Reflecting Senses Perception and Appearance in Lit... - (The Anthropological Persistence of The Aesthetic Real Shadows and Text... )

MURRAY KRIEGER
University of California, Irvine
The Anthropological Persistence of the Aesthetic:

Real Shadows and Textual Shadows, Real Texts and
Shadow Texts
Abstract: The postmodernist opposition to aesthetic illusion has come about only
because illusion has been confounded with delusion, or misunderstood as a naive
acceptance of the referentiality of words. Our capacity for illusion-making and
illusion-receiving is inherently skeptical, cautious, and capable of simultaneously
juggling several sophisticated interpretations of perceptual evidence. The concept
of "shadow text" is forwarded in an effort to counter a misunderstanding which has
been fostered under the presumption of intertextuality. H e readily grants, indeed
he insists upon, the doubleness of referentiality. Fictional texts represent some
fictional object, but at the same time they are caught up in representing the enabling
conventions of their own fictional genre. The discussion of how texts refer to other
texts rests upon the postulation of "shadow texts" that guide and direct the reading
of a fictional texts.
I think of this essay as a postscript t o m y recently completed b o o k of Ek-

Copyright © 1995. De Gruyter, Inc.. All rights reserved.
phrasis,1 if indeed it should not have been part of that work. B u t like the belated
modernist I am, I felt, at the point that n o w stands as the end of that b o o k , a
sense of closure that I preferred not t o violate with a quite alien re-vision. T h a t
closure grew out of m y completing the apologia for illusion - and the aesthetic
- in the Western tradition as it was formulated in the high m o d e r n i s m of
mid-century. I associate illusion with the aesthetic because I take the term
aesthetic quite literally, as it was taken by its G e r m a n inventors in the 18th
century. F o r them the aesthetic grows out of sense perception and thus out of
the G e r m a n Schein, out of appearance, so that it is in the first instance
dependent on our capacity for illusion-making and illusion-receiving. Illusion
1 Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1992). This essays was originally printed in New Literary History 25 (1994) N o . 1 (Winter
1994), pp. 21-33.
Reflecting Senses : Perception and Appearance in Literature, Culture and the Arts, edited by Walter Pape, and Frederick
Burwick, De Gruyter, Inc., 1995. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cuhk-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3042060.
Created from cuhk-ebooks on 2020-06-04 19:59:46.
302 Visual Metaphors and Textual Shadows
is thus the enabling force of the aesthetic, and of its fictions of representation
as well as its representations of fiction.
Despite the deceptive gratifications of apparent closure, I did risk going a
step further in the final chapter of Ekphrasis, which bragged of being "A
Postmodern Retrospect"; but it did not center itself, as perhaps it should have,
on the radical change imposed on our sense of what a verbal illusion might be,
once our postmodern - as poststructuralist - awareness of the primacy of
textuality or, better yet, of intertextuality, was forced upon us in these last
decades. Under the terms of such a commitment to the mise en abyme of
language at the expense of designating an extra-linguistic "reality," the illusion
sponsored by verbal reference was to be shifted away from worldly "reality"
and directed to other words. And, in view of the illusionary basis of the
aesthetic as I conceived it in my book, our sense of the aesthetic was to be just
as radically changed under the impact of postmodernism. Or, even more than
changed, our sense of illusion, and thus of aesthetic, might have to be dissi-
pated altogether. It is just such a dissipation that our poststructuralist com-
mentary has seemed anxious to provoke.
Let me begin here by examining the recent widespread dismissal of the
aesthetic, which is seen by some as a mystification, by some as a dangerous -
because subliminal - tool of a reactionary politics, and by many as both. Such
an examination will comment adequately on the present state of our attitudes
toward illusion in art. I confess that my examination of the fall of the aesthetic
my be viewed as somewhat, if not wholeheartedly, defensive, but I hope that
my reasons will justify the concern that moves my lament.
Under the attack of our early postmodern critics, the aesthetic - as the heir
of Kantian "disinterestedness" and the darling of modernism - came to be
condemned as mere fetishism, the consequence of a supplicant's reification of
"works of art" as sacred objects and the elevation of those sacred objects into
a canon. The aesthetic, as it was made available to modernist theory by Kant's
third critique, by its adaptation into Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education
of Man, and by the Schlegels, Schelling, and Fichte - all of these brought into
Anglo-American discourse by Coleridge - rested upon the humanist's defini-
tion of the artist's power to make many into one, in other words, to create an
integral construct. The deconstructionist mode in poststructuralist criticism
attacks this mystification of aesthetic unity by insisting upon the habit of
words to escape the poet's aesthetic manipulation of them by breaking apart
