistegui, M. de. 91n8
142–143, 149, 151–152 Belfiore, E. 76
Aristotle 6, 14, 35–40, 55, 56, 58, 59, 81, 82, 85, Bellow, S. 342
90–91, 119, 140, 151, 157n3, 175, 178n11, 181, 185, Benjamin, W. 91, 205, 217n4, 255, 264–266, 267n6,
358, 372, 377, 379, 380, 387–390, 390n9, 407, 380, 498–502, 504–507, 509, 512–513, 514n4–6
408, 414, 415, 416n5, 445, 452, 473, 486, 487, Bennett, A. 240
488, 511, 514n6, 515n17 Bentley, E. 515n16
Nichomachean Ethics 48, 64, 118, 371, 381, Benveniste, E. 390n8
390n2, 391n11, 399, 500 Berger, H., Jr. 125
Poetics 20–23, 33, 37–39, 48–49, 73–78, 97, 117, Bergson, H. 308
134, 135n1–2, 172, 176, 360–370, 373–374, 375, Berkeley, G. 139, 140, 182
383–386, 391n14, 395, 397–400 Bernabé, A. 41n5
Politics 454 Bernstein, J. M. 12, 169, 171, 177n7, 251–252, 267n4,
Arnold, M. 130–132 267n11, 268n15, 294n3
Ashcroft, B. 327 Bersani, L. 170
Attridge, D. 326 Bhabha, H. K. 324, -325, 327, 343n3
Auerbach, E. 223, 224, 393, 421 Birch, D. 195
Augustine, St. 51–52, 54, 180, 382–383 Blackwell, T. 40,
Austen, J. 175, 187, 304–305, 394 Blanchot, M. 263, 264, 268n13
Auster, P. 411 Bloch, E. 514n12
Austin, J. L. 182, 422, 430 Bloom, H. 42n29, 252, 413, 417n17
Autobiography 120, 124, 164, 173, 181–197, 333, 334 Blundell, M. W. 399
Autonomy 72, 165, 166, 186, 262, 319n3, 359, 374 Boehmer, E. 324
Of art, the aesthetic 200–201, 205, 208, 283, Bogan, T.V.F 45
292, 293, 409, 507 Boorman, J. 192
Bradley, A. C. 86, 87, 394
Bradley, F. H. 308
Bach, J. S. 248 Brand, D. 338–341
Bahri, D. 324, 344n8 Brandes, G. 283, 289, 291, 292, 295n22, 295n23
518 index
Branham, R. B. 157n3, 158n13, 158n15, 158n24, Comedy 141–144, 151, 157n3, 164
158n25, 159n28, 159n29, 159n35 Conrad, J. 174, 335, 371–372, 377, 378, 385, 487, 491
Brann, E. T. H. 349–350, 352, 357, 358, 359, 361, Conradi, P. 183–184
362, 364, 366 Coolidge, C. 215
Brecht, B. 290, 292, 294n15, 507, 510–512, Cooper, H. 125
515n17–19 Critchley, S. 211
Breed, B. W. 122 Croce, B. 19, 36
Bremer, J. M. 370–371 Cuddon, J. A. 293n1
Bremound, C. 378 Cullen, P. 129
Brentano, F. 308 Currie, G. 470
Bromwich, D. 492 Curtius, E. R. 47, 66n5
Brooks, P. 176, 306, 371, 376, 380, 381–382, 390n1
Browne, T. 274
Bruns, G. L. 215, 218n11 Dahlhaus, C. 266
Büchner, G. 87 Daleski, H. M. 294n17
Buck-Morss, S. 514n4 Damasio, A. 65n3
Burgess, J. S. 24 Dammann, R. M. J. 228, 239, 243
Burrow, C. 125 Dangarembga, T. 334
Buss, R. 287 Dante 40, 53–54, 505
Butler, J. 430 Danto, A. C. 421, 425–426, 428–429
Butor, M. 410 Darnton, R. 405, 417n10
Byatt, A. S 183, 196–197 Davidson, D. 415
Davies, M. 41n5
Davies, S. 475
Capitalism 6, 332, 421, 438n3, 487, 507, 510 Davis, T. 473
Carby, H. V. 331 Defoe, D. 173
Carlyle, T. 195, 417n8 DeLillo, D. 497
Carroll, N. 417n14, 477–478 de Man, P. 253
Cascardi, A. J. 165, 166 Depiera, M. 487
Caserio, R. 376 Derrida, J. 5, 217n6, 231, 414–416, 417n12, 417n20,
Castelvetro, L. 55 417n21, 430
Catharsis 74, 77–78, 81, 85, 117, 398, 515n17 Descartes, R. 83, 84, 85, 164–167, 175, 180, 182, 188,
Cavell, S. 72, 86, 98–99, 101, 102, 109, 112, 113, 149, 190–191, 201, 265, 267n10, 302–303, 305, 308,
158n16, 158n27, 211–216, 217n7, 218n9, 218n12, 415, 439n10
248, 249, 251, 256, 258, 260–261, 267n4, De Sena, J. 136n13
268n14, 414, 480, 482 Deutscher, I. 276
Disowning Knowledge 85, 86 Devereaux, M. 495n7
Pursuits of Happiness 96, 98–99, 100, 110–111, Dewey, J. 7, 414
417n16 Dickens, C. 163, 186, 192, 304–305, 487, 492, 508
Celan, P. 498 Dickinson, E. 365
Céline, L. -F. 496 Didion, J. 494n3
Cervantes, M. de 135, 163, 166–167, 170, 175, Diffey, T. J. 468
178n11, 497 Dilthey, W. 509
Cézanne, P. 439n13 Diogenes 144–152, 155–156, 158n17, 158n18, 158n20,
Chaplin, C. 96, 99–100, 144 158n25, 158n26, 158n27, 159n28
Character, characterization 6, 11, 20, 74– 75, 86, 109, Dirie, W. 333–334
119, 369–370 372, 385–387, 397–418, 452–461, 483 Doležal, L. 474
Chatman, S. 421 Doris, J. M. 389–390, 391n13, 391n15
Chaucer, G. 65–66n4 Dostoyevsky, F. 477, 515n15
Ch’ien, E. N.-M. 327 Douglas, M. 147–148, 153
Childers, J. 293n1 Doyle, Sir A. C. 186
Christie, A. 187, 411 Dryden, J. 141
Cingano, E. 42n32
Coetzee, J. M. 323, 327–330, 341–343
Cohen, T. 115n2, 147, 362, 477–478, 495n8 Eagleton, T. 322
Cole, P. 487 Eco, U. 147
Coleman, R. 122 Egan, M. 285
Coleridge, S. T. 60, 62, 274, 357–358, 384, 391n12 Eldridge, R. 42n34, 130, 243, 248, 267n4, 319n3,
Collingwood, R. G. 6–7, 9, 494 364, 374, 417n16, 477–478, 483, 492
index 519
Eliot, G. 281, 471 Gibson, J. 228, 239, 243, 482

