Pieces of My Mind

The Art of the Dance in French Literature (1952).

It is quite untrue, by the way, that Fenollosa and Pound ‘introduced’ the Noh plays; interest in them is at least as old as this century.

Mr Ian Fletcher directs my attention to Sabine Baring-Gould’s periodical The Sacristy (1871-2) where liturgical dancing is discussed with other matters such as liturgical lights and symbolic zoology, and to later ecclesiastical contributions.

Still thought of as a female disorder; Freud’s Vienna paper on a male hysteric brought him a reproof from a senior who said that if Freud had known any Greek he would have seen that male hysteria is an impossibility. (E. Jones, Sigmund Freud, Life & Work I (1953), p. 254)

Jones traces the development of Freud’s psychoanalysis from this point. By 1892 he knew that ‘sexual disturbances constitute the sole indispensable cause of neurasthenia’ (I. 282) (he gave up this word later) and by 1895, nine years after his studies with Charcot, the pattern was taking psychoanalytical shape. It was formed by 1897 (I. 294).

She was a friend of Marinetti and wrote on the place of women in Futurism. Like Florence Farr, she eventually retreated to the East.

This story may not be absolutely true. In the Magazine of Art for 1894 there is an article by Percy Anderson, a man so anxious to harry the short skirt from the English stage that he made, for an opera called The Nautch Girl (Savoy, 1889) a copy of an ‘eastern dancing-dress’ in the ‘Indian Museum’. ‘The great quantity of material used, in order that the dancers might envelop themselves in billowy folds of drapery, seemed to be an obstacle, but the result was curiously graceful. A clever American dancer, who was engaged at the Gaiety Theatre, saw that the idea might be even further developed; so, with the practical instincts of her race, she sped across the ocean and appeared at the New York Casino Theatre in the now famous “Serpentine” dance which has set the impressionable Parisians frantic with delight … All this was the result of one dress, which is lying hidden in the security (or obscurity) of the Indian Museum.’ This seems a more likely story, though Mr Nicol doesn’t accept it, and Fuller was not appearing as a dancer at the Gaiety in 1889. The truth may be that her having such a good idea owed a little more than she admitted to other dancers (like Kate Vaughan) and their dresses. But she made it her own.

I ought to say that this passage will make more sense to anybody who has read my Romantic Image (1957).

2 Between Time and Eternity

See S. H. Butcher, Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art (1951), p. 33 1n.

See M. P. Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England (1950).

Milton, Paradise Regained, i. 269.

3 Solitary Confinement

Christopher Burney Solitary Confinement (1952) (2nd edn, 1961).

Stephen Toulmin and June Goodfield, The Discovery of Time (1965).

Earl R. Wasserman, The Subtler Language (1959).

John Denham, ‘Cooper’s Hill’ (1642).

Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on Don Quixote (1914).

J. Hillis Miller, The Disappearance of God (1963), pp. 17ff.

Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form (1941).

See Eliot’s letters to Sarah Hennell and John Blackwood, quoted in Miriam Allott, Novelists on the Novel (1959), p. 250.

Joseph Frank, ‘Spatial Form in Modern Literature’ in The Widening Gyre (1963).

Arnold Goldman, The Joyce Paradox (1966).

Philip Larkin, ‘Reference Back’ in The Whitsun Weddings (1964).

4 The English Novel, Circa 1907

Letters of Henry James, ed. Percy Lubbock (1920), ii. 384; quoted by Samuel Hynes, The Edwardian Turn of Mind (1969), p. 358. Hynes’s book not only characterizes the general mood of the period but provides much helpful detail on the whole ‘Condition of England’.

Erskine Childers, The Riddle of the Sands (1903).

H. G. Wells, The War in the Air (1908).

But one should mention John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), and William Golding, Rites of Passage (1980).

These quotations are all from Roger Gard, Henry James: The Critical Heritage (1968), pp. 149, 269, 347, 382, 349ff.

Gard, Henry James, pp. 401 – 7.

With the consequence, as Brownell hinted, that the reader gave up James instead: ‘I know of nothing that attests so plainly the preponderance of virtuosity in Mr James’s art as the indisposition of his readers to re-read his books’ (Gard, Henry James, p. 404).

Quoted in John D. Gordan, Joseph Conrad: The Making of a Novelist (1940), pp. 306 – 8.

Paul L. Wiley, Novelist of Three Worlds: Ford Madox Ford (1962), p. 40.

Alan Friedman, The Turn of the Novel (1966), p. 74.

See Hynes, The Edwardian Turn of Mind, pp. 185ff.

Dudley Barker, The Man of Principle: A Biography of John Galsworthy (1969), pp. 22-3.

Reported in Anonymous [Cecil Chesterton], G. K. Chesterton: A Criticism (1909), p. 202.

From a late article reprinted in the Penguin edition.

Ian Fletcher, ‘Bedford Park: Aesthete’s Asylum?’ in Fletcher, ed., Romantic Mythologies (1967).

Cecil Chesterton, G. K. Chesterton, p. 142.

5 Hawthorne and the Types

Quoted by Ursula Brumm, American Thought and Religious Typology (1970), p. 106.

Brumm, p. 108.

It is true that Thomas Maule wrote The Truth Held Forth and Maintained in 1695 – a Quaker attack on the Puritan establishment and its witch-hunts that Hawthorne would have known; and that the Revd Thomas Pyncheon elicited from the novelist an apology for the use of his name. This only shows how serviceable were the names Hawthorne invented.

It is reproduced in Proceedings in Commemoration of the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Birth of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1904), p. 13. Millicent Bell remarks, not unjustly, that the daguerreotype brings out a certain harshness in Hawthorne’s face; it lacks the ideality of such portraits as those of Cephas G. Thompson (1850) and George P. A. Healey (1852), also reproduced in the Proceedings. Hawthorne, who meditated and wrote so much about portraits and their relation to truth, might have endorsed her views (Millicent Bell, Hawthorne’s View of the Artist (1962), p. 88 and might even have had his own experience in mind when writing about Holgrave’s daguerreotype of Jaffrey.

American Notebooks, edn. of 1911, pp. 372-3.

William M. Ivins, Jr, Prints and Visual Communication (1953), Chapter III. At the very moment of the advent of the daguerreotype, in 1840, the portrait painter Samuel F. B. Morse hailed it as ‘Rembrandt perfected’, because no longer dependent on ‘the uncertain hand of the artist’ (Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria (1972), p. 62).

