INTRODUCTION

KING : How well he's read, to reason against reading!
DUMAINE : Proceeded well, to stop all good proceeding!
LONGAVILLE : He weeds the corn and still lets grow the weeding.
BEROWNE : The spring is near when green geese are a-breeding.
DUMAINE : How follows that?
BEROWNE :                           Fit in his place and time.
DUMAINE : In reason nothing.
BEROWNE :                           Something then in rime.
Love's Labor's Lost 1.1.94–99

Any reader committed to reading and paying attention to the book that follows can profitably skip this introduction. Everything I want the introduction to do is done in the essays it introduces. I am writing an introduction only because experience has taught me that people who read academic criticism—usually authors of academic criticism—do not so much read critical studies as "check them out." Once such readers have a sense of a study's kind and/or its probable destination, they don't pay attention to what ensuing sentences are actually saying. For instance, the first thing I ever published was a long, dense essay on Hamlet ("On the Value of Hamlet " in Reinterpretations of Elizabethan Drama, ed. Norman Rabkin [New York, 1969]); the first thing the first section of that essay does is talk about how the first scene of Hamlet positions audiences in relation to the action that follows. The essay goes on to do a lot else (including an analysis of the "To be or not to be" soliloquy that I, who appear to be its only reader, admire immensely), but people who mention the

Hamlet essay to me or mention it in print almost invariably behave as if the essay as a whole were an essay on Hamlet 1.1.

The essays that comprise this book are at least as dense as the Hamlet essay and have a lot more twists and turns. My fear for the present essays, however, is not so much that each will be treated as if the book's first point were its only point as that my principal purpose in these essays will be mistaken to be what habit may lead readers into assuming it to be. Even though each of the following essays is laced with passionate disclaimers of interpretational ambition, they are nonetheless likely to be assumed to be telling their readers (1) that the Gettysburg Address, the Jonson epitaphs, and Twelfth Night are "really" other than what they have seemed to be and (2) that they should henceforth be understood to say things they have not previously been suspected to say. The assumption that analysis of literature and interpretation of it are always and necessarily synonymous is only an assumption, but it has been and remains very strong. At this point in academic history, I persistently try and fail to open students' minds to the possibility that one can say something about the details of a literary work that is not an assertion of hidden meaning in it. My hope in this introduction is to head off such misconceptions as may be born of inattention or assumption or of the two in combination.

In my experience, most students and many of their teachers are also prisoners of the assumption that the purpose of literary analysis must be to make analyzed works work better than they have before—or at least differently. They take it for granted that the analyst is trying to make them read or hear a given work in a way other than the way they did before. I have no such ambition. (On the other hand, I would be delighted to substitute the sort of comparatively modest, genuinely academic criticism I offer in the body of this book for the kinds that pretend to an ability to tailor readers' experiences to this or that neat pattern—usually a pattern available in, but not at all exclusive in, the cluttered reality of an unmediated reading experience.)

Everything I do in studying literature in this book and elsewhere responds to the following two questions. What is it we value literature for (what we do value it for, not what we should value it for)? And what is it in the works we value most highly that makes us value them above others like them? My answer to the first question is that it is the experience—the two-hour experience of a play or movie or the two-minute experience of a lyric or a song.

This book works toward some of an answer to the second question.

The essential notion underlying everything in the book is that a great source, perhaps the great source, of the special appeal of highly valued works is that they are in one way or another nonsensical.

The purpose of this introduction is to illustrate the book's thesis by examining some small, beloved, humble works—popular nursery rhymes, children's songs, proverbs and stock phrases—things so simple, in such little need of an analytic middleman, and of so little cultural dignity that no one could mistake my analysis of them for efforts to interpret them, much less to make them work better than they do unaided. Most important, nursery rhymes and children's songs are not things in which I can reasonably be suspected of wanting to demonstrate flaws and lapses. I hope that my brief, quickly grasped discussions of the little things I talk about here in the introduction will go some way toward forestalling the easy, wrong impression that what I'm doing in the essays that follow is debunking the Gettysburg Address, the Jonson epitaphs, and Twelfth Night, revealing them to be unworthy of our admiration for them.

In the main this book discusses and asserts value in two distinguishable categories of nonsense—one substantive, the other not.

