The Johns Hopkins University Press

The "Imaginary" and Its Enemies
Author(s): Murray Krieger

Source: New Literary History, Vol. 31, No. 1, On the Writings of Wolfgang Iser (Winter,
2000), pp. 129-162
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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The "Imaginary" and Its Enemies
Murray Krieger
I. The Aesthetic and the Illusionary
Throughout our many years as dear friends I have found that
Wolfgang Iser and I have been not only close colleagues in a

university and a department, but, far more importantly, close
in being dedicated to justifying a continuing major role to be
colleagues
in culture by the aesthetic, even in a theoretical season that has
played
grown increasingly hostile to it. Iser's and my theories may have
emerged from different sources, but they have met in what I hope is a
mutual reinforcement in their to that role. I am
attempt support major
work, for Iser's recent which has developed a pro
especially grateful
found and lasting anthropological justification for the aesthetic.1 In
what follows I try to add my own minor version of a late defense in the
face of an environment.
inhospitable
It has become almost routine in recent theoretical fashions to reject
the aesthetic as a special category that would justify what we used to call
art. aim is and has been to reassert and then maintain the role and
My
the significance of the aesthetic against these attempts to repudiate it as
a diversion, as a that masks its submissive service
deceptive mystification
to political powers. In this part of my essay and in the second part that
follows I will be arguing, first, for the restoration of the aesthetic in its
own right as an indispensable and irreducible form of human activity at
its best, and second, the reduction of the aesthetic to the
against
political.2 In what follows, then, Iwill begin by setting forth my notion of

the Western aesthetic construct, its history and the complexities in the
ways it functions. With this exposition I hope to have cleared the way for
the sequel, which will deal with the politics of struggle between the
aesthetic and its enemies in the history of literary theory and commen
tary, a struggle that leads to the crisis in which literary studies find
themselves today because of the widespread dismissal of the aesthetic as
a legitimate category.
The aesthetic in literature begins its career in the West with its
attachment to doctrines of form, and, as is traditionally argued, we must
go back to the Poetics of Aristotle for the earliest and perhaps still the
most influential doctrine of form. In the Poetics the doctrine of form
New Literary History, 2000, 31: 129-162

130 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
arises fromthe study of drama, and, within drama, of tragedy. I will

come later in this essay to look at the history of dramatic theory as that
history impinges on more general literary theory. But first I want to
review the history of a more general doctrine of poetic form.
As one of his main objectives Aristotle wants to supplant Plato's anti
aesthetic complaints against poetic imitation, based as they were on the
representation of individual external objects (persons and things), so
that for Plato's attack there was no unified art work, no aesthetic
form,
but only an assembly of imitations of objects, which are to be compared
to their external counterparts, one by one. Plato's splintering of the
poem into individually represented objects may account for the strength
of Aristotle's commitment to the integral, unified art object, which was
to convert all the assembled items being imitated into an indivisible
whole. For Aristotle each entity in the work is part of a teleological
structure to be realized in the "final cause," the effect of the work's
ultimate self-realization. Though I could cite many passages throughout

the Poetics, a very few quotations must suffice here. In them Aristotle
makes clear his principle of closed structure that would serve a totalizing
functionalism, which since the nineteenth we have called
century
organic theory.
The first of these passages reveals Aristotle charging poetry to convert
history's sequence to the logic of poetic form, to convert
chronological
before-and-after to cause-and-effect: a whole "is that which
every poetic
has a beginning, middle, and an end. A beginning is that which does not
follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally
is or comes to be. An end, on the contrary, is that which itself naturally
follows some other thing . . . but has nothing following it. A middle is
that which follows something as some other thing follows it. A well
constructed therefore, must neither nor end at
plot, begin haphazard,
but conform to these principles."3 Thus he can say later, "Itmakes all the
difference whether any given event is a case of propter hoc or post hoc"
(41). For Aristotle, it is clear, form means teleological pattern, with every
"end" already implicated in the "beginning," in accordance with his
doctrine of "final cause." We are with an "imitation" of an
dealing
action: it looks like a real-life action, and people onstage act as if they
were engaged in a real-life action; but it is also self-conscious artifice that
reminds us to see it as a action with its own artificial character
made-up
istics. So we are to read or watch doubly: as if the beginning, middle, and
end are chronological only, an arbitrarily cut-off segment out of the line
of temporality, as irreversible and unrepeatable as the passing moments
of our lives; and as if the beginning, middle, and end are as circular in
their mutually nature as Aristotle's doctrine of formal
implicative
completeness would have it.

THE "IMAGINARY" AND ITS ENEMIES 131
Following these principles Aristotle taught the formalist tradition that

followed him to assume that there ought to be some rationalization to
element of a text is included in the text rather
justify why any particular
than omitted, and why it is placed where it is rather than somewhere
else. For the teleology of a tight formalism is built into every detail of
action, of character, of language. "As therefore, in the other imitative
arts, the imitation is one when the object imitated is one, so the plot,
being an imitation of
an action, must imitate one action, and that a
whole, the structural union of the parts being such that, if any one of
them is displaced or removed, the whole will be disjointed and dis
turbed. For a whose or absence makes no visible
thing presence
difference is not an organic part of the whole" (35).
The organicist basis of this requirement is taken up in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by German theorists, for
whom the analogy of the poem?in its growth and its unified splendor?
to a living body is pressed, often being taken all too literally. Treating
Immanuel Kant as a sort of second coming of Aristotle, these theorists
pick up from him and extend (probably well beyond his intentions) his
notion of "internal purposiveness," which leads him to proclaim a
within the form, though it is one that occurs in accordance with
"finality"
no purpose ("finality") imposed from outside. A fully committed organi
cism proceeds in the work of these followers.
Their doctrine "takes root" (if Imay borrow the organic metaphor) in
English theory, thanks to the intervention of Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
who borrowed a good number of his claims?and too often the very
language he used?from German theorists. There are many eligible
quotations scattered through his work. I will mention only some of the
most obvious ones. In the crucial chapter 14 of his Biographia Literaria
(1817), Coleridge asserts that a poem must yield "such delight from the
whole, as is with a distinct from each component
compatible gratification
part." He precedes this by enunciating the general principle from which
this follows: "nothing can permanently please, which does not contain in
itself the reason it is so, and not otherwise."4
why
His most commitment to all too close to the
explicit organicism,
wording of August Wilhelm Schlegel, appears in one of Coleridge's
Shakespeare Lectures (1818), "Shakespeare's Judgment Equal to His Ge
nius," in which he complains about those who, while conceding
Shakespeare's "genius," condemn his "judgment" because of his failure
to abide by the conventional rules of the drama: "The true ground of the
mistake lies in the confounding mechanical regularity with organic
form. The form ismechanic, when on any given material we impress a
pre-determined form, not necessarily arising out of the properties of the
material;?as when to a mass of wet we whatever we wish
clay give shape

it to retain when it is hardened. The organic form, on the other hand is

innate; it shapes, as it develops, itself from within, and the fullness of its
development is one and the same with the perfection of its outward
form. Such as the life is, such is the form."5
It is this distinction between and organic form that gives
mechanical
rise to the romantic opposition between "allegory" and "symbol," with
the allegory rejected as a reflection of the mechanical dependence on
an outside authority and the symbol revered as internally generated.
This opposition, and the respective value or disvalue accorded each side,
was first enunciated by Goethe, then picked up?as we would expect?
by Coleridge, and passed on to the postromantic and idealist tradition
that followed into our own century. Coleridge's formulation is as precise
as any, as it uses the symbol to carry out the special relationship between
part and whole that organic theory calls for: for him the symbol "always
partakes of the reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunci
ates the whole, abides itself as a living part ofthat unity, of which it is the
He must the alternative: "an is
representative." reject allegorical allegory
but a translation of abstract notions into a which is
picture-language
itself nothing but an abstraction from objects of the senses; the principal
more worthless even than its both alike unsub
being phantom proxy,
stantial and the former to boot."6
shapeless
At the opening of our own century, Benedetto Croce, in his Aesthetic,
this opposition into a founding principle of his
develops allegory-symbol
enormously influential enunciation of the idealist theory of art.7 The
modernist movement in theory that follows, much of it coming in the
wake of theorists like Croce, leads to the reign of the New Criticism, in
which the distinction between allegory and symbol translates into a
method of intense verbal analysis of poems. This method dwells upon
the distinction between or simile or which is to
analogy metonymy,
characterize discourse, and which is taken to be
nonpoetic metaphor,
the soul of discourse. In nonpoems, words relate to one another
poetic
only in adjacency, while in a poem a complete fusion among words is
somehow achieved. This, indeed, becomes the formative principle of
the New Criticism. Allegory or analogy or simile or metonymy, all are
to the of difference, the commonsense dualistic
relegated principle
distinction between sign and referent that presumably allows all lan
guage to operate. Symbol or is championed as the creator of
metaphor
some magical identity between entities that, except for what the poem
has done, would be seen as differentiated.
As our theory after midcentury has looked back across the century
and-a-half of the dominance of organic theory, it has looked both
skeptically and with suspicion at the very analogy on which organicism is

based, an analogy that the theory too often took literally. Surely the
to treat the "body" of the poem as a
attempt living body cannot be
pursued literally; this is but an analogy and cannot be pursued uncritically,
as if it were a poetic metaphor. The basis of the attack on organicism,
with which Iwill deal at length in the second part of this essay, comes out
of a skepticism about this irrational leap as well as a political distrust
because of the potential application of the same organic to
analogy
entire societies and nation-states.
But I think it is an unfortunate mistake to insist that

