Krieger - Theories About Theories About 'Theory of Criticism' (MLA 1978)

7/29/2019 Krieger - Theories About Theories About 'Theory of Criticism' (MLA 1978)

1/14

Midwest Modern Language Association

Theories about Theories about "Theory of Criticism"Author(s): Murray KriegerReviewed work(s):Source: The Bulletin of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Spring,1978), pp. 30-42Published by: Midwest Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1314794 .Accessed: 24/11/2011 22:12

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of

content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms

of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Midwest Modern Language Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to

The Bulletin of the Midwest Modern Language Association.

http://www.jstor.org
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mmlahttp://www.jstor.org/stable/1314794?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/stable/1314794?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mmla


2/14

Theoriesabout TheoriesaboutTheory of Criticism*By Murray Krieger

Like the other contributors to this issue, I confront an occasion fraughtwith temptation. Professor Hernadi has provided all the stimulus onecould wish for the desire, which sensible authors have learned to sup-press, to answer all those "unjust" (which is to say unfriendly) re-viewers for all their misreadings or out-of-context attacks. We are herebeing licensed-indeed encouraged-to give vent to all our aggressive-defensive gestures as a response not only to our maligners but also tothose whose praise has been too faint or inconstant: the book, via its au-thor, is encouraged to glare back at the fish-eyes which have been view-ing it too coolly.Yet, beyond these frivolous temptations, there is the more serious op-portunity to write some afterthoughts to one's completed work-to makeclear certain methodological underpinnings that seem not to have beengrasped by those readers who have recorded their reactions. And if, sub-mitting to trivial temptations, I were to detail my many inevitable com-plaints against my reviewers, there would be little space to develop thesemore consequential matters. So I shall make this response more in thenature of a general extension of the book and-except for examples I canintroduce in passing-let go my chance to talk back in a point-by-pointway to those who have so far reacted in print to my work. I prefer, inother words, to use this assignment calling upon me to review my re-viewers to look through what they say toward a re-viewing of the book it-self.I find one recurrent concern running through the reception of Theoryof Criticism so far, one which the very organization of the book-as wellas its final polemic-perhaps asks for. It is the relation of my career tothe New Criticism, which soon turns into the relation of this general sys-tematic statement (in the present book) to my own earlier work as a the-orist for (or critic of?) the New Criticism. By implication or open state-ment, this concern leads to suggestions about the continuing relevance

Murray Krieger is the Director of the School of Criticism and Theory at the Universityof California (Irvine).

30 Theories about Theories about Theory of Criticism


3/14

(or, by contrast, the obsolescence) of my sort of system in its relationto the current theoretical dialogue. Obviously, the judgments made onthese issues depend on the friendliness of the reviewer-although friendlyreviewers turn out to be well disposed either because they think of them-selves as reactionary and welcome me as a theoretical defender of theirposition or because they see my work as less bound to older orthodoxiesand welcome it as a still vital alternative in a changed universe of the-oretical discourse. Obviously, I prefer the second attitude, although Iconfess that I would prefer either of the two to those who, seeing them-selves as being carried along in the new wave, relegate my work to quaintnostalgia. Though I have been impressed (and, I admit, pleased) by thegeneral respectfulness and cordiality of my reviewers, without exception,I clearly am more pleased by those who would still count me among theliving.Theory of Criticism, as my most recent book and my attempt to formu-late a total poetic, comes twenty years after my first volume, The NewApologists for Poetry, which is my only other book devoted exclusivelyto theory, while the several books in between the two treat specific liter-ary issues which were to influence and reflect the various theoreticalchanges I thought I was undergoing. So what naturally must bother memost-as I contemplate a writing career of a quarter-century which Imust hope reflects considerable development and growth-is the ungen-erous observation that my new book reveals my position to have under-gone little if any change, even if we go back for comparison as far as TheNew Apologists for Poetry. Thus, after these many years and writingsin which I tried to draw careful distinctions between the New Criticismand me, I am especially (and weariedly) disheartened, if not offended,at the disdainful title of a review of Theory of Criticism which carriesits complaint on its face: "On Going Home Again: New Criticism Re-visited."'I recall in the past being disowned by both Rene Wellek and the lateW.K. Wimsatt, two distinguished historians and theorists we associatewith New Critical theory, who saw me as one who deserted the movementto embrace other modernist tendencies.2 Nor do I feel that their rejec-tion of me was totally undeserved. Yet in his review Weinsheimer speaksfrom the first of my continuing "allegiance" to the New Criticism, con-fident as he is "that Professor Krieger's theory does not seem to havechanged in essentials during the last two decades." Robert Scholes sim-ilarly freezes my position in his review in The New Republic3: "SinceThe New Apologists for Poetry, which he wrote twenty years ago, Kriegerhas been trying to provide a consistent theoretical justification for theinterpretive practices of the New Critics," with "the present book" pro-

