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Introduction

Michael P. Clark

The aesthetic can have its revenge upon ideology by revealing a power to complicate that is also a power to undermine.

MURRAY KRIEGER,Ekphrasis

The essays in this volume argue for the importance of aesthetic values and formal characteristics specific to literary texts. This theme has taken on a contrarian quality today, as aesthetic issues have often been displaced from a field that only twenty years ago could still be called "literary" theory without drawing the battle lines that these quotation marks imply. In the years following World War II, after a bitter debate between literary historians and the New Critics, the priority of aesthetic value and the privileged status of the literary text had been firmly established among theorists in the United States. From the late 1950s through the early 1970s, that priority was institutionalized in the American academy by the emergence of literary theory as a distinct discourse and field of study that reflected the formalist emphasis on the self-referential autonomy of literary language and its independence from other forms of discourse. Literary theory was distinguished from the biographical and historical positivism of earlier literary criticism on the one hand and, on the other, from most forms of theoretical discourse in philosophy and the social sciences. Through the pioneering historical work of W. K. Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks, René Wellek, and Murray Krieger, and in influential anthologies by W. J. Bate and Hazard Adams, literary theory traced its genealogical roots back to Plato and constituted the "poem," or literary language in general, as a unique object of knowledge resistant to other analytic perspectives.^[1]

The privileged status of literary language among critics and theorists in the United States was first challenged effectively by the rise of poststructuralism in the early 1970s, following the appearance of The Structuralist Controversy and the translation of Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology.^[2] Initially, the influence of this work on most American critics was limited. Poststructuralism emerged from a Hegelian-Heideggerian tradition that was

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quite distinct from (and almost incomprehensible within) the Kantian lineage of most Anglo-American criticism at the time. In addition, the term poststructuralism itself denoted less a coherent theoretical program than a convenient historical marker. It grouped together some influential theorists who often had little in common apart from an interest in the constitutive role of linguistic functions in human experience, and a corollary rejection of humanistic touchstones such as "Man" and most philosophical absolutes and metaphysical foundations. Otherwise, their work was quite diverse, and most of it was difficult to classify according to conventional academic categories. In particular, apart from the brilliant exceptions of Roland Barthes and the early Michel Foucault, few of those called poststructuralists directly addressed literary issues in the usual sense, especially as that sense had been narrowed down by the New Critics.

As poststructuralism spread in the United States, however, it was quickly adapted to more specifically literary study by J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman, Paul de Man, and others.^[3] In their hands, the general antihumanism of the French theorists was focused sharply on literary issues in the form of deconstruction, and it was aimed at one of the most important tenets of American criticism: the semantic independence and autotelic coherence of the poem understood as a closed and internally consistent linguistic system. The poststructural critique of coherence and closure went much farther than a debate over the formal properties of the text, of course. The New Critics' model of literary form had been directly derived from what Coleridge had described as the organic symbol, and the autotelic model of the poem implied—and at times explicitly claimed—a unique status for literary language that was the aesthetic embodiment of the spiritual transcendence and ontic presence associated with the metaphysics of English Romanticism. To challenge the formal coherence of the poem and its discursive autonomy was therefore to challenge the philosophical foundation of Western humanism as it had been derived from the Romantic preoccupation with the symbol and from a Kantian faith in the constitutive power of symbolic categories in general. The threat posed by poststructuralism to Anglo-American criticism was thus real and substantial. It not only targeted the integrity of the literary text but also attacked the entire system of values and intellectual practices associated with that text as "literature."

In less than a decade, deconstruction won this battle and replaced the contextualist formalism of the American New Critics as the dominant theoretical paradigm in the United States. Like poststructuralism in general, deconstruction was as various as the range of its practitioners, and certainly never as programmatic as the simplistic straw men excoriated by many of its opponents. The work characterized as deconstructive was, nevertheless, usually consistent in its critique of structural closure and semantic coherence as formal virtues of poetic language. Those aesthetic attributes were

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discounted as mere illusions that obscured the differential (and differentiating) functions at work in all forms of discourse—including the literary text as an exemplary but not unique instance. Consequently, although most of the critics associated with deconstruction in the United States continued to take literary works as their primary examples of such functions, these works were usually presented as prototypical cases of general linguistic traits rather than as unique departures from ordinary language. And as literary language lost much of its specificity, the attention of many critics turned from the constitutive power of metaphor, meter, prosopopoeia, paradox, irony, and other attributes most often identified as distinctly "literary" to the extra-literary and even extra-discursive forces at work in society at large. As Foucault put it in a reaction against the linguistic focus of his earlier work, even for the intellectual and cultural historian "one's point of reference should not be to the great model of language [langue] and signs, but to that of war and battle. The history which bears and determines us has the form of a war rather than that of a language: relations of power, not relations of meaning."^[4]

This paradigmatic shift in contemporary theory away from language as the determinative basis of experience toward the extra-discursive ground of history, social conflict, or "war" was driven in part by a reaction to deconstruction that resembled the historicists' resistance to the New Criticism almost half a century earlier. Deconstruction's focus on language and tropes obviously recalled the topics, if not the methods and conclusions, that had preoccupied literary critics in the United States after World War II, and this similarity resulted in charges that deconstruction was just another form of depoliticized close reading and so just as reductive and idealist as any formalist theory. These charges were often levied in the name of a historical or cultural materialism that insisted on subordinating the text to its function within a broader social context, a function that not only superseded the text but finally determined its formal properties as well as its thematic content and social utility. From this perspective, any attempt to consider the text apart from its context—however that text may be defined—appeared as aestheticist escapism or as a vestige of Arnoldian idealism intent on isolating culture from everyday life and then speciously defending that isolation, both as the realm of universal and timeless ideas and, paradoxically, as the foundation for whatever social affect those ideas may have in some indefinite, distant future.^[5]

This complaint was quickly extended from the specific claims of deconstruction per se to the elevated status of discourse and the signifier that characterized poststructuralism in general. As a result, the terms of debate in contemporary literary theory shifted from a dispute about the nature of literary form to a broader argument about the social function of literature in the world beyond the text, and about the relevance of literary analysis to

