Krieger - In the Wake of Morality- Thematic Underside of Recent Crit (NLH 1983)

7/29/2019 Krieger - In the Wake of Morality- Thematic Underside of Recent Crit (NLH 1983)

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In the Wake of Morality: The Thematic Underside of Recent TheoryAuthor(s): Murray KriegerReviewed work(s):Source: New Literary History, Vol. 15, No. 1, Literature and/as Moral Philosophy (Autumn,1983), pp. 119-136Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/468996 .

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In the Wake of Morality: The ThematicUnderside of Recent TheoryMurray Krieger

IT S DIFFICULT, if one reads and believes even a small part ofcurrently fashionable theory written in the United States, to con-tinue to take the relation between literature and moral philos-ophy seriously as a subject. Having retreated from the notion thatposited moral philosophies can be taken at face value, as if they werewhat they claimed to be, and having questioned the notion of liter-ature itself as an exclusive selection of privileged texts, one is morelikely these days to turn on the subject and spend his efforts attackingits obsolescence. Perhaps I can suggest a sense of this attitude byrecalling a moment of self-definition that was pressed upon me sev-eral years ago while I was being introduced as a speaker before amajor university audience. The introducer repeated to us the wordsspoken by another theorist, a well-known critic identified with theschool of deconstruction, who had preceded me onto that podiumsome weeks earlier. Looking forward to my appearance that was tofollow his, he was said to have reassured his audience that, if itsmembers felt unreceptive to his hard message, they could wait forthe more agreeable pieties that would issue from me as a represen-tative of "the moral gang." As I heard the phrase, I found it (andstill find it) reminiscent of "the gang of virtue" referred to-thoughby an unsympathetic character-in Conrad's Heart of Darkness;andit is similarly condescending, if not contemptuous.I mean to spend some time here discovering the extent to which Ideserve that attachment, but more important, discovering why thecurrent critical fashion can see it as quaintly archaic, one which thesedays has presumably been interred for good by the skepticism ofsemiotic studies.I suppose the moral gang of which I am supposed to be a membercontains most of the major critics in the history of our dominantliterary tradition in the West. It is hardly news to report that Plato-despite his fear of, and opposition to, the arts-set the terms of moralobligation which were taken up by critics to come, whether their dis-course was intended to support or disagree with Plato's position and,consequently, to defend or undermine any or all of the arts. The


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critics'-and through them the arts'-responsibility to the moralrealm was from that beginning unquestioned, whatever the questionsthat might be asked about the nature of that responsibility. EvenAristotle, whose Poetics(and, even more, whose Rhetoric)seeks at timesto evade an immediate relationship to moral consequences, never-perhaps because he is working in the shadow of Plato's issues-letsloose of an at least tangential contact with the moral realm, so thatwe cannot assess his total impact as an aesthetician without invokingthe Nicomachean Ethics and allowing that work and the Poetics to fur-nish mutual illuminations upon one another. And others of the an-cient treatises on the arts, as we move into Latin works, treat moralconcerns far more openly and directly.But it is in the tradition of the Renaissance Art of Poetry and theRenaissance Poetics that, whether claiming allegiance to Horace or toAristotle, treatises on literature seem to become unabashedly awareof criticism's moral obligations (as well as those of the art being crit-icized or theorized about)-probably as a result of the Neoplatonismthat pervades these works and that moment in our intellectual history.In the work of a wonderfully talented and varied horde of sixteenth-century Italian critics and their brilliantly urbane heir Sir PhilipSidney, the moral function of poetry-as an experiential extension(and thus a rhetorical demonstration) of philosophical principles-isan almost automatic assumption. Nor would it occur to them to con-sider making a distinction between what ought to be the moral ob-jectives of poetry (whatever may be the shortcomings of individualpoems) and the moral objectives of the critical discourse that is toinstruct poems about their proper mission. It is a major advantageof Platonism, once Renaissance Neoplatonists turn it positive (that is,once they invert Plato) in order to defend poetry rather than con-demn it, that the oneness of moral attraction in universal goodness-as it gathers beauty and truth within itself-can allow all kinds ofdiscourse to lose their distinctness as they reflect the single Idea.Though the metaphysic changes radically, Enlightenment and neo-classical poetics retains an inevitable moral flavor, with regard to bothits own character and the character of the poems which are its objects.In a gigantic critic like Dr. Johnson, we find some degree of struggleas he seeks to maintain the primacy of the moral,1 but despite somewavering here and there, he can hardly be said to maintain anythingelse as primary. His predecessors and contemporaries were for themost part more single-minded in their didactic concern. In them, asin critics for centuries before, literature's meaning is dependent uponthe unquestioned universal precepts furnished to literature's partic-ular fictional examples by moral philosophy. Indeed, literature was