from controlled interrelationships and fleeing into undecidability, disseminating
Krieger: The Anthropological Persistence of the Aesthetic 303
as they go. The only honest poetics sanctioned by this activity is a "poetics of
failure," in effect an anti-poetics. 2
Further, as the more political version of the anti-modernist attack goes, the
aesthetic was an inevitable accompaniment to a formalist and "mandarin''
criticism that afforded the leisure-class commentator an escape from uncom-
fortable social realities into a self-indulgence within an insulated retreat. The
very complexities of the elite objects in which such a critic luxuriated may have
fed the contemplative life, but it now was seen as leading to a paralysis of will
that assured the ineffectiveness of those objects in prompting the necessary
decision-making among the restricted choices given us by the practical world
in its call for action. And in a world in need of social and political change, and
the firm decisions required to effect such change, the aesthetic, thus conceived
as apolitical, came to be viewed as a luxury that world must forgo. Further, in
the paralysis induced by its impractical complexities, the aesthetic was charged
with serving the interests of the resistant status quo. In this way the supposedly
disinterested character of the aesthetic could be revealed to be attached to
interests, and troublesome interests, after all.
But the political rejection of the aesthetic went much further. The aes-
thetic, like its companion formalism, it was argued, is derived by the high
modernist from the cult of organicism that shaped 19th-century romanticism.
Organicism is seen - rightly or wrongly - as governed by the demand for the
utter closure of the text as aesthetic object, with all its elements functioning
indispensably within a structure of mutually transforming interactions. With
everything in it accounted for as a contributing element, the organic work can
well be described - to use the term postmodernism scornfully invoked - as
"totalized." The political character of the trope that describes such a textual
2 "The Poetics of Failure" is the title of the concluding chapter of Joseph N . Riddel's The
Inverted Bell: Modernism and the Counterpoetics of William Carlos Williams, pp. 255-301.
The argument of the chapter carries out the program I have been describing. - As an example
of the difference in practice between a reading that tries to make unified sense out of strange
turns in a poem and a reading that sees such turns as disrupting aesthetic harmony beyond
resolving, I refer the reader to my reading of a problematic passage in Keats's "Ode to a
Nightingale" in " Ά Waking Dream': The Symbolic Alternative to Allegory," in Words About
Words About Words: Theory, Criticism, and the Literary Text (1988), pp. 271-88, and Paul de
Man's response to that reading (published posthumously) in "Murray Krieger: A Commen-
tary," in Paul de Man: Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism: The Gauss Seminar and
Other Papers (1993), pp. 181-87. De Man argues against assimilating the passage we are
discussing "to a symbolic reconciliation of opposites." He concludes, this "Ode" is "one of
the very poems, the very allegory, of the nonsymbolic, nonaesthetic character of poetic
language" (p. 187).
system is apparent: the "aesthetic" attributes of such a literary work are seen
as making it into a micro-body-politic, one which cannot help but turn the
totalized into the totalitarian. The application to the larger political realm
seems inevitable, and the name of Hegel, together with the organicism that
moves his philosophy of history and his vision of the nation-state, is sum-
moned to make the case for the political consequences of a dangerously
reactionary aesthetic. Nor, it is urged, can there be any other kind of aesthetic.
The organicist notion of the aesthetic is thus seen as that ominous
"aestheticization of the political" against which Walter Benjamin warned, in a
phrase that finds itself, like much else in his work, echoed anachronistically as
a postmodern credo. By applying aesthetic criteria to the political arena, this
charge convicts the organicists of imposing those same strict rules of closure
upon actions in the public arena that they do upon the parts of a narrative or
a poem; convicts them, in other words, of wanting their state to have the
all-unifying, and thus all-subjugating, shape of a work of art. In the one case
as in the other no part is to withstand the coercive force of the needs of the
whole.
Enemies of the aesthetic can claim a correspondence between aesthetic
totalization and political totalitarianism only because their claims are derived
from any number of questionable assumptions. O f these I want to concern
myself with three: first, that romantic organicists consistently press the meta-
phor of closure in order to postulate an unqualifiedly closed literary work as
an integral textual "body"; second, that they take the metaphor of organicism
literally in order to treat the "body" of the text as if it were a biologically living
body; and third, that the opponent of organicism is justified in further lit-
eralizing metaphor in order to argue for an analogy, which is treated as little
short of an equivalence, between the body of text, treated as an actual body,
and a body politic.