31 Theories about Theoriesabout Theory of Criticism


4/14

viding "a kind of summary statement of this theoretical position." Ifthis position represents "old verities," instead of them "we need newtruths."Even Denis Donoghue, who shrewdly follows some of the complexarguments which I see as differentiating me significantly from NewCritical orthodoxy, brings me back to it in his final judgment: "Butwhen all is said, I cannot see that Krieger's position differs very muchfrom, say, Ransom's...."4 And yet more friendly, O.B. Hardison is anx-ious to enlist me in the traditional defense of poems as objective syn-chronic systems and consequently laments any tendency I show to com-plicate my own allegiance to it.5Having permanently tied me to the New Critics, Weinsheimer con-demns me with them, invoking-much as Scholes does-the need for newerand more fashionable doctrines. Thus is historical determinism intro-duced to rationalize our current modishness. Weinsheimer complains thatmy theory, which he charges with not having changed, "is no longertenable," recent movements-such as those reflected in The School ofCriticism and Theory (of which I am the Director)-having "cast themost serious doubts on [its] viability." Since it is undiluted New Criti-cism, "the paradigm of interpretation it represents no longer speaks tous." Presumably this New Critical paradigm presupposes a fixed literaryobject which is out there for all critics to respond to and which stands im-mutably and absolutely as the judge of each subjective response. No won-der, then, that the paradigm cannot speak to critics who have becomeepistemologically, psychologically, and linguistically more sophisticated,as critics have presumably become in the post-New-Critical years. Iam charged with accepting this paradigm "by adhering manfully to a no-tion of absolute objectivity," treating the poem as a static object andplacing it normatively (and without a trace of critical epistemology) be-fore each critic, insisting "that the aim of the responsible critic is torecover the poem as it was before he imposed on it all the personalquirks and dead generalizations that comprise his critical apparatus."6Thus, guilty of "a mimetic theory of reception," I am, in effect, cat-egorized-like the New Critics-as a naive epistemological realist,7 whogrants an uncritical ontological status to the poem as absolute object. Isuffer this placement despite my explicit denial-made increasingly as thebook develops through its dialectical pattern-that the object, in its illu-sionary character, can ever attain more than a phenomenological pre-sence.Now in the last couple of pages of his review, Weinsheimer introducesan acknowledgment of a second side of my claims that turns my theoryinto sets of "intentional self-contradictions Professor Krieger has de-veloped into a method." It is unfortunate that Weinsheimer did not read