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historical analysis and political reform. Against the Arnoldian fear of culture being contaminated by the concerns of the street, many critics of poststructuralism insisted on connecting culture directly to the pragmatic concerns of ordinary life, and then on reading the products of that culture as answers to—or, in the case of much canonical literature, answerable for—the conflicts and injustices of that life. Unlike the earlier reactions against the radical formalism of the New Critics, however, which had usually depended on the relatively simple positivist claims of reconstructive historicism or the expressivist assumptions of straightforward biographical readings, the resistance to poststructuralism was more subtle and conceptually complex. Usually citing Benjamin, Bakhtin, Gramsci, and the later Foucault as its most important predecessors, this newly politicized theory coalesced in the various forms of cultural critique associated with the Frankfurt School and in certain forms of British and French Marxism.^[6] Though more varied and conceptually sophisticated than most forms of historical analysis, this work was characterized generally by an effort to treat culture as a primary object of historical analysis rather than as a reflection or expression of some other, determinative cause, and by its tendency to read literary and artistic works primarily in social or political terms, rather than according to the formal categories of more traditional aesthetic analysis.

Whether conducted in Marxian idioms or the broader forms of cultural critique that evolved from Frankfurt and Foucault, this interest in the social import of culture once again opened literary study to historical and ideological questions. By renewing faith in the political efficacy of theoretical work, it also brought a new agenda to the academic study of literature, one that began and ended with the political use of literature to challenge the status quo and effect positive social change. At times, the new cultural criticism identified literary analysis with political action to such an extent that the critic was portrayed as the modern avatar of Sir Philip Sidney's soldierpoet, intent on well-doing and not merely well-knowing.

What Sidney's poet does well, however, is write poetry, and the reluctance of this newly politicized theory to recognize the specificity of the poetic work in the field of social action marks its most significant and most problematic departure from more traditional defenses of the use of poetry. In his Apology for Poetry, for example, Sidney celebrates the poet over the historian and philosopher not because the poet knows something about society and virtue that they do not, but because only the poet knows how to embody that knowledge in a form that will lead people to act on the idea of virtue represented in the poem. The poem is fundamentally different both from the philosophical truth or "foreconceit" that it embodies and from the historical action that it would inspire, and it is this difference that imbues poetry with its social significance. Yet, despite a shared enthusiasm for the social and moral utility of poetry—not to mention Sidney's military endorsement

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of poetry as a "companion of the camps"—few associated with cultural studies would follow Sidney in attributing such independence and power to poetry. Instead, the formal or aesthetic characteristics of poetry and literature in general are often discounted by social and historical critics in favor of less mediated engagement with lived experience, and this suspicion of mediation or representation can be read (and written) too easily as the crude materialism or naive essentialism which opponents of cultural studies so often ascribe to the whole field.^[7]

The polemical extremes of this debate have little to do with theoretical subtlety or precision, and attempts to condemn or to promote this range of work under sobriquets such as "race and gender criticism," "subaltern analysis," "postcolonial theory," "cultural studies," and the like inevitably wind up being too facile and reductive to be useful even as dismissive epithets or celebratory shibboleths. Unfortunately, this hyperbolic rhetoric does have a certain currency in institutional politics. In their struggle for professional identity and institutional authority within the university, proponents of cultural studies at times translate the lack of aesthetic autonomy for the literary text into a lack of importance and significance for literary study in general. In the face of that challenge, some belletrists have portrayed this tendency to collapse literature into a generalized form of symbolic determination as indicative of a drive to reduce the rich diversity of literary particularity to a monolithic political theme, regardless of the relevance that theme may have for a specific author or work. The rhetoric of argument at this level is usually that of the jeremiad, and the professed stakes are nothing less than a defense of human rights or the fate of civilization as we know it.^[8]

As absurd as the extreme versions of these charges are, the debate has identified an important conceptual limitation that can compromise even the more nuanced versions of cultural analysis, which readily acknowledge the symbolic determination of human experience in the social realm. Although that acknowledgment avoids the simplistic materialism of much historical criticism, it almost inevitably results in literature being treated merely as one discursive form among the many symbolic systems by which subjective identity is constituted at a given historical moment. Without the independent agency or freedom often associated with poetry, however provisionally, in most humanistic traditions, literature is subsumed by a more general symbolic determinism that constitutes, in turn, our sense of the world and our place in it. Contradictions among the various symbolic systems operating at any moment allow for considerable variety in the dominant social forms, but those contradictions inevitably follow the lines of force characteristic of the system as a whole, rather than anything specific to the literary text. Literature as such simply disappears against a general background of material action or symbolic determination, and with the disappearance of literature—in the absence of any unmediated material

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ground or any other "outside" to that discursive network—the possibility of productive independence, individual autonomy, effective resistance, and difference itself disappears as well.^[9]

Since those were some of the values that motivated this challenge to poststructuralism in the first place, the difficulty of finding a ground—either material or symbolic—from which to contest the elevation of the signifier posed a serious limitation to this critique. Yet the challenge was also undercut by its intended target, which refused to hold still in the position of a more conventional formalism, even in the overtly literary version of deconstructive analysis. For all of its emphasis on close reading and the analysis of tropes, deconstruction not only contested Romantic notions of organic unity and symbolic autonomy usually associated with formalist analysis; it also deliberately challenged the distinction between world and text usually endorsed by both sides of the debate between formalists and their opponents. In his survey of the discursive properties attributed to the literary text by most poststructural critics, for example, Roland Barthes describes the differences between what he calls the "work," as traditionally conceived of by literary criticism, and the "Text," as defined by poststructuralism.^[10] Barthes begins by distinguishing between the two on semiotic and formal terms. Whereas the work is treated as a material object associated with and subordinated to some extratextual "meaning" or referent, "the text is held in language: it exists only as discourse" (75). Unlike the meaning-full work, designed to be consumed and converted to usable knowledge, the Text is characterized by the "dilatory" field of the signifier with its "irreducible plurality," which "practices the infinite deferral of the signified" in favor of "the signifier's infinitude" and the "play" that the Text engenders (76, 79). As the essay progresses, however, Barthes insists that textuality is inextricably embedded in action and so exists beyond the bounds of formal closure that constitute the "work" as such. The Text "asks the reader for an active collaboration," Barthes says; one must "produce the text, play it, open it out, make it go" (80). This opening out is what links the text to pleasure or jouissance, and it also establishes its political efficacy as a "social space":