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to be kept morally secure by being brought by moral philosophy intoits firmly held ontological precincts.In the period that follows, the inflated humanism of Romantic andpost-Romantic consciousness seeks to replace the guidance of a meta-physically ordained morality with emanations from the poetic imag-ination of the man-god-poet. But though the source of morality mayshift from the cosmos to the single (though crucially representative)mind, the overriding character of those formal impositions-whichare moral impositions-upon human experience, and thus humanart, is unchallenged. Whether it comes to us in the subtle delicacy ofKant's claim that "the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good" oris trumpeted in Shelley's overconfident pronouncement that "poetsare the unacknowledged legislators of the world," the common ele-ments of this aesthetic still put forward the signs of membership inthe "moral gang" by insisting on the dominance of the formal impulseand on the inevitable place of the moral within the formal. For themaking of forms is the making of laws, human laws which, as forms,capture and tame the vagaries of wayward human experience. In itsbewildering variety of manifestations throughout the nineteenth cen-tury, formalism-even at its most extreme-maintains itself as mor-alism, whether blatant, surreptitious, or inverted.Still, I do not mean to underestimate this shift, beginning in thelate eighteenth century, from cosmic forms to forms invented byhuman creators as the source of moral authority. Though it seemedto leave the moral function intact, this shift of authority, with its lossof ontological security, carried that which eventually would threatenthe moral function itself. And it did from the first imply the sepa-ration of that moral function from the well-ordered precincts ofmoral philosophy. For it was a shift from the authority of moralphilosophy as a body of universally binding doctrines whose justifi-cation must ultimately be theological to the authority of an individualpoetic imagination. Of course, since the latter was sanctioned by atranscendental idealism, it was trustworthy rather than wayward, sothat a quasi-theological authority was still at least implicitly present.Nevertheless, the essentially humanistic metaphysic has been provedby history to be far more flimsy, leaving, in our time, no objectivesupporting structure to which poetry's moral claims can be tied. Itrepresents a philosophical deterioration which must at last producethe crisis that requires us to put in question the very subject we arebeing asked to address-literature and moral philosophy-ratherthan addressing it. But my brief historical survey has not yet broughtus to this, our present desperate moment.The freeing of literature from its subservience to moral philosophy

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NEW LITERARY HISTORYdoes for awhile produce a new and profoundly vital moral functionfor literature as a replacement for a philosophy whose potential formoral guidance has been discredited. We have seen that criticism ofolder, more secure times, confident of the truths of the moral phi-losophy behind it and confident too of the authority of philosophicaluniversals to bring the errant particulars of human experience intoline, could assign to literary works the role of presenting, in theirparticular cases, exemplary demonstrations of those general truths.It was the obligation of those works to show those particulars ashaving been brought into line, shaping the fiction accordingly inorder to tame them. But more recent criticism-specifically thattwentieth-century criticism that inherits but transforms the projectinitiated by the Romantic and idealist thinkers-sees literary fictionsas subverting those universals through the painstaking developmentof its particulars as autonomous particulars. This is, essentially, themove we associate with the New Criticism.That move seems to come out of the notion of aesthetic disinter-estedness as originally developed by Kant. That is, Kant is taken asdefining the aesthetic by distinguishing it from practical reason aswell as pure reason-practical reason being the realm of interest asguided by the human faculty of will: in short, the realm of the moral.To define the aesthetic by its capacity to function apart from anyinterest external to it-to define it as disinterested-would appearto exclude the realm of the moral from art. But in the hands of thepost-Kantians of our century it has worked quite otherwise.It is surely true that writers as different as Schopenhauer, Yeats,Croce, Bergson, Hulme, Ransom, and Tate see the will as a fatalenemy to poetry, thereby separating the aesthetic in literature fromKant's notion of the practical, from the satisfaction of human inter-ests. The suspension of the will-which is for them a proper conse-quence of the aesthetic-leads to the rejection of moral philosophyas a system of universal principles to guide action, since it must beseen to be an unwelcome intruder whose authoritarian nature woulddisrupt, and then distort, the free play of particularity which aestheticdisinterestedness can permit. Literary works, then, demonstrate theiraesthetic freedom (from interests as defined by moral systems) byexploiting the errant (that is, the system-defying) nature of their par-ticularities, by subverting the potentially applicable universals whichthey may bring to mind. And these subversions occur not only withinthe fictional action but also within the language, the artistic conven-tions, and the very tropes of the work as these strive to establish aunique system of aesthetic play.But such a subversion of universals has important consequences