organic theory
has in its best practitioners been literal-minded about the application of
the trope that gives it its distinctness. In dealing with the shrewdest of
those we call organicists, it is, I believe, a hasty misreading to reject their
use of the analogy by claiming that they employ it uncritically, without
any awareness of its figurative status. Indeed, from the very
beginning of
this theoretical tradition?in Aristotle himself?there is no confusion
about the difference between an in nature and the borrowed
organism
features of the organic analogy that the critic sees as serving the work of
art.
At the basis
of Aristotle's philosophy, in his treatise on Physics (see
chapter 2), he draws an absolute distinction between art and nature: for
him an object in nature is one that has its of form or growth
principle
immanent within itself, like the oak within the acorn, while in an object
of art the creator imposes his or her form from the outside upon inert,
unformed matter, as the works the stone to it a form
sculptor upon give
it cannot grow into by itself. Aristotle will add as the requirement he
borrows from the organic analogy that the form imposed by the artist
must appear so right, so inevitable, that it should appear as if the object
had to grow itself that way and only that way. If the
object of art were a
natural object, and if it were able to realize its total
potential without
accidental flaws, this would be the form, and the realization ofthat form,
that itwould achieve. But it is this total self-realization of a form
precisely
that marks the object as the product of human and not natural
making.
It is in this profound sense that art is to imitate nature?that is, to
imitate the natural organic it is to the
process?although superior
natural process in that it can transform all accidental into
waywardness
the teleological necessity of a thoroughly realized form, which in nature
would be aborted or flawed by the accidents of happenstance. But it is
also in this sense that the notion of organic form, like the
organic form
provided us by the art object, is from the outset?in Aristotle?a matter
of appearance, is illusionary only, a loose with the
analogy only acquies
cence of the viewer to authorize it. There should be little confusion,
then, about the difference between the body of a natural object and the

of a to the all-too-common insistence recent

body poem. Contrary by
theorists, even the use of the word in the two cases
anti-organicist "body"
should not mislead the perceptive critic.
If we return for a moment to Aristotle's language in chapter 7 of the
Poetics, which I have quoted, the translator has him in two places
speaking of one event following another in a drama "naturally" rather
than, as in normal "at But this is not the
experience, haphazard."
confusion of
categories it might at first seem to suggest. In these
passages Aristotle clearly is equating "naturally" with "causal necessity,"
as another indication that he is using his language analogically only, in
finding ways for the logic of growth in the poet's form to substitute itself,
as an "imitation," an illusion, of the way natural
objects might grow in an
artificially purified air. But there seems to me no intention of confusing
art with nature in the poet's attempt to present his or her formally
perfected illusion of nature's teleological principles, usually thwarted in
extra-artistic its an "imitation," thanks to the
experience. Despite being
creativity of the poet and the intervention of the form-making activities

of that creativity, the poem is anything but a true "natural sign."
The recent widespread attacks on theories that depend on the organic
analogy, which I will examine in the second part of my essay, are not
sensitive to the deft and discriminating way the organic analogy has
been appealed to in Aristotle and in the most self-conscious organicists
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is this illusionary sense of
the organic (now you see it, now you don't) that I want to stress in
dealing with the evolution of the Western aesthetic since the mid
eighteenth century, when the "aesthetic" is introduced into theoretical
discourse Alexander as a an
by Baumgarten primary activity, activity
derived from sensations themselves before they are generalized into
concepts.
From the outset of its career in Western this
very thought, precon
attaches the aestheticto because from the start it was
ceptual priority
connected to appearance, to the German Schein, and thus to
intimately
illusion. In the eighteenth century the invention of aesthetics not only as
a term, but also as a the term, at once and for
discipline governed by
good wedded the study of the arts to the perceptual and?more

the sensuous. aesthetics as the science of
broadly?to Conceiving percep
tion (or of what was termed "sensuous
cognition"), Baumgarten?from
his early work in 1735 and firmly in his Aesthetica (1750)?set apart the
study of works of art from other studies on the ground of the primal
on art's to our And, from
dependence appeal sensory receptors.
to Mendelssohn to Kant to Croce to Eliseo Vivas, we are
Baumgarten
regularly reminded that percept precedes concept.
The original of aesthetics as sense perception, an etymologi
meaning

cal borrowing from the Greek aesthesis, remained attached to the term in
the tradition that, leading to Kant and beyond, used the sensuous
character of aesthetic objects to differentiate their realm from the other
two realms, both of which are dependent upon concepts: the realm of
knowledge (pure reason) and the realm of action (practical reason). As
late as in Croce's repeated celebration of the term aesthetic and his
development of the discipline named for it, the aesthetic retains that
restricted meaning, apparently still bound by its etymological origin, so
that the bond between the aesthetic object and the sensuous basis of its
entrance our remains secure. Indeed, Croce's
upon experience magi
cally omnibus term, "intuition," which he declares synonymous with the
aesthetic, has sense as its Much later,
perception originary meaning.
despite vastly different philosophical attachments, E. H. Gombrich's

commitment to illusion is similarly connected to perception.8 Illusion
for him is not an error, a matter of deception; it is rather how and what
we see. And the arts function by helping us to shape what we see, to help
us apprehend the "reality" in which we experience our
living. And, with
far more antecedents and Iser's sense of the
complex consequences,
is in many ways consonant with this tradition.9
"imaginary"
In the eighteenth century the definitional assumptions about the
sensuous basis of art led with consistency to a concern with the "aesthetic
senses," the several senses that serve the several arts, each as a
acting
receptor its appropriate
for art (sight for painting, for music,
hearing
and so forth). It was only after poetry for some decades had been
excluded from the family of arts?because itsmedium was composed of
language-as-meaning and did not appeal immediately (that is, without
mediation) to any of our senses?that it was admitted to the family of
arts because of a new interest in the important role played by its aural
(and hence sensuous) surface.10 Much later, when Eliseo Vivas in the
1950s uses the key phrase, "the primary data of experience," we must
note that word "data," which he is using in its technical
epistemological
sense as that which is "given" to the senses before being acted upon by
our and is, by our
reasoning generalizing?that conceptual?faculties.11
This consistent
attempt to keep the aesthetic prior
epistemologically
to the conceptual by keeping it close to the immediacies of perception
also leads theorists to emphasize the doctrine of closure in the domain
of the aesthetic. As I will discuss in the second half of my essay, it is this
doctrine that has aroused the most violent opposition among recent
enemies of the aesthetic. I have already suggested that Kant's influence
played a crucial role in the development of this aesthetic and organicist
tradition, as it has been reconstructed by those who would destroy its
lingering influence. Perhaps far more than his own text would justify,
Kant is seen as responsible for the claim that the aesthetic experience?

and before that the work itself?depends upon a sense of "internal

that leads us to see its form as a closed form. Indeed, if
purposiveness"
we return for a moment to the role of the senses, our of
may very way
perceiving, from Kant to the Gestaltists to Gombrich, has been made to

on our habit, within an overall psychology of perception, of
depend
out of sense-data a form that we as an
creating disparate unifying grasp
integral object.
As we find in the theoretical tradition we associate with Kant and his
forebears, like Baumgarten and Mendelssohn, this aesthetic drive to
make a whole out of disparate parts is the sign of a reading habit in
accord with our perceptual habits. The "aesthetic" is derived from sense
and sense is a matter of closure, of
perception, perception constructing
out of raw sense-data the objects, real or imaginary, that fill our world. As
cited by Gombrich, perceptual psychologists remind us that itmay well
be our need to fill in?in effect, to visual
interpretive complete?our
field that helped lead these theorists to posit aesthetic closure for art
and our to them as wholes. The
objects responses illusionary apparent
self-sufficiency of the perceptual whole produces the fictional "illusion,"

akin to Iser's which, if l'occasion, makes it our
"imaginary," only pour
"reality."
Thus the psychological pursuit of wholes in our perceptual experi
ence moves outward and to the of aesthetic wholes,
upward perception
wholes that?in their a wholeness in the
closure?sponsor psychological
experience of responding to them; in responding, that is, to the illusions

we them to create in our inner But we must
encourage perceptions.
remember that the wholes our insist on are not
perceptions creating
totally credited by us. We
know, by contrast, the sloppy incompleteness
of our world of experience, which we allow the poem momentarily to
as we see it on its roundedness and
defy insisting completeness.
Even the nineteenth and romantic con
twentieth-century organicists
sistently recognized the double of the poem, within and movement

without, as they again and again urged their motto of "unity in variety,"
with as much emphasis on the variety as on the unity. While they wanted
the to work at self-enclosure, unlike neo-classical critics never
poem they
wanted to exclude alien elements that threatened to break the enclo
sure. To return to for a moment and to words referred to
Coleridge
repeatedly by the New Critics, quote his phrase to describe let me

the
of the it achieves "the balance or reconcilia
activity poetic imagination:
tion of opposite or discordant qualities" (BL 174). I find this a favorable
restatement and of the notion of "discordia concours," which
expansion
Dr. Johnson, more negatively disposed, had used to discredit the
challenging quest for antithesis sought by the Metaphysical poets,

licensed by later organicists. The first opposed pair of these "qualities"

that Coleridge calls for to be balanced or reconciled is "sameness with
difference." (We are still echoing the opposition that later critics termed
and
"metaphor" "metonymy.")
Although Coleridge's emphasis is admittedly on the power of "recon

ciliation," of producing unity in the face of the fiercest opposition by
variety, that very power is dependent on the unceasing cultivation ofthat
opposition, the indigestible food of a variety somehow to be digested,
but only by preserving our awareness of its resistance to being absorbed.
While recent assailants of form see the embrace
organic only organicist's
of the notion of "reconciliation," which they violently reject, they ignore
Coleridge's simultaneous insistence on the "balance" of opposing forces
("balance or reconciliation"). And "balance" becomes an
important
alternative for modernist Coleridgeans.
Reconciliation and balance are of course hardly the same thing;
indeed they might be seen as contraries. Reconciliation, with the
harmony of oppositions that it imposes, is a synthetic Hegelian virtue
suggesting an ultimate monism, while a sustained balance suggests the
holding of both the opposing elements at full strength, with neither
to the other. It is more to a between
yielding likely produce tug-of-war
opposing forces it is to produce