The view that there might be ‘a gradual evolution of creative power manifested by a gradual ascent towards higher types’ was Sedgwick’s, though he had been anticipated, in a more mystical way, by Oken and Schelling. See A. E. Lovejoy, ‘The Argument for Organic Evolution before The Origin of the Species, 1830-58’, in Bentley Glass, O. Temkin and W. L. Straus, Jr, Forerunners of Darwin, 1745-1859. In Section XXVI of his Essay on Classification, ed. E. Lurie (1962), pp. 115 – 17, Agassiz seems to claim the expression ‘prophetic type’ as his own invention: ‘Prophetic types … are those which in their structural complications lean towards other combinations fully realized in a later period.’ See, on embryological types, E. Lurie, Louis Agassiz (1960). It was the rigour of Cuvier’s fixism that eclipsed the earlier Naturphilosophie of Oken and Schelling – and also of Goethe, who, it will be remembered, half-thought he might discover the Urpflanz on his trip to Sicily.

L. Agassiz and A. A. Gould, Principles of Zoology (1848), edn of 1851, p. 16.

Principles, pp. 18 – 19: ‘It is common to speak of the animal which embodies most fully the character of a group, as the type of that group.’

Principles, p. 182. Assertions of this kind are also frequent in the opening chapter. The Creation was ‘the execution of a plan fully matured in the beginning, and undeviatingly pursued, the work of a God infinitely wise, regulating Nature according to immutable laws, which He himself has imposed on her.’ (p. 34). A fuller statement occurs in the Essay on Classification, which appeared in 1857, on the eve of Darwinism, though of course - like the Principles – after Chambers (1844). (See Essay on Classification, ed. Edward Lurie (1962), pp. 8 – 12.) Both works assume that what the biologist studies is something thought, which must therefore have a Thinker: ‘The character of the connections between organized beings and the physical conditions under which they live is such as to display thought; these connections are therefore to be considered as established, determined and regulated by a thinking being.’ They must have been fixed for each species at its beginning …’ (Classifications, p. 16).

Agassiz cleaves to Cuvier’s catastrophism (p. 659 ff.) as the only explanation of changes between epochs. Principles (p. 26) even uses the analogy of nature as a book in which we study an author. A useful introduction to Agassizz, and selection of his work, is Guy Davenport’s The Intelligence of Louis Agassiz (1963). Pound’s interest is reflected in Gists from Agassiz (1953), and the Rock-Drill cantos, as well as in the earlier ABC of Reading (1934).

Life and Correspondence of Louis Agassiz, ed. Elizabeth Cary Agassiz (1886), p. 778.

The North was nevertheless predisposed to Darwinism by the success of Herbert Spencer and ‘the survival of the fittest’; and preachers such as Henry Ward Beecher and Philips Brooks anyway wanted to abandon the fundamentalist position on Genesis. The South, much more preoccupied with fixed types and degeneration, took a more conservative attitude. The judgement at the Scopes trial of 1925 prohibited the teaching of evolution in Tennessee schools, and the ban was lifted only quite recently. On this characteristic repudiation of ‘Yankee’ thought, hardening as time went by, see W. I. Cash, The Mind of the South (1941), Book II, section 12.

R. Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860-1915 (1945), pp. 4-6.

Lurie, Louis Agassiz, p. 307. On the prophetic types, Lurie, p. 162.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, Man and Writer (1961), p. 27. Wagenknecht, incidentally, is wrong to say that Agassiz is the only modern scientist mentioned by Hawthorne in his writings; see the Conclusion of The Marble Faun for a reference to Cuvier.

Taylor Stoehr, ‘Hawthorne and Mesmerism’, Huntingdon Library Quarterly, xxxiii (1969), pp. 42-4. Also, for the contemporary interest in mesmerism, spiritualism, and the like, see Howard Kerr, Mediums and Spirit-Rappers and Roaring Radicals (1972).

Stoehr, p. 54.

Marion L. Kesselring, Hawthorne’s Reading (1949), p. 45. Hawthorne quotes Buffon in a magazine article of May 1836 (Hawthorne as Editor, ed. A. Turner (1941), p. 192). Another book he borrowed was Lavater’s Physiognomy; I do not profess to have mastered the whole vast bibliography of modern Hawthorne scholarship, but I have come across no inquiry into any interest he may have had in Lavater. That it existed seems a highly probable conjecture.

Nature allows no ‘link in her great work so weak as to be broken’. (Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson (1944), p. 208)

Jefferson, p. 205.

Jefferson, p. 213.

Jefferson, p. 215. For a more extensive account of the controversy, see Daniel J. Boorstin, The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson (1948), p. 81 ff.

Buffon, Histoire Naturelle (15 vols.) (1749-67), iv, p. 209. Agassiz also used the chicken, to illustrate the point that an embryo chicken is nevertheless a chicken and nothing else, ‘though if there existed in Nature an adult bird as imperfectly organized as the chicken on the day, or the day before it was hatched, we should assign it to an inferior rank’.

In Chapter CIV of Moby Dick Melville ventures into palaeontology, citing Cuvier on the ‘antichronical’ fossil whale which has ‘left … pre-adamite traces in the stereotype plates of nature’. He implies a certain belief in catastrophism. The following chapter denies the sperm whale has declined in size.

It is worth mentioning that in 1850 Hawthorne read Winckelmann, arbiter of the classical epoch and type.

Quoted by Wagenknecht, p. 57.

Essay on Classification, Section xxv.

Agassiz mentions ancient Egyptian wheat which, taken from tombs, will sprout and grow (Principles, p. 136).

See A. O. Lovejoy, ‘Buffon and the Problem of Species’, in S. Glass, O. Temkin, and W. L. Straus, Jr, Forerunners of Darwin: 1745-1859, p. 103.

The story called ‘The Artist of the Beautiful’ is relevant; the artist is a watchmaker, not trusted in his trade, because art – the creation of the beautiful which belongs to the noumenal, not the phenomenal world – has nothing to do with materiality and time.

James, p. 156.

James, p. 57.

James, p. 10.