The first category, the substantive one, contains every sort of thing that one might label as nonsense: assertions or implied assertions that are silly ("The platform was already empty, although

the train was not due to arrive for another hour"; "... why the sea is boiling hot and whether pigs have wings"); assertions contrary to fact ("Arabia is a lake"; "The sewers of New York City are full of alligators"); sentences that are syntactically chaotic; and so on. Although the essays that follow deal with examples of all the kinds of substantive nonsense, they deal almost exclusively with nonsense that is not perceived to be so. The essays that follow attempt to demonstrate that the Gettysburg Address, Ben Jonson's epitaphs on his children, and Twelfth Night are each to a significant degree composed of nonsense, demonstrable nonsense that, because each makes and always will make sense, is merely demonstrable. What is so interesting is that, if you look at them more carefully than readers and audiences ever have (or will, or ever should), it is hard to see how they can be understood at all.

As the lengths of the following chapters testify, the texts they describe and discuss are complex and require complex analysis. On the other hand, the nursery rhyme "Little Boy Blue," which exhibits just the sorts of nonsense that the Gettysburg Address, the Jonson epitaphs, and Twelfth Night do, can be analyzed quickly.

Little Boy Blue,
Come blow your horn,
The sheep's in the meadow,
The cow's in the corn.^[1]

The presence of the cow in the corn is obviously just cause for the alarm the poem implies. But why should anyone make a fuss because the sheep is in the meadow—one of the places where one is most accustomed to finding sheep?^[2] And why am I mak-

[1] This, the one stanza of "Little Boy Blue" that is a fixture in the culture, exists in several variants. The same is true of most of the other things I discuss here. I quote "Little Boy Blue" and all other orally transmitted materials from memory.

[2] As one of what I expect is a very small number of academic critics who have earned a merit badge in sheep raising from the Boy Scouts of America, I am embarrassed to have displayed what several people who read this book in typescript quite correctly took to be ignorance of the distinction between a meadow (a field in which grass is grown and harvested for hay) and a pasture . A sheep in such a meadow threatens a potential cash crop. My surprise at our want of surprise at the alarm registered in "The sheep's in the meadow," however, remains valid, I think, because the distinction between meadowland and pastureland is and has so long been so generally forgotten. But in my embarrassment, I have nonetheless sought the comfort of company among writers with rural credentials at least as good as mine. In the seventeenth century, Margaret Cavendish concluded a poem called "Spirits" with reference to "Sheep / and feeding Cattell which in Meadowes keep." In the eighteenth century, John Dyer began "The Inquiry" by asking a "poor little sheep" if it had met his beloved Clio "On the mountain, or valley, or meadow, or grove." At the beginning of a poem called "Sports in the Meadows" the truly knowledgeable nineteenth-century "peasant poet" John Clare lists "sheep & cows . . .crowding for a share" of the flowers Maytime has brought to the meadows. My favorite in what is becoming a large collection of loose uses of "meadow" comes from a letter William Cowper wrote to Joseph Hill on April 15, 1792. In his translation of Odyssey, 9.518–19, Cowper had spoken of "wethers"—male sheep—that "bleated, by the load distress'd / Of udders overcharged." In the course of bemoaning his error to his friend Hill, Cowper casually wanders into mine: "It was a blunder hardly pardonable in a man who has lived amid fields and meadows grazed by sheep almost these thirty years" (The Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper, ed. James King and Charles Ryskamp [Oxford, 1984], 4.54).

ing a fuss about "The sheep's in the meadow"? Because I want readers to mend their ways and take notice of their previous folly in letting context: deafen them to the particulars of line 3? No. On the contrary, I celebrate the poem's ability to deafen us to the illogic of its assertion about the sheep, the poem's ability to let us understand something that does not make sense as if it did make sense, the poem's ability to free us from the limits of the human mind.

What I am going to say now may sound glib, a lot glibber than I think it actually is—or, I hope, than you will if you give it some thought.

What does the human mind ordinarily want most? It wants to understand what it does not understand. And what does the human mind customarily do to achieve that goal? It works away—sometimes for only a second or two, sometimes for years—until it understands. What does the mind have then? What it wanted? No. What it has is understanding of something it now under-

stands. What it wanted was to understand what it did not understand. I suggest that, by giving us the capacity casually, effortlessly to accept "The sheep's in the meadow" as self-evidently distressing news, "Little Boy Blue" does something comparable to the impossible: it gives us understanding of something that remains something we do not understand.