Order of the signifier, the Text participates in a social utopia of its own: prior to history, the Text achieves, if not the transparency of social relations, at least the transparency of language relations. It is the space in which no one language has a hold over any other, in which all languages circulate freely.…Discourse on the Text should itself be only "text," search, and textual toil, since the Text is that social space that leaves no language safe or untouched, that allows no enunciative subject to hold the position of judge, teacher, analyst, confessor, or decoder. The theory of the Text can coincide only with the activity of writing. (81)

As these remarks demonstrate, Barthes is careful to maintain the discursive nature of the Text as opposed to simpler materialist claims: the social

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utopia here is that of the Text, not the world, and he distinguishes between the "transparency of social relations" and the "transparency of language relations" that constitutes that utopian dimension of the textual experience. Still, Barthes deliberately characterizes that discursive space as social, and he proposes writing as an activity capable of opposing the repressive codification of the subject in the social roles of judge, teacher, or confessor. Those are the same roles that he earlier associated with the formal properties of the "work"—coherence, reference, even signification in general—and Barthes portrays those properties as the products of extratextual, ideological regulation, operating in the name of precisely those historical or social forces privileged by materialist analysis as distinct from and antithetical to merely discursive operations.

Thus what Barthes's remarks suggest, and what we could find in the work of most poststructural theorists, is an attack on the very notion of "form" as a property of the text apart from its place in the "context" of worldly experience. In Barthes's essay, the form of the traditional work—the work itself—is treated entirely as a product of its situation within the world beyond the text. The specific form of work is, in a literal sense, the material product of those extratextual forces that shape that context, and it is precisely this continuity between the work's form and the social forces that determine it that constitutes the ground, the material ground, on which those forces may be contested by "Text." That is why Barthes's reference to the revolutionary and utopian importance of the text as a "social" space is not simply allegorical. Like Lacan's insistence on the materiality of the signifier, and like Derrida's critique of the binary sign as idealist in its inherent subordination of the signifier to the signified, and like the "language games" that constitute social bonds in Lyotard's Postmodern Condition, Barthes's Text does not situate the word in the world, as historicists would attempt to do, nor the world in the word, as formalists might argue: it confounds those terms entirely by treating the word as world, by recognizing in the word the weighty materiality of its worldly existence as part of our lived experience. The Text is thus opened to determination by the same "extratextual" forces that govern the rest of our lives, but those lives are in turn influenced by properties of the text that cannot be reduced to ideological formations and social regulation, whether those properties be called jouissance, free play, or, more simply, pleasure.

Deconstruction, like poststructuralism in general, therefore cannot be easily categorized and dismissed as "formalism" in the traditional sense. It denies the integrity of form or, more precisely, the coherence of "structure," but, more importantly, it rejects the separation of the work from the world that has historically been the defining characteristic of formalist analysis and its greatest vulnerability in the face of social or historicist charges of linguistic idealism. For some theorists, such as Barthes and Lyotard, that

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rejection stems from the perception of social relations in semiotic or discursive terms; other theorists writing in the wake of poststructuralism equate the uniqueness and particularity traditionally associated with the literary work with the material specificity usually attributed to historical experience. Commenting on a particular tradition in Islamic interpretation, for example, Edward Said says that its value lies in "dealing with a text as significant form, in which…worldliness, circumstantiality, the text's status as an event having sensuous particularity as well as historical contingency, are considered as being incorporated in the text, an infrangible part of its capacity for conveying and producing meaning." That worldly particularity and contingency, Said concludes, "exist at the same level of surface particularity as the textual object itself."^[11] With that worldliness incorporated into the text as part of its signifying function, form and content, or work and world, appear not as separate fields to be connected (or not) in the act of analysis, but as reciprocal fields of experience whose significance and visibility are derived from that reciprocity. Treating the worldly situation of the work not as a separable context but as "an infrangible part of its capacity for conveying and producing meaning" means that the formal or symbolic function of the text is effectively continuous with the rest of our experience and so susceptible to the same forms of social and historical analysis as any other event.

At the same time, the peculiarly narrative or textual properties of this "event" demand that those analyses take into account a whole array of issues and questions traditionally relegated to the realm of aesthetics and literary interpretation. As Fredric Jameson famously observed in The Political Unconscious, his slogan "Always historicize!" is substantially complicated by the fact that history "is inaccessible to us except in textual form, and…our approach to it and to the Real itself necessarily passes through its prior textualization."^[12] Similarly, in his influential essay "Dissemination: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation," Homi Bhabha describes the "nationness" characteristic of postcolonial peoples "as a form of social and textual affiliation." Distinguishing his approach from the "historicism that has dominated discussion of the nation as a cultural force," and that "most commonly signifies a people, a nation, or a national culture as an empirical sociological category or a holistic cultural entity," Bhabha claims that "the narrative and psychological force that nationness brings to bear on cultural production and political projection is the effect of the ambivalence of the ‘nation’ as a narrative strategy."^[13]

For Jameson and Bhabha, the reciprocity of work and world as part of our lived experience becomes the proper object of historical analysis because making that connection is integral to the social process. So Jameson insists on the "positive" analysis of narrative closure as a figural projection of utopian longing because that longing can be found at the heart of all class consciousness

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and therefore constitutes the historical horizon of the text. Similarly, Bhabha focuses on what he calls the "performative" dimension of efforts to teach (or "narrativize") national identity in postcolonial cultures because that performance is the means by which those cultures struggle to define themselves in the wake of colonialist occupation.^[14] Unfortunately, in the hands of less careful and subtle critics, that analytic object turned out to be considerably more frangible and fragile than its theoretical origins would support. The reciprocity between work and world that is portrayed here as the object of analysis and the product of specific social actions too often becomes an apodeictic assumption that simply collapses these two poles into one another. Even in Bhabha's account of political marginality, or in other efforts to define the nature of minority discourse such as the introduction to The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse by Abdul Jan-Mohamed and David Lloyd, we find many of those attributes often associated with the literary text—hyperspecificity, provisional or local cohesion, ironic self-consciousness and internal contradictions, irreducible marginality, supplementarity, excess, etc.—dissociated from the text and projected directly into the social field as defining attributes of cultural autonomy and political viability among oppressed and marginalized groups.^[15]