5/14

this acknowledgment back into his earlier pages so that it could havequalified his more simplistic version of my still-blooming New Criticismin the major portion of his comments. But this fuller sense of a certainsystematic duplicity in my thinking is, I would judge, a more adequaterepresentation of what I am doing. In its distance from the static andabsolutistic positions associated with the New Criticism, I would expectthat this duplicity would create complications that might make it less ir-relevant to some of the theoretical debates still very much alive amongus.I would like to believe that my more astute reviewers are alive to avital relationship between dominant currents in present theory and myown work, and that they see my work finding its shape at least partly asa result of that relationship. Instead of relegating my function to that ofan embattled rear-guard action (to be expected of a late-lingering, hold-out New Critic), which is pretty much what Weinsheimer and Scholes un-happily and Hardison supportively suggest, a reviewer like Paul Miersplaces me in a far more ambivalent position with respect to my fellow-theorists.8 He concludes what I take to be the most searching and ac-curate (though hardly the friendliest) review I have yet received bydwelling upon the complex role which Jacques Derrida plays in the book,one which far exceeds that of simple adversary:

If Derrida and the post-structuralists did not exist as the antagonists of thehumanist tradition, Kriegerwould have needed to invent them in order to givehis system the dialectic power it lacks by itself. Derrida serves as Krieger'sshadow... Krieger's problem is not to refute or imitate Derrida, a mistakehe avoids making where others have not, but rather to evade Derrida's ownshadow. So Kriegerand Derrida dance around each other in the play of criticalthought, around a word both presentand absent.

Hazard Adams, in his review of the year's work in literary criticism,uses more striking language to observe much the same relationship tak-ing place in the book between Derrida and me: the book, he says, "endsin a clash with Derrida in which, as in Yeats' dance plays, the swordsnever quite touch, the duel being as much dance as battle."9 And RobertM. Strozier similarly (and, I think, with equal justness) claims, "Der-rida and Krieger are roommates if not bedfellows, though they turn inopposite directions."'0 Though Strozier must acknowledge that my the-ory is disquieting since its challenge seems "to entail our rejection ofa great deal of the critical theory of the last fifteen years" (and in thishis placement appears to resemble Weinsheimer's or Scholes'), he pro-ceeds to mark off my differences from that theory in far more delicatestrokes-as the quotation about Derrida, above, indicates-so that he cansee my own skepticism endearing other critics to me, as well as es-



6/14

tranging me from them. Finally, if I may cite an essay which, while nota review of the book, does review the relationships of several currenttheoretical movements to one another, Wesley Morris uses this book asone of several refracting lenses through which a number of positions il-luminate one another in complex and unexpected ways."If I do continue to have a living relationship to the dominant move-ments in current theory, it is because I have worked at it, trying tokeep my own position in motion, whatever the fidelities which I tried toretain. Though I have always been self-conscious about my debts to theNew Criticism and anxious to exercise a continuity with the tradition outof which it grew, I have constantly been alive to the need to open doorsoutward from it. I thus would argue for the accuracy of the observationby Miers that "Contextualism has served Krieger's purposes well asa critical umbrella he can expand or contract in order to maintain con-tact with his origins in New Criticism and yet avoid the narrowness thathas driven that tradition into disrepute." My actual origins in the historyof my career should not be mythified into the fallacy of origins whichwould confound them with the circular beginnings and endings which weave(and unravel) my system.As I look back, I see that mine has been a cautious and cumulative-if not conservative-theory in that, as it developed, built (I hope) onopenness to other theories rather than on easy rejection of them, I havetried to add ever newer ways of coping with antagonists as I have seenthem coming-trying to convert possible duels into dances, as Adams hassuggested. In other words, more than most theorists, I have worked inaccordance with what counterpositions (to mine) in the history of theoryand in the work of my contemporaries have forced me to take account of,but to co-opt them, to incorporate them without undoing my own construct,(if I may be dangerously candid) to see how much of them I could swal-low without giving myself indigestion. So I appear guilty of trying to turnwhat appear as inimical elements into cooperative supports for my theory,although I also try to make that theory an extension of what I have seenas the traditional Western poetic from Aristotle to Kant and Coleridge toliterary modernism as represented-say-by Wallace Stevens. My prag-matic assumption is that-at least through modernist literature-the worksthemselves seem to demand such an aesthetic if the continuing presenceof the best of them is to be accounted for. Perhaps post-modernist liter-ature, with its anti-artistic and anti-verbal bias, will require anotheraesthetic-one much like the "decentering" theories now flourishingamong us 2-though I see this revolutionary aesthetic as inadequatewhen confronted by the long history of our most elite works, those whosebrilliance creates and earns our sense of their privileged status. This is