The second kind of nonsense that concerns me here, commoner in literary works than substantive nonsense, is nonimporting pattern, pattern that fits the "nonsense" label because and only because it does not ordinarily signify anything, is without import. Such pattern is familiar in effects based in repetition with variation: effects like rhythm, rhyme, and alliteration by which a literary construct gets a feel of coherence. Echoes and repetitions can make an artificial construct feel almost as inevitable—as obviously one thing and not a conglomerate—as an object in nature. Nonsubstantive nonsense is a category that includes the kind of incidental repetition that cannot reasonably be believed ever to have signified anything to anybody. The dogs that stud A Midsummer Night's Dream are a good example of the sort of insignificant (that is, nonsignifying) motif I'm talking about. So are slavery, furniture, and valuable refuse in Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, where those substantively incidental topics thread across the thousand-page sprawl of the novel.

In the same category are submerged relationships among words and syllables that regularly share a common context entirely irrelevant to the context of the particular work or passage in which they appear. Consider, for example, the monumentally clumsy refrain of "Home on the Range":

Oh give me a home where the buffalo roam,
Where the deer and the antelope play;
Where seldom is heard a discouraging word
And the skies are not cloudy all day.

I think the song may derive some of its improbable durability from the presence of the word "heard" in that refrain in lines

previously focused on herd animals. The pertinence of the sound of the word "heard" to buffalo, deer, and antelope is presumably entirely inaudible to the conscious minds of readers and listeners. And, I suggest, is all the more powerful and valuable for being so. The available but unmade pun on "heard" and "herd" gives a feel of rightness, naturalness, to lines that are also ludicrously form-driven. If one thinks about the lines, "seldom is heard" and "discouraging word" seem to have been generated for no reason but to rhyme with one another, and "the skies are not cloudy all day" is a periphrastic pretzel pretty clearly designed not for the purpose of noting the prevalence of sunshine in the great plains but to place a rhyme for "play" where one is needed. As I said, all of that is true of the lines if one thinks about them . I suggest that the coherence the unmade "heard"/"herd" pun brings with it helps one not to think about them, that it acts to dissolve one's inclination to examine the content of the lines or to notice their clumsiness and desperate obedience to form. (So, I would add, does the unexploited contrariety of implication inherent in the meanings of the rhyming words "home" and "roam.")

The transparent nonsignificance of the link between "heard" and a collective noun useful for describing mammals that live and travel in groups goes some way toward suggesting my reason for stretching the word "nonsense" beyond its usual function as a label for linguistic constructs that are meaningless or absurd and asking it also to cover varieties of unifying relationship at most substantively incidental to—but usually substantively irrelevant to—the sense made and delivered by the passages they inhabit. Unfortunately, however, the deer and antelope example also goes a way toward evoking a response emblematic of the ones I most fear and am writing this introduction to forestall. Despite my protestations, readers are likely to bridle at what I say. Habit will keep them forever suspicious that I am putting forth a reading of "Home on the Range" that includes a pun on "heard" and "herd" (and perhaps that I see irony in the union of

"home" and "roam") and make them eager to dismiss what I say because no such pun (and no such irony) can be believed ever to have been observed by any sane audience to the song.

I could seem foolish to force the available but idiomatically foreign sense "nonimporting" upon the common, garden meaning of the word "nonsense." By perversely using the word "nonsense" to designate things other than those it customarily designates, I risk the implication that I am about to launch a thesis that rests on a pun, rests on the linguistic accident of two senses of the word "sense." I'm doing no such thing. The risk of seeming to be, however, is worth taking because insistence on a kinship between what the word ordinarily describes—want of rational coherence—and what its elements are capable of describing—want of substantive import—can be useful in talking about kinds of coherence and incoherence in works of art. A principal tenet of the essays in this book is that in the works it discusses ideationally insignificant coherence often takes the place of, does the job of, the ordinary, substantive, syntax-borne coherence that we expect, demand, and do not notice is absent. The words "coherent" and "incoherent" are now most often heard in the metaphoric senses in which they say that this or that assertion or argument does or does not make rational sense. The nonsense I focus on in this book feels sensible because it participates in systems in which coherence is more literal, is like the coherence a snowball has, and in which incoherence is of the kind exhibited by a pound of granulated sugar.