This tendency to treat social and political marginalization in textual terms and vice versa has produced some important pedagogical and political effects. In particular, it has opened the literary curriculum to a broad and heterogeneous range of works termed "minority literature" as defined by the authors' gender, race, or ethnicity. However, the undeniable benefits of this curricular innovation have been compromised to some extent by the conceptual tautology that informs it and that is inherent in the very phrase "minority literature." Most humanistic formulations of the literary text since the Romantic period insist on the marginality of the text to ordinary discursive practices and social regulation, and, despite its many differences with humanism on most other grounds, poststructuralism too defined the text as an event of absolute singularity. Those attributes continue to be associated with the literary text as such, and as we have seen they have also come to embody (or "incorporate") the experience of specificity and radical particularity that constitute materiality and history as the limit of symbolic determination and ideological generalization. These literary properties of the text thus, by definition, generate opposition and resistance at a plethora of points not mapped by the status quo either as hegemonic or as subaltern. Whether it is defined in the traditional terms of Western humanism or as the disseminative proliferation of difference characteristic of poststructural textuality, literary experience is so utterly unique or "marginal" in itself that it must undermine the very possibility of stable affiliation with any group. The only way such an affiliation may be enforced, other than as a utopian fantasy or as a performative gesture, is by codifying the

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group in the image of the work through the illusionary, ideological projection of the work's marginality and difference into the world as an attribute of that group's lived experience and social identity. To designate any set of texts as "minority literature" in terms of the authors' historical or social status, therefore, is not only semantically redundant; it also obscures the textual origin of the features that constitute the marginality, as well as obscuring the literary basis of that designation.

This tendency to treat the world in terms of aesthetic attributes is not new: Walter Benjamin, over fifty years ago, described the strategic imposition of conventional formal attributes such as coherence and unity onto the world as a defining characteristic of fascist politics.^[16] The overt political values of recent cultural studies are diametrically opposed to the coercive conformity of the fascist agenda, of course. Nevertheless, the contemporary proclivity to read social and political marginality in terms of poststructural textuality exhibits a similar inclination to treat work and world as mirror images of one another: it simply transposes those attributes formerly associated with literary form onto the world and then claims to "read" them in and as material action, thereby codifying in inverted form the very textual properties that distinguished work from world in both Arnoldian humanism and poststructural analysis. The result is an imaginary opposition, in which the functional reciprocity of work and world that makes this transposition possible in the first place is disguised by an ideological scenario that posits the world as distinct from the work and then reads the work in, and on, the world's terms. The resistance to aesthetics in the name of cultural criticism may therefore be read as the product of an imaginary projection of work and world into irreconcilable opposites, when in fact their apparent opposition is produced by symbolic characteristics of the literary text whose status is being contested in the subordination of work to world. The terms of the debate itself, the very notion that "work" and "world" denote ontic realms or modes of experience that can be separated or connected, can be understood in this light as an effect of specific discursive functions that underlie this conceptual opposition and that render its two poles visible; and those functions may well be what constitute literature as such.

The essays in this volume take up this possibility as a point of departure from which a wide range of texts and issues may be read in terms of contemporary debates about the importance of literature to theoretical argument. Though varying greatly in their topics and the historical range of their examples, the authors represented in this collection all insist on some form of dialectical relation between work and world that confounds simplistic distinctions between these two realms, and that contests the facile elevation of either work or world as the determining factor of literary experience.

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This insistence constitutes a general thesis for the volume that is reflected in its title and summarized by the epigraph from Murray Krieger's Ekphrasis: "the aesthetic can have its revenge upon ideology by revealing a power to complicate that is also a power to undermine."^[17] Numerous precedents for this position are cited throughout the collection—Vico, Marvell, Friedrich Schlegel, Nietzsche, Celan, and de Man, to name only a few—but most of the essays situate it in reference to the sustained argument Murray Krieger has developed throughout his career. As these essays indicate, Krieger's work has been central to debates about the status of literary and aesthetic form. He has repeatedly and systematically returned both sides of the debate, which he characterizes in his essay for this volume as an "aesthetic" interest in the work vs. an "ascetic" emphasis on the world, to their common ground in a textual encounter that joins world and word even while flaunting their difference.

Although the terms and emphases of his argument have varied considerably, Krieger has consistently focused on what he calls the ironic or "duplicitous" nature of literary illusion as the key element that distinguishes the unique status of the literary work and that constitutes its importance to the world of lived experience. The literary work, Krieger says, presents an illusion of, and to, the world; but unlike the dogmatic proclamations of ideology, literature presents its illusion as illusion. In doing so, literature clarifies not only its own relation to the world but also the provisional status of all the other illusions that would pass themselves off as the truth. By foregrounding the provisional nature of aesthetic autonomy in this way, literature offers a unique perspective on the ideological tendency of all discourse to claim for itself the authority of some transcendent foundational truth, whether that truth be offered as history, race, gender, imagination, art, form, or "theory." As Krieger puts it in his essay for this volume, literature is much like what he described in an earlier essay as theater at its best:

the theater, like trompe l'oeil painting, is not trying actually to take us in. Instead, its devices slyly point to itself: it undercuts its apparent illusionary claims with its textual or subtextual references to its artifice, to the art of theater. In his espousing the anti-illusionary call for alienation, it was Brecht—and not necessarily the rest of us—who was being taken in by traditional theater. Here he is representative of the politicized theorists who would take us in by locking us within the ideological limitations of their claims. It is, I believed, the aesthetic that helps rescue us from such traps, because it alerts us to the illusionary, the merely arbitrary, claims to reality that authoritarian discourse would impose upon us; because, unlike authoritarian discourse, the aesthetic takes back the "reality" it offers us in the very act of offering it to us. It thus provides the cues for us to view other discourse critically, to reduce the ideological claims to the merely illusionary,

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since there is in other discourse no self-awareness of their textual limitations, of their duplicity—their closures, their exclusions, their repressions. I would agree with Brecht that illusion may frustrate, may baffle, may mislead us—but only until the aesthetic teaches us how to put it to use.