than the classic repose of unity. Why
should the balanced opposition, and thus the tension, between oppos
ing forces produce in the reader an and not an
organized harmony
extended, irreconcilable impasse? In the two-sidedness of this dialectic,
with the opposition?especially the opposition between the would-be
autonomous part and the would-be totalizing whole?both indulged
and overcome, there is a magical imposition of unity, but only as at every
moment it is confronted with a negative thrust that would explode it.
From T. S. Eliot on through those who developed the New Criticism,
this phrase from Coleridge and the doubleness of poetic function that it
implied controlled much of the way they analyzed and evaluated poems.
As Eliot, in the spirit of Coleridge, put it, a poet like John Donne, to his
credit, to "devour any kind of and was
sought experience," "constantly
amalgamating disparate experience."12 Eliot invoked the words that Dr.
a far narrower claim for used to the
Johnson, making unity, castigate
poems of the metaphysical poets because in them "the most heteroge
neous ideas are yoked by violence together." But this for Eliot was
the source of their He
precisely strength. required the poem continually
to seek out more and more challenging materials, those that threatened
to break the enclosure, and to struggle to do business with them too, to
bring them within even as they threatened to destroy the unity that
sought to overwhelm them. The dynamic conflict in the poetic text

between unity and variety, between centripetal and centrifugal forces,

between that which would enclose and that which would explode the
enclosure, was to be confronted and never evaded.
always
In the wake of Eliot, as the New Critics sought to characterize the
peculiar power of the poetic, out of this two-sidedness they developed
their criteria of ambiguity, irony, and paradox. All of these stressed
instability in the text: both the poem's inclusiveness and the challenge to
that inclusiveness by those elements so carefully excluded but shown us
as beckoning from without and thus also brought within our awareness,
if only by negative reference. Whatever the illusion of unity called for by
the organicist aesthetic, it is never long in wanting us to be reminded of
all that is outside threatening to undo it.
We are still with Aristotle's art object that allows us the illusion of what
a natural object ought to be if its potential were to be fully realized, even
though we now understand that neither the world, nor even this object,
can withstand the coldly skeptical analysis that searches out every aporeia
(every break or gap, every disruption) in both. And it is the poem that
exploits both the transformation of all accident into inevitability and the
always perceptible aporeias that would altogether undo the perfection of
that pattern.
Obviously I am speaking of illusion not as misleading error, in

distinction to some positivistic notion of objective fact, so much as the
"reality" projected by our internality as the realm of experience within
which we think we live. If we want to confer upon illusion the
psychologically willed-for-a-moment reality that we know is illusionary,
and if we are to think of art's creation of illusion as its primary function,
then among the verbal arts we must think at once of the drama. And it
is no accident that Aristotle initiated the ambiguities of the illusionary in
a treatise devoted to the drama, and within drama, to
exclusively
tragedy.
Iwant to look briefly at dramatic theory from Aristotle to Dr. Johnson
in order to examine the peculiar direction it took in providing a theory
of illusion that could be expanded to serve all the verbal arts. Even
before Aristotle, Plato had already provided grounds for separating
drama from the other literary arts (lyric and narrative). At that earliest
point, the separation of dramatic from other literary theory began. In a
curious turn in book 2 of the Republic Plato reserves a specially narrowed
and literal meaning for "imitation" as he applies it to the author's
to be someone else, to be imitating?that is, pretending to
pretending
be speaking in the voice of someone else. According to this definition,
drama, in which only the characters speak, is wholly imitative; lyric
poetry, with its single voice, is not. This distinction is reflected in the
highest position that Aristotle accords the drama precisely because it is

wholly imitative, despite the fact that Plato rejects it as the most
of literary forms for that very reason.
objectionable
It was on the grounds of its special illusionary power that, since Plato,
drama has been separated from the other literary genres as a special
case that demanded its own theory. And that theory has had a history in
some crucial ways distinct from the history of literary theory at large. Its
character as a art?that is, as an
peculiar performance immediately
representational art?allowed it to be treated as different

from the other
verbal arts in that it was uniquely free from the limits which language
on the representational powers of those others. It was the one
placed
verbal art that could join the company of the immediately visual arts that
appealed to the senses directly, without requiring the mediation of
language.
In brief, the drama of
apparent presence?the tangible presence?in
its objects of representation gave it an immediacy denied to words alone.
No matter how forceful the conjuring power of verbal images, only
drama could claim to produce a sensible illusion of reality, a moving
of What
it. is being appealed to in this oversimplified opposition
picture
between the sensible and the mentally intelligible arts is the dubious
distinction between natural signs and signs which, though conventional,
are arbitrary; that is, between signs that appear most closely to resemble
what they stand for and signs that derive from a socially constructed
language, without any resemblance to what they refer to. The distinction
is as old as the philosophical study of language, though for some time it
in Naive versions of criticism of
has?deservedly?been disrepute.
and of them as arts in contrast
painting sculpture thought natural-sign
to nondramatic literature, which was assumed to be and
arbitrary
art.13
conventional-sign
Because of its mode of
peculiar representation?flesh-and-blood
creatures (actors) standing in for and impersonating made-up poetic
creatures (dramatic characters, who real
represent supposedly people)?
drama converts literature's words into the of a visual art.
moving pictures
The words of a play, though arbitrary like all words, are an imitation of
an actual act: the words of a dramatic constitute a natural
speech speech
in the mouth of a who
sign representation, natural-sign speaker speaks
like his or her "real" counterpart. On the criterion of a natural-sign
aesthetic, in neoclassical criticism, drama is supe

commonly accepted
rior even to the spatial visual arts because only it can marry the natural
sign to temporality, thereby imitating the sequence of living itself. In this
ultimate extension to literature of the natural-sign aesthetic (which
since Plato had been applied uncritically to the visual plastic arts),
dramatic poetry alone becomes the most perfectly realized representa
tion of the consecutiveness of human experience, because the fact that

it is only a representation ismost completely hidden, so that the illusion

of reality ismost effective.
This is precisely the point Lessing later makes in the mid-eighteenth
century in speaking of drama as the one art closest to being a pure
natural-sign art. And seem to us the strange
this is the ground for what
requirements that had been
imposed by the French seventeenth-century
call for dramatic "verisimilitude," which treated drama as the ultimate
natural sign from the viewer's perspective. It is as if the desirability of the
revered convention of trompe l'oeil art (that is, painting that seeks to trick
us into thinking it is the thing itself) was to be transferred to the more
obvious for it, the drama, which the audience was to mistake for
place
the real thing. But in both cases (trompe l'oeil paintings and drama) it is
not, Iwould argue, that we are supposed to be fooled (we should neither
try to walk through a painted doorway nor to leap onstage to rescue
Desdemona), so much as that we are to admire the brilliant use of
artistic resources to create a that could almost
persuasive representation
fool us if we did not know we were responding to art. But the almost
remains in our resistance to to the
all-controlling retaining succumbing
delusion.
On the other hand, French dramatic

seventeenth-century theory
preferred to take its imitation literally?that is to say, naively: it treated

the drama as a mimesis that literalized the imagination by reducing the
play to the audience's reality as bodies in the theater. The doctrine
rested on the insistence that the should a one-to-one
play approach
between stage and audience
relationship time-and-space time-and-space,
between, that is, the passage of time represented onstage and the
amount of time in the theater, as well as between the one
elapsed place
to be in a continuous action onstage and the of
represented singleness
the framed itself. Otherwise, the argument runs, the
stage presentation
would not be credited by an audience who knew how little their time
had advanced and that their space had not changed at all. These critics
would thus break the frame that made the proscenium stage a moving
set from the audience's in order to preserve what
picture apart reality,
they?and a century later Lessing?thought of as illusion, though Dr.

Johnson, that eccentric neoclassicist, in a brilliantly perceptive moment
would it as "delusion," "illusion" for a more
reject saving self-consciously
aesthetic activity.
Johnson frees dramatic representation from a mimetic subservience

to our empirical reality since such a subservience would deny the
representation its own constructive power: "It is false, that any repre
sentation ismistaken for reality; that any dramatic fable in itsmateriality
was ever credible, or, for a moment, was ever credited."14 The
single key
it is clear, is that qualification, "in itsmateriality": it points to the
phrase,

difference between the stuff of the world and the make-believe of stage
illusion. It is not that the credibility of the drama as dramatic represen
tation is being denied; what is being denied is our literal belief in the
in its materiality as a real happening. We believe in it not
stage-happening
as reality but as a staged reality, as if it were reality. I quote again the
often quoted lines: "The truth is, that the spectators are always in their
senses, and know, from the first act to the last, that the stage is only a
and that the are ... It will be how the
stage, players only players. asked,
drama moves, if it is not credited. It is credited with all the credit due to
a drama. . . .The from our consciousness
delight of tragedy proceeds of
fiction; if we thought murders and treasons real, they would please no
more" (255-56).
For Johnson the audience's imaginative power can entertain dramatic
illusion while resisting being deluded about what is art and what reality.
Speaking for
the power of dramatic illusion rather than dramatic
delusion, Johnson sees both time and place as to the
"obsequious
imagination" (a lovely phrase). He has taken us a long way from the
literal, surrogate function of the natural sign and iswell on the way to all
that late eighteenth and nineteenth-century critics will claim for the
aesthetic. For "illusion" is a wilful, self-conscious version of
Johnson
"delusion," a momentary deception that is aware of itself even as it
indulges itself. The spectator sees the duplicity of the play?as both a
human happening and an artful representation?but is complicitous in
allowing it to function both ways at once. The in drama is no
sign longer
viewed as natural, but it does not totally lose its relation to the natural
sign myth. The make-believe in the play requires that we respond to the
sense in which it apparently claims to be a natural sign while ministering
to our commonsense of it as but natural?as an
knowledge anything
artifact constructed out of and conventional materials. In
arbitrary
effect, the stage illusion is a fake imitation of the natural sign it pretends
to and as audience we share both in its and in the
represent, pretension
deception behind that pretension.
The myth of the natural sign, prompted by the example of drama, for
a long time deceived the innocent mimetic theorist about the semiotic
of the literary work of art. The drama, given its peculiar character and
the peculiar history of its theorists, may be viewed as the example par
excellence of how the natural-sign aesthetic turned its deceived worship
pers into willing victims of the temptation to convert aesthetic illusions
into their delusions. And it is Johnson's corrective view, as
developed
through the nineteenth century and through the first half of the
twentieth, that us to see that naive conversion and to resist
permits it,
and not only in the drama.
Coleridge's well known advice to the reader to cultivate a
"willing