I specified two distinguishable kinds of nonsense. That implied a categorical purity that does not exist among the nonsense examples I talk about here and in the book at large. Typically they combine wrongness in one dimension with rightness in another. For example, there is nothing truly nonsensical—unreasonable, ridiculous, illogical—in the substance of the lines I quoted from "Home on the Range." What is nonsensical—accidental to the import of the lines—is the interplay between the sound of "heard" and the herd animals that are its neighbors in the lines of the song. Similarly, the overlooked implications of its third

line aside, what "Little Boy Blue" says is reasonable and ordinary. Moreover, the rhythm of the quatrain, the rhyme in "horn" and "corn," and the alliteration in "Blue" and "blow" give the lines substantively irrelevant extra coherence. Those lines get a more obviously nonsensical coherence from the presence in the sound of "Blue" of the sound of the past tense of the verb "to blow": "blew." They get another still from the presence of the sound "corn" (meaning "grain-bearing plants" and nothing else) in a poem much concerned with cornute animals. And, although few of the preschool children who are its usual audience are likely to know the terms "cornucopia" and "silver cornet," an adult English speaker—accustomed to hearing "cornucopia" and "horn of plenty" used interchangeably and familiar with the fact that cornets are horns—does not need etymologic lore to feel the far-off extra pull between "horn" and its rhyme.

In short, the process of perceiving "Little Boy Blue" is vastly more eventful than its paraphrasable substance implies. What I am suggesting is that "Little Boy Blue" is exciting for the mind that hears it and that the casual, effortless act of comprehending its simple substance is an act of considerable mental athleticism. I suggest, too, that, just because the act of perceiving the four little lines is so casual and so effortless, the act is godlike, as close to superhuman as anything we can do outside the experience of a work of art. We don't even notice how very many the systems of understanding are in which our minds casually participate.

Now I want to present a string of tiny examples of a great many variations on the kinds of unobserved verbal fireworks I have already illustrated. The examples are in no particular order. I wish they were. I would like to have grouped them by kind, but they resist categorization, and an effort to make categories and then argue the specimens into them would, I think, have inevitably resulted in an essay that seemed to give demonstration precedence over the demonstrated—that invited as much of a reader's attention to boxes as to what the boxes were built to assist them with. Consider the incidental troubles an author's presumably benign will to categorize has inflicted on readers of

Seven Types of Ambiguity and of the letter to Raleigh with which Spenser tagged the 1590 printing of the first three books of The Faerie Queene . Moreover, organizing the examples by kind would have swollen a brief introduction to chapter length.

I will begin with two particularly popular proverbs: "It's the exception that proves the rule" and "A friend in need is a friend indeed." Like "Little Boy Blue," the two proverbs are familiar small change in the currency of most English-speaking cultures. They apparently cause no more ripples in the consciousnesses of their users and hearers than "Little Boy Blue" does. They differ from it, however, in an important way. Each of the two proverbs has, I suspect, puzzled most English speakers—at least momentarily and probably in childhood. The idea that the exception proves the rule is customarily brought into conversations by someone supporting the validity of a rule questioned because it does not fit all cases.^[3] It does not make sense that an exception

[3] Note that I talk not about what the proverb means but about how it is used. I have heard cases made for "the exception proves the role" as "really" meaning something other than what it is commonly used to mean (for instance, that to recognize the exception is to acknowledge the existence of the rule—whether the rule is valid or not). Such cases are obviously irrelevant to the fact that the proverb is in practice taken to say that exceptions to rules prove those rules to be valid. The most obvious and interesting corrective reading of the proverb takes note of "to prove" as a once-common synonym for "to test"—a sense that remains current in everyday English in such terms as "proving ground" and "printer's proofs." "It's the exception that tests the rule" makes fine sense, and one might guess that the improbable use we now make of the proverb drifted into being as "to prove" meaning "to test" drifted out of daily use. Surprisingly, however, back when "to prove" commonly meant "to test" in colloquial English, the proverb appears already to have been used as a contradiction in terms. Morris Tilley's Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth Century (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1950) gives this from 1666: "The exception gives Authority to the Rule" and "the Latin says again, Exceptio probat regulam." The 1970 third edition of The Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs quotes Samuel Johnson from 1765: "The exception only confirms the rule." The proverb has evidently been brashly paradoxical for centuries. It may, however, have started life as an open play on the two senses of Latin probare, which like its English descendant meant both "to test" and "to show to be valid."