Noting the persistence of this theme even in his earlier work, Krieger adds

Because of its fictional character, the literary would be free of any totalizing tendency toward the single-sided. For to me the danger of totalization, and its repressive force, emanates rather from the unrelenting controls that the conceptual—often in the guise of the political—would impose upon discourse. Thus for me it was the aesthetic that held the promise of freeing us from that repressive dominance: the drive to exclusion dictated by the monolithic claims of conceptual discourse can be happily evaded by the drive to inclusion provided by the duplicitous notion of the aesthetic as I had been developing it. The sociopolitical function of literature in its aesthetic dimension, then, is to de stabilize the dominant culture's attempt to impose its institutions by claiming a "natural" authority for them, and by using (as Brecht in this case properly sees) a false art (a conceptual rhetoric disguised as art) to create the ground for this illusionary naturalization of its claim to power. The aesthetic reveals the fraudulence, and thus the deception, of this attempt.

Not all of the authors in this collection agree about the extent to which Krieger has been successful in this effort to establish a worldly function for the uniquely self-reflective character of literary illusion. The importance of the effort itself is apparent, however, in the extent to which the authors agree that separating the work from the world relies on a false distinction, imposed upon literary experience by theorists who would denigrate art by collapsing it into one side or the other of that binary opposition. On the one hand, this specious logic is evident in efforts to portray literature in terms of an effete aestheticism and then to condemn aesthetic autonomy for its escapist—or all-too-willing—collusion with the status quo. On the other hand, the same opposition also underlies attempts to reduce the literary work to its political themes and then to assimilate the text entirely into a social context, understood either in material or symbolic terms. In the place of that binary logic, the authors in this volume emphasize the paradoxical or, more simply, "poetic" capacity of literature to have an effect on the world beyond its limit by acknowledging the limit as such. That proposition is at times argued as a metatheoretical rejection of any fixed opposition, such as that between text and context, in favor of a non-binary logic peculiar to poetic discourse. At other times, the proposition informs the analysis of specific tropes and rhetorical strategies that constitute the very possibility of literary performance against the pressure of ideology and dogma. At every moment, the essays in this volume direct our attention to the special status of literature in the full range of human experience, and

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they celebrate the unique vision literature affords for readers able to tell the difference between the work and the world, and able to read what the work tells us about the world in that difference.

The collection begins with Stanley Fish noting the difficulty that critics of Andrew Marvell have had in situating his work persuasively within the historical and social context of its time. Fish argues that Marvell's poetry is best characterized as an "art of disappearance" that would both reform and reject the world of which it is a part. This paradoxical relation of the work to the world is most evident, Fish argues, in Marvell's pervasive imagery of freedom and withdrawal from time and from human relations, but it extends even into the representational mechanisms of artistic media themselves. The very impulse to represent the freedom of poetry from intrusions of the outside world necessarily invokes that world in the images and figures that reject it. Consequently, that impulse inevitably returns both poem and poet to the worldly entanglements that mark the limit of the art. This ambivalence has frustrated some of Marvell's more politically minded critics, Fish observes, though it is far from a simplistic escapism. In fact, it resembles the more complicated aestheticist tendencies implicit in Krieger's work, where the work's paradoxical relation to the world constitutes a privileged perspective on the ideological constraints it would—but finally never can—transcend.

Underlying Fish's reading of Marvell's poetry is an oppositional logic that reads literature as suspended between poetic freedom and worldly constraint. Hazard Adams shows us that same logic at work beneath Krieger's insistence on the "duplicitous" nature of the poem, though what Fish sees as ambivalence in Marvell, Krieger reads as the "self-confessing illusion" of poetry in general. That "illusion," which calls attention to itself and so renders its illusory status visible, shifts poetry from "an epistemological to an ethical arena" by warning us against any cultural delusion "that would legitimize its authority by an appeal to nature" or truth, as Krieger puts it in Words about Words about Words.^[18] As Adams claims, however, this paradoxical concept of the poem still defines poetry in terms of the binary opposition of truth and illusion, or presence and absence, and so perpetuates an epistemological bias beneath its ironic embrace of both sides of the opposition. Adams proposes instead what he calls an "antithetical" poetics that resists binary opposition as such. He derives this position from Vico's notion of the "certainty" associated with primitive mythology and poetry. Certainty, according to Vico, had nothing to do with the criterion of "truth" that governed later scientific thought. Adams notes that this certainty possessed a social utility quite apart from questions of truth and credibility, a utility resembling that of the "credible idol" described by Mazzoni. The ethical importance

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of poetry, Adams concludes, is therefore derived from its capacity to resist the logic of negation that is inherent in all ideological oppositions, including those that would bind the oppositions together aesthetically in a reciprocal or duplicitous relation.

Of all the solutions proposed to transcend the ideological bind of oppositional logic, none was more influential nor propounded more confidently than Romantic organicism and the aesthetic ideology of form with which it is associated. Coleridge's famous definition of beauty in the third essay of the "Principles of Genial Criticism" as "multeity in unity" promises to resolve the dilemma of word vs. world in the poetic image, where "the figure, and the real thing so figured, exactly coincide."^[19] Yet deep within the German idealism from which Coleridge borrowed his theoretical formulae was a persistent reluctance to impute that resolution quite so simply to the work of art itself. Friedrich Schlegel occupies an especially controversial position in that tradition, as J. Hillis Miller explains in his essay. That controversy, Miller says, derives from Schlegel's status as "a great theorist and practitioner of irony." Hegel and Kierkegaard denounced Schlegel's irony as "infinite absolute negativity," but Miller follows de Man in stressing Schlegel's definition of irony as "a permanent parabasis," i.e., that moment when an actor suddenly breaks role and addresses the audience in his own voice. Thus, while irony is fundamentally unsettling and vertiginous, undermining the very categories of truth and illusion that constitute secure knowledge, that effect is also enlightening because it reveals the very limits of illusion that hide what remains unknowable.