suspension of disbelief appears to me to be an extension of Johnson's

notion of illusion, but Coleridge has extended it to lyric poetry, which by
his time had long since displaced the drama as the primary literary
genre, just as the natural-sign aesthetic had been displaced. Under the
aegis of Romantic claims for imagination, theories of organic form,
nourished by the doctrines of aesthetic I have already examined, put
other genres into the position where Johnsonian illusion could prevail
with them as well.
In the modernist criticism that follows the path I have tried to trace,
we can find illusion also characterizing the complex ways we are to
respond to the lyric poem and prose fiction. I have mentioned the drive
toward creating an illusion of identity among disparate
metaphoric
words or other elements, especially in the lyric. But this illusionary
cannot claim the of a substantive with one
identity power equation, part
literally able to be substituted for the other, for?as illusion only?it is an

identity that must thrive in the midst of a m?tonymie awareness that
threatens it. This double view can occur in fiction as well.
prose
Similarly, in the lyric, at the micropoetic level, there is also, in the use of
puns or other sorts of phonetic play, an illusion of interchangeability
from which we draw back as we are tempted to assert it. The lyric, when
it is an imitation-confession or can also create
introspective monologue,
the illusion of a spontaneous outpouring by the speaking voice, except
that we should recognize that it is only a crafted and conventionally
conditioned of such a document. Short stories and
representation
novels also have behind them those illusionary genres from which they
borrow and to which we are to appeal as they transform them into their
fictions. What we take for granted in them is the illusion of "real"
histories or or to whose we
autobiographies biographies, commonplaces
are to refer but in which we are not to believe?or at least for
quite
which we will suspend our disbelief. These duplicitous re
willingly
are to?and in theoretical terms related to?the
sponses analogous
more obvious responses to dramatic illusion that I have discussed in
detail earlier.
Viewed in this way, our to the of form,

responses complexities organic
self-consciously drawing back while

ready momentarily to succumb, may
be seen to be using the illusionary power of the aesthetic to confront the
vagaries of human experience, both to see them and to dream them.
The poem as a self-questioning organic form yields the dream, or the
illusion, of a utopia of words and of verbal structure, as well as the
breakdown beyond, the return to the confusing humdrum that comes
before after, and even during,
and our reading, both enriching and
hindering it.
From Aristotle to Coleridge to the New Criticism, there is a striving

toward an organicism that would claim the perfect harmony of part and
whole, and yet a paradoxical harmony: with each part utterly autono
mous and thus free and wayward, and yet with the whole as wholly
(without aporeia) the fully realized composite of those parts (each of
them indispensable). Every deconstructive, would-be secessionist subver
sive element asserts itself and yet at the same time fully contributes to
the whole without excess. How to have a totality that threatens no
element, not even an random or element, within
apparently disruptive
it?Or, from the other end, how to have an assembly of wayward elements
that surrender nothing, while the illusionary whole is constructed out of
them as well as being deconstructed by them? We find these only in the
fictional or so this tradition maintains. It the
literary artifact; presents
illusion of a "free play" of total breakthrough, which, as it caters to our
perceptual habit of both seeking and doubting completion, leads to our

realization?and our undermining?of the teleologies latent in the
human to form, the to create an order we cannot
power impose power
find, an order in which we can only half believe. And it is for this
momentary of a logo-utopia, a utopia of words, that only the
glimpsing
aesthetic can serve as our and
guide companion.
But I cannot close the first part of my essay without a shadow, a
if not a counterstatement, to this lofty conclusion. The
qualification,
Utopian text is one that we must be complicitous in trying to create as
Utopian, although we should also recognize that it is only a flawed
human creation produced by an imperfect person restrained not only
by psychological peculiarities, technical aberrations and deficiencies,
but?perhaps above all?by historical contingencies. On the other side,
besides the idiosyncrasies and inadequacies of our own reading habits,
there are our own historical us as flawed
contingencies restraining
readers of the text. It cannot but be tempting to the postmodern mind
to demystify our Utopian dream of the text by subjecting it to the
historical contingencies produced by our continuing and inconclusive
dystopia. I will devote at least one additional set of arguments?those
that follow in the second part of this essay?to account for that
temptation and to suggest resistance to its unqualified application.
II. The Ascetic versus the Aesthetic; or, The Exclusive

versus "the Simultaneity of the Mutually Exclusive"
The subtitle for this part of the essay is taken from Iser's phrase that I
have found to be central to his characterization of the aesthetic as a way
of reading; of permitting?nay, encouraging?unexpected things to
happen as we read the text before us. He has used his formulation, "the

simultaneity of the mutually exclusive," to describe those exceptional

moments that evade the way we view discourse as since
usually working,
in our nonaesthetic readings we expect to keep the opposition between
exclusives distinct and consecutive. For Iser the claim of finding this
simultaneity in a text has been evidence of one's reading aesthetically, in
a way that the "fictive" with the even as it distin
couples "imaginary"
between them.15
guishes
Let me begin this second part with a preliminary statement of its
in recent we have seen the aesthetic interest in
argument: years
literature overwhelmed by a political interest that rejects the literary as
literary in order to put literature to political use, and to insist that
everyone, the writer and the critic alike, has always?whether explicitly
or or unconsciously?put literature to political
implicitly, consciously
use. It is as if an ascetic resentment has the we
grown against pleasures
take in a text, a resentment on behalf of an immediate social account
ability that never is allowed to relax into pleasure?as if aesthetic

were a selfish, mandarin, antisocial vice. The seems
pleasure assumption
to be that the only way in which a text functions as social criticism?and
it cannot help so functioning?is by its directly reflecting one political
or another.
position
Amid the great variety of political there are those who appeal
critics,
to the Marxism of Fredric Jameson focusing on the expression of what
he calls "the political unconscious" propelling the text from below. Or
to Michel Foucault's reliance on the control
they may appeal pervasive
over discourse exercised by political power structures that dominate a
historical moment in a culture's development; or to Bertolt Brecht's
rejection of aesthetic illusion in the drama as yet another deception
or to Walter Benjamin's condemna
imposed by bourgeois capitalism;
tion of the aesthetic as a for or to others.
subterfuge political repression;
Whatever source, recent political
their critics consistently display an
ascetic's contempt, as well as deep misgivings, when they speak of the
merely aesthetic.
Whichever of these make, the aesthetic?that is, the
appeals they
various arts as arts?is condemned, its
perceived consistently despite
professed innocence, as being in the surreptitious service of the politi

cal, and usually an elitist and thus reactionary politics at that. But I will
be arguing the reverse: that nothing ismore exclusively in the service of
the political than the argument that everything is political; that it is
rather the pursuit of the aesthetic that has the power to undermine the
of the thereby engaging in an ultimate?though
hegemony political,
indirect?political act that helps free us all from the yoke of the narrow
ascetic interests of political dogmas.
Now to fill out that argument:

The ascetic versus the aesthetic, asceticism versus aestheticism, the
denial of the pleasures of sense versus

the appeal to the senses: for the
ascetic the veil of words is thin, transparent, self-effacing, pointing us, as
in old-style allegory, to the subtext of meanings that it serves to disguise;
for the aesthetic the veil of words is dense, systematically thickened to
captivate us within its riches of possible readings. These two words,

ascetic and aesthetic, which as words so resemble one another,
closely
represent attitudes that have been antagonists throughout the history of
literary theory. As with most of the contraries that shape Western
culture, this one also begins with Plato, with his preference for the
dualism of transcendence over the monism of immanence. Plato warned
us never to trust our senses, that to do so would make us to
prey
illusions, thereby diverting us from supersensory truth in our quest for
and diverting us from the ideal of goodness in our quest for
knowledge,
morality. It is no wonder that we find Plato's major works, such as the
Republic, to be anti-aesthetic insofar as he identifies the aesthetic with the
senses and thus with the illusionary (which for him is delusionary). This
is the side of Plato we think of as as ascetic.16
puritan,
From late classical theory through the Renaissance and the eigh
teenth we can trace a Platonism that is ascetic in
century fundamentally
its distrust of the sensuous attractions of the aesthetic, which was defined
as that realm of human activity that begins with the sensuous and that
asks us to if the realm of the
yield?even only momentarily?to
illusionary, which the aesthetic treats with admiration rather than with
Plato's Yet since the that sort of
contempt. mid-eighteenth century
Platonism was persistently challenged by those attracted by the aesthetic,
as the aesthetic was in those sensuous attractions.
grounded very
So I am viewing the history of theory as a series of theoretical wars,
with momentary victories by one side or the other, reflecting the
oscillation between the ecstatic champions of the aesthetic and the stern
champions of the ascetic. Nowhere has this struggle, which has its basis
in the ascetic-aesthetic conflict, been more evident than in the recent
history of theoretical disputes in the United States between those who

used to argue on behalf of the specially attractive powers of the literary
work as a work of art and those who now insist on making that work
subservient to the sober demands of sociohistorical reality. After many
around that saw a concentration on the art, in
years mid-century literary
recent years sociohistorical (or should we not rather say sociopolitical?)
theory has established its ascendancy over the claims of a more aestheti
cally-disposed theory, which is currently being dismissed as an unac
knowledged cover for political reaction. Theory in the United States
tends to drift between extremes, showing little capacity to explore the
via media: like "Dame Fortune," as Henry Fielding describes her, our

theoretical movements rarely "do things by halves." And now it is the

ascetic extreme that has taken hold.
The sociopolitical attack on the aesthetic has now become the
dominant version of the rejection of the modernist tradition in the arts
by recent so-called postmodern theorists. In tying it to its historical
antecedents, I am here emphasizing the ascetic character (now in an
intensely political guise) of this recent attack on the aesthetic, even
while, by implication, I am revealing my hope for there to be some small
swing of the pendulum toward a more balanced view.
At the same time I must confess that, as is usually inevitable in
dichotomies, my own here tends to a polarization that exaggerates the
more mixed nature of many individual theorists and turns their mea
sured works into caricatures. Despite this distortion in my characteriza
tion of theoretical positions, I would argue that, throughout the history
of can be traced to these at the
theory, arguments logical consequences,
cost of neglecting qualifications that are often ad hoc and in contradic
tion to the main line of argument. To this extent the differences are
turned into and are treated as made this
oppositions, polar. Having
concession, I will treat them this way, asking the reader, in individual
cases, to supply the blurrings that any narrative of the history of theory
chooses to overlook.
necessarily
As I have suggested, since Plato the champions of the ascetic and the
champions of the aesthetic have had at the root of their dispute their
over the nature and the role of illusion. From the ascetic
disagreement
illusion, as with Plato, is seen as false, as
perspective, consistently
a reality that it misrepresents; those who
take pleasure in
masking
indulging it are deceiving themselves (or others) irresponsibly about
what is "really out there." The fictional is thus to be condemned for its
distance from the real. Further, as we shall see, our most recent version
of the ascetic treats the aesthetic in texts as an illusion that is danger
as well as false, because it would lead us away from the
ously reactionary
subtextual for which it serves as a mask. On the other
"reality" deceptive
side, from the aesthetic perspective, illusion is taken as a perceptual or
reality, as the world in which we feelingly exist as individu