to a rule should be thought to prove the rule's validity. An exception to a rule may not disable it entirely, but an exception is certainly not to its credit. As to "A friend in need is a friend indeed," context dictates one meaning for it, standard usage another. The common adjectival phrase "in need" is ordinarily used and heard to mean "needy." But it is in no way probable that neediness should make someone seem a better friend than he or she would be if flush. The implications of the assertion thus belatedly tell us that "in need" must be the proverb's desperately contrary way of saying "when one is oneself needy."

As I said, the two proverbs are unusual among the buried nuggets of unreason on display here in being generally recognized as at least superficially paradoxical. The reason I bring them up here is that they are so perennially popular. These two are always among the first examples college freshmen call out when I ask them to give examples of proverbs. Their near ubiquity in our culture makes them evidence that taking pleasure in accepting nonsense as sense is usual among us. So is our delight in paradox and our fascination with oxymoron. Pointed paradoxes and oxymora display themselves to our minds as oddities, freaks of nature marked as such by their presentation in epigrammatic cages. Nonsense that lies hidden from consciousness is another matter. I suggest, however, that in contending that we take pleasure in nonsense concealed from our consciousnesses, and in contending further that nonsense that goes unobserved to consciousness can be a primary reason why we value some of the works we value most highly, I am only taking a new step along the already-established path that leads us to value open, self-assertive paradox.

Moreover, I contend here and in the essays that follow that the ordinarily unobserved effects I dwell on are of greater value to us, the satisfied clients of the works in which they lurk, than they would be if they were presented ostentatiously as puns or paradoxes or other witty whatnots. Puns, paradoxes, and all such self-conscious displays of simultaneously probable and improb-

able coincidence are like circus acts and sideshow menageries. Displayed as oddities to the minds that are audience to them, they reinforce our confidence in the norm with which they contrast and from which they are so efficiently isolated. The same is true of magicians' tricks. On the other hand, the feats of comprehension enabled by the phenomena I talk about here are not so much performed for their audiences as by them. We the readers and listeners are made capable of taking casual command of simple truths—that is, truths free of considerations foreign to them, uncontaminated by the muck of possibilities from which they rise up pure—that also cling still to inconvenient contexts and locally impertinent identities that would ordinarily force our minds to pause and reason them away. Whereas a pun or a paradox is `just a pun or a paradox, the raw materials for a pun or a paradox are exciting to a mind that feels them and their energy, feels them and their energy raw, not diminished by having been fashioned into toys. The presence of the inert stuff of chaos is exhilarating to that mind when an ordered, ordinary play or poem or sentence brings with it the gift of casual superiority to a potentially baffling cacophony of ideational static unheard within it.

I want to talk now about the school-yard jingle "One for the money":

One for the money,
Two for the show,
Three to get ready,
And four to go!

Nothing in that quatrain violates reason, but neither does the quatrain make positive sense. "One for the money" sounds as if we understand it, but what do we take "for" to indicate? Do we take it to say "in order to obtain"? Maybe so. "Money" suggests so. But what money? And of what assistance might whatever it is that "one" refers to be to the obtaining? I don't think we ever know—or ever wonder. The one-two-three-four pattern and the rhythm take over and substitute nonsignifying articulation

for substantive. Thus, by the time we get to "the show" in "Two for the show" we no longer care what "for" means in this context or notice that the context denies it the possibility of meaning anything at all.

At the same time, however, the lines vaguely and unsuccessfully beckon our minds in several directions obviously alien to the one in which one says or hears "One for the money." In the first line of a jingle used to insure a fair start for contestants in a race, "one" reaches toward its homonym "won" and is immediately seconded by the mere presence of "money"—a potential prize to the runner who is number one at the finish line. And any mind that heard "for" try to say "in order to obtain" in lines I and 2 will hear—and presumably fail to register—its echo in "to get" in "Three to get ready."^[4] That echo is blocked from any listener's consciousness by "ready": the idea of obtaining a "ready" is ridiculous.