Eliot, T. S. 63, 67n20, 136n13, 206, 244, 342, 402, Gide, A. 290, 291, 293n2, 319n1
487, 513 Girard, R. 135n3
Ellmann, R. 194n19 Gjesdal, K. 92n10
Emerson, R. W. 253–254, 259, 261, 263, 264 Godard, B. 336
Empson, W. 135n1 Godard, J.-L. 258–259, 260, 261,
Engell, J. 357, 358 Goethe, J. W. 59, 81, 152, 159n32, 289, 405
Epic 6, 8, 10–11, 19–42, 47, 134, 140–141, 163–164, Gogol, N. 171
169–170, 177n7, 396, 407 Goldberg, S. M. 40
Espmark, K. 287–288, 294n10, 294n12, 294n18 Golding, W. 192
Euripides 36, 90, 100–101, 229–230, 400, 462n10 Goldmann, L. 168
Gombrich, E. 421
Goncourt, E. 224
Fanon, F. 323, 324, 325 Goncourt, J. 224
Farah, N. 325 Goodman, N. 421
Farrell, J. 42n33 Gorky, M. 510
Faulkner, W. 207, 299, 306–307, 311, 315–317, 318n1, Goulet-Caze, M. O. 158n15, 158n21
475, 493 Graham, G. 477
Feldman, M. 252, 266n1 Graves, R. 462n8
Feminism 283, 330–32, 334, 344n5 Gray, S. 334–335
Ferguson, M. W. 66n8 Graziosi, B. 31, 41n21
Fichte, J. G. 203–204, 263–264, 265, 357 Greenblatt, S. 177n5
Fictionality 118, 120–121–124, 126–127, 130, Greene, R. 125
132, 133, 134–135, 135n2, 175, 185–188, Grene, D. 457
196–197, 226–231, 242, 244, 305–306, Grobman, N. R. 40
349–350, 359–362, 365, 370, 376, 383, Grundy, J. 136n6
393–395, 397, 404, 406, 407, 409–410, Guyer, P. 303–304
412–414, 446, 467–468, 471–472, 474,
475–476, 486–488, 490–492
Fielding, H. 157n6 Habermas, J. 214
Figuration 9, 12, 57–58, 427 Halliwell, S. 135n2, 514n6
Fish, S. 468 Hamann, J. G. 59
Flaubert, G. 171, 282–283, 487 Hamburger, M. 133, 136n13
Foley, J. M. 35 Hampshire, S. 58
Forcione, A. 178n11 Hamsun, K. 496
Ford, A. 135n2 Hanna, P. 232, 235
Ford, R. 393 Hardie, P. 122
Förster, E. 294n3 Hardy, T. 289, 290, 294n17
Foster, H. 438n3 Harold, J. 470
Foucault, M. 267n7 Harris, H. S. 80
Frank, M. 248 Harris, P. L. 360
Franken, A. 139 Harrison, B. 231–232, 235, 242, 477
Frede, M. 144 Hausman, C. 361
Freeland, C. A. 91n2 Hegel, G. W. F. 7–12, 14, 58, 61–62, 73, 74, 81–83, 85,
Freeman, D. C. 421 86, 90–91, 104, 163, 167, 168–170, 178n8, 251,
Frege, G. 226–227, 232, 239, 473–474, 475 265, 274, 275, 294n3, 387, 402–405, 410, 414,
Freud, S. 12, 147, 157n3, 158n22, 176, 306–307, 314, 415, 422, 510
318n1, 319n4, 319n5, 329n8, 379–382, 455–457, Heidegger, M. 64, 68n22, 103, 188–190, 191,
458, 459–460, 461, 462n9 193–195, 207, 218n10, 256, 261–262, 267n10,
Freudenberg, K. 157n2 268n13, 298–299, 308–309, 311, 320n9,
Frye, N. 92n11, 92n14, 96, 100, 101, 106–109 414, 415
Fuentes, C. 163 Heilman, R. B. 157n3
Heiserman, H. 163
Hejinian, L. 216–217, 218n10
Gadamer, H.-G. 66n7 Hemingway, E. 493
Gaita, R. 196 Henrich, D. 248
Gandhi, L. 324, Hentzi, G. 293n1
Gaut, B. 471, 475, Herder, J. G. 59, 83–84, 262
Genette, G. 342, 376 Herington, J. 37
520 index
Hesiod 27, 41n19n20, 47, 120, 121, 448, 450 The Critique of Judgment 9, 59–61, 201–203,
Heslin, P. J. 461n7 207, 251, 357–358, 410, 438n14, 499–500