34 Theoriesabout Theoriesabout Theory of Criticism


7/14

the privilege that requires the delicacy of critical treatment which mysort of theory sanctions.In my book, with its detailed exposition of the theoretical tradition andthe (I hope) systematic extension of that tradition into not always likelyshapes, I have tried to demonstrate the power of the traditional aesthet-ic to accomodate alien perspectives and yet to thrive. But finally, for itspreservation, it must insist-with all its newly won self-consciousnessand self-skepticism-on the illusion of verbal and aesthetic presence in thatbeckoning structure that confronts the reader-critic. So I have tried tooutmaneuver anticipated contradictions (as I have tried to account foralien elements forced upon me by history and by my contemporaries) byincluding them within the terms of a paradoxical model. Somewhere inmy argument I have anticipated most objections by trying to includethem too within my paradoxical contours in advance-if one can acceptmy tactic just at the outer edge of what may be permitted to argument.The reviews indicate that some will not, although I prefer them to ob-ject to my two-sidedness rather than to cut my position in half by reduc-ing me to one side only, however more neatly systematic it would then ap-pear.Paradox may well be less acceptable in critical discourse than it is inpoetry, but in my defense I can say only that I can do no better and cando no less if I am to do justice to what I find our literature requiringof its critic. For critical theory, I feel, should always yield to the artfor which it vainly seeks to account. It is in this sense that I mean bothmy starting point and justification to be empirical and practical ratherthan self-sufficiently theoretical: what is the scholar-critic to do aboutthe literary corpus-as his "given"-which is in his charge as teacherand writer concerned with the western literary tradition? The corpus,even if it is a shifting group of works easily added to or subtractedfrom, is of course enormously limited and limiting, although it is his pro-fessional world, the world for which he is held to account. It is, alas,ethnocentric surely, and surely elitist too, in that we recognize from ourshared experiences of them that-as they function for us and should betaught to function for students-the works in that corpus (and perhaps thisis the criterion for admission to it) do indeed appear to claim privilege.So if, as such a scholar-critic, I can construct a theory to account forthem and the privilege in them, that is objective enough for me. If suchare their apparent qualities within our habit of response to them, then weshould try to account for them and their effects on their most faithfulreaders. They seem to demand privileged treatment, the delicacy andcomplexity of criticism many of us practice, and they are responsive toit-which is to say that we are responsive to them. If, in our commodity

35 Theoriesabout Theories about Theory of Criticism


8/14

culture with its egalitarian reductions that turn poetry into just so muchecriture, we produce an anti-art that insists on its anaesthetic charac-ter-with its denial of the power of the word-then such products may giverise to another sort of reader intentionality which may be more approp-riately productive of another criticism and another theory. Yet probablybehind my theory and what I claim to be its empirical sanction is ananxiety-finally, I suppose, a moral anxiety-to keep active within ourtradition the capacity to read the major works within our corpus lestwe lose what man at his most creative is able to do with language forother men-lest, that is, we lose our sense of all that language can meanand do.So there are several major paradoxes which I find our literary exper-iences to suggest-paradoxes in which I can see neither side yielding.As I state them baldly here, they may overlap one another, but I believeeach is worth mentioning separately. In the book I have tried to holdfully and press simultaneously both halves of the following oppositions:both the poem as object and the poem as intentional object; both the con-cept of a discrete aesthetic experience and a notion of all experience asindivisible and unbroken;both the discontinuity of the poem's language sys-tem and the continuity of all discourse as a system; both spatiality andtemporality, mystification and demystification in the work's workingsupon us; both the poem as self-willed monster and the poet as a presentagent subduing a compliant poem to his will; both fiction as reality andfiction as a delusive evasion of reality; or, put another way, both a closed,totalized, metaphoric reduction seen as our autonomous world and anopen fullness of reality that resists all reduction and gives the poem thelie. Finally, then, both the verbal miracle of metaphorical identity andthe awareness that the miracle depends on our sense of its impossibility,leading to our knowledge that it's only our illusion of identity held withan awareness that language cannot reach beyond the Structuralist prin-ciple of difference. We both learn to see and distrust our seeing, as weview poetic language both as breaking itself off from the normal flow ofdiscourse to become a privileged object, worthy of idolatry, and as lang-uage self-deconstructed and levelled, joining the march of commonecriture.So one may well complain about my method, as Weinsheimer does, sinceit makes no secret of trying to have most things both ways, but-what-ever those complaints-I do not expect to be surprised by complaintseither that I have deluded myself or that I have stumbled into unfore-seen contradictions; for I have depended on bringing them up in advanceto anticipate objections that may be made by those who notice only halfmy story at any point. Nevertheless, I hope that there is more than this