A quatrain charged in any event with gestures toward significances available only in other contexts gets a further charge of potentially bewildering energy for any present-day listener acquainted with the American racetrack terms "win," "place," and "show." A bet on the winner to win brings the bettor a large return. The horse that finishes second is said to "place"; a successful place bet—a bet that a chosen horse will come in either first or second—pays much less than a win bet. Betting a horse to "show"—to finish third or higher—gives abettor three chances, but a winning show bet pays even less than a place bet does. For anyone familiar with "win/place/show," the line "One for the money" is a vague but straightforward echo of the hierarchical betting system. "Two for the show" is at once a considerably solider echo than "One for the money" was of the one-two-three of win, place, and show and, since the term for a third-place bet is paired with two and not three, all wrong.

[4] Needless to say, the unobserved echo of "for" meaning "in order to obtain" is absent from the versions of the poem in which line 3 is "Three to make ready."

Experience of the "One for the money" jingle is further complicated, I think, by its patterned but unexploited play on "for" and "four" and on "to" and "two." Here is the quatrain as it might look if someone took conscious note of the pun potential and printed the 1–4, 2–4, 3–2, 4–2 pattern in such a way as to bring the shadow puns to light in our consciousnesses (and thereby rob the poem of the energy they bring it as dimly felt potential):

One 4 the money,
Two 4 the show,
Three 2 get ready,
And four 2 go!

What does all this strenuous analysis of signals and counter-signals in the jingle achieve? It demonstrates that, simple as the experience of "One for the money" is, it is also very complicated, very rich, and very demanding of mental agility we never notice ourselves to exercise. Such analysis, I think, goes a good way toward explaining why "One for the money," "Little Boy Blue," the exception/rule proverb, the "friend in need" proverb, and similarly standard cultural furniture persist when apparently comparable objects come and go.

We seem to value things that, like "One for the money," leave us thinking we understand what in fact we do not. A good example is the old campfire/nursery-school song "Go tell Aunt Rhody":

Go tell Aunt Rhody,
Go tell Aunt Rhody,
Go tell Aunt Rhody
Her old gray goose is dead.

The one that she's been saving,
The one that she's been saving,
The one that she's been saving,
To make a feather bed.

I find it fascinating that I—who lived through the 1960s in Berkeley, California, where my children's childhoods and those

of their friends often seemed to me to consist principally of singing "Go tell Aunt Rhody" in groups—have never known anyone to wonder whether the news that singers order brought to Aunt Rhody is good news or bad. Think about it, and notice that you probably would not think about it unbidden.

I am similarly fascinated by the recently popular, apparently new idea of "getting one's ducks in a row"; people say that they or other people are getting their ducks in a row as a way to say that they are pausing briefly to arrange their affairs in preparation for efficient action. No one seems to wonder why one would want to get ducks into a row or why—since from birth onward ducks voluntarily form rows for travel—one would need to.

We seem particularly fond of things that are at once right and wrong, things like this:

Roses are red.
Violets are blue.
Sugar is sweet,
And so are you.

Red roses are red. And "rose" is the name of a color in the pink range. Violets are certainly bluer than they are red, but the label for their traditional color is "violet."

Some phrases seem to me to get special, extra energy from substantively unharnessed, usually unharnessable, relationships among their parts or between them and their contexts. "Fast food," a recently coined but now standard phrase, probably benefits as much from the unacknowledged presence in it of a label for abstinence from food—"fast"—as it does from alliteration in f . The operative sense of "civil" in "civil war" makes the term straightforward, but it is also a paradox: war and civility are ideas at odds with one another. And I suspect that the English language clings to the term "dry wine" precisely because, whatever else it is, it is oxymoronic.

Other favored phrases may be so because they embody relationships among their elements at once pertinent and entirely impertinent to the sense they are understood to intend. Take

"horse's ass." Why that animal? Why not a cow or a pig or a moose? Because, I suspect, the term "horse's ass" refers—entirely unheard by the consciousnesses of its patrons—to a slave-master relationship between equine classes. I also suspect that some words that might be expected to be very rare in nonspecialized vocabularies are common because of sounds in them accidental to the words' etymologies, but pertinent to the contexts in which the words commonly figure. I am thinking in particular of "hierarchy," which contains the sound of "higher," and "exegesis," which has the sound of "Jesus" in it.