For a more positive statement of the relation between Hester and Anne Hutchinson, see Michael J. Colocurcio, ‘Footsteps of Anne Hutchinson: The Context of The Scarlet Letter’, ELH, xxxix (1972), pp. 459-94.

An adaptation of Marvell’s conceit at the end of ‘The Unfortunate Lover’ – ‘In a field sable a lover gules.’

Brumm, p. 147, suggests that Donatello is an emblem of the antique, and Miriam of the Renaissance which, in rediscovering it, corrupted, and also Christianized it.

6 Wuthering Heights

Leonard B. Meyer, Music, the Arts and Ideas (1967), p. 8 (speaking of musical styles).

My subsequent reading in Wuthering Heights criticism (which has certainly substantiated my vague sense that there was a lot of it about) has taught me that the carved names, and Lockwood’s dreams, have attracted earlier comment. Dorothy Van Ghent’s distinguished essay asks why Lockwood, of all people, should experience such a dream as that of the ghost-child, and decides that the nature of the dreamer – ‘a man who has shut out the powers of darkness’ – is what gives force to our sense of powers ‘existing autonomously’ both without and within. (The English Novel: Form and Function (1953)). Ronald E. Fine suggests that the dreams are ‘spasms of realism’ and that Emily Bronte arranged the story to fit them, or as he says, lets the dreams generate the story. He emphasizes their sexual significance, and the structural relations between them, explained by the generative force of a basic dream of two lovers seeking to be reunited (‘Lockwood’s Dream and the Key to Wuthering Heights’, Nineteenth Century Fiction, xxiv (1969-70), pp. 16-30). Ingeborg Nixon suggests that ‘the names must have been written by Catherine after her first visit to Thrushcross Grange as a child … but they form a silent summary of the whole tragic dilemma’; they indicate three possibilities for Catherine, who of course chooses Linton. This is to give the inscriptions the most limited possible ‘hermeneutic’ sense, reading them back into a possible chronology and ignoring their larger function as literary or defamiliarizing signs (‘Note on the Pattern of Wuthering Heights’, English Studies, xlv (1964)). Cecil W. Davies notices that ‘Heathcliff’ is an Earnshaw name, and argues that this makes him ‘in a real, though non-legal sense, a true inheritor of Wuthering Heights’ (‘Reading of Wuthering Heights’, Essays in Criticism, xix (1969)). Doubtless C. P. Sanger’s justly celebrated essay (‘The Structure of Wuthering Heights’ (1926)) is partly responsible for the general desire to fit everything that can be fitted into legal and chronological schemes; but the effect is often to miss half the point. All these essays are reprinted, in whole or in part, in the Penguin Critical Anthology, Emily Bronte, ed. J.-P. Petit (1973). Other collections include one by Miriam Allott in the Macmillan Casebook series (1970), Thomas A. Vogler’s Twentieth-Century Interpretations of ‘Wuthering Heights’ (1965), and William A. Sale’s Norton edition (1963). Since 1975 there have been innumerable additions to this list.

‘Indeterminancy and the Reader’s Response’, in Aspects of Narrative, ed. J. Hillis Miller (1971), p. 42, reprinted in Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (1989).

F. R. Leavis and Q. D. Leavis, Lectures in America (1969), pp. 83 – 152.

For a different approach to Mrs Leavis’s reading see D. Donoghue, ‘Emily Bronte: On the Latitude of Interpretation’, Harvard English Studies, I, ed. M. W. Bloomfield (1970); reprinted in Emily Bronte, ed. J.-P. Petit (1973), pp. 296 – 314, p. 316.

E. D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (1967), p. 168.

F. Jameson, The Prison-House of Language, 1972, p. 195, compare the Frege-Carnap distinction between Sinn (unchanging formal organization) and Bedeutung (the changing significance given to the text by successive generations of readers).

Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (1968), p. 198.

Jameson (1972), p. 196.

‘ … commentaries or interpretations are generated out of an ontological lack in the text itself … a text can have no ultimate meaning … the process of interpretation … is properly an infinite one’ (Jameson, p. 176, paraphrasing Jacques Derrida).

Picard, p. 135.

Barthes, Critique et Vérité (1966), pp. 52-3.

The ‘cultural code’ of S/Z (1970), serves some of the purposes of Mrs Leavis’s archaeological categories, though she is inclined to retain the period elements that he drops.

P. L. Berger, ‘Secularization and the Problem of Plausibility’, extracted from The Sacred Canopy (1967), in Sociological Perspectives, ed. K. Thompson and J. Tunstall (1971), pp. 446-59; developing the thesis of Berger and T. Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (1967).

William Berg, The Early Virgil (1973).

7 The Man in the Macintosh

Stuart Gilbert, James Joyce’s Ulysses (1931), pp. 152f. Gilbert got the idea from Victor Bérard’s Les Phéniciens et l’Odyssée, in which all the mysterious movements of Theoclymenos are set forth, with the speculation that he may have been a hero in a part of the epic cycle following the Odyssey – the Telegony.

Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper (1958), p. 165; and articles by John O. Lyons (in James Joyce Miscellany, 2nd series (1959), pp. 133f) and by Thomas E. Connolly (in James Joyce’s Dubliners, ed. Clive Hart (1969), pp. 107f)

Robert M. Adams, Surface and Symbol (1962), pp. 218, 245 – 6. Hélène Cixous, The Exile of James Joyce, translated by Sally A. J. Purcell (1972), expressly disagrees with Adams, saying that by the time the table emits its loud lone crack Bloom ‘knows … who M‘Intosh was … The garment has become transparent to Bloom’s “unconscious substance,” and he has now to struggle against the truth that is self-imposed’ (pp. 712f). How we know this is not explained.

Note the persistent suppression of Bloom’s name in the concluding pages of ‘Cyclops’. Indeed, as Gilbert points out, ‘the idea of anonymity or misnomer is suggested under many aspects’ – perhaps by way of allusion to Odysseus’ change of name to No-man in the relevant episode of Homer (James Joyce’s Ulysses, p. 252).

Adams, Surface and Symbol, p. 186.

The Pleasure of the Text, translated by Richard Miller (1975), p. II.

Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd edn (1970).

Taylor, St Mark, pp. 561 – 2.

Cranfield, St Mark, p. 438.

Taylor, St Mark, p. 561, Cranfield, St Mark, p. 438.