psychological
als. Illusion thus conceived in its teasing fullness transforms any more
austere claim to a "reality" that would tame and thus reduce it.Any claim
to cognition that denies the value of aesthetic illusion is thus seen as the
thinner for evading it. Further, any cognition that we would claim by
denying the illusionary is charged with being tyrannical as well as
threadbare in its would-be "realism," its universalism.
From the mid-eighteenth century through the middle of our own

century (the heyday of modernism), the aesthetic was given a major role
in our cognitive judgments. That role, steadily increasing in importance

since the middle of the eighteenth century, was theoretically justified by

giving the aesthetic an independent?indeed a primary, which is to say a
^conceptual?place in human cognition. Thus the claim of the

independence of the aesthetic from concepts becomes the very center
of the theorizing of Croce, who, descended from nineteenth-century
German organicism, was the leading proponent of the aesthetic as a
mode of experience at the close of the last century. And,
considerably
later, Vivas, often referred to as the aesthetician of the American New
Criticism in the 1940s and 1950s, privileges the aesthetic because he sees
it as dealing with and revealing "the primary data of human experience"
before these data can be
conceptualized.
This claim, that the aesthetic is to the becomes a
prior conceptual,
major point of attack by postmodern critics of the modernist aesthetic,
those I am calling "ascetic." For these critics the conceptual is the home
of the ideological, and for them nothing is?or should be?prior to the
force of ideology in exerting control over all our visions and our
judgments, including?of course?the aesthetic. Working from the
premise of Fredric Jameson's notion of the "political unconscious" as
the privileged, if secret, agent behind all our discourse, this current
mode of ascetic sees the aesthetic as no more than a
thinking deceptive
lure in political manipulation, a lure that masks itself in a claim to an
innocent epistemological primacy.
In the post-Kantian theoretical tradition from the Romantics to the
New Criticism, the work of the poet?that is, the writer of fictions?
alone, in a sort of prepolitical purity, was granted untainted visionary
powers by the developing aesthetic tradition. The literary criticism of
these theorists usually consisted of their attempts to show how the
internal relations the verbal, and narrative or dra
among figurative,
matic elements they were
examining in their privileged texts resisted any
absorption into universalizing concepts. It was a dichotomy, long pur
sued in the nineteenth-century organicist tradition and culminating in
the modernist tradition, between symbol and is, between
allegory?that
the insistence that in the symbol aesthetically directed verbal signs could
be interrelated within a self-contained density, while nonaesthetically
directed verbal signs were relegated, as allegory, to the role of
referring
outward, to an external In this monistic aesthetic
transparently, concept.
the honorific title of the proper literary work was bestowed only upon
the symbolic, with the allegory consigned to what Croce termed "the
intellectualist error," which comes, as he puts it, from art functioning as
science in disguise. W. B. Yeats called this allegorical sort of sign
functioning "the will trying to do the work of the imagination."17
Out of this preconceptual priority accorded the poet and the aesthetic
as an integral of a unified organism, in kind, there
experience unique

arose, from the middle of the twentieth century on, a vigorous rejection.
That recent widespread dismissal of the aesthetic, we will see, arises not
only from those who attack it as a totalizing mystification, a sort of
fetishism, but, even more from those who attack it as a
severely,
dangerous?because subliminal?tool of a reactionary politics. That

assault upon the aesthetic, now several decades in building, has come
from as structuralists, and?more
many quarters, poststructuralists,
specifically?new historicists, Marxists, feminists, and other sociopolitical

and cultural theorists, have joined in it for reasons as different as their
differing agendas.
They joined especially in the attack upon the notion that there is a
special literary mode of discourse, which is perhaps the most vulnerable
version of the aesthetic. Indeed they often dismissed the very notion of
the literary as an absurdity cultivated for elitist reasons that they find
highly suspect. I say the literary is the most vulnerable version of the
aesthetic because literature (that is, any form of fiction in verse or
is the one art whose material, words, is the common medium
prose) just
of all discourse, so that it can wear any privilege bestowed upon it only
through an act of faith by the bestower of that privilege. And a fiercely
anxious to establish a semiotic that would
egalitarian skepticism, general
deny any such privileging, has set in matters of

language these last
decades. The political implications of my diction here (words like
"elitist," a reduction of the aes
"egalitarian," "privileging") represent
thetic that has become the of recent anti-aesthetic
popular practice
theorists of several varieties.
Under the attack of critics, the aesthetic has been seen as

postmodern
fetishistic, the result of an idolater's sacralization of holistic "works of
art," sacred unlike others, and, the elevation of
objects consequently,
those sacred into a canon. The aesthetic, as it was made
objects literary
available to modernist theory by Kant's third critique, by the adaptation
of Kant into Schiller's Letters on theAesthetic Education ofMan, and by the
Schlegels, Schelling, and Fichte, and all of these brought into Anglo
American discourse by Coleridge, rested upon the humanist's definition
of the artist's to make into one?in other words, to create
power many
an construct, an aesthetic out of diverse elements.
integral integral object,
All this may be viewed from Aristotle's as an inheritance
insistence on
formal aesthetic closure and the total functionalism of parts that both
creates and sustains the whole. The ascetic opposition, in its turn
inherited from Plato's, concentrates on the text only as an arbitrary
collection of individual representations, one to one. It thus decries the
claim to wholeness or to any would-be fiction, which, in a
self-sustaining
holism that would transform the mimetic elements, seeks to
deceptive
contain the reader's attentiveness. To the ascetic this aesthetic distrac

tion seeks to conceal the clues that can be found here and there in the
text, clues that he or she sees as individually pointing to subtextual
realities or attitudes or?better once he or she has
yet?ideologies,
extracted them from their place in the illusionary context of the fiction.
In more recent times, the deconstructionist mode in poststructuralist
criticism attacks the mystification that claims 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 as they go. The only honest aesthetic
sanctioned by this deconstructionist activity would be an aesthetic of
what has been termed a
dispersion, "poetics of failure," in effect, like
Plato's, an anti-aesthetic.18 the attack on aesthetic
Despite unity by
deconstructionists, in their close readings of texts and in their attention
to the elements that simultaneous
provoke contradictory interpreta
tions, their practice has more in common with the aesthetic tradition
than they might like to be the case.
A more damaging reaction against the modernist worship of aesthetic
closure has come from those who see that as from an
worship resulting
aesthetic that is accused of being indifferent to the sociopolitical realm.
The aesthetic has come to be seen as an inevitable to a
accompaniment
formalist and "mandarin" criticism that affords the leisure-class com
mentator an from uncomfortable realities into a
escape sociopolitical
self-indulgence an insulated retreat. The very
within of the
complexities
elite aesthetic objects in which such a critic has luxuriated may feed the
contemplative life, but they are now seen as leading to a paralysis of will
that prevents those objects from affecting the decisions needed to be
made among the restrictive choices given us by the practical world in its
call for action. And in a world in dire need of social and
political
change, and thus in need of the firm decisions required to effect such
the aesthetic, conceived as has come to be viewed as
change, apolitical,
a that the world must for, it is claimed, its
luxury forgo, consequences
turn out to be all too and so.
political, perniciously
Further, in the paralysis induced by its impractical complexities, the
aesthetic was charged with serving the interests of the resistant status quo.
to this the valorization of the aes
According argument, post-Kantian
thetic, because it is supposedly "disinterested" (free of worldly "inter
est"), is however in the service of a
actually, surreptitiously, very strong
interest, the interest of the existing power structure, which distracts us
with the aesthetic in order to extend its sway. So, despite the apparent
of the aesthetic mode of critics
quietism experience, political charge it
with serving, in its disinterested passivity, as a support for repression.
Bertolt Brecht, as a political theorist of drama, returned to an attack
on dramatic illusion that may remind us of some of the more naive

of which would
assumptions seventeenth-century natural-sign theory,
have us mistake the stage for our real world, functioning as a trompe l'oeil
painting is to function.19 In rejecting traditional drama, what he terms
the theater of illusion, Brecht, like the seventeenth-century French, fails
to comprehend the duplicity of illusion's hold on us. Brecht claims that,
because the "reality" projected onstage wraps us in illusion, persuading
us to mistake the actors and their actions for "natural signs" (their
counterparts in reality), bourgeois drama is serving the dominant
political power structure as a model and a metonym of its illusions, in
which itwould enclose its audience. Consequently, for him such theater
creates in the audience a habit of perception that will accept as reality
the sociopolitical-economic illusions that power would foist upon them.
A repressive society, according to Brecht, tries to use its art rhetorically
to the audience to take as real the of
persuade illusionary naturalizing
the authorization of its power. So the audience must fight the aesthetic
impact of theater as one must fight the political impact of destructive
ideological illusions?fight it by invoking the reaction of "alienation."
But Brecht was wrong and too naively accepting of illusionist drama:
at its best the theater, as in trompe l'oeil painting, is not trying actually to
take us in. Instead, its devices slyly point to itself: it undercuts its
apparent illusionary claims with its textual or subtextual references to its
artifice, to the art of theater. In his espousing the anti-illusionary call for
alienation, it was Brecht?and not the rest of us?who was
necessarily
being in by traditional
taken theater. Here he is representative of the
politicized theorists who would take us in by locking us within the
ideological limitations of their claims.
It is, I believe, the aesthetic that helps rescue us from such traps,
because it alerts us to the the claims to
illusionary, merely arbitrary,
that authoritarian discourse would upon us; because,
reality impose
unlike authoritarian discourse, the aesthetic takes back the "reality" it
offers us in the very act of offering it to us. It thus provides the cues for
us to view other discourse critically, to reduce the ideological claims to
the since there is in these no self-awareness of their
merely illusionary,
textual limitations, of their duplicity?their closures, their exclusions,
their repressions. I would agree with Brecht that illusion may frustrate,
may baffle, may mislead us?but only until the aesthetic teaches us how
to
put it to use.
These against Brecht may be extended