9/14

doubleness to my theory. I have intended the doctrine of self-reference-which bestows upon the literary work a fictional self-consciousness-to exploit the nature of metaphor so as to create for the literary work asingle, overriding form which unifies (as it exacerbates) tendencies toparadoxical inconclusiveness. For, as I see metaphor, its self-conscious-ly illusionary status requires it to make an affirmation of miracle which-in the very act of affirming-is affirming also its own self-denial. As itaffirms itself, it constitutes itself as the world, in an act of closure thatexcludes all else; although as it affirms itself as fiction, it obliteratesits own "reality" in order to open the way outside its own linguistictrap, suddenly seen also as no more than trap. In permitting us bothvisions at once, the metaphor becomes an enclosing unity which containsthe opposing elements it sustains. It serves as both the essence and thetranscendence of the paradoxical.I do not share the concern others have shown for my invocation ofparadoxical or self-contradictory elements in my discussion of metaphorand the literary work as master metaphor, for I see these elements asfused in what the metaphor, as a fiction, does and has been seen to do bygenerations of readers. Metaphorical closure functions under the aegisof aesthetic illusion although we remain aware (and its fictional self-consciousness helps remind us to remain aware) of its illusionary char-acter. This is to say that even while it functions it gives way to the demy-stification of an epistemological breakdown or a phenomenological reduc-tion that shows it up for what it is, though what it is is glorious andenough, so long as we are under the aesthetic dispensation. This is reallyno more contradictory, in the end, than the double sense of reality-un-reality which we feel as we watch actors (or are they "characters" oreven "actual" people?) on the stage or as we indulge in equivalentillusion-making in the silent reading of nondramatic fictions. I am re-ferring only to our dual capacity to believe and disbelieve literary fic-tions, as I am appealing to the primary element of aesthesis, of Schein,which theorists have long associated with our experience of the arts. Isit not just this venerable response which I call up with my notion of themetaphor as the miracle in which we can believe only because we knowthat, as miracle, it cannot "really" occur? So I must claim that here,and in my more detailed exposition and poetic examples in the book, myargument is not itself reduced to the paradoxical doubleness which it willnot permit the metaphor to give up. But whether I achieve more thanmere doubleness I must leave to others to say-even if I have seizedthis occasion to quarrel with their conclusions.

It is this attempt at a systematic duplicity both yielded to and over-come which marks my major differences from the New Critics as, over



