A Re-Vision of Literature Author(s): Ihab Hassan Reviewed work(s): Source: New Literary History, Vol. 8, No.

1, Readers and Spectators: Some Views and Reviews (Autumn, 1976), pp. 127-144 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/468617 . Accessed: 22/10/2012 13:30
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A re-Vision of Literature* Ihab Hassan Pretext

AND GENTLEMEN, permitme to begin witha brief pretext." This is how thistextonce began. There were listenersthen,spectators;now there are readers. What we need is.... But I should startthe present text properly,witha few words about its origin,its theme, and its form. The text was intended as an address to the Midwest Modern Language Association,1975. The topic of the plenarysession was "Response to Vision: Judgingthe Value of LiteraryContent." What could that mean? I began to write,and later to rewrite,and what followsis a palimpsest,a language of discontinuoustime. So much for the "origin." Now about my "theme": it is a plea for vision. Not for spectacle, not even for the denser participationsof reading, but for somethingthat is best invoked by such words as imagination,vision. My plea must be tentativeand roundabout. A full response to literaryvision implies an ontologyof literature, and an ontology is what we now call into doubt. The very concept forcesupon us radical queries. "Literature,"and not simplyliteraryhistory, Hence myinordinateconcern withthe re-visionof literature. Yet the pun on revisionhas become ratherstale and weary: we revise everything and rarely see anythinganew. Can this failure be due to the framesof our vision? This bringsme to the "form"of thistext: it is mildlyparacritical.(There is no reason for alarm: I have no influence in the professionto corrupt the young.) Why paracritical?Consider for a moment this curious event we call "hearingan address," or "reading an article."Someone makes a claim on our our time,our mortality-someone,includingourselves.The frame attention, of thisclaim is oftenthe same. Yet frames,we know, shape what we hear or see. Tilt the frame or crack it, and we perceive another thing; make it conscious of itselfas frame and the perception is different again. I do no more here than alter a littlethe semantictypography mytext,and so call attenof tion not only to the cultural problematicof frames (see Erving Goffman's FrameAnalysis) but also to the currentreflexivewill of literature.Thus my discourse will follow a Text, interruptedby some Intertextsand Contexts, concluding witha Postext. And here ends my Pretext. "LADIES *Withappreciation to the Camargo Foundation, Cassis.

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Context I
We sit in Schloss in Leopoldskron, Salzburg;therococowindow openson a large there a bigplop,and rings is on green water: artificial pond.Suddenly toform the begin a fish.Sally,whois reading out Emerson, circle;the first quotes loud: "The eyeis the horizon whichitformsis thesecond;and throughout naturethisprimary figureis emblem thecipher theworld."Circles, in without end. It is thehighest of repeated I an at center where thatfatfish that is now, frames, wasfor instant the ciphers. wonder thecircumference. ringsrippleout,empty, gravity. The with of

Text
I begin my proper text,knowingthat anticipationsof furtherdisruption may hinder thisreading-or spectacle. We need to re-cognizethe primacyof visionin the arts. Even a subvisionary critic,Hilton Kramer,exhortsus thus: "It is alwaysa shock to be reminded thatart is, afterall, a spiritualenterprise. Our culture has developed in a way that makes it so much easier to think about art in termsof techniquesor economics,as a game of personality cults and epochal 'break-throughs,' that its spiritualattributestend to be, if not whollydenied, then discreetly consigned to the ineffable.... we seem to lack even the rudimentsof a persuasivevocabulary."' Art,literature, a spiritual as force-that tattered Arnoldian doctrine is one we still esteem. Challenged aesthetes,and by criticsas manytimes,challenged by churchmen,moralists, incongruousas T. S. Eliot and George Steiner,thisprejudice of the spiritfor art will not go away. Steiner'schallenge is the more recentand harsh. We have heard the grisly Kommandant who loved to read Shakeparable of the concentration-camp speare, Goethe, and Rilke. But what do we mean by "read"? Steinerdoes not the permitus to quibble or ask. "We do not know,"he cries,"whether studyof the humanities,of the noblest that has been said and thought,can do very much to humanize."2Indeed, we do not; and our ignorance only proves that literatureremains an aspect of our freedom (Sartre). The great literary classicsmay or may not humanize; theycertainly not serve to conditionor do brainwash.Their "goodness" offersitselfas a choice. Steiner may be a moralistwho expects too much (and whynot?) fromart; but thereare skepticsand aestheteswho expect too little. They remindus that art provides no substitute ethicsor religion. It may provide no substitute, for yet for many,the moral imaginationhas been kept vital in bad timesby the perversepowers of art. Surely our own spontaneous response to Kent State, mediated by our experience in literaWatergate,or My Lai was itselfthickly ture. Surely,such mediationsquicken our values. Steven Marcus, directorof the new National Humanities Center, seems to think otherwise.In a piece entitled"The Demoralized Humanists,"he writes:"There is an undercurrent of expectation that the humanities are or should go into the business of

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ProfessorMarcus prefersthe taskof creatingvalues, new or old, forsociety."3 This preferenceaccords with the cultural conser"criticalself-clarification." vatismof the National Endowmentforthe Humanities. Yet "self-clarification" is no less a shibboleth-or an ideological stance. We choose one kind of clarity againstanother,and thatassumes some value; moreover,we use clarification toward presumptiveends. If this does not make axiologistsof us all, it may nonethelessexpose the limitsof our skeptical neutrality. The last is indeed cause for de-moralization. In brief,to the shocking question that George Steiner asks we have no answer. But the answer to the Kommandant may be George Steiner himself: man, throughlanguage and silence,pittedcontinuously againstthe Inhuman. The moralityof this confrontation perdurable, and also too simple. Can is morality help us to know vision? I much doubt it. Our path to the visionary questionwillbe curious-and itmaysuddenlystop beforethequestion starts.