Quoted by H. Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, 2nd ed. rev. (1963), p. 274. Jonas, describing the Gnostic ‘Hymn of the Pearl’ or ‘Song of the Apostle Judas Thomas’, mentions that the symbolism of a garment includes a use of it as the heavenly or ideal double of a person on earth, sometimes the Saviour. That an allegory of Gnostic origin has been intruded at this point in the Passion narrative has not, so far as I know, been proposed by the exegetes, who may well find it wholly counter-intuitive.

Morton Smith, Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark (1973); The Secret Gospel (1974).

Austin Farrer, A Study in St Mark (1951); St Matthew and St Mark (1954 (2nd edn, 1966)).

For the view that Peter’s third denial is a formal curse directed against Jesus, see Helmut Merkel, ‘Peter’s Curse’, The Trial of Jesus, ed. Ernst Bammel (Studies in Biblical Theology, second series, 13) (1970), pp. 66-71.

Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, p. 4.

For the difficulties that arise when ‘history-likeness’ is confused with historical reference, see Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (1974).

Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (1959), p. 535. He also told Samuel Beckett ‘I may have oversystematized Ulysses’ (Ellmann, p. 715).

‘La Construction de la nouvelle et du roman’, in T. Todorov ed. Théorie de la litterature: Textes des Formalistes russes (1965), pp. 170-96.

D. E. Nineham, Saint Mark (Pelican Gospel Commentaries) (1963), P. 439.

Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 536.

Ellmann, p. 725. (Translation slightly altered.)

J. Jeremias, The Eucharistic Words of Jesus, translated by Norman Perrin (1966), p. 132.

W. L. Knox, quoted in Taylor, St Mark, p. 609.

Farrer, Study, p. 174.

Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (1975), p. 244.

Etienne Trocmé, The Formation of the Gospel According to Mark, translated by Pamela Gaughan (1975), p. 240.

8 Dwelling Poetically in Connecticut

Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous (1957); hereafter cited as OP in the text.

Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens (1966); hereafter cited as L in the text.

Margaret Peterson, ‘Harmonium and William James’, Southern Review (Summer 1971), 664ff.

Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel (1951); hereafter cited as NA in the text.

‘Und keiner Waffen brauchts und keiner / Listen, so lange, bis Gottes Fehl hilft.’ Text and translation from Michael Hamburger’s complete parallel text, Friedrich Hölderlin: Poems and Fragments (1966), pp. 176 – 7 (translated from Hölderlin: Sädmtliche Werke [1961]).

Friedrich Hölderlin, Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael Hamburger (bilingual edition; 1980), p. 250.

Ibid., pp. 600 – 601. The prose poem ‘In lieblicher Bläue’, from which these lines derive, is not certainly Hölderlin’s own, but Heidegger treats it without question as authentic.

Thomson, ‘The City of Dreadful Night’; Whitman, ‘A Clear Midnight’. Both quoted in NA, p. 119.

Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems (1954); hereafter cited as CP in the text.

Jarrell, The Third Book of Criticism (1969), pp. 57 – 8.

Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (1971), p.x.

Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art [Der Ursprung von Kunstwerkes]’, in Poetry, Language, Thought, pp. 17 – 81.

‘The Thinker as Poet’, in Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 4.

Heidegger, ‘Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry’, trans. Douglas Scott, in Heidegger, Existence and Being, comp. Werner Brock (1949), p. 310.

Commentators on Stevens appear not to have interested themselves much in this affinity, always supposing that it exists. They have not, to my knowledge, spoken of Stevens in relation to late works of Heidegger (that is, from the 1936 Hölderlin essay on). But Richard Macksey freely alludes to Sein und Zeit (along with Husserl and Merleau-Ponty) to illuminate late Stevens. He observes, in part, that ‘Stevens grounds his poetics and defines his individuality in terms of a death which always impends even in ‘the genius of summer’ (CP, p. 482). See his ‘The Climates of Wallace Stevens’ in Roy Harvey Pearce and J. Hillis Miller, eds., The Act of the Mind: Essays on the Poetry of Wallace Stevens (1965), p. 201. Heidegger argues that my death alone achieves and delimits wholeness of Being (cf. ‘Every man dies his own death’ [OP, p. 165]); and the project of the late Stevens recalls Heidegger’s Sein zum Tode (‘when Dasein reaches its wholeness in death, it simultaneously loses the Being of its “there”’). Macksey cites as his epigraph Heidegger’s favourite Hölderlin quotation (‘dichterisch, wohnet der Mensch auf dieser Erde’) but does not otherwise refer to the philosopher’s later work. An essay by J. Hillis Miller in the same collection sounds as though Miller could have had these later essays in mind, but he does not allude to them explicitly.

In Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (1962), p. 80, Heidegger explains (though that is not the right word) that the word innan (wohnen) collects the senses of ‘to dwell’ (inn) and ‘accustomed’, ‘familiar with’, and ‘look after something’ (an). But there is no substitute for a reading of that passage and related passages.

Quoted by Heidegger in ‘Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry’, p. 296.

Heidegger, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, in Poetry, Language, Thought, pp. 143 – 62.

Heidegger, ‘Remembrance of the Poet’, trans. Douglas Scott, in Existence and Being, p. 281.

Heidegger, ‘Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry’, pp. 293 ff.

Heidegger, ‘Remembrance of the Poet’, p. 264.

Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, p. 41.

Ibid., p. 47.

Heidegger, ‘What Are Poets For?’ in Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 97.

9 Secrets and Narrative Sequence

From Academe (1979). My thanks to Alexander Baramki, who sent me this book.

After this was written, I read Jurij M. Lotman’s ‘The Origin of Plot in the Light of Typology, Poetics Today, 1, nos. 1 – 2, 1979: pp. 161 – 84. Lotman speaks of two primeval kinds of plot. The first is ‘mythic’ and has no ‘excesses or anomalies’; it is timeless and motionless. The second is the linear tale about incidents, news, ‘excesses’. The two exist in dialectical interaction, and the result is a ‘fusion of scandal and miracle’. A secret motivation arising from the ‘eschatological’ plot intrudes into the linear plot; ‘mythologism penetrates into the sphere of excess’. It is from such combinations that we have learnt to interpret reality as we do, plot-wise. Keats’s poem foreshadows this theory. The mythic event is injected into scandal and outrage; beauty subsumes a version of truth which represents it as calamity, decay, and consequence; the assurance that there is a timeless and motionless transcendent world reduces to insignificance the faits divers which seem to constitute the narrative of ordinary life.