Hesse, H. 319n1 The Critique of Pure Reason 174, 217n1, 365, 500
Heyse, P. 283–284, 285, 286, 287, 288, 289, 290 Kaufmann, W. 416n4
Hobbes, T. 84, 223, 227, 231, 234, 242, 262 Kearney, R. 357, 364, 365
Hoffman, P. 84 Keaton, B. 96
Hofmannsthal, H. von 458–459 Keats, J. 492
Hölderlin, F. 68n22, 274–276, 275–276, 294n3 Kermode, F. 374–376, 381, 385, 390n7
Hollander, R. 66n16 Kern, S. 301, 319n2
Homer 10–11, 20, 22, 24–40, 47, 119, 140, 278, 401, Keynes, J. M. 305
443–444, 446, 448–450, 454, 455, 505, Kierkegaard, S. 244, 299–300, 320n6, 404–405
Homelessness, Transcendental 7, 167–170, Kivy, P. 471–472, 475, 488
173–174, 178n8 Knight, C. A. 157n3
Horace 156 Knuuttila, S. 461n2
Horkheimer, M. 91n5, 503, 514n7, 515n14 Kompridis, N. 267n4, 267n9, 268n14
Hornblower, S. 398–399 Konstan, D. 157n5, 461n3
Howe, E. A. 133 Krell, D. 311
Huggan, G. 329, 333, 343n1 Kristeller, O. 417n11
Hughes, J. 421 Kuhn, T. S. 272
Humboldt, W. 262, 267n12 Kundera, M. 163, 168
Hume, D. 167, 171–172, 182, 201 Kurke, L. 158n13
Husserl, E. 237, 308
Huyssen, A. 295n24
LaCapra, D. 294n9
Lacoue-Labarthe, P. 201–203, 207, 209, 210, 247,
Ibsen, H. 76, 273, 274, 277, 279–280, 282, 284–286, 263–264
289, 290–291, 293, 293n2, 294n15, 294n16, Laertius, D. 146–150, 152, 155, 158n17, 158n26,
294n19, 295n25, 487 158n27, 159n33
Ignatieff, M. 77 Lamarque, P. 225–226, 229–230, 242–243, 468, 471, 477
Imagination 3–4, 61, 204, 275, 277, 342, 353–367, Landy, J. 132
384, 394, 409, 428, 434–437, 450, 468–471, 475, Lang, B. 421, 424–425, 439n10
483, 488, 490–491 Laplanche, J. 307, 319n4
Iser, W. 125, 134 Latacz, J. 461n5
Isocrates 25–26, 32 Lattimore, R. 457
Lawrence, D. H. 319n1
Lear, J. 78, 91n3
Jakobson, R. 423 Ledbetter, G. M. 14n3
James, H. 175, 177n2, 207, 290, 294n18, 301, 375, Lee, H. 197
390n6, 413–414 Lerner, L. 132
James, W. 237, 414 Levin, H. 141
Jameson, F. 342 Levin, S. R. 421
Janson, H. W. 406 Levinas, E. 299, 304, 308–311, 317
Jefferson, T. 488 Lévi-Strauss, C. 378, 423
Jenkyns, R. 42n34 Lewalski, B. 66n15
John, E. 468, 477 Lewis, C. S. 40, 42n34
Johnson, S. 83, 225, 386 Lewis, D. 474
Jones, P. 165 Lewis, P. 411
Josipovici, G. 244 Locke, J. 167, 171–173, 182, 227, 262, 302–303, 305
Joyce, J. 63, 73–74, 96, 207, 304, 317, 318n1, 342, Loraux, N. 78
411–412, 497, 506 Lord, A. B. 34–35, 42n24
Love, G. A. 421
Loyola, St. Ignatius 53
Kafka, F. 244, 298–302, 306–307, 311, 315–317, Lucian 140, 149–152, 159n31, 159n33
318n1, 319n2, 510 Lucretius 240
Kallendorf, C. 39, Lukács, G. 12–13, 14, 163, 164, 168–171, 173–176,
Kant, I. 7, 62, 64, 200, 210, 213, 214, 217n1, 260, 177n6, 177n7, 178n8, 207–208, 211, 213, 224,
263–264, 274–275, 277–279, 294n6, 302–304, 276, 294n4, 509–511, 514n12, 515n13, 515n15
319n3, 354, 373, 387, 415, 431, 489, 490, Lyotard, J.-F. 206, 212, 213–214, 216
499–504, 506 Lyric 6, 11–12, 21–22, 45–68, 133, 134, 432, 508, 515n17
index 521
Macaulay, T. 323–4 Morreall, J. 95