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THEMATIC UNDERSIDE OF RECENT THEORYfor our moral awareness, especially since twentieth-century thoughthas provided an alternative tradition of making moral claims that canarise only where moral philosophy proper has been subverted. I amreferring, of course, to the existentialist-personalist tradition, whichthrives only on the anti-Hegelian hatred of universals. It sees themoral universals of systematic thinking as denying the unique sub-jectivity of the person, imposing a death-dealing totalitarianism ofspirit that rejects differentness, settling for a conformism projectedoutward to posit an ontological structure of enslavement. In an anal-ogous way it sees the universals of normal language as similarly life-denying, so that they must be subverted by the playful deviations oflanguage-become-literary in quest of its own uniquely particular-which is to say self-justifying-authority as a verbal system. By blur-ring the analogy, modernist critics in this line of thinking find a nat-ural alliance-indeed a similarity of interest and, finally, a two-sidedidentity-between the post-Kantian aesthetic assault on moral will,with its consequences for a too-controlled language, and the existen-tialist-personalist assault on external moral authority (or, as theymight prefer to say, on universal authoritarianism).2This union of interests between a post-Kantian aesthetic and ananti-Hegelian existentialism leads on both sides to a flight from moralimperatives, at least from giving moral imperatives the role ofemerging-without being undermined-from literary works. Butthis is not, as it might at times seem to be, a flight from morality itselfas the appropriate atmosphere in which the work is to draw its breath.Indeed, in the existentialist-personalist context it is anything but sucha flight. It is, instead, a claim that literature is the only discursiveequivalent for experiential particularity; that is, it alone is faithful toour moral experience in its infinite contingency, the only languagecreated to match that experience. In this view literary works are tofurnish paradigms of the self-defeating fraudulence of universals,thereby precluding the extraction of any moral proposition uponwhich practical decisions can be based. But, it is claimed, only theirreducibly unique case can provide authentic moral insight, and onlyliterature has the language and the narrative manipulation to con-front the irreducibly unique case and to protect its irreducibility.So, far from being divorced from moral considerations, literatureis seen to have an indispensable moral function, one now its ownsince it no longer requires the external authority of a universal prop-osition to sanction its particular case. Literary form, viewed from thelimited vantage point of moral universals, is seen as grounded in astructure of oppositions in which neither side yields-provided weinterpret fully enough-so that each would-be universal claim is un-

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NEW LITERARY HISTORYdermined by its antithesis, and there is no all-resolving synthesis. Inthis way literature does find a moral objective in the wake of theabandonment of any possible universally applicable moral philos-ophy, the abandonment of claims for categories that dare speak animperative. Yet of course this is, for literature, the most ambitiousand exclusive claim for a moral function that any discourse couldmake. Since my book of some years back, The Tragic Vision (1960),arises out of such a post-Kantian-existentialist posture, at once formaland thematic (as I argue below), there is little question that-howevermuch its existentialist energy depended on the exploding of moralstructures-it most strongly maintained me as a stalwart, if defiant,member of "the moral gang."3We see, then, how completely moral philosophy has been removedfrom its role as guide to otherwise errant literary fictions, but alsohow completely the removers, our Romantic and post-Romanticcritics, still the moral gang, retain their commitment-however het-erodox-to both the moral function of literature and the moral func-tion of their criticism. If moral discourse is seen as an empty andfraudulent exercise of a failed language, literature is salvaged forlanguage as the one kind of discourse in which words still struggletoward creating a fully human meaning.It is just this privileging of literature which our newer criticismthese days would deny, as it would extend the demythification oflanguage from philosophy to all writing, including what had been setaside as the special mythic preserve of literature. Just as the combinedpost-Kantian and existentialist tradition, as I have described it, wouldempty moral philosophy of meaning while keeping only poetry full,so its successors would empty poetry as well, demystifying it withother discourse, and on the same principles. We are to be as wary inliterary works as in philosophical ones of a naive logocentrism thatpersuades us to ascribe reality to the references of words as if it wasliterally contained within them. This is another version of thewarning against "existential projection" from the order of words tothe order of world made by Northrop Frye in another context someyears back. Consequently, the literary work must be deprived by themof its claim to illuminate our moral experience, as it is seen to joinother discourse-including moral philosophy, of course-in onlypretending to a revelation (or at least reference) from which its se-miotic character actually shuts it off. So much, then (shall we say?),for the relation of literature to moral philosophy as a live and fruitfulsubject, now that both of them have been disposed of as claimants tomoral knowledge of human existents. Has all that the history of crit-icism took so seriously for so long been demythified, demystified, and

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THEMATIC UNDERSIDE OF RECENT THEORYdeconstructed away? Is there nothing left except for us to examinethe history and the nature of our deceptions and self-deceptions?

I must admit that, in this newly changed theoretical moment, Ihave modified my own claims to which I have before referred, sothat I speak now less of the existential and more of the anthropolog-ical-that is, I speak less of poetry's license to reveal the actual moralcontingencies that the abstractions of philosophy must ignore andthus misrepresent, and speak more of poetry's license to create com-plex illusions which provide us with visions of the shape that our ownaction-guiding fictions, private or collective, may take. This may seemto be a niggling difference, though I see it as an important theoreticalchange that permits me to concede the need for a skeptical view ofthe capacity of language, even literary language (if we still can distin-guish such a function), the need to shift from the meanings of wordsto the dizzying and obfuscating functions of words. But it is also myway of suggesting that-whatever recent language theory may do todeny the humane missions we confidently used to give to our severalkinds of discourse, and especially the literary-the moral and, yes,ideological spurs to our speaking and writing are still with us, leadingus to smuggle in those concerns, even if we do so under alien permitsthat might point toward excluding them. Such an assertion mightitself seem to be a self-serving anthropological assumption of mine,except that I believe it is justified by our careful reading: we can findat work, even in those theories that are least permissive about whattexts can tell us about their subjects, indirect claims for privilegedmoral and ideological meanings, even if they are negative ones rep-resenting unspoken negative visions. In the hands of a daring andambitious critic, I mean to argue, poetics cannot remain purely de-scriptive or semiotic; instead, it narrows into the realm of privilegeand spreads into the realm of the thematic. It subliminally invokesattitudes that we can think of as moral, or even ideological.I am speaking, obviously, about the thematizing of even those the-ories apparently least concerned with-or perhaps most concernedto deny-any legitimate thematic dimension for literature or its crit-icism: in effect, about the turning of antithematic theories on them-selves by thematizing them. I now suspect I may have been moreaccurate than I knew in describing more theories than my own-many not yet invented-when, years ago in The Tragic Vision, I de-scribed "thematics s the study of the experiential tensions which, dra-matically entangled in the literary work, become an existential re-flection of that work's aesthetic complexity."4 Of course, in most cur-rent theories the situation is the reverse, since in The Tragic Vision Iwas centrally concerned with "thematics" while today theorists are