IntertextI
FranzKafkatoRudolphSteiner: and my "Myhappiness, abilities every of possibility beingusefulin anywayhave alwaysbeen in theliterary field.And hereI have,to be sure,experienced states which (notmany) in myopinion correspond statesdesverycloselyto the clairvoyant cribedbyyou,HerrDoktor, whichI completely in dwelt every in idea, but also filledeveryidea, and in whichI not only feltmyself my at but of boundary, at theboundary thehumanin general."4

If vision is not always discovered in a humanisticethic,neitheris it rediscovered in "literary content." Content is what lurks in Pandora's box itself. Open the box and out burstall those dreadful dualisms-literature as poesis and/ormimesis(aletheia came later),coherence and/orcorrespondence,pleasure and/orinstruction, image and/orconcept, mental event and/orphysical and finallysigobject, presentationallanguage and/ordiscursivestatement, nifierand/or signified. I am not contemptuous of these dichotomies: they may be an aspect of the thinkingmind, generated by the metalanguages of criticism ratherthan in the languages of literatureitself.The dichotomies,so to speak, are the sound of only one hand clapping, while the other hand writes. silently Far frombeing a formalist criticism, stillfind the question of content I in troublesomein three ways at least. First,it can lead and yield too quicklyto ideology,a subject I am happier to engage in other terms.Next, it tends to confine the relation of literatureand realityto older philosophical modes (Realist,Idealist, Nominalist)or else to restateitsown question,as KaiteHam-

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is nature fromreality burgerdoes when she saysthat"literature of a different because the latter is its material."5Last, the evaluation of content precisely and the hermeneuticrange extends from impliesa theoryof interpretation, E. D. Hirsch to WolfgangIser to Roland Barthes,fromvalidity intentional in to interpretation the phenomenologyof an implied reader to the scandalous and duplicitiesof the text. pleasures ("atopiques") contentmay be troublesome; I would not call it trite.It Evaluating literary and theseare temptamaytemptus intoideology,ontology,or hermeneutics, tionswe should not alwaysresist.My own evasion on thisoccasion is simplya choice: I have construed a genuine response to visionas an invitation first to re-visionliteratureand then to pre-visiona new theoryof the imagination. For in the mansions of criticism, there are many divisions.

II Context
I sitin my in the books:The Unmediated study Milwaukee; wallsare linedwith Vision, The Visionary Company, The Field of Vision, The Tragic Vision, Beyond the Tragic Vision, The Classic Vision, The Vision Obscured, Vision and Response in Modern Fiction,Primal Vision, The Orphic Vision, Prelude to Vision, The Politicsof Vision, The Armed Vision, Inventory(Butor). I sitin my a cube.Or is itreally, so many it with dimensions study; is almost perfect of in a In fourth,fifth,nth or vision itswalls, hypercube? the as dimension, in a hypercube, one maytakeawayall the"contents" a room, without Are of disturbing anything. we memories survivors other in ourselves rooms? (DorisLessing) of

Obviously,the currentrevision of literaturemust proceed withinthe culitself.In America, it has been clear for some time that the tures of criticism has exhaustionof theold New Criticism leftbehind ita certaincritical exhausof the tion.Quite possibly, riseof popular cultureas a matter academic curiosBut those critics itymay provide a certainstimulusto criticism. seekinga new theoreticalfoundation for theirdiscourse-where shall theylook? Can they turn to England, as theydid in the time of Hulme or of Leavis? Nothing in England now compels theoretical attention; those current civilitiesof the willnot do. Some do turn to Germany,findingin Luk;ics criticalmind finally and Adorno, in Bloch and Benjamin, a neo-Marxistsource of literary ideas, or findingin Hans-Georg Gadamer and Hans Robert Jauss mastersof the new hermeneuticsand Rezeptionsdiisthetik. But it is to France and again to France thatAmerican criticsrush to learn about linguistics and semiotics, structuralism phenomenology.Theirs is a and drybut moveable feast,the largestsince Stein, Hemingway,& Co. descended upon Paris. One wonders,can Edward Wasiolek be rightwhen he says: "We

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are a nation thatis attached or condemned to scientism and the faiththatthe for mind is an instrument the analysisof given entities.Russian Formalism,if ever enough texts are adequately translated and if ever enough intelligent commentaries are produced, is likely to exercise a greater influence on American criticism than the French New Criticism"?6 I suspect thatif we do turn to Russian Formalism,it will be only afterwe have sacked Gaul. The point is simple: nowhere is the revision of literaturemore advanced than in France. I say this with some qualms. For much as I admire French I at criticism, want to put myself a certainreadable, a certainlegible distance from its languages and its lacks. The languages have already turned into sesquipedalian cant; pick up any of our more ambitiousquarterlies,and you will hear the poststructuralist chant. As for the lacks, theyare those of signs of dissolvingperpetuallyintoother signs,a metaphysics absence (based on the a disappearance of the "fullsubject"),an ideology of fracture, systemwaverunmaking ing sometimesbetween science and solipsism-in short,a brilliant of the modern mind. Let us attend fora while to some familiarvoices of thisunmaking,as they declare themselvesin seven questioning (or questionable?) statements.