My current favorites among phrases that glow with unobserved energy are from popular music. Before he abruptly decided to have no name at all—he now insists on being called "the artist formerly known as 'Prince' "—Prince Nelson, who had dropped his surname for stage purposes, called his first movie (and one of its main songs) Purple Rain . I never heard any comment on the regal ramifications of "purple," traditionally the royal color, or the sound of "reign" in its homonym, but I think the title got energy from its unheard wit—much more than it could have had the title somehow pointed up its cleverness. More complex and more interesting is the experience of hearing the "Rolling Stones" as the name of the famous 1960s rock group (that is still going strong, though now composed of teenagers in their fifties). The wit and energy in the name is kept leashed by its open allusion to the proverb about not gathering moss. I suggest that, having acknowledged the allusion, minds feel no inclination to think further about the name and, by examining it, deaden the energy "Rolling Stones" gets from the unadvertised wit of using "stones"—rocks —with "rolling" in the name of a rock and roll band.

And so on through many more examples than I need bother with here.

I had one further reason for using little, undignified things to introduce a book on works that literary professionals take seriously enough to write about and teach to students. The sayings

and rhymes and fragments I have just been talking about cannot, I think, be thought by any reader to have been trivialized by my analyses. They are already obviously trivial. And I doubt likewise that anyone will say that in talking about them I should properly have given at least some of my attention to their ideational substance, to what they say to us or demonstrate to us that we are gladdened to know or see. They are to the literature we honor as small coins are to great fortunes, and for that reason they present a particularly good background against which to take up the topic of literary value. I suggest that the one big difference between, on the one hand, "Little Boy Blue" and "One for the money"—each obviously valued in the culture but neither taken seriously—and, on the other, King Lear, War and Peace, the Gettysburg Address, and Jonson's epitaphs on his children is that the works in the latter list take up matters that matter to us, whereas nursery rhymes and the jingles do not.^[5]

Readers who go on from here to read what I have to say about the Gettysburg Address, the Jonson epitaphs, and Twelfth Night will find that I give little honor and less time to the insights they provide or can be said to provide into their topics or the human condition or morality or society or politics. And readers who go on may well feel that in, for example, demonstrating that the Gettysburg Address is variously nonsensical I trivialize it.

I do not, however, believe that great literature is any more capable of trivialization than nursery rhymes are. As I have been saying in one way or another in conference papers, lectures, and

[5] Twelfth Night probably belongs in the latter list too. One of the many unostentatious, substantively incidental patterns of repetition that unify it and give it its quasi-physical integrity is composed of phenomena that, looked at philosophically (that is, looked at in a way Twelfth Night never invites us to), put into question whether human beings should ever feel certain of anything. Twelfth Night differs from its listed peers in that the solemnity of that topic—the topic that gives it the kind of weight absent from nursery rhymes and urgently present in works on topics like premature death—is never brought forward in Twelfth Night for audiences to notice.

printed essays for the last several years, our fear that public display of some kinds of truths about literature will trivialize works we revere is born of our knowledge that literature is indeed trivial and that attention to it is essentially frivolous.^[6] For as long as there has been a culture in the West, Western culture has felt a need to justify literature. The justifications have all, I think, been driven by a need to find a dignified function for an activity that, by all standards at all comparable to the ones we apply to other things we value, is frivolous—a need to find a function for literature that has the practical weight of the other things that matter to us, things like food, shelter, love, gods, children, and law.