10/14

the years during which I have grown in response to a succession of newtheoretical impulses in our midst, I have either increased my distancefrom them or become increasingly aware of a distance that had been im-plicitly there. The first major difference is that, while they must be ex-clusively committed to an aesthetic closure that substitutes the work forthe existential world, I claim that the apparently self-conscious char-acter of this closure-its fictional self-referentiality-leads it also andat the same time to deny itself, thus opening itself outward to the exis-tential world which it would exclude but now, by negation, must include.So for me, the paradoxical character of metaphor permits a total closurethat also is a self-abnegating opening. The synchronic illusion need notpreclude the diachronic, but rather insists on it. In its self-demystifi-cation, the illusion that knows itself as such does not undo the totalizingpower of metaphorical reduction; it rather doubles back upon itself in ananti-metaphorical thrust that denies the power of language and metaphoreven while the metaphor and its language offer testimony to that power.Metaphorical speaking identifies-as it polarizes-linguistic identity andpolarity in words and their existential references.'3 My second majordifference from the New Critics is involved in the first: they must as-sume a fixed ontological place for the literary work as object, freezingour radically temporal experiences of it into the stasis of spatial there-ness, while I can invoke the notion of illusion, in the manner of Gom-brich, to convert the object to a phenomenological object-conscious of thefiction which gives it its as-if existence-and this permits us to indulgein the mystification about its presence only as we know it to be a mystifi-cation and thus place ourselves outside that indulgence. Its sounds dis-appear in the air as they are spoken, or its black marks off the page asthey are read while aesthetic intentionality leads us to arrest them. Themetaphorical and linguistic system which is the work seals itself offfrom a general discursive system, and yet the first flows into the second,as it is reduced to it under the egalitarian principle that levels both lan-guage and experience into a single continuum.These differences from the closed and exclusivistic formalism andeven aestheticism often associated with the New Criticism derive fromthe doubleness of my treatment of metaphor-within a definition of eachliterary work as a master metaphor. And this doubleness, in turn, de-rives from my commitment to the existential as that which-like the deathof each of us-is outside metaphor, indeed outside language. And, howeverclosed in its totalization, the metaphor should keep us aware-by the neg-ation fostered by its self-referentiality-of that outsideness. So my dif-ferences from the New Criticism should permit the criticism sanctionedby my sort of theory to open literature to the existential as well as to con-



11/14

tract it to those enclosed metaphorical mini-worlds which become man'sreduced moments of vision, representing what the world has become fora given moment in culture. In light of these differences it is painful toread charges that my theory "suggests that all poems are autorefer-ential and thus irrelevant to the world," or that my denial of "truth" topoetry "reduces literature to vapidity."'4 As some of my reviewersrecognize, though none more perceptively than Harold M. Watts,15 themost important element in my "systematic extension" to the theoreticaltradition is the argument I make, in Chapter 7 ("The Aesthetic as theAnthropological: The Breath of the Word and the Weight of the World")for the visionary function of metaphor.That argument is based on the doubleness of the metaphor's affirmationand denial, of its closedness within its own world and its openness to thepre-poetic world of experience-the doubleness which I have tried to ex-pound here. If the literary work seeks to enclose a segment of experi-ence within the terms that create its reduced totalization (the argumentruns), it also-by virture of its fictional self-consciousness-points,through negation, to the broad world of experience that it excludes. Andboth its inclusions and exclusions serve us as ways into a moment of vis-ion which the poet provides his culture. If we do not find propositionaltruth here, we do find what a culture, by way of its poet, constitutes as itstruth, together with a grudging acknowledgment of its limitations, of thatworld beyond in which the non-linguistic fact of death withstands all met-aphorical reductions and transformations.In his review of my book, Hardison laments my failure to be suffi-ciently faithful to the Kantian perspective (an accurate observation madeby none among the other reviewers who term me a Kantian); he rejectsmy insistence on the lingering reality of existential fact outside the realmof the human vision into which it has been transformed by our symbols.16If we agree (as Weinsheimer would not) about the self-sufficient valueof symbolic vision as the prime content of man's earthly story, my doub-le view requires me to disagree with the claim that it is all the realitythere is, however much our solipsism may cherish it as such. It is inthis expansive and yet self-limiting sense that I claim for literaturerevelatory powers, illuminating both what man sees and what he endures,as private man and as communal man.Only after exploring this duplicitous function of metaphor, and the workas master metaphor, can I move, in my final chapter, to my now-you-see-it-now-you-don't notion of "the presence of the poem." Thus do Ibring the humanist theoretical tradition into a perhaps unexpectedly am-bivalent relationship to the Structuralist and Post-Structuralist move-