MacCary, W. T. 461n6 Morris, W. 431
MacEwan, I. 461n4 Morrison, T. 334, 498
MacIntyre, A. 175, 184–186, 188–189, 191, 407–408, Most, G. 461n1, 462n9
413, 417n13 Mulhall, S. 480
MacMurray, J. 91n1 Mulroy, D. 66n10
Macrobius, A. T. 53 Murdoch, I. 174, 177n4, 183
Maeterlinck, M. 290 Murray, P. 42n23
Maley, W. 136n9 Music 21, 23–28, 30, 32–34, 45, 50, 51, 52, 62, 108,
Mallarmé, S. 132–133, 497 121–123, 127, 266, 398, 410, 411, 476, 488
Mann, T. 244, 317, 319n1, 510, 515n13 Musil, R. 319n1
Marcel, G. 308 Myth 46, 59, 114, 120, 375, 383–384, 396, 407, 412
Marcuse, H. 503
Martin, R. P. 34, 35
Martz, L. 53 Nabokov, V. 493–494, 494n4, 515n15
Marx, K. 275, 414 Nagy, G. 21, 23, 24, 34, 35, 37, 38, 40n3, 41n6, 41n7,
Marxism 168, 275, 276, 292, 325, 498, 504–506, 41n9, 41n10, 41n14, 41n18, 41n19, 42n24,
508–509, 513 42n26, 42n30, 42n31, 42n32
Materialism 257, 275, 283, 324 Nancy, J. 201–203, 207, 209, 210, 247, 263–264
Maupassant, G. de 224 Narrative 20, 46, 74, 119, 122, 134, 164, 165, 171,
Mayer, R. 157n2 173, 176, 184–194, 197, 207, 209, 214, 299–307,
McCabe, H. 192 318, 323, 324, 342, 349, 360, 365, 369, 371, 373,
McCarthy, C. 498 376–379, 387, 389, 390n1, 394, 395, 407, 414,
McClary, S. 42n27 478, 482, 497
McGann, J. 257 Neer, R. 437n2
McGinn, C. 351, 353, 355, 360, 361 New, C. 472
McKay, C. 323 Newlands, C. 125
McKeon, M. 178n10 Newton, I. 302–304, 315, 358
McLeod, J. 326 Niehues-Probsting, H.S. 158n19, 159n32, 159n33,
Melville, H. 476, 489–490, 491 159n35
Memory 382–383 Nietzsche, F. 14, 64, 102, 109, 144, 149, 152–156,
Merleau-Ponty, M. 237, 299, 308–309, 311 158n27, 159n33, 159n35, 244, 259, 267n7, 291,
Metaphor 28, 29, 49, 53, 55, 58, 59, 62, 74, 80, 293n2, 309, 354, 400, 407, 414, 415
90, 124, 134, 145, 212, 240, 241, 243, 335, 357, Beyond Good and Evil 154–155, 286–287
361–362, 365–367, 380, 433, 435, 477–478 The Birth of Tragedy 96, 99–101, 111
Michelangelo 427 Ecce Homo 156, 180, 403
Milic, L. T. 422 The Gay Science 152–154, 159n34, 250–251, 258,
Mill, J. S. 145, 490 514n7
Milton, J. 39, 42n34, 410 The Genealogy of Morals 406, 408
Mimesis 20, 37–38, 56, 124, 127, 223–226, 370, Twilight of the Idols 155, 157n11, 315
383–384, 391n14, 395–396, 398–399, 407, 414, Nightingale, A. 47, 66n6
483, 498, 501–504, 506 Nisbet, H. B. 416n7
Minh-ha, T. 330 Nobel, A. 287
Minkowski, E. 319n2 Novalis 266, 274, 503
Mistry, R. 342 Novel, the 12, 95, 162– 178, 224, 266, 268n15, 359,
Mitchell, S. 42n24 366, 397, 403, 405, 410, 515n15, 515n17
Modernism 6, 63, 200, 204–208, 211, 244, Novitz, D. 360, 362, 470
248–250, 252–253, 257, 263, 267n5, 272–273, Nussbaum, M. 73, 76, 165, 171, 177n4, 178n13,
287, 290–293, 293n2, 295n24, 300–320, 323, 218n8, 243, 373, 377, 385, 390n4, 390n5, 390n9,
411, 420, 497–498, 504, 509–510, 513, 514n1 417n16, 461n3, 470
Modernity 7, 12, 90, 130–131, 163–176, 200, 207, Nuttall, A. D. 225, 243
248–249, 251–252, 256, 277, 278, 359, 401–402,
404, 497, 508, 514n1
Mohanti, C. T. 330 O’Neill, E. 459, 460
Moi, T. 293, 294n16, 295n22 Ohmann, R. 424, 425, 438n9
Moisy, S. von 283, 285 Olsen, S. H. 225–226, 229–230, 242–243, 468, 471, 477
Monk, R. 196 Ortega y Gasset, J. 411
Monrad, M. J. 284–285 Orwell, G. 158n23
Montrose, L. A. 128 Ovid 338
522 index
Paddison, M. 514n11 Realism 272–273, 280–282, 285, 287, 291, 293n2,