Edward W. Said, Beginnings (1975), p. 83.

Not forever, I hope; his essay and its ‘refined common sense’ have powerful implications for a more general narrative theory. [The essay, first presented at the Chicago Symposium on ‘Narrative: the Illusion of Sequence’, which was also the occasion of the present chapter, is called ‘Narration in the Psychoanalytic Dialogue’. It is reprinted in Narrative, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (1981), pp. 25 – 49. For Hayden White’s essay, see Narrative, pp. 1 – 23.]

See Chapter 2 of the present volume.

Joseph Conrad, Letters from Joseph Conrad, 1895-1924, ed. Edward Garnett (1928), p. 234.

The trouble is not that there are unreliable narrators but that we have endorsed as reality the fiction of the ‘reliable’ narrator.

Albert J. Guerard, Conrad the Novelist (1958); all references to this work will be cited in the text.

See Frederick R. Karl, Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives (1979), p. 68 n.

Conrad, preface to Chance, 1920, p. viii.

Eloise Knapp Hay, The Political Novels of Joseph Conrad (1963); all references to this work will be cited in the text. See also D. C. Yelton’s Mimesis and Metaphor (1967) which sees a connection between the ‘motif of vision’ and the phantom but treats it only psychologically.

Avrom Fleishman, ‘Speech and Writing in Under Western Eyes’, in Conrad: A Commemoration, ed. Norman Sherry (1976), pp. 119 – 28. After this paper was written, there appeared Jeremy Hawthorn’s Joseph Conrad: Language and Fictional Self-Consciousness (1979), which contains interesting remarks on Conrad’s play with English tenses and argues that when the language teacher tells Miss Haldin that he has understood ‘all the words’ but without understanding, he is speaking for the reader as Conrad imagined him (see pp. 102 – 28).

See ‘The Structures of Fiction,’ in Velocities of Change, ed. R. Macksey (1974), P. 198.

The pun is actually French, since English ‘apparition’ = ‘appearance’ is virtually obsolete.

10 Botticelli Recovered

Michael Levey, ‘Botticelli and Nineteenth-Century England’, Journal of the Warburg & Courtauld Institutes 23 (1960): pp. 291 – 306. My opening pages draw freely on this article.

Ibid., p. 294. As late as 1887, W. P. Frith, an academician still remembered for the detailed realism of his ‘Derby Day’, could speak of Botticelli’s ‘bad drawing and worse painting, and such a revelling in ugliness’ (My Autobiography [1887], Chapter 2, p. 90 (cited in Levey, p. 305).

In 1864 the Primavera was moved to the Accademia; it was returned to the Uffizi in 1919.

Levey, p. 296.

R. N. Wornum, Epochs of Painting (1860), p. 160 (cited in Levey, p. 301).

Levey, p. 302.

Walter Pater, The Renaissance, text of 1893, ed. D. L. Hill (1980), p. 39.

Ibid., p. 43.

Ian Fletcher, ‘Herbert Horne: The Earlier Phase’, English Miscellany (Rome) 21 (1970): pp. 117 – 57. Professor Fletcher has kindly allowed me to read the not quite complete manuscript of his life of Horne.

Letters of Ernest Dowson, ed. Desmond Flower and Henry Maas (1967), letter of 4 March 1891 to Arthur Moore; but next day Dowson reported to the same correspondent that the dinner was a success – Horne was ‘charming and kind’, and afterwards, at 11.30 p.m., they ‘strolled Alhambra-wards’ but ‘were too late for divinities’.

Letters, 27 January, 1890.

On some of the implications of the cult, see Chapter 1.

E. H. Gombrich, ‘Botticelli’s Mythologies’, Symbolic Images (1972), pp. 31 – 81. ‘Dancing with a slow halting step’ is from Apuleius’s description of Venus in The Golden Ass (lente vestigio). In Apuleius, also, she is ‘slightly inclining her head’.

W. B. Yeats, Autobiography (1953), P. 191.

Fletcher, p. 151.

Yeats, p. 182.

Herbert P. Horne, Botticelli, Painter of Florence. With a new introduction by John Pope-Hennessy (1980), xi. Ronald Lightbrown, Sandro Botticelli: Life and Works and Complete Catalogue, 2 vols. (1978) does not dissent from this very usual view, though he notes errors, certain and probable, and also certain disadvantages inherent in Horne’s method. For instance, he probably dated the Primavera too early: it is a painting for a marriage chamber, made for Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco in 1482 – 3 (not 1477); it is, therefore, much closer in time to The Birth of Venus (another picture for a marriage chamber) than Horne supposed. The composition of Horne’s book began as early as 1903, so he was unable to include information available only after that date; Jacques Mesnil, Botticelli (1938), supplements and corrects Horne from his own notes. Finally, Horne’s book (of which only 240 copies were printed) is extremely long and has neither chapter divisions nor index, which certainly reduces its utility; but then he liked to think he was writing only for his own amusement.

Fritz Saxl, ‘Three Florentines’, Lectures (1957), p. 331 ff.

Fletcher, p. 127.

Horne, xviii.

Horne, xix.

Horne, xviii.

Horne, xix.

Horne, p. 43.

Horne, pp. 59 – 60.

Horne, p. 69.

Horne, p. 111.

Horne, p. 121.

Horne, p. 122.

Horne, p. 152.

Horne, p. 255.

Horne, pp. 333 – 4.

Horne, p. 329.

Horne, p. 308.

Horne, p. 334.

Horne, p. 304.

Horne, p. 147.

Horne, p. 88.

E. H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (1970), p. 305. I have drawn heavily on this work in my discussion of Warburg.

Professor J. B. Trapp reminds me that Warburg dedicated his Botticelli study to Humbert Janitschek and Adolf Michaelis, masters important to him. One should also mention his reverence for Burckhardt.