12/14

ments. In this sense the presentation of my poetic is completed withChapter 7, so that Chapter 8 serves, essentially, as a polemical conclu-sion. The book, beginning in that humanist tradition and trying to developa systematic poetic which could grow outward in the hope of speaking toother contemporary movements, had an introduction that was anythingbut polemical. From the exposition of that tradition it extends itself dia-lectically until its later stages create complications which, read back,qualify significantly those earlier definitions which were apparently madewithout the intrusion of ideas potentially alien to the tradition, which isnow beingforced to absorb them.The structure of the book should then be evident, although it seems notto have been so to Fabian Gudas who, though otherwise writing a very fav-orable review, warns the reader not to expect in the book "a systemat-ic presentation of a fully articulated poetics."'7 I believe the presen-tation is quite systematic and my poetic articulated as fully as I am cap-able of doing. Gudas agrees that my early chapters (especially the sec-ond) examining the several areas to be covered by a theory do indeedconstitute a "systematic survey" of my position. He has high praise forthis survey, recognizing it (in language similar to what we have seen inother reviewers) as "essentially similar" to what I have been urgingsince The New Apologistsfor Poetry. Seeing this portion of the book as sosatisfying and consequently as conclusive rather than (as I suggest)only preliminary, Gudas sees the remaining five chapters as mere "re-finements" or "a filling in of gaps," hence lacking in systematic pres-entation. Had he been less satisfied with my early statement, had he un-derstood that my "preliminary questions and suggested answers"(which indeed restate many of my older positions, though in small wayspreparing for later modifications) were indeed preliminary, he might havediscovered that the historical and problematic explorations which followmust open into a fuller, if more complicated, statement that seeks to in-corporate positions with counterpositions. And if their organizational in-terrelationships are not explicitly announced, I think they are clearlyenough there. The four crucial issues I delineate in Chapter 2 are theact of poetic creation, the poem as object (if it is one), the peculiarlyaesthetic response (if there is one), and the function of poetry in culture.The four chapters which follow trace historically and extend theoreticallythe provisional suggestions made in my preliminary discussion, eachchapter devoted in turn to one of these issues: mimetic and expressivetheories (in Chapter 4) relating to creativity, the role of form (in Chap-ter 5) relating to the poem as controlled by its poet or breaking free ofhim, and the problem of fiction (in chapter 6) relating to the reader andthe kinds of reality he surrenders or discovers as he experiences thepoem. As I have already argued at length, Chapter 7 seeks to determine



13/14

the grounds on which the poem may or may not be returned to its culture(and ours); and, with the poetic articulated as fully as it is going to be,Chapter 8 uses it to make its polemical conclusion.But I have been too long in using these remarks by reviewers as anopportunity for afterthoughts of my own. Obviously, if I had made manyof these points more clearly in the book, I would not have had to workover them now since my reviewers would not have read me as they did.This is my way of saying that I am grateful to them for showing mewhat I had left less clear than I intended, and it is my way of apolo-gizing for some suggestions made earlier about what they have missedwhen I should rather have spoken about what I failed to put in the bookto be found. To the extent that such is the case, I must thank them forstimulating me to make perhaps a clearer case for my position on thisoccasion, as I must thank Professor Hernadi for seeing the potentialvalue in providing the occasion. I feel fortunate in my reviewers: theyhave shown themselves to have both respect and good will toward mywork, even where they wished it would have taken other directions, andthey have without exception said kind things about my role in the recenthistory of critical theory, whatever their thoughts about my role in itspresent debates. Finally, whether from a keenness of perception (ex-ceeding my own) or from their failures of perception, they have pro-vided me ample opportunity to make these supplementary remarks whichI now feel my book needed. Though I obviously have my own ideaswhich are which, I leave to the reader the task of distinguishing keen-ness from failures of perception, theirs and mine.