IntertextII
A. The Unmaking of Man. "I Claude I&vi-Strauss: believetheultimate goal ofthehumansciences tobe nottoconstitute, to dissolveman.... I am notblindto thefact but thattheverb'dissolve'does notin any wayimply(butevenexcludes) of of the destruction the constituents the body subjectedto another body." in the manis neither MichelFoucault:"One thing anycase is certain: thathas been posed forhuman oldestnor themostconstant problem of .... manis an easilyshows, knowledge As thearchaeology ourthought of date.And one perhapsnearing end."8 its invention recent B. The Unmaking of Literature. "All theseendeavors us RolandBarthes: maysomeday permit to define ourcentury as thecentury thequestion ... of What Literature? is (Sartre answered from it whichgiveshiman ambiguous outside, literary posibecause thisinterrogation conducted from is not tion.)And precisely outsidebut within literature itself... it followsthatour literature has beenfora hundred its in yearsa dangerous gamewith owndeath, other wordsa wayof experiencing, livingthatdeath....". of

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NEWLITERARY HISTORY Tzvetan Todorov: "We must firstcast a doubt upon the legitimacy of literature; neither the mere existence of the term,nor the fact that a whole university system is based upon it, can of itself justify its acceptance."10

C. The Unmaking of the Discrete Author, Reader, and Text. Roland Barthes: "In France, Mallarme was doubtless the firstto see and foresee in its full extentthe necessity of substituting language itselffor the man who hithertowas supposed to own it.... The absence of the Author... is not only a historical fact or an act of writing:it utterlytransformsthe modern text(... the textis henceforth written and read so that in it, on every level, the Author absents himself).""1 Jacques Ehrmann: "The presence of a reader is no more explicit nor implied than is thatof an author. This presence is just as indeterminate because these 'texts' are not addressed to any particularpublic.... Since the one who has assembled the 'texts' has a minimal control over how they are read, everythinghappens between the lines, in the interval between the words, in the whiteness that separates the 'texts'... in all has remained silent and thatdepends upon the user.... that,knowingly, In this manner the 'text' loses the sacred characterwhich in our culture we have been pleased to confer upon it."12 D. The Unmaking of the Book. Roland Barthes: "... any upset an author imposes on the typographic norms of a work constitutesan essential disturbance: to deploy isolated words on a page, to mix italic, roman, and capital letters... to break the material threadof the sentence by disparate paragraphs, to make a word equal in importanceto a sentence--all these libertiescontributein short to the very destructionof the Book .....""3 lanPhilippe Sollers: "In our civilization the book was originallywritten guage. Then it became printed writing.Perhaps it is in the process, and has been for a long time, of assuming a totally differentsignificance of which poses the real, misunderstood question of writing, which the writtenvolume would be only a limited particular case.""4

E. The Unmaking of Genres (including Criticism). Philippe Sollers: "On thislevel the distinctionsbetween'literarygenres' destroythemselves. They are generallymaintained only by a convention which permits falsified limits.... But we should not let our society

A RE-VISION LITERATURE OF dictate the definition of literary activity any more than our artificial roles as producers and consumers.""5 extends to all Jacques Ehrmann: "In fact,if literarymaterial rightfully linguistic signs, it is logical to think that every distinction between literarylanguage, ordinary language, and critical language is also rightfully abolished because no inherent difference separates them essentially. The opposition between language and metalanguage would be obliteratedtherebyfromthe start.It would yield to a critical unfolding of signs stretching out infinitely and indefinitely, in the same plane, all withoutany prioritybeing attributedto a particular one...."" F. The Self-Unmaking of Semiotics. Julia Kristeva: "Semiotics cannot develop except as a critique of semiotics. ... Research in semiotics remains a process thatdiscovers nothingat the end of its search but its own ideological moves, so as to recognize them, to deny them,to startagain."17 G. A Coda to Unmakings. Jean-Francois Lyotard: "Oh that exquisite polysemy,little tear of safe thinkers[bien pensants],small carping disorder, sugared deconstruction. Do not hope to gather the libidinal in those nets. A final point, understood a thousand times: semiology is nihilism."s8

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or Terrorism, travesty, trivia? These enunciations denunciations notrepresent coherent moveand do a ment system. or and and Theyare sometimes contradictory often provisional; of of indeed,laterrepresentatives Tel Quel can be as critical earlierstructuralist theories they of traditional as are As himliterary ideologies. Barthes selfsays,Structuralist is notthelastwordof time;a newlanguagewill Man arise (has arisen?)thatwillspeak himin turn.Yet we cannotdismiss him without least some struggle; mustbe qualifiedin our consciousness at he beforehe is "overcome." ambition, His whileit lasted,was afterall a noble
one: "Homosignificans," structureswere simulacra of "intellectadded to his object."'9 The structuralist be however,may itself partof a largerimmanence activity, of our time. In searching for an epitome of that activity, have used the I word "unmaking"(anglo-saxon, the way,as the French simpleAnglo-Saxon by insiston calling Beowulf, Muhammed Ali, the Godfather,and myself).Yet I could have used trendier terms: for instance, deconstruction,decentering, decreadissemination, dispersion,difference, discontinuity, demystification, tion,disappearance, etc. All of thesetermsof unmakingshare somethingwith