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ostensibly concerned with the verbal level of writing. But the essentialobservation holds, that the formal-that is, the textual or intertextualperceived as a systematic sequence of signifiers-seems to imposeeven upon the most stubbornly antithematic commentator, eventoday, a thematic analogy, often unguarded, that thrusts itself intothe critic's company. The difference is that my own existential in-terest, a couple of decades ago, allowed me to be more candid andless embarrassed in seeing it there. Indeed, in my desire to escapethe charge of escapist formalism, I wanted it there.Today, though my semiotic awareness makes me also more dis-trustful about the poem's revelatory powers, I remain all too awareof the thematic implications of my aesthetics of illusionary presence.I now mean my criticism to dwell upon the literary work as a self-conscious fiction: to dwell upon the ways by which the work, oper-ating within our moment of aesthetic perception, persuades us of ametaphorical identity among its elements while reminding us,through its self-reference, that this feat can be worked only withinsuch a moment and with the reader's complicity. It is, then, an iden-tity that calls itself illusionary, that acknowledges another (also illu-sionary?) realm of difference, that affirms its aesthetic power of pres-ence while denying itself any ontological substance. In effect, it warnsagainst our projecting it beyond itself and into the realm of humanexistence.Yet how can I not acknowledge that such a theoretical approachfavors those literary works which are most self-conscious about theirartifice, those works which most emphasize the elements of theirreality which would dissipate themselves into the transient evanes-cence of phantoms, thereby dissolving our certainties and looseningour grip on our world's heavy furniture? Can I refrain from seekingto turn the works I treat-insofar as I wish to make them worthy ofmy admiration-into works tending in this direction? Can I refrainalso from importing certain privileged themes of appearance andreality, as well as a privileged metaphysic or antimetaphysic, and fi-nally a privileged conception of paradox as the moral problematic,of moral dilemmas and the dynamics of their inevitability? These leadalso to an implied liberality of moral judgment, the antiauthoritarianconsequence of seeing the harsh, repressive inadequacy of universals.Behind all these, there is in my theory an implicit demand foraesthetic form that calls for the fulfillment of the obligation-themoral obligation-upon man as form-maker to impose shape,though fictional, upon the unformed data of experience. As withMatthew Arnold, poetry becomes the last resort for a culture whosemoral psychology-after the death of its gods-requires the soothing

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power of myth, though now accepted only as myth and not as afalsifiable fact. So however much in retreat, I represent "the moralgang" still, and in a variety of ways. I mean to be this confessionalabout the thematic underside of my theorizing in hopes that thislengthy recital can set the example for equally unwelcome suggestionsto create doubts about other recent theories, which arejust as anxiousto avoid the charge of thematizing their linguistic or semiotic claims.I should like to propose similar suggestions about a number of thesetheories.In light of my earlier discussion, it should not be hard to establishthat extensions of the New Criticism, however outwardly formalistic,would be heavy with thematic implications. As we have seen, ambi-guity or paradox as a New Critical verbal and structural principle caneasily become thematically overdetermined and slide into a descrip-tion of how things are in the moral universe. These days this seemsobvious enough. More significant, perhaps, is the spatialization of thetemporal, which explicitly turns into the mythification of history.For example, Joseph Frank's well-known claims about "spatialform" shift all too easily from words to existence: from the effect ofsimultaneity achieved by the juxtaposition of successive verbal unitsto the collapsing of several historical moments into the archetype ofan ever-returning eternal present. Following the example of Eliot'spoetry and applying Eliade's religious mysteries, Frank blurs andthen substantializes the analogy between the breakthrough of timeby poetic words seeking form and the breakthrough of time by historyseeking an eschatology. Thus for Frank the poem works "to under-mine the inherent consecutiveness of language, frustrating the read-er's normal expectation of a sequence and forcing him to perceivethe elements of the poem asjuxtaposed in space rather than unrollingin time." In this way "past and present are apprehended spatially,locked in a timeless unity that, while it may accentuate surface dif-ferences, eliminates any feeling of sequence by the very act of jux-taposition." But in this second quotation the terms are becoming am-biguous, in that they can refer either to simultaneity as it affectsverbal sequences or to the actual dissolving of historicity ("By thisjuxtaposition of past and present ... history becomes ahistorical").In the passage that follows, Frank completes the thematic transfer:"What has occurred, at least so far as literature is concerned, may bedescribed as the transformation of the historical imagination intomyth-an imagination for which historical time does not exist, andwhich sees the actions and events of a particular time only as thebodying forth of eternal prototypes." It is, he adds, "the myth ofeternal repetition and, in the last analysis ... the abolition of time."5