*Murray Krieger, Theory of Criticism: A Tradition and its System (Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 1976).' A review article by Joel Weinsheimer in PTL: A Journal for Descriptive Poeticsand Theory of Literature, 3 (1977), 563-77.2See, among several places in their writings, Wellek, Concepts of Criticism, ed. Stephen

G. Nichols, Jr. (Yale University Press, 1963), p. 341, and Wimsatt, Day of the Leopards:Essays in Defense of Poems (Yale University Press, 1976), pp. 188-89.3In the issue of October 23, 1976, pp. 27-28.4In The (London) Times Higher Educational Supplement (March 4, 1977).5In "Krieger Agonistes," in The Sewanee Review (Fall 1977), cxv-cxviii.6 Weinsheimer complains-because of its "most regrettable consequences for the con-cept of criticism"-about the notion (which he claims I maintain) of the poem's "logicaland temporal priority to the reader" (p. 567). Yet, in trying later to produce an antidoteto his version of my position, he categorically states as his truism, "A poem is tempor-ally and logically anterior to a reader's consciousness" (p. 574). Not that I would wish todispute so prima facie a claim, but why-earlier-should he?



14/14

7Thus, while Weinsheimer's argument should lead him to call me an epistemologicalrealist, he strangely pursues his argument by associating me with the opposite tendency,nominalism (see p. 566). Had he been aware of this inconsistency, he might have ques-tioned the limited terms he was using to describe my own argument.xIn Modern Language Notes(December 1976), 1634-38.9In "Hazard Adams on Literary Criticism," in The Neut Republic (Nov. 27, 1976),

pp. 29-30.10In Criticism(Summer 1977), pp. 275-78."In "The Critic's Responsibility 'To' and 'For'", Western Humanities Review

(Summer 1977), pp. 265-72, especially pp. 266-68, 272.12 But only "perhaps." It has been the case in literary history before that literaryworks were perceived by their contemporaries to evade the receptive possibilities of exist-

ing manners of response, so that they were seen as demanding a revolutionary aesthetic-except that later periods came to see them as being less discontinuous with their prede-cessors than they were intended to be or were originally read as being.13With these claims I am invoking an alternative model to the popular version of Hege-lian synthesis in that the unity of method which I seek through metaphorical analysis isone that denies that differences can be modified into a joint reconciliation. Instead of acompromise union, as in the usual model of synthesis, I am urging the paradoxical modelof at once both/and and neither/nor, representing the simultaneous pressure of both polar-ity and identity, polarity as identity. In pressing forward from these notions (especiallyin Chapter 7 of Theory of Criticism), I perhaps did not relate them as explicitly as Ishould have to the anti-synthetic methodology out of which I built my earlier book, TheClassic Vision: The Retreat from Extremity in Modern Literature (Johns Hopkins Uni-versity Press, 1971). See my diagrammatic description of the synthetic and anti-syntheticmodels on pp. 24-27 of that volume. I suppose I am here suggesting that the New Critics,with their total commitment to organicism, cannot and would not move beyond synthesis.

14Weinsheimer, p. 573 and p. 567, respectively. Perhaps his misunderstanding derivesfrom his own inability to recognize that poetry can have meanings and can relate us to ex-perience without having to state truths. Weinsheimer is thus led to the extreme position(and, strangely for him, extremely reactionary position) of arguing that poems must statetruths that are "falsifiable." "What cannot be falsified is worthless, vacuous, andinane," as obviously poetry is not (p. 572). When he so identifies poems with propositions,it is no wonder that he is unhappy with my attempt to distinguish poems from other formsof discourse.

15In Modern Fiction Studies 23 (Summer 1977), pp. 307-310.16See Hardison, p. cxvii.7In Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (Summer 1977), pp. 480-82. The quota-tion appears on p. 481.


Krieger - Theories About Theories About 'Theory of Criticism' (MLA 1978)

Documents