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the concept of silence,variouslyarticulatedby George Steiner,Susan Sontag, of and myself;and they also evoke Harold Rosenberg's "de-definition" art. But they go further,suggestinga radical reorganizationin our modes of knowledge, in the discourse by which we apprehend our very beingsuggestingwhat Michel Foucault would call a postmodernipistimd. In The Orderof Things,Foucault distinguishesamong three 6pistemes,or sovereigncodes, whichorganize cultureand consciousnessin the preclassical, classical (roughly the seventeenthand eighteenthcenturies), and modern periods. In the latter,the failureof the heroic Mallarmean taskof transforming all language into the ultimate Word confirmed "the disappearance of Discourse." But if language now returnsin some postmodernera, withthe shudder of new gods, if it returns,Foucault asks, "withgreaterand greater insistencein a unitythatwe ought to thinkbut cannot as yetdo so, is thisnot is the sign thatthe whole of this[modern] configuration now about to topple, and thatman is in the process of perishingas the being of language continues at to shine ever brighter upon our horizon? Since man was constituted a time when language was doomed to dispersion, will he not be dispersed when language regains its unity?"20 Foucault, of course, means the "dispersion" of man as a particularconcept, as a constellationof images withina particular epist6mb;but thatin itselfis no minormatter.The "dispersion"of man intoa universallanguage (like Teilhard de Chardin's "no6sphere"?) or a universal desire would leave none of our categories,leastof all "literary intact. content,"

Diversion: I say desire because that is also the term used by Gilles Deleuze and F61ix The auGuattariin their stunningrevision of psychoanalysis, L'Anti-Oedipe. thors "disperse" man, not into language but into the uncoded flux of a as "machinedesirante,"a universaldesiringmachine.These "schizo-analysts," a call of theycall themselves, fora liberationof instincts, recognition desire as the source of all productivity-a liberation,once again, in whichour current concept of man dissolves. "Never," theysay, "can we go too far in the deterthe ritorialization, uncoding of fluxes. For the new earth.., lies neitherbehind nor before us; it coincides with the realization of a desiring productivity ."21 ... Diversion Ends.

But Foucault and Deleuze are not alone. Jacques Derrida seems most at ease with"deconstructed"realities.As a philosopher,he does not flinchfrom to at saying,"I am trying, precisely, put myself a point so thatI do not know any longerwhere I am going."22Followingthroughwiththe "decentering"of Derrida refuses"totalithought begun by Nietzsche'scritiqueof metaphysics, zation,"refuses transcendentalmeaning withinany given system,affirming

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instead thejoyous play of a world without"truth,"without"origin,"a world our aband our deconstructions, offeredcontinuallyto our interpretations Derrida De la grammatologie, sences.23 In his philosophical epos on writing, and "meta-scientificity" sureven hintsthat a future"meta-rationality" may and theline[of thebook.]"24 pass "in the same and singlegesture,man,science, A radical reorganizationin our modes of knowledge, in the discourse by which we apprehend our being, is indeed what the French structuralist and insinuatesinto our midst-a re-visionof the Human poststructuralist activity even more than of Literature.The reaction of American criticsto the situationis oftenuncertain,and sometimesdownright after queasy. Our tradition, all, is pragmatic, and we are rightlyskeptical of the eccentricitiesand ethnocentricities French intellectuallife.Still,we yearn more than ever for of vindicationof the humanitiesin an age of technology, yearn especially for a brightnew theoryof literature.French theories,however,raise more questionsabout our business than theyare willingto answer. Some critics attempt to neutralizeor domesticatethese questions, and so are able to pursue their "redouble" their"utterances" businessquite as usual. (Some, moreau courant, its to "constitute" their"enunciations"by "liberating signifiers"-whichact, of course, both "diachronically"and "synchronically"-thenproceed to "dean center" a "text" here, "deconstruct" an "epistemb" there, "demystify" of ideologyelsewhere,while "adequating" the "textuality" the whole through scrupulous observation of both its "paradigmatic" and "syntagmatic" "codes"-in short, they "disseminate" the impression of a noisy "absence," have done.) Others, still,attemptto provide a searching, perhaps as I myself rigorous,and sympathetic critiqueof structuralism; already,we have, among others,the worksof Richard Macksey,Eugenio Donato, Paul de Man, GeoffreyHartman, Leo Bersani, FredricJameson, Edward Said, Robert Scholes, I and JonathanCuller, and the listis quicklygrowing.As formyself, want to a different explore way.

III Context
I In myoriginaladdress, includedheretwo blankpages, witha notereading: Do moment. so in twoblank critical on pages,i.e., orally theaporias ofthis "Improvise thanspectators, improvisathe rather But for fourvoiceminutes." in thistext readers thanthe rather a to be cannot mainly own.Still,ifI were impersonatereader, tions my I these I writer am impersonating, wouldbeamongthetopics wouldchoose random for queries: works realorsymbolic dedicate their to dedications. Somecritics -The erotics critical of Some others Siblings present). to Parents past),someto Children future), (the (the (the who are and others Female.There critics, instance, tend to to dedicate Malefigures for still others toWives-very others Mothers, to and to todedicate Fathers Brothers, rarely A to whodedicate a wholeFamily. few are and Wives.Then there those to Mothers

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dedicate No One andfewer toEvery to still critics One. On thewhole, to dedications the Anima seem to Is in theworld criticism, are dedications Artists. as underrepresented of there erotics critical an dedications? not?How can theemblem a critic's love of Why of be irrelevant his work? to

ThomasS. Kuhn In -Media and theillusionof a paradigm. thehistory science, of sucha paradigm, are and there paradigms knowledge innovation. of Lacking argues, whichare thenpromptly assumedto be thehumanities create"schools" thought, of In critics philosophers and of paradigms knowledge. Paris,New Haven, orBaltimore, and weave intellectual to density their enterprise. Friendships rivalries converge, giving discourse. This has alwaysbeenso. But themselves theepistemological into fabricof become mediaevenbefore harden whether artor ofcriticism, schools of they nowadays, in currentformation What the is roleofmedia, both into publicand covert, the ideology. have of one Do and readersrespond images they to critics, of criticism?. authors, is with Arethey cliches, like too another rather thantotexts? what wrong And "images"? humanneeds, and sofinally more than with and insistent transparent charged simple texts?