I hardly need address the obvious fallacy involved in literalizing metaphors,
or in arguing from analogy as if similar syntactical relations (among text,
biological body, and body politic) dictated similar substantive relations,
thereby making the terms interchangeable. And the consequences of this
fallacy in postmodern rejections of the aesthetic as organic can be as mislead-
ing as they seem these days to be almost universally accepted. Let me look
critically at the three assumptions in reverse order.
First, in view of the inevitable openness of language as signs, how can one
close a text in the same way as one can close an authoritarian political entity?
Can a text, by virtue of its quest of closure, be charged with authoritarian
repression? Are texts, or parts of texts, to be taken as equivalents of sovereigns
persons, so that there is something undemocratic about claiming a hierarchy
of value among texts? What are the consequences, and what the misleading
insinuations, of talking this way? Second, even if one should, as an organicist,
look for an all-inclusive, mutual functionalism among the elements of a text,
like the parts of a body, does not the multi-dimensionality of words lead also
to flights that seek an escape from an over-arching unity? Finally, once we
loosen the organic metaphor's applicability by questioning the attachment of
organicism to unqualified closure, we can also discover in their texts that
romantic organicists reveled in the tension between centripetal and centrifugal
forces in the literary work, so that the drive to enclose could assert its power
only in the teeth of the agitated forces, never quite subdued, that struggle
against being accommodated. The dynamics that gave aesthetic organicism its
excitement derives from this struggle. And modernism, like the organicist
program it carried out, recognized and - despite its formalist gesture toward
holism - paid special tribute to these impulses to resistance, even as they were
restlessly balanced against the impulses to compliance.3
This two-sidedness - the push and pull - of the aesthetic reemphasizes its
rootedness in the give and take of the illusionary. I take as the exemplary
version of aesthetic half-belief (and yet double belief) the ambiguous "reality"
of the characters and action onstage before us in the drama. And it is our
rooting aesthetic "reality" in illusion that can justify the aesthetic - in effect
by ungrounding it, turning it into a will-o'-the wisp, matching every "now you
see it" with a "now you don't." As we perceive it aesthetically, what is repre-
sented before us as being out there, as our object, is to be taken as that object,
but also, and simultaneously, as no more than our fiction of it - an "airy
nothing" - and hence as not there after all (and I stress the after). Ever since
Plato, that ambiguity has been the very center, the always vanishing center, of
the notion of appearance, of Schein, the aesthetic itself.

But as both a representation and a fictional object, it is a representation of
what further object? As we have moved into these poststructuralist days we
have increasingly recognized that not only is the literary representation verbal,
but the presumed object of representation - whatever its fictive "reality" - is
itself only verbal, and hence not really "outside." Looking behind the age-old
semiotic desire for the natural sign in our response to representational objects,
we must acknowledge the illusionary character of that supposed "window to
nature," which has come to be seen as opening us only to yet further words,
all trapped within an infinitely receding verbal network.
3 This is the major argument of my Wellek Library Lectures, A Reopening of Closure:

Organicism Against Itself (1989).
Thus momentarily - that is, under the aegis of the aesthetic moment - we
willfully yield to the quasi-persuasion of the aesthetic illusion, though only
while we remind ourselves not to be altogether taken in by it. And we seize
upon that in the text which reminds us to be wary. But we can in these
postmodern days go beyond this notion, which has largely controlled literary
movements from romanticism through modernism. What is now seen to
exaggerate the merely illusionary character of the aesthetic illusion is the
denaturalization - the textualization - of the semiotic thrust of the sign, the
reduction of the presumed "object of imitation" from an outside "reality" to
a merely verbal "reality," whose representational force teases us as, within a
fading sequence of words depending on yet more words, it retreats before us.
Of course, my use of quotation marks in speaking of "reality" indicates my
concern about the difficulty of making it more than a verbal device that would, in
a willed naivet^, try to designate an "outside" that words struggle in vain to reach.
For more than two millennia, discussions of literary representation, en-
closed within variations of theories of imitation, confidently assumed the
availability of the non-verbal, or rather />re-verbal - extra-verbal - realities to
which texts were claimed to refer. The text's verbal reality, then, was seen to
be shadowed by the presumed reality of things, the furniture of our existential
world. But we have come to see the extent to which we have in literary texts
the illusion (we used to say "imitation") of other texts rather than the illusion
(or "imitation") of an extra-textual "reality." We have, in other words, come
to see the text as relating to a shadow text rather than to a shadow reality.
This shift can be traced back to the collapse of the naive version of the
doctrine of imitation in the later eighteenth century, a collapse that is roughly
contemporaneous with the waning of the drama as the principal - because the
most literally - mimetic genre. From the earliest theories of drama in Plato and
Aristotle, who treated poetic theory primarily as a theory of drama, there was
a direct tie, via the notion of mimesis, to the doctrine of the natural sign, a
doctrine that inevitably elevated the drama among the verbal arts.4
The equivalence between the human sign (the actor) and its referent (the
character) was easily - too easily - assumed by naive versions of mimetic
theory, as it always has been by naive members of the drama's audience. In this
sense the drama was not taken, literally, as a text that is primarily verbal,
because it was seen, as a mode of representation, to be an imitative human
performance, person for person. The actor has, in contrast to the other verbal
4 I address the natural-sign consequences of classical dramatic theory at considerable length