Pappas, N. 115n1 294n8, 301, 302–306, 310, 315, 318, 319n5,
Parkes, M. 51 320n7, 399–400, 409–410, 411, 510
Pascal, B. 139, 140, 144 Relihan, J. C. 159n29
Patterson, A. 124, 136n5 Rengakos, A. 39
Pavel, T. 474 Ricoeur, P. 382–385, 391n11, 417n15
Payne, M. 118, 421 Riede, D. G. 136n11
Paz, O. 133, 134 Riefenstahl, L. 494, 495n7, 496
Peirce, C. S. 414, 415 Rilke, R. M. 256, 260–261, 298–299
Perec, G. 497–498 Rivkin, J. 416n3
Perloff, M. 68n21, 217 Robbe-Grillet, A. 292, 410
Pessoa, F. 133–134 Robinson, J. 421, 439n10
Petersen, C. 277 Rocco, C. 91n5
Petrarch 39, 54–56 Romanticism 59, 62, 114, 201–205, 209–210, 213,
Philip, M. N. 335–339, 341–343, 344n7 216, 249–268, 271–272, 277, 290, 358–359,
Pillow, K. 357, 364 402–403, 503, 513
Pindar 450 Ronen, R. 134
Pippin, R. B. 165–166, 178n12 Rorty, A. O. 76, 77
Pisco, P. 427 Rorty, R. 247, 248, 253, 257, 267n2, 414, 415,
Plato 6, 21–37, 40, 55, 56, 59, 64, 73, 76, 77, 78, 417n20, 417n21
90–91, 96, 140, 141–146, 149, 157n6, 157n8, 174, Rosen, C. 266
225, 227, 266, 274–275, 372–373, 407, 415, 445, Rosen, S. 66n6
450, 470, 473, 486, 487, 498, 513 Ross, A. 267n1
Apology 157n9, 142–4, 145, 512 Rothstein, A. 41n4
Gorgias 22, 47 Rousseau, J.-J. 62, 66n18, 180, 405, 417n10
Ion 4, 22–32, 34, 41n11, 41n13, 41n17, 41n19, 47 Rush, F. 502
Laws 22, 452 Rushdie, S. 323, 326, 442–448, 449, 454–455, 460
Phaedo 390n3, 390n5 Russell, B. 231
Phaedrus 47, 158n18 Russell, D. A. 47
Philebus 141–2, 157n4, 157n10 Ryan, M. 416n3
Republic 21, 34, 37, 42n23, 46–47, 53, 71–72, 119, Ryle, G. 468
134, 452
Symposium 26, 48, 101–103, 105
Theaetetus 37 Said, E. 324, 326–327, 330
Plaatje, S. 323 Sand, G. 273, 280–281, 283, 291, 294n8, 295n21
Plot 6, 74–76, 77, 209, 398, 404, 416n5, 455 Santayana, G. 53, 59
Plutarch 451, 454 Saro-Wiwa, K. 325
Poe, E. A. 378 Sarraute, N. 410
Poiesis 21–22, 29–30, 32–34, 58 Sartre, J.-P. 13, 190–191, 193–196, 275, 306,
Poovey, M. 281–282 308, 318, 325, 351–352, 355–356, 362–363,
Pope, A. 432, 437 365, 380, 414
Postmodernism 6, 250, 293, 305, 318, 394, 411, 415, Satire 56, 96, 163
438n3, 468, 497–498 Saussure, F. de 42n25
Pound, E. 63, 136n13, 342, 513 Sayles, J. 113–115
Preminger, A. 45 Schapiro, M. 421, 422
Propp, V. 376, 378, Schelling, F. 357
Proust, M. 164, 207, 244, 299, 306–307, 311–315, Schiller, F. 60–61, 136n5, 271, 274, 276–281, 283,
317, 318n1, 320n9, 342, 497 286, 289–290, 291, 294n5, 295n22, 401–402,
Purdie, S. 157n3, 158n18 404, 405, 511
Pynchon, T. 497 Schlegel, A. W. 62, 201–202, 511
Schlegel, F. 204, 217n2, 217n3, 217n4, 253, 265–266,
274, 276, 503
Quine, W. V. O. 231 Schleiermacher, F. 217n2
Schoenberg, A. 248, 252, 266, 267n5
Schopenhauer, A. 164, 165
Ramsay, F. 492 Schor, N. 273–274, 281
Rand, A. 417n18, 487, 491 Schott, R. M. 294n6
Rao, R. 323 Searle, J. 474
Réage, P. 487 Segal, C. 79–80, 92n6
index 523
Shakespeare, W. 82–86, 92n11, 97, 99, 100, 103, 104, Szafraniec, A. 5