-Academic depression thecritical and The topicis sordid;everyone knows our spirit. troubles. The tenures. jobs, wobbling Ebbingfunds,falling enrollments, shrinking in In how humanities, general,dispirited. thesecircumstances, mucherrorand/or can innovation our disciplines we True,in a moment exigency, can willto of permit? and still, renew-better toreinvent-"quality"; wecan learntodo without frills. many how But among theyoungest risk? More professors, manywill acceptintellectual a is there critical that the moment of interestingly: theory satisfied needs an ungenerous better another? than our What there both is in semiotics neo-Marxism constricts and that visionof thehuman?Or is all literary anti-heroic? theory profoundly

I But enough of these animadversions.Myself, said, I would like to explore another way. I am not certainyet where it may lead. I hope that it will lead toward Imagination, and perhaps by an incommodious "vicus of recirculation" bring us face to face withVision once again. How? The structuralist adventure, as it is sometimesjauntily called, has accomplished a major revisionof our literary thought;but it may have also taken us wronglyin certain directions,or taken us too far. Here are five points of personaljudgment:
a. The structuralist metaphysicof absence and its ideology of fracture refuse holismalmost fanatically. But I want to recover mymetaphoric sense of wholes. The differencebetween Norman O. Brown and Gilles Deleuze (who failsto acknowledge Brown) is preciselythis:Brown knows thatopen is broken and fractured free,but knowsalso thatreality one is is the French criticsonly disconnect. (see Love's Body). Subtle materialists,

OF A RE-VISION LITERATURE theycultivatean ontologicalbrittleness. Opposed to ontologicalbad faith, the Platonic apple must remain split. Erotically, b. The structuralist concept of literatureis, as Richard Schechner has noted, entirelyimplosive. Everythingcollapses inwards on language But I long fora concept of on within/without structures. itself, structures literaturethatis also explosive: outwards into gesture and performance, outwardsintoaction,responsiveto change. Is language reallyeverything? (See Jameson'sThePrison-House Language.) There is a loquacityin strucof turalismthat I find,finally, disagreeable. c. The structuralist temper requires too great a depersonalizationof the writing/speaking subject. Writingbecomes plagiarism: speaking becomes quoting. Meanwhile, we do write,we do speak. I realize that the problematicof the "subject"is exceedinglycomplex (fromSartre'sCritique de la raison La [ dialectique1960] and Levi-Strauss' Pensee sauvage [1962], the du controversycontinues through to Kristeva's La Rdvolution langage podtique[1974]). Yet I know that I myselfmust articulate my historical voice as well as silence it, lose my life and find it. I cannot stand forever besidemyself. and then-begins to d. The styleof manystructuralists fascinatesat first, repel? Consider the oblique and difficult styles of LUvi-Strauss, Barthes,Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva,Deleuze, Serres. But whatdoes "difficult"mean here? Hegel, Heidegger, and Husserl are often more difIs to ficult read (see Hegel's notoriousPhenomenology). itbecause the structuralistsrightly disciplines-they are not onlyphilosophersor transgress anthropologists or critics-and so must transgress certain received for categoriesof "clarity"?Is it because of theirdeep sympathy what the Or bourgeoisie calls "perversity"? is it because, havingbanished the "subthe ject" fromtheirepistemology, subject returnsto asserthis presence in idiosyncratic styles,in complex verbal ceremonies that pretend to shun the vulgarities the signified?And what of myown verbal ceremonies? of when all is said and done, does not suffie. The structuralist activity, enhance the meaning,experience, force,value, pleasure of parciently or enhance whatdrawsmeto literature quickensmeto ticularliterary texts, it. For Barthes, pleasure is crucial, though it implies a process of coding and uncoding, making and unmaking,recuperationand loss-finally of "fading"-a process thatis not centralto myown temper (see Le Plaisirdu This touches on that most elusive of questions: modern boredom. texte).

137

Diversion: Jonathan Culler makes some astute remarks on pleasure and boredom in structuralism. Still, I remain skeptical when he says: "A semiological criticism should succeed in reducing the possibilities of boredom by teaching one to find challenges and peculiarities in works which the perspective of pleasure alone would make boring."25

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The question of boredom is more general; itapplies to much contemporary art: the compositionsof John Cage, the filmsof Andy Warhol or Michael AfterhearSnow, the books of Philippe Sollers or even Alain Robbe-Grillet. on to ing Jean-Franiois Lyotard speak brilliantly ennuieand its contribution I "le corpsinhumain," wrote him a briefnote: "I suspect we need a theoryof in ennuie.How are we to distinguish the postmodernartsbetweenan alienat'boredom' (Marx), and another 'boredom' (Baudelaire) conducive to a ing new typeof consciousness,making traditionalpatternsof expectationsobsolete? There is also, Om, Om, Om .... " Diversion Ends

These criticalpoints,no doubt, appear too personal (the mot here is injuste to sustain a genuine critique,and they lump too many writersto"naive") gether; but they mark for me a virtualarc, passing throughstructuralism, leading out. The shiftin taste, in need, from a literatureof commitment to of mustitself (Sartre/Camus) a literature abstraction(Robbe-Grillet/Sollers) shiftagain. As Barthes says: "I am tempted to see in their alternationthat which precisely entirelyformal phenomenon, the rotation of possibilities, defines Fashion: an exhaustion of a language and a shiftto the antinomic language ...."-26 Indubitably,Barthes is the criticalgenius of our age. But a shiftto what? He does not say.