arguments to serve against
attacks on the aesthetic. And
other, though quite different, political
other ascetic ways to attack the aesthetic on political grounds are more
commonly pursued. Most generally it is claimed that aesthetic value is
bestowed upon those texts that, almost automatically, reflect and serve
the interests and the values of the "hegemonic" discourse of a culture,

an exclusionary canon of literary works out of them. And all

establishing
this, the charge goes, occurs under the guise of a disinterested system of
universal principles of judgment, when actually it is the dominant
phallocentric, ethnocentric, class-driven "episteme" that shapes judg
ment and hence enforces the inclusions and exclusions within the
honorific literary category. It is this same episteme that is seen to form
the subtext for each of those works that the modernist critic used to
valorize, aesthetic Even
presumably?though mistakenly?on grounds.
any liberal transformations within the literary canon by the aesthetic
critic, the new admission of alien or even subver
apparently potentially
sive texts, would demonstrate the dominant culture's awesome
only
power to domesticate all such texts and render them harmless. In all
these ways the supposedly disinterested character of the aesthetic is
claimed to be a and fraud.
surreptitious, dangerous,
The modernist version of the aesthetic, like its companion formalism,
can be traced to the cult of organicism that shaped nineteenth-century
romanticism. As a consequence of the idolatrous development of the
from idealism to romanticism to modernism, closure
organic metaphor
itself?closure in a myriad of guises, from the literary to the political?
has come to be viewed as a disease in need of
postmodernist therapy.
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?as
in any organism?functioning indispensably within a structure of mutu
ally transforming interactions. With everything in it accounted for as a
element, the work can well be described?to use
contributing organic
again the term that postmodernism scornfully invoked?as "totalized,"

totalized in what it represses and excludes as well as in what it includes.
The political character of the trope that describes such a textual
system is apparent: the "aesthetic" attributes of the are seen as
system
making it into a micro-body-politic, one that 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 all
encompassing organicism that moves his philosophy of history and his
vision of the nation-state, is summoned to make the case for the
political
of a aesthetic. Nor can other
consequences dangerously reactionary any
kind of aesthetic be conceived.
The organicist of the aesthetic
notion is thus seen as leading to the
ominous "aestheticization of the political" against which 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 drama or a poem; convicts

them, in other words, of their nation-state to have the all

wanting
and thus of an work of art.
unifying, all-subjugating, shape organic
Conversely, the organically perfect literary work serves as a metonym for

the totalitarian state. In the one case as in the other, no
all-mastering,
part is to withstand the coercive force of the needs of the whole. Hence
the charge that, however much in retreat, the aesthetic cannot help but
carry dire political implications within itself.
We must that, for almost two centuries, too many writers
surely grant
and leaders with a holistic political agenda could use, and did use,
to serve totalitarian consequences on behalf of the
organicist thinking
state, often with effects. This too often un
catastrophic tendency,
checked, did indeed blur the political with the aesthetic, as well as the
reverse. But, when treated more sensitively within aesthetic objectives
that distinguish themselves from the ideological, organicism can be seen
as more even as the
functioning ambiguously, subverting political
agenda.
So I suggest that, at the other extreme, the attack on closure that has
in recent become so acute slides,

years politically by analogy, easily?
sometimes too concerns about the realm (closed
easily?from political
totalitarian systems such as those ultimately realized in Hegelianism) to
the semiotic (the verbal enforcement produced by a society's hege
monic discursive system within a Foucauldian episteme) down to the
aesthetic (the exclusionary power of the text's internal self-fulfilling
system). All are now condemned on the same grounds by the fear of
totalization, which is seen as equally under the control of the political
consciousness, or rather the unconscious," whether the
"political politi
cal unconscious of authors or of theorist-critics.
Enemies of the aesthetic can claim this automatic and inevitable

between aesthetic totalization and totalitarian
correspondence political
ism only because their claims are derived from a number of question
able assume, first, that romantic
assumptions. They organicism,
uncritically and without qualification, presses the metaphor of closure in

order to an of the text; and, second, that
postulate integral "body"
organicism must
take its metaphor literally, and again uncritically,
this "body" of the text as if it were a biologically living body. But
treating
themselves outdo the they go one step further in
they organicists:
the metaphor by extending it to the state. Beguiled by the
literalizing
analogical potential of the word body, they stretch it to analogies, which
they treat as little short of equivalences, among the human body, the
body of text, and the body politic.
There are obvious problems on
arising from this careless dependence
a verbal analogy that allows recent anti-organicists to use the word
"body" in speaking of all these "bodies" interchangeably. In postmodern

rejections of the aesthetic

as organic, I am arguing, the logical fallacy of
an relation as if itwere a literal equivalence can be as
treating analogical
misleading as it seems these days to be almost universally urged. In
argument this obliteration of the literal into a ubiquitous figuration
allows for a play upon words that victimizes the theorist once he or she
ismisled into accepting the equivalences to which the slipperiness has
led.
Further, in view of the inevitable openness of language as signs, only a

deluded organicist would claim that closure can be imposed on a text in
the same as one can closure within an authoritarian
way impose political
Can a text, because it seeks closure, and without for
entity. simply regard
its content, be
charged authoritarianwithrepression? To put my
complaint another way, are texts, or parts of texts, to be treated as if they
were the same as so that there is undemo
sovereign persons, something
cratic about claiming a hierarchy of value among texts? What are the
and what are the insinuations, of anti
consequences, misleading
organicists talking this way?

Besides, even if organicists should look for an all-inclusive, mutual
functionalism among the elements of a text, like the parts of a body, they
stress difference too: does not the multidimensionality of words also
lead necessarily to flights that seek an escape from an overarching unity?
I would argue that our shrewdest organicists have, by implication,
as much. For a work seek
acknowledged organicists literary may unity,
but it tries to create a wholeness within itself only while the cost,
showing
as well as the constant risks of as it makes
facing disruption, continually
and unmakes itself, and yet tries to make itself again. Indeed, one need
only refer to the common call by organicists for "unity in variety" a
that was never to the
variety stop challenging unity.20
Once the applicability of the organic metaphor has been thus
loosened, we can see in the tension between
organicists reveling
centripetal and centrifugal forces in the literary work, so that for them
the drive to enclose could assert its power only in the teeth of the
forces, never subdued, that accom
agitated quite struggle against being
modated. The that gave aesthetic its excitement
dynamics organicism
derive from
this struggle. It is what allows texts to approach the
complexities of our living and dying. And modernists, like the organicist
program they carried out, recognized and?despite their formalist
gesture toward holism?paid special tribute to these impulses to resis
tance, even as they were restlessly balanced against the impulses to
compliance. This balance accounts for the repeated quest for irony and
ambiguity in their interpretations.
The emphasis on aesthetic resistance to the ostensible ruling argu
ment of a text leads to my association of the aesthetic with the

counterideological potential of the literary art. Those whose lead I

followed when I first entered the field of literary theory?Russian
Formalists and American New Critics alike?served the aesthetic by
finding the poeticity of the poetic or the literariness of the literary in the
defamiliarizing features of verbal manipulation, deviations from what
they called "normal" discourse that are organized into their own special
verbal systems. Again I am repeating Iser's call for "the simultaneity of
the exclusive."
mutually
By thus defining the poetic or the literary by its resistance to a

culture's normal of these critics were forward a
ways meaning, carrying
theoretical tradition that values the aesthetic as
counterideological.
They encouraged in readers a special mechanism enabling them to
respond to?or even to seek?a language that multiplies its meanings
beyond the monolithic, beyond an ascetic reading that refuses to see
language at play, language that complicates itself in ways that decon
structionists have in recent made us aware of. We
especially years newly
are to encourage our reading to be disturbed by a thickening of
discourse with its own countermovements. In this way, one can in
argue,
opposition to political critics, that it is not literature that threatens us

with totalization and exclusion; rather this threat comes from the
monolithic discourses of ideology represented by ascetic critics. Despite

this in recent years ascetic critics, undermined
argument, having
movements, became their successors.
aesthetically-oriented antagonistic
Nevertheless the alternative has not, even now, been
counterideological
without its voices.
Plato himself, taking his lead from his misgivings about Homer's
influence on his readers, conceded the
dangerous counterideological
power of the literary. Indeed, as one who would protect the power of the
state, he founded his ascetic desire to exile the poets from his Republic
upon his fear of their power to subvert it. So even as Plato provided the
model for later ascetic attacks on the aesthetic in order to a
protect
he to cre
political ideology, granted poets?however grudgingly?the
ative power that would threaten the ideology by exposing its thinness.
Even within there are some theorists who,
postmodernist theory
differently political in their objectives, suggest a more sympathetic use

for the complexities of the literary. They reject the claim of the other
political critics that texts reinforce cultural hegemony by speaking their
culture's ruling discourse. Because, unlike Plato, these theorists have an
interest in undermining any political monolith that would assert a
claim over a culture's discourse, extend Plato's
hegemonic they argu
ments for literature's subversive power, but this time by embracing
rather than fleeing from that power. This variety of postmodernism,
then, attributes an independently critical sociopolitical force?though