136n7, 228–229, 278, 394, 402, 412–413, 471, Szondi, P. 92n8
476, 496, 505
All’s Well That Ends Well 106–109
Hamlet 83–86 Tagore, R. 323
King Lear 83 Tanner, M. 156
Measure for Measure, 238–241 Taylor, C. 248, 262, 263, 267n8, 267n12, 417n19
Shaw, G. B. 286, 291 Theocritus 118–125
Shay, J. 461n6 Thilo, G. 123
Shelley, P. B. 60, 287 Thiong, ’o, N. wa 323
Sherman, N. 91n4 Titian 427
Shklovski, V. 376 Todorov, T. 376, 377
Shoat, E. 325–326 Tolstoy, L. 63, 288
Shusterman, R. 481 Toulmin, S. 166
Sibelius, J. 248–250, 252 Tragedy 36–39, 71–93, 95, 97–98, 103–104, 115,
Sidney, P. 55–56, 61, 236, 240 117, 144, 164, 285, 369–370, 373–374, 375, 379,
Sifsakis, G. M. 462n10 386, 390, 391n14, 398–400, 402, 404, 457, 459,
Simon, C. 410 462n10, 488
Singer, A. 381 Trauma 88–91, 313–314, 315, 374, 427
Sittenfeld, C. 488 Trotsky, L. 276
Skepticism 110, 171, 215, 253, 257–258, 283 Tupper, M. 240
Slatkin, L. 19, 21 Tututola, A. 323
Smith, S. 333 Twain, M. 477, 496
Snell, B. 49–50, 400
Socrates 22–23, 25, 27–35, 47–48, 102, 117, 140,
141–146, 148–151, 157n9, 158n13, 158n18, 182, Unger, R. M. 167
390n3, 390n5, 512
Sommer, D. 327, 344n8
Sonnet, the 54–55 Valéry, P. 67n21
Sophocles 78–82, 91n5, 104, 371, 375, 379, 386, 400, Van Es, B. 136n9
457–458 Van Sickle, J. 120, 122
Sorabji, R. 461n2 Velleman, J. D. 388–390
Soyinka, W. 325 Vera, Y. 334
Spanforth, A. 398–399 Vernant, J. 78, 135n2
Spenser, E. 124–129 Vico, G. 57–58, 59, 62, 64
Spinoza, B. B. de 58–59 Vidal-Naquet, P. 78
Spitzer, L. 421 Virgil 39–40, 42n34, 121–125
Spivak, G. C. 327, 331–332, 334 Viswanathan, G. 323
Staten, H. 92n12
Statius 449–450
Stein, G. 63, 96, 199, 204–209, 210, 213, 215, 217n5, Wagner, R. 266, 496, 515n16
218n10 Walcott, D. 338–339
Stendhal 170–171 Walker, S. F. 132
Stern, R. 494n4 Walton, K. 360, 470, 474
Sterne, L. 3, 410, 488, 497 Wang, O. 258
Stevens, W. 63, 67–68n21, 434–437 Warnock, M. 349, 356
Stewart, S. 66n11 Watson, J. 333
Stolnitz, J. 468 Watt, I. 163, 438n8
Stowe, H. B. 487, 492 Weber, M. 413
Strier, R. 136n7 Weinberg, B. 281, 294n7, 294n8
Strindberg, A. 275 Weinbrodt, H. 177n1
Sturma, D. 267n3 Weinstein, P. 319n1
Style 6, 10, 12, 35, 100, 165, 170, 171, 223, 224, 242, Weinstock, S. 66n5
266, 281, 329, 420–440, 493 Weston, M. 473
Suetonius 452–453 Whale, J. 365
Suleri, S. 330 White, H. 468
Summers, D. 421, 438n5 Whitman, W. 223
Sutherland, K. 394 Wilde, O. 290–291, 293n2, 294n19, 295n20,
Swift, J. 140, 157n12 295n21, 394
524 index
Williams, B. 254 Preface to Lyrical Ballads 62, 129, 254–56, 262