III Intertext
of all onceand for thequestion the seemstosettle "Our Tiresiassymbol in is truth. Truth on theside ofTiresiasand ofthat interpretationdepth Are this the which turns tableson a former interpreter. weso surethat is theend oftheroad?... The blindprophet maywelltakesuchpridein the of the uncovered illusions hisfellowmen, demystificator may having withhis demystification he, himself, that be so satisfied mayfall,ultiof At into identical that his adversary. this to mately, an illusionalmost point, everything Oedipus saysofTiresiaswillbecomeas trueas Tireof he sias's interpretationOedipus.... Tiresiaswillthink incarnates the truth he willabandon and himself oracular to vaticinations. too,will He, all believethat riddlesare solved,that pitfalls in thepast.Thatis all are at too, whyTiresias, canbe obtuse. Havingreadthesignsofothers, least he his him,moreurup to a point, neglects own,whichare beckoning moredesperately thanever."27 gently,

what threshold? Again: a shiftto what? Afterfracture, A shift,I would propose, to a renewed concern with Imagination and its

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in implications the activelife. Is Imaginationthe teleologicalorgan of human evolution, predicting,guiding, fulfilling change? Can Imagination take regenerativepower (that slogan of 1968 stillhaunts the mind)? What are all the manifestations Imagination,of whichour verbal languages are onlya part? of In short,can we re-visionthe Imagination under everyaspect-for instance, alphabetically? Action Biology Class Consciousness Dream Eroticism Futurology Genius (or Gardens or Ghosts or Glamour or Gluttony) History(or Hallucinogenics) Insanity or Jealousy (or Jactitation Juvenescence) Knowledge Languages Myth(or Mysticism) Necromancy(or Neurasthenia) Ontology (or Oenology) Pleasure (or Perceptionor Play or Politics) Quests (or Quackery) Ritual Science Time (or Teaching or Telepathy or Transvestitism) Utopia Vision War Xenophilia Yoga Zeugma (or Zaniness or Zola) I admitit: thislistsounds less likea prolegomenontoa theory the Imaginaof fromBorges' wastetion thanrandom notationsforan encyclopediaretrieved basket. My crude intent,however,was to put fortha crucial question: if the of Imaginationis indeed constitutive our mental,our cultural,perhaps even our organic life,does it not devolve upon humaniststo explore that supreme fictive power-explore it, for the time being, not under the aegis of a single method or semiotictheory,but in all its duplicityand multiplicity? of Structuralism, course, does not offerus a theoryof the Imagination: behind all the dissolvingstructures, there is only an enigmaticmelody. Nor does ExistentialPhenomenologyofferus an adequate theory:withImaginationthereis a kindof enriched negativeperception.Nor does Marxismreally, despite its most brilliantinsightsinto culture and history.Nor does Bergsonian Vitalism,which implicates Imagination too heavily in memory. Since Kant and Coleridge, since Romantic philosophy and poetry,only the Sur-

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realistsattemptedto theorizeabout the Imaginationand to articulateitsmystery.But thoughSurrealismretainsa privilegedposition(the famous quarrel of Andre Breton and Roger Caillois over Mexicanjumping beans stillliveson in France), its repugnance for science inhibitsits own theory.

Context IV
I sit in Cassis, reading Caillois' La Pieuvre. In a certainslant of sun the I how is Mediterraneana hard,bluemirror, of nothing itself. wonder lightflows giving the outrageous eye. through octopus' in creaand of fancyandfact, mingle our vision certain Imagination observation, the the the Cailloissays:thenarwhal, instance, praying mantis, spider, lion, tures, for the the the the thebat,thepeacock, serpent, horse--and octopus. history, Throughout it was the has acquiredwithin imbrications ourfantasycertain of qualities: octopus and considered clownish, often hoarding, very adaptable, self-devouring, shy, thieving, But Romantic lascivious. notuntilthe Lautriamont, JulesVerne, age-with Michelet, and It become Victor and especially octopus malignant horrific. became, Hugo--did the tentacles and suckers, the a figure of the Void. Withcountless in Romantic myth, with the absorbed humanSelf intoitsviscousmaw, fixingtheentire process octopus silken eye. huge, he We as Theconclusion Cailloisis nearly startling. deceive ourselves, argues,in of to itsown needs,evolves thattheImagination onlyaccording its obeys only thinking the on True be level, Imaginalevel, another may on a certain uniquestructures. as this and dreams," "Substances withNature,an extension tion is "contiguous" thereof. but itineraries....I hazardto say thatthe distant Jnalogous Cailloiswrites, 'follow theirunitary traverses same 'innervation' field of field....2" 2Yet in thisunitary as and even species. existence, of compete, do organisms figments theImagination that'justify" themselves (Cailloisspeaksof "une imagination figments Onlythose because in take themselvesan evolving universe, hold-precisely "complex juste")justify seemto makethatuniverse 29 and disconcerting just. correspondences" in in garlicand saffron theair. Sitting Cassis,readingCaillois,I suddenly.smell Is Sallypreparing bouillabaise? If so, I and somesmalloctopus a maysoon meet. And of Or a Another Simply? simply metaphor? "correspondence"? is correspondence I bite what?In skepticism, mytongue.