in Ekphrasis (see note 1), chapter 2.
arts, the least apparent distance5 from that shadow "other" lurking for us
within or behind him. Among the verbal arts, then, it was only in the drama
that mimetic theorists could claim to find an imitation that provided an
unmediated illusion of "real" life, much as mimetic critics of the visual ans
found such an illusion in still-life paintings or, better yet, in sculptures of the
human body.
Consequently, during the many centuries during which the natural-sign
aesthetic held sway, drama was the obvious model literary art in that it escaped
the arbitrary-sign fate of the word as the word functioned in the other verbal
genres. Lessing himself, in defending the use by poets of metaphor and other
verbal devices, sees them as wrestling with their medium to create only an
rf/moii-natural sign in contrast to the totally natural sign of drama's illusionary
"show."4 And, in the realm of the natural-sign aesthetic, the power of art lay
in its capacity as an imitation to arouse the fullness of illusion in its audience.
It was drama alone among the verbal arts that seemed to have an immediate
access to that power - principally because, as unmediated representation, it
was not, in its primary appeal to the audience, really verbal at all.
Thus the reign of drama, and the primacy of dramatic theory as the model
literary theory, carried with them the assumption of a naively mimetic relation
between aesthetic representation and the world of things and people, an
assumption quite in accord with naively mimetic assumptions about the minute
fidelity sought in the arts of painting and sculpture. It is not surprising that,
in the latter half of the eighteenth century, the decline of imitation theory, at
least in its most naive forms, and the decline of drama as the primary literary
art should have pretty much accompanied one another. As theory veered from
its dependence on the solid pre-aesthetic thing-in-the-world, so, as the prin-
cipal art of the natural sign, drama gave way to the lyric and the novel, genres
that, in their complete dependence upon a medium of arbitrary signs, have
come to be seen as imitating other sorts of texts more than they imitate actual
experiences; as imitating, that is, other sorts of verbal sequences more than they
imitate the parade of things and people and actions in a solidly furnished world.
We can move from drama to the other genres by treating the play onstage
as a semiotic structure and converting it into tropological terms, terms that
5 And we must remember that, in the aesthetic as a game of illusion, appearance is all we have,
as theorists of the aesthetic have insisted from their earliest treatises, which founded the
discipline in the mid-eighteenth century.
6 Lessing is perhaps our most instructive example of a critic who needs the drama as the one
genre that fully carries out the requirements of the natural-sign aesthetic. I have an extended
treatment of his position in Ekphrasis (see note 1), chapter 2.
then can be applied to the non-dramatic genres. We may thus see the actor
performing as the most elementary sort of metaphor in the double and para-
doxical way that he or she relates to the character represented (as well as both
of them to a live person): here, viewed as a semiotic instrument, the actor, as
in all metaphor, functions as a sign carrying the illusion of identity within our
common-sense awareness of difference, as well as the illusion of a bodily
presence within a common-sense awareness that there is no "real" presence
here at all. This duplicitous function of metaphor (at once identity and dif-
ference, presence and absence) can be extended to the play between and
among words - without the ambiguities of representation by live persons - in
those verbal genres that are reduced to representing only by the printing of
words on the page. In verbal metaphor, as in dramatic, two differentiated
entities are momentarily cast into an illusion of identity, while reminding us
of their differentiated status, which gives the lie to that pretense. The make-
believe of the metaphorical pretense at identity is a less obvious version of the
make-believe pretense at identity that we have in every actor's playing at being
his or her counterpart in "reality."
In the most literal sense neither the lyric nor the novel, as words on a page,
"imitates" (that is, looks like, sensuously reminds us of) anything or anyone
out there in the world, in the way that actors onstage in a drama do. And this
difference in what Aristotle called the "manner" of representation remains a
significant difference (though no longer with the crucial theoretical conse-
quences) between those genres and the drama; it was, after all, the principal
reason that the history of dramatic theory - ever since Book Three of Plato's
Republic - took a road distinct from that taken by the history of literary theory
apart from the drama. As tropes for the world of things, the two genres - the
lyric and the novel - may try mightily, by inventing their own devices, to
approach the "imitation" of "real"-life experience, as Lessing long ago re-
minded us;7 but I am claiming that what they, as verbal fictions, are more likely
to remind us of are other, more apparently referential (I had almost said
"truth-telling") genres. Indeed, the more naive readers among us may well
mistake them for their non-fictional equivalent. But for all readers of the lyric
and the novel, the make-believe of the fiction before them gets its start by
referring them subliminally to those supposedly non-fictional genres that
operate under the pretext of shunning the make-believe for the "real." In
7 Again I remind the reader (see note 6, above) of Lessing's effort to acknowledge those
devices used by non-dramatic poets to approach mimesis, while he reserves to the dramatic
poet the power to achieve it totally. I remind the reader of my discussion in Ekpkrasis (see
note 1), chapter 2, especially pp. 49-51.
effect, the lyric or the individual piece of prose fiction is referred back to its
non-fictional equivalent, to its shadow genre, in order to give us purchase as
we seek to assimilate the unknown to the known, the unique to the generic.
The lyric, as an apparent expression of the internality of a first-person
persona, comes to the reader as an imitation-confession, or imitation-personal
journal, or - if there is a strong appeal to an addressee - an imitation-letter. It
has, in other words, these non-fictional genres shadowing it, creating formal
conventions to which it must pretend some allegiance. Similarly, the novel
comes to the reader as an imitation-history or even imitation-chronicle; or, if
it concentrates on the career of a major protagonist, as an imitation-biography;
or, if in the first person, again as an imitation-confession or imitation-personal
journal, or even an imitation-autobiography. In either the lyric or the novel,
then, before we can, through make-believe, be referred to any possible "real"
world out there, the primary object of imitation - indeed the very agency for
referring us - is what I call the "shadow genre" behind the verbal fiction. The
"shadow genre" is the apparently factual or referential sort of text that, at the
most elementary level, the lyric or the novel is making-believe it is. That
shadow genre - confession, journal, letter, history, biography, autobiography
- is the unseen but directing medium that makes everything else (that deviates
from it) happen for us when we read fictional texts other than the drama.
I am not at all suggesting that these shadow genres, and the shadow texts
emanating from them, which are implied by and stand behind fictional texts,
are accurate representations of what those presumably non-fictional genres,
those would-be referential genres, actually are like. Poststructualist theory of
the past several decades has made us well aware of the narratological, tropo-
logical - indeed the generally fictional or make-believe - character of those
very genres (history, biography or autobiography, etc.) that I am now claiming