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NEW LITERARY HISTORYI have paused this long over Frank's work because I thought it wouldbe useful to observe so clear-if naive-an example of the unan-nounced transfer from the formal to the thematic. But we may notbe surprised to find such an appeal to the spatializing mysteries ofsimultaneity in this metaphorical projection of the New Criticism.The more recent deconstructionist strain of American poststruc-turalism would seem to present a far greater challenge to my claimthat even purely verbal theories end by thematizing themselves, be-cause deconstructionism so strenuously rejects our conventional ref-erential expectations of how words function. But we can point toexamples in which the apparently unintended glide from purelyverbal matters to those which make claims about the human conditionis all too similar to Frank's, however great the doctrinal differencebetween them. I think especially of Paul de Man's "The Rhetoric ofTemporality," largely because the essay is as vulnerable to this sortof analysis as it has been influential.6 It seems to be the inverse ofFrank's, though it no less easily falls into the thematic realm. De Manmakes as exclusive claims for the temporal as Frank did for the spa-tial, attacking just that spatialization or collapsing of time which weobserved in Frank.For de Man's favored mode, allegory, what is celebrated in a wordis its "pure anteriority," which renounces "the desire to coincide" with"another sign that precedes it," instead accepting its "temporal dif-ference," "its authentically temporal predicament" (pp. 190-91). Butthe last word, "predicament," opens language outward to the humancondition: the fate of being only temporal starts by belonging to asequence of words but shifts to the consecutive, unrepeatable mo-ments of our lives. And with the prohibition against the spatiality ofa return, against any simple repetition, the moments can only runout, following one another to death. So the consciousness of death isin each moment, as from each we fall into "the temporal void" (p.203). It becomes our obligation-and, even more, the obligation ofthe authentic poet-to acknowledge the separateness of the humansubject confronting the "unbreachable distance" (p. 209) in his tem-poral predicament, and with it the void, in effect his own death. Thishe must acknowledge without forgoing its facticity for a mystifyingfiction-without, that is, seeking the simultaneity of the repetitionthat would unauthentically spatialize time and so redeem it. Insteadof symbolic mystification, allegorical demystification; instead of spa-tial constructs, temporal deconstruction.All these terms beginning with de force upon language a negativerelation to human existence, but also-not altogether intentionally-create a negative vision of existence. Still, de Man tries not to yield

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THEMATIC UNDERSIDE OF RECENT THEORYhis primary dedication to a language that is shut off from existence,seeking to remain a linguistic and not an existential critic. He wouldhave us retreat from a notion of the "original self" to the " 'linguistic'subject" (p. 199), trading the "empirical world" for "a world consti-tuted out of, and in, language" (p. 196), a language in which "therelationship between sign and meaning is discontinuous" (p. 192).For language is hopelessly differentiated from the world and cannotbridge the chasm between them; the temporal void is revealed "inthe narrowing spiral of a linguistic sign that becomes more and moreremote from its meaning, and it can find no escape from this spiral"(p. 203). Consequently, applying verbal knowledge to the empiricalworld is an "impossibility" (p. 203). Accordingly, the poem is to yieldto this referential incapacity of language. But since it is also an alle-gory of man as subject, the poem is being allowed by de Man, in spiteof himself, to find a bridge after all and cross over to thematize itselfby illuminating our "temporal predicament" as existents. The semi-otician in de Man cannot abandon the existentialist in him: treatingthe verbal sign as that which keeps us from touching our existentialfate, he is simultaneously showing that language can contain thatexistential fate, though as a negative vision.It is true that the more recent de Man has tried to eliminate themuch too visible thematic shadow that I have shown trailing his se-miotic claims, as he turns the written text more and more within itstextual problematic, turning it into its own "allegory of reading." Buthis position, though more markedly influenced by Derrida and freeof terminology we associate with existentialism, is not discontinuouswith what I have found in his earlier work. That "narrow spiral" oflanguage has become narrower and is more consistently shut off fromthe "empirical world," so that there would indeed seem to be "noescape from this spiral" (to use the language of "The Rhetoric ofTemporality," which seems applicable with greater force now). Butthe continuity of his thought suggests there is still an appeal, thoughit is more submerged, to the implications of a negative existentialism,and with it a moral appeal to the human obligation to confront thenihilism of the "void," which, beginning as linguistic, still extendsbeyond to our "predicament." The text before us, trope within trope,trapped within its own figurational turns, returns us always to theproblematic of its verbal character and, anticipating our struggle withit, becomes yet another in the endless line of "allegories of reading,"tightening this narrow spiral within which texts-together andapart-wrestle with their own textuality. But in doing so it still re-minds us of the nihilistic ground-or rather unground-which per-mits the spiral to turn. The crucial word allegories, which de Man