It was Usener who directed Warburg’s attention to the work of Tito Vignoli, whose Mito e scienza (1879) proved to be of importance to the younger man. Maria Michela Sassi says that Warburg used Vignoli in a very personal way, impressed above all by Vignoli’s insistence on fear as the motive behind the tendency to ‘animate’ the unknown – a tendency that would persist into a scientific age because man ‘humanises and personifies images, ideas and concepts by converting them into living subjects, just as in the beginning he humanised and personified cosmic objects and phenomena’. Maria Michela Sassi, ‘Dalla scienza delle religioni di Usener ad Aby Warburg’, in Aspetti di Hermann Usener, filologo della religione. Seminaro della Scuola Normale di Pisa … 1982, a cura di G. Arrighetti [etc.], Pisa (1982).

‘Sometimes it looks to me as if, in my role as psycho-historian, I had to diagnose the schizophrenia of Western civilisation from its images in an autobiographical reflex’, wrote Warburg in relation to the Nympha (Gombrich, p. 303). And it is true that for him the image had a ‘manic’ quality (he seems, both here and in speaking of his own illness, to have confused the manic-depressive with the schizophrenic). But he was not alone in attaching this sort of significance to the Nympha; Taine had done so, much more palely (see below); and so, a few years later, did Horne, who singles out, in the Sistine fresco of the Temptation, the ‘woman with flying draperies, who steps forward, almost in profile, with a bundle of oak faggots on her head. In the blithe, exuberant sense of life which animates this incomparable figure, Botticelli approaches more nearly to the spirit of Greek art than, perhaps, even Donatello himself had done’ (Horne, p. 99). Here we may feel a curious affinity between ‘Decadent’ and ‘Greek’, which doubtless originates in Pater’s essay. Of course it remains true that neither Taine nor Horne was obsessed with the image as Warburg was; we do not sense in what they say anything corresponding to what Gombrich calls ‘the subsoil of fear that underlies Warburg’s fascination with the Nympha’ (Gombrich, p. 305), its association with headhunters, maenads, and ultimately, one supposes, castration fears.

M. Podro, The Critical Historians of Art (1982), p. 157.

The source of this expression, much enquired after, seems now to have been found in Hermann Usener, whose method it was to seek general laws by studying a particular datum (Sassi, p. 86, citing D. Wuttke). Usener has several versions, none completely identical with Warburg’s. Sassi shows that Dilthey has the same ideas, differently expressed, and attributes it to Goethe; she is persuaded that Warburg read Dilthey. Here is another indication that Warburg singled out from several diverse threads of the German tradition the theme that had most interest for him as he constructed his own.

R. Semon, Mneme (trans. 1921).

Gombrich, p. 250.

Gombrich, pp. 241 ff, 275.

E.g. E. Panofsky, Renaissances and Renascences in Western Art (1960) (Harper Torchbook, 1969), pp. 191 – 200; E. Wind, Pagan Mysteries of the Renaissance (1958), pp. 100 – 120; E. H. Gombrich, ‘Botticelli’s Mythologies’ (see n. 13); more recently R. Lightbrown (see n. 17) who finds a simpler message in the ‘frank carnality’ of the paintings than Neoplatonic or highly ethical programmes account for (Lightbrown, p. 81); and Paul Holberton, ‘Botticelli’s “Primavera”: che volea s’intendesse’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 45 (1982), pp. 202 – 10, argues that Warburg was in general right about sources and themes, though the lady in the central position of the picture is not Venus. Holberton agrees with Gombrich in finding an ethical intention, though for him the subject is not humanitas but the conversion of spring lust into gentilezza – love taming savage desire.

Gombrich, p. 65.

Hippolyte Taine, Italy: Florence and Venice, trans. J. Durand (1889), p. 129. Taine speaks also of ‘dry outlines, feeble colour, and irregular and ungracious figures’ combined with ‘deep and fervid sentiment’ in the painting of the period. Of the lady and the nymph in the Nativity of St John, he adds: ‘A fresh smile rests on their lips; underneath their semi-immobility, under these remains of rigidity which imperfect painting still leaves, one can divine the latent passion of an intact spirit and healthy body. The curiosity and refinement of ulterior ages have not reached them. Thought, with them, slumbers; they walk or look straight before them with the coolness and placidity of virginal purity; in vain will education with all its animated elegancies rival the divine uncouthness of their gravity.

‘This is why I so highly prize the paintings of this age; none in Florence have I studied more. They are often deficient in skill and are always dull; they lack both action and colour. It is the renaissance in its dawn, a dawn grey and somewhat cool, as in the spring when the rosy hue of the clouds begins to tinge a pale crystal sky, and when, like a flaming dart the first ray of sunshine glides over the crest of the furrows.’

Gombrich, pp. 106ff, 169.

Sassi, p. 90, records the ‘stupefaction’ of Ernst Cassirer when he went to the Institute in Hamburg in 1920 and saw that Warburg, then still very little known, had brought together in the library – as if for him personally – all that material, placing books on magic beside those on astrology and folklore, associating art, literature, and philosophy in the manner most suitable for his grasping the relations between the various ‘symbolic forms’.

Gombrich, pp. 297 – 302.

Gombrich, p. 315.

Gombrich, p. 87.

Gombrich, p. 238.

Gombrich, p. 305.

M. Podro, The Critical Historians of Art (1982), p. 214.

11 Cornelius and Voltemand

References to Hamlet are to the Arden edition, ed. H. Jenkins (1981). For all other works of Shakespeare I refer to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. B. Evans (1974).

See Paul S. Conklin, A History of Hamlet Criticism: 1601-1821 (1957).

See L. Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters (1983), Chapter 1.

It is hard to believe, but I cannot find that anyone has noticed the use here of the Life of Caligula.

John Carey, John Donne, His Life and Art (1981), p. 264 ff.

Sir Thopas’s reply to Malvolio’s complaint that he is being kept in the dark house, ‘Why, it hath bay windows transparent as barricadoes, and the clerestories toward the south north are as lustrous as ebony’ (iv.2.36 ff), is modelled on the carnival-like inversions of Belsey Bob.

L. Sonnino, A Handbook to Sixteenth-Century Rhetoric (1968), p. 188 (quoting Richard Sherry).

Roman Jakobson, Selected Writings, III. Poetry of Grammar and Grammar of Poetry (1981), p. 767.

Sonnino, p. 157, quotingJ. Hoskins, Direction for Speech and Style (c. 1600).

Otto Rank, The Double, translated by Harry Tucker, Jr (1971; 1979 edn), p. 58.