an implicit one?to the counterideological tendencies that I have been

assigning to the aesthetic.
For example, in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and Jean-Fran?ois
Lyotard and those influenced by them, we have seen the extension of
the counterideological reading of texts into the realm of cultural history
and the sociopolitical.21 Both of them, in their different though comple
mentary ways, make the and hence subversive,
counterideological,
characteristic of at least some texts serve a social and political purpose.
In them we find perhaps the most challenging version of the
counterideological tradition of reading. I see both Bakhtin and Lyotard
as reinforcing the tradition of the aesthetic by making it, however
implicitly, an indispensable avenue to a fresh view of the political. (They
perform this service for me in spite of their explicit intentions, which
lead them to be highly distrustful of the aesthetic.) Far from an ascetic
narrowness of focus, in both of them we find the desire to link the
sociopolitical to the text's capacity for dialogistic play, which rejects the
ascetic reading that invariably comes to rest in ideology.
Bakhtin's fascination with the notion of carnival and "heteroglossia"
and Lyotard's fascination with a heterodox notion of the sublime
similarly cherish the effects that texts use to free us from the taming
order of the totalizing master narratives imposed by our dominant
cultures. As a way of emphasizing the dialogical character of literature,
Bakhtin frees it?especially in the novel, which he sees as a multiplica
tion of incompatible genres?to revel in the carnivalesque. This is a
textual force that, like the ritual of carnival in an authoritarian society?
that momentary of and distinctions?
suspension hierarchy repressive
throws up in the air a variety of otherwise incompatible possibilities, for
the occasion free from exclusion, free of authoritarian
regulation
imposed by an ideologically controlled structure.
Of course the dominant culture does not willingly permit itself to be
threatened: it not only makes use of texts that seem in compliance with
it, texts that it explicitly authorizes; it also may well put to its use even
texts that seem subversive, texts that arise out of its indul
potentially
gence of carnival, in this way its awesome a power
demonstrating power,
that can domesticate even the most unruly of its subjects and render
them harmless by authorizing them, in effect ritualizing them, bringing
them too, despite their incipient subversiveness, into the consent
calendar that patterns the lives of the governed.
Nevertheless, through that momentary indulgence, the Bakhtinian
a culture's vision to what its
carnivalesque opens ideology would
condemn as the forbidden: by seeking to reinforce itself by allowing
what is not permitted representation to be represented, the power
structure has allowed us to see with other eyes than its own. And

however encapsulated and inconsequential that moment of carnival may

be, what has been seen may be remembered and may some day have its
so, I argue, can literature?other
unmanageable consequences. Just
genres as well as the novel?so long as it works dialogically, manipulate
a culture's discourse in a surreptitious of the usual
ruling disruption
ways that discourse operates and maintains its authorized meanings,
which is to say, its dominant ideology. Just so can it be the instrument of
our seeing anew, of
turning us against the trim discursive lines of
ideological authority. The play with and against the ideological "givens"
provides an inoculation against the asceticism of ideology's monolith.
In a similar vein, seeks to invalidate of a culture's
Lyotard any
"master narratives" in order to
strenuously imposed, all-controlling
allow autonomy to what he calls the little stories, "les petites histoires,"
which resist adaptation into a universal story, indeed which cannot be
made to serve any structure of and, that,
generalized meaning beyond
any unified plan of action. Through such little stories and their
resistance to the of a master narrative, resurrects the
authority Lyotard
notion of the sublime as a violation of philosophic order. The sublime,
now a postmodern virtue, shines through the jagged edges of piecemeal
which are to satisfy us in a world that must learn to do without
"phrases"
the of whole "sentences." As moments of the
finality postmodern
sublime, these mini-subversions on and on, and the carnival of little
go
stories, each with its small but resistance, overwhelms any
unyielding
master narrative that would claim control over all our little stories.
The counterideological thrust of the tradition of the aesthetic thus

receives, however obliquely, this postmodernist blessing, which calls for
a resistance the narrows of the ascetic. In
continuing against empower
ing these scattered autonomies, Lyotard, like Bakhtin before him, is,
through his own master metaphor, of course speaking politically. The
celebration of the small gadfly power of an uncontrollable number of
individual secessions proclaims a kind of literary anarchy, not altogether
unrelated to Leon notion of revolution." Or
Trotsky's "permanent might
we, by way of Bakhtin, call it permanent carnival? But, in its revulsion
against the ascetic, it is a descendant of what we used to call the
aesthetic. has carried to the extreme, and has
Lyotard given special
value to, those elements of the aesthetic that Plato warned
wayward
We now see more than ever his authoritarian
against. clearly why, given
and ascetic commitments, Plato had to be so antagonistic to the literary.
Reinforced by such voices as these, the tradition of the aesthetic that
treats totalization as the enemy?with ideology seen as the agent of that
totalization?can claim that it is literature, as agent of the aesthetic, that
functions as the privileged agent of subversive resistance against, indeed
of liberation from, the trap of an ascetic ideology that would absorb

everything into itself. In this tradition there is an insistence, in the

interest of being inclusive rather than exclusive, on using literature's
revolutionary potential to splinter any all-enclosing ideological struc
ture. Far from being the passive servant of ideology, as current ascetic
theorists would have it, it is literature's creative function to provide a
critique of ideology.
Admittedly, this conception of literature, as that which can liberate us
from the closures of ideology, inverts what had been the standard attack
on formalist critics because were seen as a
precisely they advocating
text's aesthetic closure and hence its totalized and character,
totalizing
with the obvious asocial consequences. Antiformalists have long argued
that it was the literary text, as defined by organicists, that was being
called upon to generate a self-sealing form in the dynamic mutuality of
all its internal relations, thereby seeking a totalization that excluded
everything else. By contrast, the argument went on, formalists had to
condemn all discourse because saw it as
nonpoetic they unfortunately
open to the world of generic meanings and hence as lacking the self
sufficiency of the internal holism they were calling for. It is this common
anti-aesthetic based on the claim that formalists must con
argument,
ceive of the literary as totalized and exclusive and of the nonliterary as
and inclusive, that I have here been to reverse.
open trying
A closer examination of the counterideological theoretical tradition
reveals that, far from calling for a literature of closure, it would have
literature, in its duplicity, persistently resist total closure. Instead, it finds
the of closure?and hence of exclusion?in texts that
agent repressive
are based in ideology, even though, ironically, it is ideologically-based
theory that seeks to indict the aesthetic for imposing closure. The
ideological theorist may well be impatient with the complexities of the
fiction as it playfully develops itself, but not because it is
poetic perhaps
closed so much as because it seems to exclude?to be closed to?his or
her ascetic interests. However, those I have cited on the aesthetic side
would say that a careful reading finds those interests addressed, though
as are exceeded.
only they
So, for the recent version of the counterideological tradition, it is not
literature that is seen as the discourse that rests upon the closure of
or unac
universalizing, all-encompassing assumptions, acknowledged
knowledged; on the contrary, it is that other sort of discourse, which asks
not to be read aesthetically, that makes its coercive ideological claims
upon us, even when it would hide its essentialist, metaphysical?and,
yes, ascetic?features. It is the latter discourse, which cannot help but
serve ideology, that should be seen as repressive in the closed exclusive
ness of its affirmations and denials. And it is the exemption from such a
narrow mission, with the consequent indulgence in the space for play,

that allows for the potential openness and the liberating effects of a
literary text as aesthetic. As defined by the counterideological tradition,
then, literature, in its flight from asceticism, can resist becoming a
discourse that imposes coercive ideological claims upon us, textually or
subtextually.
Such a rethinking of the politics of discourse would persuade us to
reverse the anti-aesthetic judgment about which texts are repressive and
which texts open themselves to admitting what is otherwise repressed.
After all, what could be more inclusive than aesthetic readings of texts?
Such readings will admit, and give equal status to, the contradictory of
any singleminded that an ascetic reading might use to stake
proposition
out an ideological claim, as it uses that claim to take over and subjugate
the whole of the text, which an aesthetic reading would rather see as
such takeover? On the other side, we ask, what could
resisting any may
be more exclusive in its totalization than an ideological reading that
would, in its asceticism, repress any aesthetic diversion that gets in its
way? The continuing impact of the counterideological reading of texts,
one that sees the literary as free of the logical and rhetorical constraints
that discourse normally imposes, rests upon what it yields to the power
of irony. Consequently, it rests upon the unrestrained aesthetic breadth
of the materials and conflicting attitudes that literature, once granted a
counterideological license, can admit. This sort of reading still holds
onto the at least the
preconceptual?or counterconceptual?domain
that was granted to the aesthetic since the earliest arguments in its
behalf.
Looked at this way rather than the other way around, totalization is
that which the discourse of ideology imposes, and it is that from which,
potentially, the counterideological discourse of the literary text, viewed
can liberate us. At the same time I must that
aesthetically, grant
aestheticism has its own dangerous temptations: it must refrain from
a negative ideology that would turn resistance to
conceptualizing
universals into a universal assertion and thus a theoretical institution. It
is a totalizing temptation to which have been aware of succumbing

I
myself on occasion, and perhaps I havebeen doing so in this essay. Such
a danger may well have existed under the aegis of late modernism, but
that is hardly the situation now. There is at this moment, it is evident, a
far greater danger from the hegemonic rule of ideology, on one side or
the other, than there is from an ideology of resistance to ideology; a far
greater danger from the ascetic rejection of the notion of the literary-as
aesthetic than there is from the idolatry of the literary-as-aesthetic.
those who would disenfranchise the aesthetic, we may
Today, against
well need the counterideological power of the literary to keep our
current episteme from becoming the one in which we seek to freeze

ourselves by theorizing ourselves out of the means?that is, the dis

course?to break free of it.
Itmay well be that what most makes literature worth studying is what
it reveals to us about ideology (and negative ideology as well) as it
exposes, while resisting, ideology's totalizing dangers. Thinking of the
monolithic character of the discourses we today encounter outside
literature, I can
only hope for them to be contaminated by the
discourses the arts. The literary art may perform
of perhaps its most
important service for society by contaminating the reader's other
reading experiences: by inducing the compliant reader to learn to read
fully, to indulge in the play of the text's language and its fictions, thereby
preparing that reader to find this sort of play and these fictions in a
of texts, of them not or "aesthetic."
great variety many ostensibly "literary"
I am calling
for a reading that permits the text to create beyond what
its surrounding discourse has made available, that frees in it the power
to surprise, provided we have a compliant reader. This is precisely what
the text as read by ideological criticism lacks?the power to surprise, to
or exceed expectations as these have been determined by the
disrupt
culture. There is no need for the aesthetic to evade the
surrounding
indeed, there is every reason to secure a connection, firm
political;
though surely wnreassuring, between the aesthetic and our political

consciousness, which now would have in it some element of resistance to
the totalizing force of ideology; not just to this or that ideology, but to
the ascetic narrows?if not the total enclosure?of the
ideological
attachment itself. If, after Schiller, we now see that conscious
liberating
ness as itself aesthetic, we can feel a gratification as political creatures in
the aesthetic even as we use it to look beyond.
indulging
Still, even while we defend the transformative powers of the aesthetic,
there does remain, as recent theorists remind us, the sober
frequently
ing persuasiveness of the historicist's

claim of the historical contingency
of all interpretive and evaluative statements, as well as of the literary
texts to which they supposedly refer. The infinite regress of charges of
historical and ideological contingencies?even to those, the last in the
series for now, that Imust level at myself while I level them at others?
reminds us that we all tend to the ascetic in the arguments we bring to
the arena of debate. It is a sequence of confrontations that
wearying
feeds the universal one universal?that marks the late
skepticism?our
stages of our theoretical dialectic, perhaps us to a
leading posttheoretical
despair.
Nevertheless, we must also, at some and
point?however imperfectly
with some unavoidableself-delusion?seek to move outside the limita
tions admittedly on us the of our
imposed by contingencies place in
history's succession of moments. And aren't we all too often convinced

that in our judgments we have accomplished just such a transcendence?