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retains, will not permit the thematic to be excluded: once allegoriesare let loose-even those of reading-the spirals they spin tend toescape their own confines.Hillis Miller, writing in the spirit of de Man and Derrida, substitutesfor the metaphor of the narrow spiral the equally tormenting one ofthe miseen abyme.It represents the principle of infinite regress, whatMiller calls "the Quaker Oats box effect."7 Taken from heraldry,where it represents a shield containing an image of itself, which con-tains an image of itself, and so forth, the figure here obviously is tocharacterize the function of the word within the endless march ofwords we call textuality; in this infinite regress of words, the wordcannot escape its network and can have no appeal except to what deMan called "pure anteriority" or "unreachable anteriority." Onceagain it sounds as if what we are hearing is only semiotics and not atall thematics. But we cannot ignore-any more than Miller wouldwant to-the existentially loaded notion of the abyss in abyme.Castinto the abyss by the metaphor, we must grant to the word abyme tsfull density as it describes a verbal crisis that is a reflection of ourcrisis as living creatures. Nor does Miller flinch from the conse-quences of verbal gaps and blanks being characterized as an abyss,but a special abyss of the paradoxical sort the heraldic phrase remindsus of: "The paradox of the miseen abyme s the following: without theproduction of some schema, some 'icon,' there can be no glimpse ofthe abyss, no vertigo of the underlying nothingness. Any suchschema, however, both opens the chasm, creates it or reveals it, andat the same time fills it up, covers it over by naming it, gives thegroundless a ground, the bottomless a bottom."8 This formulationclearly reveals the heavy freight of thematic content Miller is carrying,no matter how strongly he protests that it is a purely verbal structureand not a content he is accounting for. The elusiveness of discoursetraps and displays itself, so that the inevitable linguistic movementtoward infinite regress slips into the concept of infinite regress-whose home is in the abyss-with its consequences for our moralview of the universe. Strangely, despite the extravagant differencesbetween the two movements, the now-you-see-it, now-you-don't par-adox of this peculiar abyss sounds like an echo of the New Criticism,but so, I believe, does its thematic consequence. It may be an echoalso of the early Miller, whose doctrinal allegiance was quite differentfrom what it is now, but whose concern about "the disappearance ofGod" still haunts his theorizing.We now can describe how thematization-of theory and, throughtheory, of criticism-takes place. As we watch, what seems a pristineinstrument of verbal analysis takes on substance, projects itself into a

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metaphysic that sets out the guidelines of the existential universewhich circumscribes first this literary work and then every literarywork worth talking about. The analytic method thus is analogized,but the two halves of the analogy invade one another, so that theanalogy is allegorized. And the critic's guiding allegory works throughfiguration until his text becomes its ownfigura.Viewed this way, the critical text is its own object as much as it is acommentary on a textual object outside itself. But this is very muchhow recent critical schools, committed to textuality and intertextualityin ways I have described, see the critical text: as no less sovereignthan what we used to think of as elite literary texts, and as in com-petition with them. We should note that, in the reflexivity of his essay,Miller goes beyond his literary subject and applies the mise en abymeto "uncanny criticism" and to his own work.9 Once it turns "uncanny,"criticism plunges into the textual swim, joining-as one amongequals-the poem, its precursor poems, and fellow "uncanny" criticalworks.

Though I have elsewhere rejected the equal primacy (or equal lackof primacy) of poem and commentary,10 it is useful to proceed hereas if this now widely held claim had merit. For it is by accepting criticaltexts as occupying the same level of creativity as the poems they pre-sumably are aboutthat we can pursue the moral implications of recentcritical modes. From the beginning of my historical survey in thisessay I have been aware that, for the most part, no distinction wasmade between the question of the moral claims for poetry and thequestion of the moral claims for criticism, so that the first of thesetwo issues was the only one addressed, the second being draggedalong automatically. But the elevation of the status of the critical text,at the expense of the poetic, permits us to ask about the moral de-mands it makes as well as those it responds to. And we have seen inwhat subtle ways criticism has addressed concerns it had thought ittaught itself to exclude.Because I have focused here on the implied moral and thematicinterest of theories presumably committed to other interests, I canfurther isolate that interest by classifying a few critics and movements,placing them, in effect, in thematic genres normally appropriate toliterary works. I would suggest, for example, that, trapped in theabyss, the negations of deconstruction represent something like thethematic side of the tragic, or perhaps only the pathetic. Or, in atheory of spatial form the attempt to transcend history through theall-inclusive moment of myth may be seen as seeking an epic-liketotalization. And my own cherishing of self-conscious illusionary playin language and fiction displays some of the harmless, if hardly in-