to be reflected as referential, non-fictional shadows behind the texts I would
threat as proper fictions. Under the pressure of these widely shared poststruc-
turalist claims about the ubiquity of textual fictions, current theory has pretty
well collapsed any distinction between what Aristotle called "poetry" and the
other sorts of texts that he would have called "history" but that we now see as
similarly subject to the transformations that must arise in the process of
represention. This is to collapse any distinction between fiction and non-fic-
tion by cutting one as well as the other off from what we used to think of as
unambiguous reference. So, as themselves a sort of fiction in spite of appar-
ently non-fictional intentions, these ostensibly referential genres have their
own shadows, which represent yet less ambiguous texts, as well. This so-called
"problematic of representation," occurring, as it is now claimed, similarly in
all text-making, might seem to obliterate any distinction I might want to make
between verbal fictions and their shadow genres.
But what I am speaking of as a shadow genre is not the history, journal,
biography or autobiography etc. as each of them usually comes to us as a text
in its own generic right; rather by the shadow genre I mean the make-believe
referential genre (history, biography, autobiography, etc.) that, as it is -
however subliminally - summoned to support the verbal fiction, would claim
as its mission the seeking of literal referentiality. For example, the make-be-
lieve "history" that is fictionally presumed behind The History of Tom Jones,
A Foundling is the naively literal transcription of a live person's life. Because
it is only an illusionary suggestion, we need not subject the implied or shadow
genre to the post-structuralist critique that we would apply to an actual
historical text in order to question its ostensibly referential claims. The actual
would-be referential genre (history, etc.) is what the verbal fiction only pre-
tends to emulate as it converts it to a shadow, an illusionary shadow of that
genre, against which the fiction makes its play.
So the shadow genre is the fiction of a would-be non-fictional genre, the
illusion of a genre that every non-dramatic verbal fiction subliminally invents
and requires us to keep in place behind it so that it may creatt,pour Voccasion,
the suspension of our disbelief in order to allow the fiction to do its work. As
this subliminal shadow of the actual genre - as this make-believe thrust at
"real" reference - it is part of the fiction constituted by the non-dramatic
fictional text. A mere shadow text invented by implication, it no more closely
resembles the would-be non-fictional text that it fictionalizes than does any
other aspect of the created verbal fiction resemble its apparent match in reality.
Though but a shadow, it sets its conventionally generic limits upon the ways
in which the verbal fiction moves along.
Indeed, behind the fictional text that stands before the reader there may be
many such shadow genres and their texts lurking, depending on what the
reader brings to it. What readers should try to resist, however, is the tempta-
tion to substitute for the complications of the text that is moving before them
the simplicities of the shadow text that they carry with them to guide their
vision. This assumed shadow text, all too consistent with the shadow genre, is
in no sense there, except as an invisible standard that readers should watch
being being consistently violated by the text that is there for them to read. By
reading it well they would relish and explore the new paths constituted by the
textual peculiarities, the fruitful "deviations from the norms," of the shadow
text that in their reading they must come to abandon.8
8 The phrase, "deviations from the norm," is borrowed from the Russian Formalists who long
Krieger: T h e Anthropological Persistence of the Aesthetic 311
I am, it should be clear, trying to find a way to distinguish between literary