Williams, R. 87 The Prelude 248–250, 259, 328–329, 342
Williams, W. C. 207 “Resolution and Independence” 129–31
Wimsatt, W. K. 96, 99 Working through 9, 10, 12–13, 74, 84,
Winterbottom, M. 47 447, 477
Wirsén, C. D. 288–290, 294n13, 294n18 Wright, R. 487
Wittgenstein, L. 7, 14, 63, 139, 140, 156, 182, 195,
199, 211–214, 216–217, 218n7, 218n8, 218n9,
230, 234, 239, 256, 262, 351–356, 359, 362, 367, Xenophanes 47
414, 415, 420, 426, 428, 439n14, 440n15
Wölfflin, H. 422
Wollheim, R. 420, 421, 425, 426–429, 438n6, Yeats, W. B. 433–434, 437
438n7, 439n11, 439n13 Young, R. J. C. 331
Woolf, V. 63, 207, 244, 289, 293n2, 305, 319n1, 334, Yourcenar, M. 462n8
488, 497
Words, 231–236, 239, 242, 262, 396–397, 493–494
Wordsworth, W. 9, 60, 261, 264, 342, 344n4, Zink, M. 55
357–358, 410 Zola, E. 224, 283, 287, 288, 291, 293n2, 294n12

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Copyright © 2009 by Oxford University Press, Inc.

Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The Oxford handbook of philosophy and literature / edited by

Introduction—Philosophy and Literature as Forms of Attention 3

7. The Novel 162

8. Autobiography and Biography 180

9. Experimental Writing 199

Part II. Periods and Modes

10. Realism 223

11. Romanticism 247

12. Idealism 271

13. Modernism 298

14. Postcolonialism 322

Part III. Devices and Powers

15. Imagination 349

16. Plot 369

17. Character 393

18. Style 420

19. Emotion, Memory, and Trauma 442

Part IV. Contexts and Uses

20. Literature and Knowledge 467

21. Literature and Morality 486

22. Literature and Politics 496

Charles Altieri teaches in the English Department at University of California,

Stanley Bates teaches philosophy at Middlebury College. He has written

J. M. Bernstein is University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the

R. M. Berry is coeditor of Fiction’s Present: Situating Contemporary Narrative

Simona Bertacco is assistant professor of English literature at the University

R. Bracht Branham teaches classics, comparative literature, and philosophy

Anthony J. Cascardi is director of the Townsend Center for the Humanities

Ted Cohen is professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. He is a past

Richard Eldridge is Charles and Harriett Cox McDowell Professor of

John Gibson is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Louisville.

Timothy Gould is professor of philosophy at the Metropolitan State College

Bernard Harrison currently holds an Emeritus Chair in Philosophy at the

Nikolas Kompridis is currently a visiting professor in the Department of

Glenn W. Most is professor of Greek philology at the Scuola Normale

Stephen Mulhall is fellow and tutor in philosophy at New College, Oxford.

Mark Payne, assistant professor of Classics at the University of Chicago, is

Understanding: Aesthetic Reﬂection in Kant and Hegel and articles on imagination,

Fred Rush teaches philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. He is the

Alan Singer is professor of English at Temple University. He publishes on

Philip Weinstein is Alexander Griswold Cummins Professor of English at

For my hobby-horse, if you recollect a little, is no way

strange fruitlessness or compelling necessity—sometimes both. As early as Plato’s

of thinking. He ﬁnds himself equipped, as it were, with certain ideas, and

Liberation in feeling is not a matter simply of settling on classiﬁcations, normative

individual stamp to what is inherently external by bringing it into close

Certain conceptions of human character must further be both commonly

A more individualized working through of emotionally freighted point-of-view

devoid of it, as abstract fragments and as concrete, autonomous life, as ﬂowering

1. György Lukács introduces the notion of transcendental homelessness in order to

Auerbach, E. (1953). Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (W.R.

In order to discern more precisely Aristotle’s view of epic as a genre, we need

At the agōn of mousikē held at the Panathenaia, the contests of citharodes,

to perform Homer by heart at the Panathenaia and to be the perfect hermēneus

4. For further elaboration, see Rothstein 2004.

22. The theatrical mentality of Athenians is ostentatiously deplored by Kleon as