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nocent, character-I like to think-of a thematic version of pastoral.The lyric? If I were to include in my discussion the all-absorbing,triumphant Romantic ego of a theory of influence like HaroldBloom's, I believe we would be exposed to the critic's version of thelyric. And, to thwart all of these as well as the idea of genre, if I tookaccount of Bakhtin, we could begin to talk, through the idea of car-nival, about the critic's thematic dedication to genera mixta. Each ofthese suggestions of possible generic associations, of course, carriesthematic and thus moral implications with it.But I would like to cut short these mere hints of possible genericequivalents before I seem to be advancing them literally, for theyseem rather overschematized. Still, I find it useful to consider them.I have meant only to indicate the extent to which subliminal thematicand moral pressures tend to shape the theoretical and critical textsof our contemporaries in directions not unlike those we find oper-ating in primary literary texts. As I have suggested earlier, thesepressures also shape what critical commentary, anxious to reinforceits theoretical commitments, makes of those literary texts it chooses-in response to its own character-to work upon. It proceeds to the-matize the text which it first selects and then reflects, thereby be-coming-or rather remaking itself into-the thematic genre of thetext that preoccupies it. But as commentary too, it is a thoroughlyself-conscious version, reflexive as well as reflective. So the criticaltext can move from the coyness of a pale image of its object text tothe arrogance of a full-bodied substitute or even replacement-orsuch, at least, is its pretension, one that I have momentarily encour-aged here. However autonomous the critical text is licensed to be bycurrent theorists, we still must concede that its object text is what getsit going on its self-assertive-and thematic-path.This self-assertiveness and its deviousness open criticism to decon-struction by theorists of a different sort from those discussed so far-social theorists, whose works are usually strongly flavored by politicalconcerns. Speaking strongly for itself from motives that derive fromextralinguistic or even extraaesthetic sources-what I have beentreating as thematic and, ultimately, moral-criticism becomes anobject of study for those theorists-Marxists and some of those in-fluenced by Michel Foucault-who have been hunting for hiddenmotives, mainly social and political, behind what texts are apparentlyseeking to perform. For them no claim is as nakedly forthright as itsexplicit argument makes it seem; none is to be taken at face value, aslimiting its argument to its stated intentions. Instead, what criticismhas been presenting to its readers is treated as a complex linguisticdevice whose structures function as subtle instruments of social en-

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forcement, repressing and excluding on the one hand, privilegingand crowning as elite on the other."1In this essay I admit I have been suspicious of those whose inten-tions seem directed away from moral-thematic matters toward lin-guistic ones, and I have tried to expose allegiances not openly pro-claimed. But theorists committed to uncover struggles for powernourish (and would foster in others) darker suspicions-those of con-spiracies, largely unconscious, on behalf of social-political forcesworking within and through texts. After all, I do not complain aboutthematizing: I do not say that it is bad, only that it is inevitable, sothat it is better confronted than denied in one's own work and at-tacked in others'. For my survey strongly suggests that all of us, oneway or the other, are part of "the moral gang."But the theorists of social-political power are far more invidious intheir suggestions. Indeed, under their tutelage others have learnedto treat the history of criticism (or of literature, or of discourse itself)as a disruptive series of disguised struggles for mastery and institu-tional domination. And they have introduced the study of texts ex-clusively as emanations of historic institutional forces seeking orholding power. Ironically, it is a study which in effect represses,without embarrassment or self-consciousness, the more conventionalstudy of texts as arguments capable of being attacked or defendedon the weakness or strength of those arguments, as if they meantwhat they said. Instead, the text must always be given the lie by apolitical subtext which is allowed to overwhelm it. What has emergedis a method of writing critical history that is a radical alternative towhat had been the usual way: the history of the struggles of institu-tions to gain and maintain power through the manipulation of thediscourse they create out of their need replaces the history of thesuccession of argumentative structures which succeed and fail insolving the problems they address (or the problems which their termscreate but which they reify).To return to the ground I so hastily surveyed at the start, we neednot search far, in examining writers from Plato to Pope or evenJohnson, to trace the mimetic structures and metaphors of their crit-icism to questions of social order and the status quo, which are theirculture's structures and metaphors. Their reification of objective sys-tems, metaphysical and moral, which then solicit imitation serves so-cial-political needs effectively. If we wish to exhaust the meaning oftheir argument by citing these causes for them, our history of criti-cism can be considerably simplified-and reduced. The languagethat speaks for the totalization of nineteenth-century organicism canbe shown to harbor similar, though historically advanced, reactionary

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functions, propagating the ideological imperialisms of which EdwardSaid and Fredric Jameson have written. And more recent criticismperforms its surreptitious services for a retrograde culture when it isperformed by the "mandarin" critics stacked together for attack byFrank Lentricchia.12 Everywhere the "political unconscious" writestexts that are responsive to its will to power.Although through Foucault they maintain their own poststructur-alist connections with the realm of semiotics, the ultimate appeal ofthese critics is to historical realities beyond language in the socialstructures that determine human behavior. Hence these social-polit-ical theorists are, indeed, the most moralistic of all we have discussed.We need not strain to force them toward a thematic statement when