For this reason, Schlegel insists that any attempt to represent "the highest" must combine enthusiasm, or the embodiment of that highest spirit, with irony, a self-canceling, a-rational attention to the limits of enthusiasm and to the "shimmering through of the aboriginal chaos's madness and stupidity." This combination constitutes what Schlegel calls mythology and serves as an allegory, not of the form of "the highest," but of the form-making or Bildung by which we know of it. Myths are therefore "catachreses for chaos," Miller argues, "thrown out to name something that has no proper name," and as such they are primarily performative acts that are "alien to knowledge" because they have no natural correspondence to their referent and must be "worked" into a sign for the chaos to be revealed.

The substitution of ethical effect for the epistemological criterion of truth, which Adams and Miller describe in their essays, echoes one of the oldest and most persistent defenses of poetry against Plato's charge that poets are liars. As Ernst Behler explains in his essay, that defense traditionally proceeds by situating poetry in an aesthetic realm where distinctions between truth and falsehood are inapplicable because there is no pretense of an exact—or any—correlation between language and the world. Behler argues that modern versions of this defense are more complicated because

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they take what was formerly considered the "aesthetic" freedom of poetry to be characteristic of all forms of human utterance. As developed by the Schlegels, Novalis, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Wilde, and others, this position often retains the criterion of truth, but it associates truth with poetry rather than prose because poetry celebrates its derivation from human desire and social interaction and openly admits its dissociation from the empirical world.

If understood simply as the negation of scientific or philosophical discourse, Behler adds, poetry is trivialized, as it is in the radical aestheticism of Wilde's "lying." (Fish suggests that poetry would be similarly trivialized in Marvell's poetry if the poetry's escapist impulse were not constantly frustrated by the text's inevitable return to the world.) Behler prefers Nietzsche's insistence on a reciprocal, dialectical relation between the discourses of poetry and science. That relation does not reverse Plato's elevation of science or truth over poetry so much as it subsumes that opposition in an inclusive dialectic between moral distinctions and artistic conjunctions. Behler also claims that we find vestiges of Nietzsche's position today in the softer forms of Gadamer's dialogic understanding or Habermas's idea of a philosophy that combines "strong propositions with weak status claims." As the essays by Adams and Miller demonstrate, however, the apparent modernity of this dialectical phenomenon may in fact be the product of a contemporary tendency to reduce the arguments of those earlier theorists (including the Schlegels) to a simplistic opposition between the truth of reference and the falsehood of artistic representation, whereas in fact that simplification belies the more complicated understanding of poetic discourse actually found in the work of those writers.

Historically, these complications found their most sustained and sophisticated expression in the long tradition of debate over the nature of ekphrasis. In that tradition, the representational status of art was argued as a contest between the spatial medium of painting and the temporal medium of poetry concerning which medium could best capture the immediacy of life. Contrary to the usual reading of the ekphrastic tradition, Stephen G. Nichols argues in his essay that poets and artists often represented a "complementarity between the iconic epigram and painting" rather than a simple opposition. This complementary relation not only promised to transcend the spatial and temporal limitations of visual and linguistic arts, but also aspired even to master the vagaries of space and time that distinguished the living models from their artistic representation. The French poet Clément Marot explored that complementarity in his work, Nichols says, using poetry's capacity to represent the immaterial, inner life of its subjects in order "to mediate the temporal vulnerability of the body and its likenesses." Similarly, the easy physical mobility of the linguistic medium extended the spatial range of art well beyond the usually fixed status of visual media. Literature

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thus surpassed the limits of place and position and reached out into the reader's space rhetorically in an effect resembling that of the portraiture that was increasingly fashionable during Marot's lifetime.

What distinguishes the ekphrastic tradition described by Nichols from the ironic or "antithetical" aesthetic described by Miller and Adams is the explicit retention of a referential truth-claim for aesthetics in ekphrasis. Within the ekphrastic tradition, the complementarity of painting and poetry is valuable precisely because it tells us something about the world that even lived experience cannot reveal. Denis Donoghue argues in his essay that the ekphrastic commitment to an epistemological dimension for poetry remains even in Krieger's sophisticated and highly self-conscious adaptation of this theoretical tradition. Donoghue claims that we find traces of this commitment most consistently in Krieger's emphasis on the self-consciousness and ultimate futility of poetic closure within the discourses of organicism and the American New Criticism. Though usually portrayed as an expression of skepticism toward the autonomy of the aesthetic object, this emphasis in fact reflects a vestigial epistemology in Krieger's work, Donoghue says, and he attributes it in part to Krieger's description of formal closure in spatial terms.

Donoghue proposes an alternative to spatial models of form, an alternative that he derives from Paul de Man's elevation of allegory over symbol as the defining trope of poetic language. That shift from symbol to allegory offers the possibility of thinking about form in temporal terms, and as a process that is not dependent on closure for its integrity. Nevertheless, Donoghue notes that de Man's emphasis on the failure of allegory to accomplish symbolic closure still retains a referential standard that measures the language of the poem against the world it fails to reach. Donoghue claims that this standard is less essential to de Man than to Krieger, however, because de Man's treatment of prosopopoeia as the defining trope of poetic language undoes the distinction between external reference and internal signification, portraying objects in the poem as semblances of the world rather than as illusions or hallucinations. We engage those semblances as action and experience, Donoghue says, not as knowledge (or even as knowledge admitted to be ironic, false, or lacking). Understood as experience, reading retains its temporal form and is oriented toward feeling and action rather than toward objects in the world. Consequently, as symbol in this temporal sense, the poem "is not a constituent of knowledge but of desire," and so it is free from the taint of epistemology endemic to the ekphrastic tradition.