fictions and the fictionality of apparently non-fictional texts even while ac-
knowledging that the problematic of representation ensnares histories, bio-
graphies, autobiographies, and the others, as well as it does literary fictions.
N o text, no matter how apparently (or, dare I say, intentionally) referential
and addressed to factual "truth," altogether escapes the distortions of tex-
tuality and thus silently invokes its own shadow texts, implicit shadows that
are presumably more "normal" than itself. But this concession still leaves
room for the claim that the literary fiction resembles and leans upon a prior
notion of a referential text that it fictionalizes. And it is this sort of phantom
text that helps us to work our way into the errant literary fiction that we then
allow to lead us further into itself. So, after our concessions about all texts, this
literary textuality is textuality with a difference, the difference of a shadow of
a text. With the rise of literary genres (the lyric and the novel) less subject to
being mistaken for natural signs and more dependent on their textual charac-
ter, it was inevitable, now that the drama had lost sway as the model literary
text, that other texts would come to replace external - or at least extra-textual
- "reality" as the supposed object of literary imitation.
Once armed with this newer model of literary texts dependent on tex-
tuality, we can turn back to drama itself and revoke its privileged status as a
mimetic art by recognizing that the older doctrine of natural-sign imitation
should not have held even in its case. Beyond the illusion of "real life" created
by the actors and their onstage actions, we can now observe the convention-
ality rather than the "naturalness" of drama: the rules governing the sequence
of movements of characters in action are not the rules of "natural" realities -
though they may try to appear as such - so much as they are borrowed from
dramatic conventions as reflected in earlier plays. So drama, as conventional,
is also seen as deriving much of its power from its own shadows, which are the
source of the quoted or parodic elements in speech and action that it manipu-
lates and transforms.
In addition, far more than its apparent worldly references to real persons,
we have learned to observe drama's dependence on its devices of self-refer-
ence, its need to turn on itself, to call attention to itself as mere illusion and
not the "real" thing.9 Once having made these observations, we can ascribe the
ago used it to urge the distinction they sought to maintain between poems (home of the
deviations) and non-poetic texts (home of the norm).
9 It should be noted that self-reference as a literary device is no longer the subtle discovery of
the modernist critic. In its function as an increasingly prominent feature of late modernist
drama, in its exaggerated form in postmodern drama, and most extravagantly as it shapes the
problematic of representation, the curse (and blessing) of textuality, to this