they make such statements openly as the other side of any semioticclaim they may make. If I wished to find a thematic genre for themin the literary classification I tentatively put forward earlier, I wouldhave to reach beyond the genres of poetics and assign them to rhet-oric, in Aristotle's notion of that ancient art as one devoted to thepowers of persuasion and the persuasions of power. Their moral-political interest guides their analysis of the work of others-whetherof poets or of critics-which is most often seen to violate that interest,and of their own work, which apparently seeks to serve it. But pre-sumably their habit of going right for the subtext, whatever the di-versions of the text proper, gives them a nose for the rhetorical func-tion both of the texts on which they comment and of the texts whichthey write. The difference between the two is that their own text,sponsored by their awareness of the rhetorical secret beneath all dis-course, is obliged to be self-conscious-whether in fact it is or not-as it unmasks those other texts that do not know themselves. Asmaster explainer, it must explain the ground for all texts, includingitself, thereby joining the others within a Dantean circle of languagein which all are damned and none innocent. And the ground whichit has explained falls away.This final turn that should make their own discourse reflexive-and my present one as well-exposes us all to the miseen abyme hattraps even our motives within language, with its many false bottoms.Language, deconstructed, is turned inward upon itself again, an in-sulated, reflexive textuality. Still, there remain, outside, those desiresthat would shape language to themselves as they seek to shape historyin their direction. These subjugate the text to themselves, the sublim-inal masters that make us distrust all that is said. So the text may bea devious moral instrument indeed, though we would do well to letit make its claims and to examine them on their own, as if they weredisinterested stabs at the truth and not just one stage in the reflexive

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series of an unending spiral. So, whether as a rhetorical manipulationof language needing to be unmasked, as a series of words making aclaim to meaning which asks to be apprehended, or as the infiniteregress that undermines the very project of verbal representation,literature-and the critical language that surrounds and competeswith it-work their way into the realm of thematics, make their moraldemands, and have their moral impact.Like its predecessors, modern theory, often in spite of itself andoften self-righteously, is thematic. And to thematize is to moralize,even if negatively. The wake of morality has plenty of draw: indeed,we all find ourselves drawn within it. However some of us may resist,as we seek to join the amoral fashion, we find ourselves awash inmorality still. Or, if I may change the metaphor to the other sense ofthe word as I discover the pun in my title, the wake of morality hasbeen prematurely called, for morality-if not moral philosophy-remains very much alive among us and, indeed, within us, capturingus all for "the moral gang." As an act of human will, how can writingitself be other than a moral act, and its objects (yes, objects!) conceivedas other than fellow moral agents?UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE

NOTES1 I examine at length Johnson's struggle with the moral in "Fiction, Nature, andLiterary Kinds in Johnson's Criticism of Shakespeare" and " 'Trying Experiments uponOur Sensibility': The Art of Dogma and Doubt in Eighteenth-Century Literature,"both in my Poetic Presence and Illusion: Essays in CriticalHistoryand Theory(Baltimore,1979), pp. 55-69 and 70-91.2 I provide a detailed study of the collision of these two traditions in "The ExistentialBasis of Contextual Criticism," in The Play and Place of Criticism Baltimore, 1967), pp.239-51.3 For a later summary and application to the worldly realm of choosing how to act,see my "Literature, Criticism, and Decision Theory," in Poetic Presence and Illusion, pp.238-69, esp. pp. 246-53.4 The Tragic Vision: Variations on a Theme in LiteraryInterpretation New York, 1960),p. 242. In this passage I take great pains to divorce "thematics" from "theme" (whichI there define as "the so-called 'philosophy' of a work, that series of propositions whichwe supposedly can derive-or, better yet, extrapolate-from the aesthetic totality thatis presented to us" [p. 241]). So we are far from moral philosophy, locked in a languagecontext that still, in its subtle network of internal relations, relates to our existentialcondition and hence to our moral state.5 Joseph Frank, The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Masteryin Modern Literature(Bloom-ington, 1963), pp. 10, 59-60.6 Paul de Man, "The Rhetoric of Temporality," in Interpretation:Theoryand Practice,ed. Charles S. Singleton (Baltimore, 1969), pp. 173-209.7 J. Hillis Miller, "Stevens' Rock and Criticism as Cure," GeorgiaReview, 30 (1976),5-31, esp. pp. 11-12.

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136 NEW LITERARY HISTORY8 Hillis Miller, p. 12. Miller's paradoxes are reminiscent of Thomas Mann's in hisDoctor Faustus. There he describes Adrian Leverkuhn's late music, The LamentationofDoctorFaustus, in which "the final despair achieves a voice," silence achieves an echoand "abides as a light in the night." (The translation is that of H. T. Lowe-Porter [NewYork, 1948], p. 491.) The similar focus upon the created "icon" of nothingness is forme evidence of the intrusion of a lingering modernism in Miller's postmodernist en-terprise.9 J. Hillis Miller, "Stevens' Rock and Criticism as Cure, II," GeorgiaReview, 30 (1976),347-48.10 See "Literary Criticism: A Primary or a Secondary Art?" in Arts on the Level: TheFall of theElite Object Knoxville, 1981), pp. 27-48.11 If this were an exhaustive study, as it is not, I would want to include, as a separatebut related group, those Freudians, and some of those influenced by Jacques Lacan,whose search for hidden subtexts is psychological rather than political, deriving fromprivate rather than collective drives.12 Among other places in the writings of each of them, see Edward Said, Orientalism(New York, 1978), Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious:Narrative as a SociallySymbolicAct (Ithaca, 1981), and Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism(Chicago,1980).

Krieger - In the Wake of Morality- Thematic Underside of Recent Crit (NLH 1983)

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