Donoghue's reading of the debate between Krieger and de Man attempts to shift the terms of the debate from an epistemological connection between the work and the world to an engagement with the work itself as a material act or worldly experience, specifically that of desire. Though

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Donoghue does not discuss the genealogy of this move, it clearly recalls Archibald MacLeish's famous dictum, "A poem should not mean, but be." It echoes even more aptly Cleanth Brooks's formalist defense of the poem as "a simulacrum of reality…by being an experience rather than any mere statement about experience" or even a representation of experience.^[20] As Brooks understood, however, any effort to defend the poem as concrete experience or act necessarily subjects poetry (and its defense) to the same ethical and political judgment that may be directed toward any other action in the world. Brooks welcomed that judgment, for although he believed it fell outside the bounds of literary analysis per se, it ultimately justified the unique status of the autonomous poem because that autonomy was what guaranteed the disinterested exploration of all attitudes and emotions associated with whatever action the poem might portray mimetically, or with whatever statement the poem might stage within the context of its closed form.

For all of its formal sophistication, Brooks's aesthetic rather obviously echoes the dominant social ideals of the postwar United States. He envisioned the poem as a symbolic melting pot, in which images, actions, and even words themselves give up their worldly constraints and identities as they are reordered according to a more egalitarian and inclusive—in Brooks's terms, "ironic"—poetic order. It should not be surprising, then, that today, when the metaphor of the melting pot is often read as a rationalization for repressive homogenization and for the suppression of ethnic and racial difference, the aesthetic principle of formal closure would be associated with political totalitarianism and condemned for its collusion with the status quo. That collusion is sometimes read as allegorical (a structural homology between self-contained aesthetic systems and closed social orders) and sometimes as expressive (the work as the manifestation of more pervasive and sinister values of exclusivity and elitism). Either way, the association of formalist aesthetics with repressive politics has been posited both as an inevitable theoretical conjunction and as an undeniable historical phenomenon, and such arguments have been among the most persistent and persuasive challenges to the specificity of aesthetic experience and to the importance of literature as a source of autonomy and resistance to the status quo.

Yet, as David Carroll argues in his essay, this association is reductive, both as a reading of aesthetic form and as a political theory. Formal closure always works against itself in art by disclosing the connection to the world that the work of art would resist. Consequently, critics who argue for the isolation of the work from the world, and those who insist on its worldly status as an expression or reflection of political values, are equally caught within the oppositional logic that the literary work confounds. Carroll compares this aesthetic principle of an open organicism to Jules Michelet's theory of national

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unity, which borrows directly from aesthetic models of organic form. Contrary to monolithic racial models of the nation, Michelet argued that the spiritual unity of any people is not fixed or closed but in fact emerges in history out of the material differences among races and classes. Unlike totalitarian theories of "unification" imposed upon difference from without, Michelet's "dialectic of division and unification" unifies the nation as an aesthetic ideal and as a historical process that constantly confronts specific differences as the very ground of unity itself. Thus, Carroll concludes, the same obligation to resist ideological closure that Krieger describes as the critic's duty "should also be carried over into the study of history and politics, where the critic should dwell on what in history, as well as literature, resists organic closure and the ideological and aesthetic ideologies that support it."

For Wesley Morris, the historical significance accruing to the failure of aesthetic forms to close off their relation to the world must be understood as the product of a symbiotic relation between modernism and postmodernism. Postmodernism's famous decentering of the subject is but a "second-order" displacement, Morris argues, built upon modernism's earlier decentering of community through the image of an autonomous individual whose imaginative power opposed the oppressively technological form of late industrial society. Postmodernism's celebration of the sign undermined both the autonomy of that individual subject and the organic unity of its symbolic expression, but Morris claims that this "anti-formalism" was "irrevocably bound" to the organic formalism it opposed. Hence, Morris concludes, both movements are profoundly antihistorical in their rejection of the materiality of the world and the pressures of the past that emerge from it.

Unlike postmodernism, however, which exhausted itself in its celebration of difference, modernism's project remains unfinished. Morris claims that modernism's insistent search for a way to resolve differences and conflicts reflects the persistent need to make choices in the world experienced by a subject situated "at the site of contact between ideas of order and sensations, the locus of reality." Such choices require the wisdom born of memory and experience, Morris concludes, not the mere competence to manipulate and negotiate signifying systems, and they depend on a language that recognizes its own materiality in an effort to make a worldly "sense" rather than merely signifying "meaning." We can find that language theorized in Lyotard's différend, Morris says, and in Krieger's theory of a poem "that asserts itself as an image of presence." In both cases, we find a metaphor that eludes both the organic ontotheology of modernism and deconstructive difference. Instead, metaphor "operates to differ from difference, not as a guarantee of the good, but as a reminder of our most fundamental human engagement with the corporeal substance of our world."

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For Wolfgang Iser, human experience is situated precisely in this gap between the world and the aesthetic forms with which we would make sense of that world; that situation is the focus of what Iser describes as "literary anthropology." Noting the importance of culture and representation in contemporary anthropological theory, Iser argues that literature may be understood as a special form of the fictions by which humans negotiate the "information gap" between their place in the world and the reflective self-consciousness that displaces them from that world. Drawing on the work of Clifford Geertz and Eric Gans, Iser describes anthropological fictions as oriented toward the world but caught up in a "recursive looping" of input and output that measures the fictional model against the world and then revises and retests that model endlessly. He thus describes anthropological fictions as explanatory and integrative, as opposed to literary fictions, which are exploratory and dissipative, "not meant to grasp anything given." Literary fictions represent the world only "as if" it were present to the author and reader.

Because Iser agrees with Krieger that literary fictions "deliberately disclose their fictionality," he claims that they "function as a means of disordering and disrupting their extratextual fields of reference," creating gaps rather than bridging them. In addition, literary texts are always composed of fragments of earlier fictions and must therefore be understood as "an ineluctable duality" in which previous texts are invoked but rewritten, while the pasts they represent are simultaneously invoked in the presence of the text. This intertextuality thus also constitutes cultural memory, and Iser claims that literature gives us a unique perspective on the way that memory functions.