I want to end by returning to Plato, but this time to summon support
from him by siding with him in his argument with Thrasymachus in the
Republic. Here he is fighting again the battle he constantly fought against
the sophists' exclusive worship of contingency, and the relativistic
vagaries that go with that worship, because he felt impelled to keep alive
some hope of doing better than the closures that our egocentrism (or
rather our logocentrism), trapped by contingencies, permits. I too must
escape the trap of determinism if I am to claim a way to free texts, read
aesthetically, to become the source of cultural politics as a complement to
their function as the involuntary receptacle of cultural politics.
So,
although I struggled from the start against Plato's asceticism,
against his embrace of the universals of his ideology, it was not in order
to surrender to the great god contingency, but to use his attack on
sophistic illusion to make room for those less assertive aesthetic illusions
that help to shape a culture's history by working to subvert the deadly
force of its dubious ideological certainties. In this way I mean to find
some for the illusions and self-delusions of the aesthetic even on
place
the of Plato's asceticism.
unsympathetic, anti-illusionary grounds
Unhappily the mood of our theory these days may hardly be encour
aging for such a project; that current mood is but one more ideological
dead hand that the liveliness of the aesthetic can and must remove,
again and again, with every work of art. I look with gratitude to the
contributions made throughout the career of Wolfgang Iser, literary
whose arguments on behalf of the "imaginary" have
anthropologist,
helped restore that liveliness by providing it with a firm theoretical
ground.
University of California, Irvine
NOTES
1 Wolfgang Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology (Baltimore,
1993).
2 The two parts of this essay are revisions and expansions of a series of lectures delivered
at the University of Hong Kong in March 1997.
3 Aristotle, Poetics, in Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, tr. S. H. Butcher (New York,
1951), p. 31; hereafter cited in text.
4 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (London, 1906), p. 172; hereafter cited
in text as BL.
5 Samuel Equal to His Genius," Essays and
Taylor Coleridge, "Shakespeare's Judgment
Lectures on Shakespeare and Some Other Old Poets and Dramatists (London, 1906), pp. 46-47.
6 The Statesman's Manual, The Collected Works of Coleridge, Lay Sermons, ed. R. J. White
(London, 1972), p. 30.
7 Benedetto Croce, Aesthetic, tr. Douglas Ainslie (London, 1922), p. 34: "the symbol has
sometimes been as the essence of art. Now, if the symbol be conceived as inseparable
given

from the artistic

intuition, it is a synonym for the intuition itself, which always has an ideal
character. is no double
There bottom to art, but one only; in art all is symbolical, because
all is ideal. But if the symbol be conceived as separable?if the symbol can be on one side,
and on the other the thing symbolized, we fall back again into the intellectualist error: the
so-called symbol is the exposition of an abstract concept, an
allegory; it is science, or art
aping science."
8 As he develops this notion of "illusion" in works after his Art and Illusion, Gombrich
often collaborates with perceptual and makes aesthetic use of their
psychologists findings.
See E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (New York, 1959).
9 Again I refer to Iser's The Fictive and the Imaginary.
10 I have an extended discussion of "aesthetic surface" as this affects the
concept
classification of the arts in my Ekphrasis: The Illusion of theNatural Sign (Baltimore, 1992),
pp. 172-86.
11 Eliseo Vivas, and Knowledge,"
"Literature Creation and Discovery: Essays in Criticism and
Aesthetics (New York, pp. 117-18.
1955),
12 In that most of Eliot's brief essays, "The Metaphysical
influential Poets," in T. S. Eliot,
Selected Essays, new ed. (New York, 1950), pp. 241-50.
13 It is hardly necessary to point out that for some time our theory and our criticism of
the visual arts has accepted the contrary notion that painting and sculpture are also to be
"read" as languages deriving from socially-constructed conventions.
14 Samuel Johnson, "Preface to Shakespeare," Samuel Johnson: Selected Poetry and Prose, ed.
Bertrand H. Bronson (New York, 1952), p. 254; hereafter cited in text.
15 The quoted phrase appears several times as a "formula" for defining the "doubleness"
of the fictional in Iser's
"Representation: A Performative Act," in The Aims of Representation:
Subject/Text/History, ed. Murray Krieger (New York, 1987), p. 221. My further comments
refer, of course, to Iser's additional and important concept of the "imaginary," which he
from the "real" on one side and the "fictive" on the other, in The
distinguishes crucially
Fictive and the Imaginary.
16 There is of course side to Plato, which
another emerges in other dialogues, that is
deeply committed to the notionof "beauty," so long as it is a beauty that transforms itself
through upward stages into the transcendental. Still, it is the aesthetic that is being
appealed to, however supernal Plato means it to be. So here, at the source of Western
about the matter, we find the very between the ascetic and the aesthetic
thinking struggle
that in what follows I intend to bring forward into recent theoretical movements.
17 W. B. Yeats, "The Symbolism of Poetry," Essays and Introductions (London, 1961), p.
106.
18 "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 (Baton Rouge,
1974), 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 that tries to make unified
reading
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 "'AWaking Dream': The Symbolic Alternative
to Allegory," in my Words About Words About Words: Theory, Criticism, and the
Literary Text
(Baltimore, 1988), pp. 271-88, and Paul de Man's response to that
reading (published
posthumously) in "Murray Krieger: A Commentary," in Paul de Man, Romanticism and
Contemporary Criticism: The Gauss Seminar and Other Papers, ed. E. S. Burt, Kevin Newmark,
and Andrzej Warminski (Baltimore, 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).

19 See my extended discussion of illusion in drama in the first part of this essay. I discuss
the natural-sign implications of French dramatic theory?like the trompe Toeil theory in the
visual arts that it resembles?in Ekphrasis, pp. 53-57.
20 In a much-extended form this is a running argument throughout my 1988 Wellek
Lectures, which were published as A
Reopening of Closure: Organicism Against Itself (New
York, 1989).
21 Like many others, I associate Bakhtin's work (that is, the work frequently attributed to
Bakhtin) with postmodernism its having been written so long ago. After having
despite
been for decades, it was suddenly revitalized some years back and turned
largely ignored
into an important influence on certain elements of postmodern theory. Among other texts
attributed to Bakhtin, See Rabelais and His World, tr. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass.,
1968) and The Dialogic Imagination, tr. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, 1981).
For Lyotard, see Le Diff?rend (Paris, 1983) and in Dispute, or Kant After
"Judiciousness
Marx," in The Aims of Representation: Subject/Text/History, ed. Murrary Krieger (New York,
1987), pp. 23-67.


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The "Imaginary" and Its Enemies

Author(s): Murray Krieger

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I. The Aesthetic and the Illusionary

Throughout our many years as dear friends I have found that

Wolfgang Iser and I have been not only close colleagues in a

political.2 In what follows, then, Iwill begin by setting forth my notion of

New Literary History, 2000, 31: 129-162

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arises fromthe study of drama, and, within drama, of tragedy. I will

ultimate self-realization. Though I could cite many passages throughout

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Following these principles Aristotle taught the formalist tradition that

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it to retain when it is hardened. The organic form, on the other hand is

This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Tue, 27 Jan 2015 18:12:04 PM

But I think it is an unfortunate mistake to insist that

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of a to the all-too-common insistence recent

creativity of the poet and the intervention of the form-making activities

good wedded the study of the arts to the perceptual and?more

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despite vastly different philosophical attachments, E. H. Gombrich's

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and before that the work itself?depends upon a sense of "internal

perceiving, from Kant to the Gestaltists to Gombrich, has been made to

self-sufficiency of the perceptual whole produces the fictional "illusion,"

experience of responding to them; in responding, that is, to the illusions

sistently recognized the double of the poem, within and movement

repeatedly by the New Critics, quote his phrase to describe let me

challenging quest for antithesis sought by the Metaphysical poets,

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licensed by later organicists. The first opposed pair of these "qualities"

Although Coleridge's emphasis is admittedly on the power of "recon

opposing forces it is to produce

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between unity and variety, between centripetal and centrifugal forces,

Obviously I am speaking of illusion not as misleading error, in

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representational art?allowed it to be treated as different

aesthetic, in neoclassical criticism, drama is supe

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it is only a representation ismost completely hidden, so that the illusion

On the other hand, French dramatic

preferred to take its imitation literally?that is to say, naively: it treated

they?and a century later Lessing?thought of as illusion, though Dr.

Johnson frees dramatic representation from a mimetic subservience

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This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Tue, 27 Jan 2015 18:12:04 PM

suspension of disbelief appears to me to be an extension of Johnson's

literally able to be substituted for the other, for?as illusion only?it is an

Viewed in this way, our to the of form,

self-consciously drawing back while

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perceptual habit of both seeking and doubting completion, leads to our

II. The Ascetic versus the Aesthetic; or, The Exclusive

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simultaneity of the mutually exclusive," to describe those exceptional

ability that never is allowed to relax into pleasure?as if aesthetic

professed innocence, as being in the surreptitious service of the politi

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The ascetic versus the aesthetic, asceticism versus aestheticism, the