IntertextIV
The poet Elizabeth Sewell says: "Human thought is not merely metaphoric in operation. Itself forms one term of a metaphor. The other termmay consist of the cosmic universe....",30 The scientistJeanPiaget says it in a different way: "Languages are not in it the habit of forecastingtheevents theydescribe; rather, is a correspon-

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dence... a harmony, then,between... the human being as body in and mind-and theinnumerable operators nature-physical objects at theirseveral levels. Here we have remarkable proofof thatpreestablishedharmony among windowlessmonads of which Leibniz
dreamt... .",

Once more, I returnto my text,trying comprehend Sewell and Piaget. to Do both secretly invoke an ancientdoctrineof correspondencebetweenmind if and matter?Of course, Piaget,who is mainly, not uniquely,concerned with the languages of science, is easier to understand. Afterall, Albert Einstein, alone in a room witha blackboard,wroteE = mc2;and decades lateran sitting explosion annihilatedHiroshima. Afterall, Paul Dirac predictedtheexistence of the positron years before it was found in cosmic ray experiments and calculated the exact weightof the monopole fourdecades before it was "captured" (perhaps) over Sioux City,Iowa. But how are we to understand the metaphor of Elizabeth Sewell? mystic Should we refer it to that traditionof language and gnosis about which Babel-a traditionof George Steiner writesso marvelouslyin his book, After the Logos,or Lingua Mundi, or Ur-Sprache, Word of God, which variously or includes Pythagoreans, Kabbalists, and Pietists,includes Meister Eckhart, Paracelsus, Kepler, Jacob B6hme, and Angelus Silesius, includes even, with complex qualifications,Leibniz, Hamann, Vico, Goethe, the Romantics,and on to Kafka, Benjamin, and Borges? Though Steiner himselfleans to the view of language, he admits: "The "monadist"ratherthan the "universalist" habitsof feelingshown in these occultsemanticsare remoteand oftenbizarre. But at several points,linguisticgnosis touches on decisive issues of a rational theoryof language and of translation."32 Or should we understand Elizabeth Sewell's "human metaphor" in the postmoderncontext?I have argued elsewherethat Imagination and Science, Myth and Technology, Earth and Sky, begin to converge in a new gnosticism-by which I mean that tendencyof Mind to dematerializereality, to gather more and more mind in itself, turn nature into culture,culture to intolanguage, language intoim-mediateconsciousness.This verytendencyof Mind may lead us to an enlarged conception of Imagination. I no Unfortunately, have no leisure here (and perhaps finally capacity)to offera full theoryof thatenlarged apprehension which I want to call Imagination. In an antic and alphabetical moment, I have tried to suggest the comprehensivecharacter of that faculty.I should like furtherto suggest a focus of practicalconcerns-before we all dissolve into a gnosticlight.These concerns I offernot anticallybut a littletoo baldly: From Orphic to Cybernetic fromPlato First,concerninghistory. mysteries, a fromRomanticsto Postmodernists, to Hegel in philosophy,and in literature certainidea of Mind is implicit.What concept of Imagination emerges from thatimplicitness? instance,when H61derlinassertsthatman dwells poetiFor the earth and when Norman O. Brown avers a centurylater that callyupon chosen is of everything onlya metaphor-what history poesisdo these writers, at random, invoke?

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Will a theoryof ImaginaSecond, concerninga general theoryof fictions. tion be only a special case of a vast unified theoryof fictions,more comprehensivethan Vaihinger's"philosophyof as if,"Husserl's phenomenology, of point be Nietzsche's Heidegger's later metaphysics poetry?Will itsstarting be thatwhateveris thoughtmustcertainly a fiction? rather,will conviction Or, it depend on further breakthroughsin neurologyand brain research? works,rangingfromideolThird, concerningchange. Can certainliterary and visionary be poetry, consideredas verbal ogy and utopia to science fiction models of change, mythsof metamorphosis?Do theyexert a constantpressure on the present?If so, what do these models assume about the relationof Imagination to Power? Can we anticipate a stage, as Marcuse does, "where capacityto produce may be akin to the creativecapacityof art,and society's of the constructionof the world of art akin to the reconstruction the real world-union of liberatingart and liberatingtechnology?"33 whichexists Fourth,concerningthe future.Blake believed thateverything today was imagined long ago. What does thisassume about Imaginationand Time-that is, about Prophecy?The cognate question concernsthe meaning of optative and future tenses in languages. Why are the "shapes of time" preserved in our grammars? "Future tenses," Steiner says, "are an example... of the more general frameworkof non- and counter-factuality. and illustrate the They are a part of the capacityof language forthe fictional central power of the human word to go beyond and against 'that absolutely whichis the case.' "34 But all fourconcerns may stillbe too abstractforour daily business,as we exchange in class our ideas and our liveswiththe young. I rememberarguing some yearsago, in an essay called "Fictionand Future,""3 thatthe futuremay be considered a fiction and fiction considered a maker of futures;but I only began to understand what I could have meant when I finishedteaching a course entitled"The Literatureof the Future." Once again, thereis no timeto revisionsand ecospeak here of pedagogic perplexitiesin an age of literary nomic constraints.Yet I do hope that when a new theoryof Imagination comes forth take hold of our intellectual to energies,itwillnot be so remoteas to ignore our familiaractions. In-formingour languages and metaphysical passions, can it also re-formour day?

Postext
Every ending is a littledeath, which makes space for another beginning, another death. (Death has been the broken song in this text,and the first can person a coarser cry.Death and Self, instead of abstractdeconstructions, also remind us of our wall-lesshome in reality.) And so I must conclude, must tryto connect, to disconnect,to make new connectionsof disconnections.Is thatalso a function the Imagination,whichacknowledgesabsence, of respectsfracture-and always passes throughnew thresholds?