previously exempted genre as well. And drama can join the other genres on
their textual grounds, no longer an exception among the literary genres be-
cause it was claiming a privileged access to the extra-textual, to the "real" world
of things and people.
Thus, in seeing drama as composed of conventional signs that refer to texts
rather than natural signs that refer to the actual world, theories of drama have
in these semiotic times tended, like theories of the other genres, to find -
lurking behind its representations - shadow texts, deriving from shadow
genres, rather than shadow "realities." Besides the ambiguities of identity and
difference that govern the actor's relations to the textual character and, be-
yond, to any potential flesh-and-blood person, we find in the actor's perfor-
mance the shadows cast by other actors and by other textual characters from
other plays: those that have taught us how to read both actors and the textual
characters they seek to represent.
The illusion, that which appears to us to be, is our opening into every
version of the aesthetic - non-dramatic as well as dramatic within the verbal
arts - and the shadows cast by our earlier illusions are carried along to guide
us every step of the way. The value of the aesthetic, then, lies in its capacity to
foreground the fictional character of the realm of the illusionary and to press
it to its self-conscious extreme, while, through self-reference, reminding us of
the pretense that at once licenses and delegitimates it. It reminds us of our
capacity for - indeed our dependence on - illusion-making, indeed encourages
it by providing us marvelous texts that are self-consciously dedicated to
make-believe, to "once upon a time." At the same time those texts, through
self-reference, warn us about their fiction's unreality, while they help us
acknowledge our inability to know what, apart from appearance - from illu-
sion - "reality" is. Thus cut off, in their attachment to the codes by means of
which appearances are imposed upon us, they reflect those previous excur-
sions into illusion - the texts and their genres that have before them prepared
our vision to receive these newest fictions.
The aesthetic, then, as exemplified in each literary work, displays the
duplicity of its workings: through its illusion-making, which controls us
during the moment of our engagement with it, it appears to be tricking us into
accepting the conventional and the arbitrary as if they were natural signs, and
postmodern film, the referring of a work to its illusionary self has been driven to become a
commonplace, a mere convention that helps constitute the postmodernism of the work it
pretends to subvert.
at the same time it reveals the source of its trickery, thereby ««deceiving us.
It thus can earn a "willing suspension of [our] disbelief" only by compelling
our provisional and momentary complicity with it. But by reminding us of the
process of our almost-deception, it de-naturalizes the illusionary naturaliza-
tion that the literary sign seems to want to bring about. It reminds us that what
we are dealing with is a fictionalized version of a would-be natural sign, which,
however compelling, demonstrates by extreme example the delusion perpe-
trated by any semiotic that would, seriously, without self-consciousness,
make a natural-sign claim.
By this example the fictionalized, and thus conventionalized, pretense at a
natural sign, at once persuasive and self-deconstructed, can serve, in the dis-
cursive realm beyond the aesthetic, as a warning against the illusions that our
dominant culture may, surreptitiously but forcefully, be trying to impose
upon us as if they were naturally authorized. It exhibits, as it exposes, the
accepted appearances that have been made to constitute "reality" for us as
members of our culture, and in so doing deprives them of the authoritative
semiotic ground on which they would rest. Consequently, it converts "reality"
into the shadows of a text and the genre that sustains it, a text that itself is
shadowed by textual illusions that precede and surround it, and that in turn
will shadow texts yet to come.
It is in this sense that the aesthetic, cultivated as a mode of experience, may
be taken as an emblem that reveals our deceiving, and self-deceiving, stabs at
"reality" via language in those ordinary - and more consequential - moments
in our daily living when, oblivious of what the aesthetic should have taught us,
we are manipulated by the overreaching words of the world that would control
us. The aesthetic alerts us to the attractions and the dangers behind our
quotidian belief in the act and fact of verbal representation, in our habit of
confidently, without question, using language to get beyond language, in
effect obliterating the mediating character of language by making it a transpar-
ent vehicle, confident of its rider as it drives toward "reality."
So what is the "reality," any "reality," lurking in the shadows? Perhaps it
may be no more than the reality of the primacy and the persistence of the
aesthetic, of our need always to cherish, as well as to be wary of, the illusionary
ground - or ungroundedness, the shadow text beyond shadow text, shadow
beyond shadow - that both creates, and destabilizes, our perceptual version of
"reality." With a continual shuddering at our epistemological predicament, we
should call upon the power, sustained by the aesthetic, of resisting the certain-
ties of any more confident claims by language to entrap the real, exposing
them as the ideological monoliths they are, thereby enabling us to reject the
univocality they would impose upon us. This resistance may send us back t o
the skeptical insecurity of the aesthetic, with its textual world of receding
shadows, although we can hope for the moments of emergence out of the
shadows by the glow of a present text. That glow affords an illumination,
though in the realm of anthropology rather than ontology: it can enlighten
only the self-enclosing realm of human consciousness, reaching both the
richness of what its perceptions include and the poverty of its ruthless exclu-
sions - reaching into the shadows.

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MURRAY KRIEGER

University of California, Irvine

The Anthropological Persistence of the Aesthetic:

I think of this essay as a postscript t o m y recently completed b o o k of Ek-

and a body politic.

the notion of appearance, of Schein, the aesthetic itself.

3 This is the major argument of my Wellek Library Lectures, A Reopening of Closure:

4 I address the natural-sign consequences of classical dramatic theory at considerable length

very genres (history, biography or autobiography, etc.) that I am now claiming

I am, it should be clear, trying to find a way to distinguish between literary

problematic of representation, the curse (and blessing) of textuality, to this

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