D. Parish, ‘Transitional Objects and Phenomena in a Case of Twinship’, Between Fantasy and Reality, ed. S. A. Goalnick and L. Barkin (1978), pp. 273 – 87. The case described is of a neurotic younger dizygotic twin who had the tendency ‘to view separate people as halves of dyads’, especially when he wanted to reject them; however, he mistrusted this feeling. Hamlet certainly tends to think of the dead and living kings as a dyad, and wishes to reject the latter.

12 The Plain Sense of Things

See F. O. Matthiessen, The Achievement of T. S. Eliot, 3rd edn (1958), p. 90.

Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957), p. 76.

J. Barton, Reading the Old Testament (1984), p. 85.

De libero arbitrio, quoted in Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. 3, The West from the Reformation to the Present Day, ed. S. C. Greenslade (1969-70), p. 28.

John Lyons, Semantics, vol. 1 (1977), p. 237.

Bruno Bettelheim, Freud and Man’s Soul (1983).

Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. 3, p. 11.

Gerald Hammond, The Making of the English Bible (1982), p. 10.

Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, 2nd edn (1952), p. 15; D. S. Wallace-Hadrill, Christian Antioch: A Study of Early Christian Thought in the East (1982), Chapter 2.

City of God, XVI, 2.

Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. 2, pp. 252 ff.

Smalley, Bible in the Middle Ages, Chapter 4.

Ibid., p. 151.

Ibid., p. 163.

Ibid., p. 362.

J. S. Preuss, From Sbadow to Promise: Old Testament Interpretation from Augustine to the Young Luther (1969), p. 53.

Ibid., p. 69.

Ibid., p. 81.

J. T. Burtchaell, Catholic Theories of Inspiration since 1810 (1969), p. 32.

Ibid., pp. 69 – 70.

Ibid., Chapter 5.

Papers of the Institute of Jewish Studies, London, vol. 1, ed. J. G. Weiss (1964), pp. 141 – 85.

John Searle, ‘Literal Meaning’, in Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts (1979).

13 Mixed Feelings

The English Auden, ed. E. Mendelson (1977), p. 142.

Chorus from ‘The Rock’, Complete Poems and Plays, 1909 – 1950 (1952), p. 103.

Selected Prose, ed. W. Cookson (1973), p. 249.

‘The Desperate System: Poverty, Crime and Emigration’, in Fraser’s Magazine (July 1830), reprinted in G. Levine (ed.), The Emergence of Victorian Consciousness (1967), pp. 272 – 83.

See G. Himmelfarb, ‘The Culture of Poverty’, in H. J. Dyos and Michael Wolff (eds), The Victorian City (1973), pp. 707 – 36.

See D. Craig, The Real Foundations (1974), pp. 89 – 90.

See S. Marcus, ‘Reading the Illegible’, in The Victorian City, pp. 257 – 76; and F. Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, translated and edited W. O. Henderson and W. H. Challoner (1958).

Bagehot is admiring Dicken’s talent for dealing with this disconnection. See P. Collins, ‘Dickens and London’, in The Victorian City, p. 34.

Louis MacNeice, The Strings are False (1965), p. 130.

Ibid., p. 135.

I take these figures from J. Stevenson, British Society, 1914-1945 (1984). In P. Hamilton, Hangover Square (1941) – a novel which scrupulously registers the conditions of life immediately before the war – a meal for two at a very expensive London restaurant, together with a great deal to drink, costs £2. 13s. 7d.

Cecil Day-Lewis, in Poetry of the Thirties, ed. Robin Skelton (1964), p. 69.

Ibid., p. 186.

The English Auden, p. 142.

The Strings are False, p. 138.

K. Allott, Collected Poems (1975), p. 17.

D. Trotter, The Making of the Reader (1984), p. 113.

The English Auden, pp. 165 – 6.

G. Orwell, Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, ed. S. Orwell and I. Angus (1968), i. p. 230, written in August 1936.

Homage to Catalonia. (The Penguin edn of 1966, etc. reprints the essay and the poem, pp. 246 – 7; they originally appeared in England Your England in 1953, but are dated 1943 by the author.)

S. Spender, World within World (1951; 1956 edn), pp. 311 – 12.

W. H. Auden, New Year Letter (1941), p. 119.

S. Hynes, The Auden Generation (1976), p. 317.

‘Conversation with Edward Upward’, Review, pp. 11 – 12 (1965), pp. 65 – 7.

‘Sketch for a Marxist Interpretation of Literature’, in C. Day-Lewis (ed.), The Mind in Chains (1937), p. 48.

London Magazine (July 1985), pp. 3 – 13.

‘Letter to Lord Byron’, Part V, in The English Auden, p. 198.

J. Meyers, The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis (1980), p. 190.

F. Jameson, Fables of Aggression (1979), pp. 179 ff.

W. Lewis, The Revenge for Love (1937; 1962 edn), pp. 201, 206, 225 – 6.

W. Lewis, The Diabolical Principle (1931), p. 146.

Introduction to The Revenge for Love (1962), vii-xvi.

14 Eros, Builder of Cities

This is according to MacNeice. Sir Isaiah Berlin told me after the lecture that there was not a word of truth in it.

The Strings are False (1956), p. 168.

G. Rees, A Chapter of Accidents (1972), pp. 106, 110.

The English Auden, ed. E. Mendelson (1977), pp. 208 – 9.

Autumn Journal (1939), pp. 16, 17.

L. MacNeice, I Crossed the Minch (1938), p. 125.

See M. Ceadel, ‘Popular Fiction and the Next War’, in F. Gloversmith (ed.), Class Culture and Social Change: A New View of the Thirties (1980), pp. 161 – 84.

Quoted in S. Hynes, The Auden Generation (1976), p. 299.

S. Spender, The Thirties and After (1978), p. 33.

The Strings are False, p. 169.

The English Auden, p. 245.

G. Orwell, Selected Essays (1957), pp. 9 – 50.

B. Everett, Poets in their Time (1986), p. 220.

The English Auden, p. 119.

E. Mendelson, Early Auden (1982), pp. 246, 142.

Reprinted in J. Haffenden (ed.), W. H. Auden: The Critical Heritage (1983), p. 231.

The English Auden, p. 281.

Collected Poems (1976), p. 546.

Ibid., p. 433.

The Thirties and After, p. 30.

Early Auden, pp. 200 – 203.