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There is a parable about this imaginary function in an essay by Owen Barfield. The essay begins with that profound dialogue between the God Krishna and the hero Arjuna which is the heart of the Bhagavad-Gita, and moves quickly through three millennia of history.The Imagination is the facultythat connects; passing through impassable thresholds,it constitutes our existence. The thresholds,for instance,separate Self and Not-Self (the Gita), Mind and Matter (Descartes), the Knowable and the Unknowable (Kant), the Conscious and the Unconscious (Freud). The Imagination passes throughthese thresholds, among many others, without abolishing them; for only thus can it sustain its life and ours. Sustain and expand. "Then it is," Barfield writes, "thatthe thresholdbecomes like Aladdin's ring, yieldingnew meaningsforold and givingbirthto a futurethathas originated in present creativity instead of being a helpless copy of the outwardlyobserved formsof the past."36 The Imagination of thresholds, correspondences across thresholds:this of is what Barfield wants to call "inspiration," what Coleridge called the "philosophicalimagination,"what Blake meant by "twofoldvision."Twofold or fourfold,what mattersthe number? We are moving toward the visionary realm: visionarybut not altogether mystical,not idle or insubstantial, but capable, self-creative, generous as love, binding as gravity.We are moving toward the visionaryrealm-are we moving,too, toward a point where Imaginationand Spiritmeet? Emanuel Swedenborg spoke of the spiritualthus: able by means of ittobepresent it as "althoughit is in man, man is nevertheless wereelsewhere, anyplace however in in remote.... The Human is theinmost every created thing[my italics]."37 "The Human is the inmost in every created thing." Is this the tedious of anthropomorphism, anthropocentrism, our race speaking out once again? Or is the Human some aboriginal principle, toward which all theories of Imagination must finallytend? It behooves humaniststo wonder, and posthumanists too. A re-visionof literaturemay give this wonderment an intellectualshape, and yet preserve the wonder. Beyond fracture-what other thresholds?
UNIVERSITY MILWAUKEE OF WISCONSIN,

NOTES
1 Hilton Kramer, "The Spiritual Yearnings of a Founder of Dadaism," New YorkTimes,7 Sept. 1975, sec. 2, p. 39, cols. 1-3.

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2 George Steiner,Language and Silence(New York, 1967), p. 65. 3 Steven Marcus, "The Demoralized Humanists,"Chronicle HigherEducation,11, No. 7 (1975), of 24. 4 Franz Kafka,Diaries: 1910-1913, ed. Max Brod, tr.Joseph Kresh (New York, 1965), p. 58. 5 Kite Hamburger,The Structure Literature of (Bloomington,Ind., 1973), p. 9. in 6 Edward Wasiolek, Introduction to Serge Doubrovsky,The New Criticism France, tr. Derek Coltman (Chicago, 1973), p. 34. 7 Claude Lvi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago, 1966), p. 247. 8 Michel Foucault, The Orderof Things(New York, 1970), pp. 386-87. 9 Roland Barthes, "Literatureand Metalanguage," Critical Essays,tr. Richard Howard (Evanston, Ill., 1972), p. 98. New Literary 5 10 Tzvetan Todorov, "The Notion of Literature," History, (1973), 5. ed. Sallie Sears and Geor11 Barthes, "The Death of the Author," The Discontinuous Universe, gianna W. Lord (New York, 1972), pp. 8f. New Literary 3 12 Jacques Ehrmann, "The Death of Literature," History, (1971), 36. Critical 13 Barthes, "Literatureand Discontinuity," Essays,pp. 172-73. 14 Philippe Sollers,"The Novel and the Experience of Limits," ed. Surfiction, Raymond Federman (Chicago, 1975), p. 61. 15 Ibid., p. 73. 16 Ehrmann, p. 42. 17 Julia Kristeva,Semiotik(Paris, 1969), pp. 30ff. libidinale 18 Jean-FrancoisLyotard, (Paris, 1974), p. 64. 19 See Barthes,Critical ltconomie Essays,pp. 215-18. 20 Foucault, p. 386. 21 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, (Paris, 1972), p. 458. L'Anti-Oedipe and the Sciencesof Man: The Structuralist ed. 22 The Languages of Criticism Controversy, Richard Mackseyand Eugenio Donato (Baltimore, 1970), p. 267. et la difference 23 See Jacques Derrida, (Paris, 1967), pp. 412, 423, 427. L'ltcriture 24 Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris, 1967), pp. 103f. Poetics(Ithaca, N.Y., 1975), p. 263. 25 JonathanCuller, Structuralist 26 Barthes,Critical Essays,p. 265. and 27 Ren6 Girard,"Tiresias and the Critic,"TheLanguagesofCriticism theSciences Man, p. 20. of 28 Roger Caillois,La Pieuvre (Paris, 1973), p. 227. 29 Ibid., pp. 229f. 30 Elizabeth Sewell, The Human Metaphor (Bloomington, Ind., 1967), p. 11. ed. 31 Jean Piaget,Structuralism, and tr. Chaninah Maschler (New York, 1970), pp. 40-41. Babel (New York, 1975), p. 61. 32 Steiner,After 33 Herbert Marcuse,An Essay on Liberation (Boston, 1969), p. 48. 34 Steiner,After Babel, p. 160. 35 Ihab Hassan, Paracriticisms (Urbana, Ill., 1975), p. 116. The 36 Owen Barfield,"Imaginationand Inspiration," of Interpretation: Poetry Meaning,ed. Stanley Romaine Hopper and David I. Miller (New York, 1967), p. 73. TheFindings EmanuelSwedenborg 37 Quoted by Wilson Van Dusen, ThePresence Other of of Worlds: (New York, 1974), p. 208.