The issue of memory is also crucial to Jacques Derrida's analysis of testimony as a poetic act. In his reading of Paul Celan's poem "Aschenglorie" ("Ash-glory"), Derrida argues that testifying or "bearing witness" to an event has much in common with the poetic experience of language as Krieger has described it. That experience, according to Krieger, is characterized by the poem's capacity "to play the unmasking role—the role of revealing the mask as mask." In so doing, "in the very act of becoming successfully poetic," the poem "implicitly constitutes its own poetic." Derrida claims that this paradoxical relation of the poem to the act of its own formation, its "poetics," establishes the specificity of a poem and, at the same time, opens the text out onto something beyond its verbal borders: onto the other to whom the poem is addressed, and onto the world.

According to Derrida, testimony bears a similar relation to its own performative basis because it, too, is always about something other than what it is. It is always about an event that took place in some other time and place, and that can only be remembered in its absence. Responsible witnesses, in the same way, are always conscious of an inevitable doubleness in their own roles. They speak about being in another place and time, and their authority

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depends on their having been there. On the other hand, the act of their speaking, or being able to speak, depends precisely on their no longer being there "as such," so that the position of which they speak is spoken of as absent, past, inaccessible, and irremediably other.

Derrida claims that Celan's poem testifies to this inevitable displacement of the witness's authority in its elliptical allusion to the Holocaust. By refusing to ground its rhetoric in that absent scene of horror, or even to vouch for the authority of the witness—Celan says there is no "witness for the witness"—"Aschenglorie" abandons knowledge and instead demands belief through a performative act that situates testimony in relation to the absence that marks the limit of its meaning, even as that absence authorizes those who bear witness to it. In terms of Celan's poem, that limit is death, the deaths of those victims who can never testify to their presence at the event that is remembered in the testimony of the witnesses who speak about them. That limit also marks the limit of interpretation, and the impossibility of ever seizing the poetic reference to which it bears witness by revealing the secret as secret. This internal limit characterizes both testimony and the poem, Derrida concludes; it is that to which all poems testify, and that which constitutes the poetic nature of all testimony.

In recognition of his influence on the contemporary defense of literary and aesthetic form, Murray Krieger was invited to reflect on the shape of his career and the extent to which his own "travels with the aesthetic" reflect theoretical debates on this issue from the 1940s to today. Characterizing his intellectual itinerary during these years as a voyage between ascetic and aesthetic values—between an emphasis on the moral and political uses of art and an attention to the properties of the work as an independent object—Krieger argues that these alternatives have "preconditioned" the dispositions of all literary commentators. Posed in this way, the alternatives have also created an unnecessary and misleading opposition between theories of organic closure that celebrate textual autonomy, and theories of direct referential connection between the text and the world that subordinate the text to that world.

Rather than choosing between these alternatives, Krieger proposes a "duplicitous" organicism that "subliminally calls attention to its own illusionary status" and so opens the text out onto the world by calling attention to the fictional status of its aesthetic claims. This "duplicity," in Krieger's terms, preserves the connection between the text and the world in all of its rich specificity, but it performs an even more important social function by exposing the fictional status of all discourse, even—especially—those ideological claims that would mask their fictions as natural and true. Thus Krieger confronts the "war on the aesthetic" being waged by "several varieties of sociohistorical theorists…replacing theory with historicism and the aesthetic with the sociopolitically ascetic." Such theorists assume with

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Brecht that art merely reinforces the gullibility of the public by encouraging them to accept illusion as truth. Krieger insists instead that the aesthetic dimension of art actually sharpens the distinction between truth and illusion and so undermines the totalitarian impulse of all authoritarian discourse, including that of the "politicized theorists who would take us in by locking us within the ideological limitations of their claims."

This demystifying power turns the work of art into a potent source of resistance to ideological determination, but the very "self-conscious duplicity" that frees the work from determination by conceptual systems of all sorts also threatens to isolate it from effective dissent and so paralyze us in inaction. Krieger claims, however, that despite the power of this threat, we only ever experience this inaction in passing. The ephemeral character of aesthetic illusion necessarily turns us back to the world even as it satisfies, for a moment, the "elementary desires" for metaphorical unity embodied by the fiction of a natural sign. Thus, Krieger concludes, literature does not protect us from the need to act in the world, and to decide to act, in ways that are inevitably ideological, political, and partial. But it does protect us from becoming captives to the limitations of those actions and the delusions of truth and inevitability that the ideologue would project upon them. "The fictions we entertain within the aesthetic mode of response," Krieger says,

thanks to the resistance to universals they engender in us, allow us an awareness of existence that enriches, as it softens, our humanity. In the everyday world of action, of decision-making, literature, unlike other discourse, does not help us decide so much as it warns us to distrust the decisions we must make. When we are required to choose one path rather than another, it reminds us to tread with a light foot and a heavy heart.

If a "heavy heart" seems like a rather somber burden for a defense of poetry, especially in the midst of fervid calls to action that characterize so much theoretical work today, we might recall the importance that Wordsworth ascribed to "the still, sad music of humanity,/Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power/To chasten and subdue." Half created and half perceived, a compound of memory and sensation, this is the music that the ear of the poet hears beneath the frantic cacophony of life, and this is the music that constitutes for the poet, "In nature and the language of the sense,/The anchor of my purest thoughts…and soul/Of all my moral being."^[21] A still music, a gentle power, an anchor of thought in the language of sense—these paradoxes define poetry for Wordsworth as the link between reflection and action, pure thought and moral being, and they situate the poem squarely at the intersection of imagination and experience. That same crossroad is the point at which Krieger claims the aesthetic takes its revenge against ideology by suspending our steps along either path for a moment, and it marks the place of literature in theory today.

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The essays in this collection were specially written to honor the work of Murray Krieger and his contributions to the development of literary theory as a field of inquiry and as an academic discipline in universities around the world. The vitality of debate represented here only begins to express the enduring influence of his presence as a theorist, colleague, teacher, and friend.

Michael P. Clark

NOTES

I would like to thank the following people for their help with this book: William Murphy of the University of Minnesota Press, Linda Norton and Jean McAneny of the University of California Press, Damion Searls, and Annelise Zamula. I would also particularly like to thank Professors Helen Regueiro Elam and Emory Elliott for their careful reading of the manuscript and their helpful suggestions.