There are lots of things people say to justify literature. We go through school and sometimes life parroting them and hearing them parroted, but none of them explains why we go to the movies, why we like some movies better than others, why we like some movies better than others that have the same themes, similar situations, similar philosophies. For an extreme case, consider The Maltese Falcon . The 1941 version, one of most movie lovers' favorite movies, is the second of two remakes of a good, relatively forgettable, now largely forgotten 1931 film, released both as The Maltese Falcon and as Dangerous Female . (The first remake, Satan Met a Lady [1936], was stillborn, stayed that way, and need not trouble us.) John Huston, the director of the 1941 Falcon, tinkered with the 1931 script, but minimally. Moreover, neither Huston's decisions as director nor the performances of his actors are ostentatiously different from their 1931 counter-

[6] As I say, I have been making the points I am about to make in various places and in various ways for quite a while—since 1990 at least—most solidly in three printed essays: "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time and All Others," Shakespeare Quarterly, 41 (1990), 262–68; "Close Reading without Readings," in Shakespeare Reread: The Texts in New Contexts, ed. Russ McDonald (Ithaca, 1994), 42–55; and "The Coherences of 1 Henry IV and of Hamlet, " in Shakespeare Set Free: Teaching "Hamlet" and "1 Henry IV, " ed. Peggy O'Brien (New York, 1994), 32–46. Bits and pieces of these last few introductory paragraphs are freely recycled from those essays.

parts. My point is that the kinds of reasons critics customarily give for why we value one work over another would not distinguish the 1941 Maltese Falcon from the 1931 one. One cannot distinguish the two except by recourse to minor details . One cannot distinguish the two except by admitting in effect that what we probably value in movies, stories, poems, and such is less dignified and spiritual than we would like it to be.

I contend that, although a great work may well be chock-full of spiritual nutrients, what we turn to it for and return to it for is the pleasure the experience of it affords us, the experience of a minute or so with a short lyric, a couple of hours in the theater, hours or days with a novel.

I submit that great literature is like spinach. I read somewhere that although spinach is indeed a valuable source of iron for human beings, only a small percentage of the iron that spinach contains is of a sort available to the human digestive system. I may be entirely misinformed about spinach, but what matters here is that, regardless of its accuracy, the analogy is usefully illustrative of the discrepancy between what a critic can say we see or learn from a work we value and what in fact we do value. Consider your own early experiences with the discrepancy between what introductions to classic works said they were and your own experiences of those works.

Fully as valuable as spinach as an analogy for the literature we value is ice cream. In the recent past, when milk products were still fondly believed to be good for people, advertisers and pop nutritionists in newspapers often gave the impression that what people liked about ice cream was its capacity to provoke and preserve good health. Absurd. The idea that we value the literature we find great for the insights it provides is equally absurd—but, as I will shortly explain, much more appealing.

Back when my work was first being rejected by editors and readers for university presses, the negative comments I got sniffed as if offended at what I wrote. They said, for example, that all I did was play head games or that I behaved as if great poems and

plays were only head games. "Head games" was a popular term of academic contempt in the 1960s. Its opposite numbers, always vague but always solemn, were things like "profound" and "meaningful" and other terms redolent of spiritual or cultural or philosophical pith. Later, when I got things into print, one reviewer of my edition of Shakespeare's sonnets said (in a review I can't now find) that my fussing about moment-to-moment experience of succeeding syllables and their nuances was all very well, but that I needed to remember that Shakespeare's sonnets are more than that. My memorial reconstruction of what wanted to be and succeeded in being a cutting comment doesn't do it justice. I remember, too, that the review or some other said that I couldn't see the forest for the trees. I was appropriately stung by the criticisms. It was years before I realized that what the various negative commentators accused me of believing or seeming to believe was exactly what I did and do believe. The comments about head games and trees were unjust as negative criticism, but they were entirely just. I do indeed believe that great literature—at least what we principally value in it—can be justly called head games. And I do not think there is a forest, just so many trees—syllables that we perceive one by one as we read or listen, syllables whose relations to one another flicker and change as we and they progress to the end.

We care very much for the literary works we care for, much more than one would expect creatures to care who must service the serious, practical needs and fears and ambitions that human beings have to cope with. Nothing is likely to change that. I see no sense in finding or making up dignified excuses for our fondness. A behavior pattern that does not make sense is still a behavior pattern that exists. Reason not the need.

Let me end by quoting myself again. As I have said in print (in the essay on 1 Henry IV and Hamlet ), and say to students so often that their eyes glaze over, literature is different from all the other arts in that literature alone has for its raw material elements that appear to have been created only as means of transporting information from one mind to others: words.

Common sense says, therefore, that the value of literature must derive from the substance it delivers to our consciousnesses, from what it tells us.

Common sense is wrong. After all, as the physicist Percy Bridgman observed more than half a century ago, common sense is something that tells us the world is flat.