The Thirties and After, p. 25.

The English Auden, p. 155.

Ibid., p. 138.

The English Auden, p. 212.

Collected Poems, p. 581.

The Destructive Element (1935), p. 223.

Forewords and Afterwords, ed. E. Mendelson (1973).

W. H. Auden, review of V. Clifton, The Book of Talbot, in The English Auden, p. 319.

The English Auden, p. 156.

15 Memory

Confessions, X. 8; see Henry Chadwick, Augustine (1986), pp. 9 – 70.

Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (1989), pp. 134 – 6.

Taylor, p. 140; Augustine, Confessions, I. xiii (21) (Chadwick’s translation).

Jean Starobinski, The Living Eye (1989), p. 177.

In a letter to Fliess of 6 December 1896, Freud spoke of ‘memory-traces being subjected from time to time to a re-arrangement in accordance with fresh circumstances – to a retranscription.’

Starobinski, p. 48, quoting the ‘Profession de foi du vicaire Savoyarde’.

For an admiring account of Green’s theories see E. Nakjavani, ‘The Unbinding Process: The Pedagogy of Listening to the Text with the “Third Ear”’, Proceedings of the 9^th International Conference on Literature and Psychology, pp. 25 – 34.

He said this to Maxim Gorky; see J. M. Coetzee, ‘Autobiography and Confession’, in Doubling the Point (1992), p. 264.

Vladimir Nabokov, Speak Memory, Penguin edn (1969), p. 23.

The Language of Autobiography (1993), p. 286.

Starobinski, p. 232.

Sturrock, p. 142.

See Jerome Buckley, The Turning Key (1984), pp. 87 – 8.

Gibbon, Autobiography, ed. Georges A. Bonnard (1966), p. 86.

‘Full of Life Now’, in James Olney ed., Autobiography, pp. 49 – 72.

J. M. Coetzee has some interesting remarks on the problems of ending in confessional writing: there is always, as in Rousseau, the possibility of there being a deeper truth than the confessant allows. And if he allows that, there will be another, each deepened interpretation constituting a Derridean ‘supplement’ and getting no closer to the inaccessible ‘blind spot’ or truth (‘Confession and Double Thoughts: Tolstoy, Rousseau, Dostoevsky’ in Doubling the Point, pp. 251 – 93.

From the Ebauche de Confessions, Translation from Starobinski, p.64.

William Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Gill (1984), p. 602.

ibid, p. 603.

16 Forgetting

See ‘Botticelli Recovered’ above, and E. H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (1970).

Terence Cave, Recognitions: A Study in Poetics (1988), p. 212.

Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot (1984), pp. 7, 104, 108, 226 – 7.

John Butt and Kathleen Tillotson, Dickens at Work (1957), edn of 1968, pp. 21, 30 – 32, 141 – 2, 145 – 6.

Patricia McFate and Bruce Goffers list errors in ‘The Good Soldier: a tragedy of despair’, Modern Fiction Studies 9 (1963-4); others are noted by R. A. Cassell, Ford Madox Ford: A Study of his Novels (1961), and C. Ohmann, Ford Madox Ford (1964). Since this essay was written the matter has been fruitfully discussed in Martin Stannard’s edition of the novel (1995) and in Max Saunders’ biography (2 vols, 1996).

Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. K. Blamey and D. Pellauer, vol. 3 (1988), p. 189.

F. C. Bartlett, Remembering: a Study in Experimental and Social Psychology (1932).

Bartlett, (edn of 1967), Chapters viii, xiv, xv.

P. N. Johnson-Laird, The Computer and the Mind: an Introduction to Cognitive Science (1988), alludes to Bartlett, and cites a study by Ulric Neisser in which John Dean’s memories of pre-Watergate conversations are compared with the record of the tapes. Dean got the gists but lost the non-gist detail. Johnson-Laird remarks that ‘the activity of any single unit [in a set of connected inputs] is relatively unimportant. If it malfunctions or is destroyed, the system will not be drastically impaired’ (p. 181). This is what happens when novelists are forgetful in what we think of as trivial matters, as in some of the examples above.

Rodolphe Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (1986), pp. 264 – 5.

Jacques Derrida, On Grammatology, trans. G. C. Spivak (1976), p. 18. See the interesting discussion of Derrida’s attitude to the Nietzschean concept of forgetfulness (‘there could be no present without forgetfulness’) in the Preface, pp. xxx-xxxiii.

Karlheinz Stierle, ‘The Reading of fiction texts’, in S. R. Suleiman and Inge Crosman, ed., The Reader in the Text (1980), pp. 83 – 105; Wolfgang Iser, ibid., pp. 106 – 119; S. Chatman, Story and Discourse (1978), pp. 41 – 2.

Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction (1965) [1921], pp. 35, 197.

S/Z (1971), p. 18. (I have consulted the translation of Richard Miller (1974, p. 10) but have felt it necessary to translate rather more freely.)

Annette Lavers, Roland Barthes (1982), p. 200.

Le Plaisir du texte (1973), p. 15. And see Stephen Heath, Vertige du deplacement (1974), pp. 155 – 6.

Of Grammatology, p. 158; Positions (1981), p. 63.

R. Scholes, ‘Deconstruction and communication’, Critical Inquiry, 14, Winter 1988, pp. 278 – 95; John M. Ellis, ‘What does deconstruction contribute? ’ New Literary History, 19, Winter 1988, pp. 259 – 79.

Standard Edition, vi (1960), pp. 46 – 7; vii (1953), pp. 174 – 6.

‘Introduction à l’analyse structurale des récits’, Communications 8 (1966), p. 27.

18 Literary Criticism: Old and New Styles

The anecdote is taken from Michael H. Kater, Composers of the Nazi Era (2000).

See D. J. Gordon’s fine essay, ‘Name and Fame: Shakespeare’s Coriolanus’, in S. Orgel (ed.), The Renaissance Imagination: Essays and Lectures by D. J. Gordon (1975), pp. 203 – 19.

Greenblatt, Learning to Curse (1990), pp. 80 – 88.

‘The History of the Anecdote’, in H. Aram Veeser (ed.), The New Historicism (1989), p. 52.

A Critic’s Journey, 1958-1998: Literary Reflections (1999), p. 227.

D. P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic, from Ficino to Campanella (1958), p. 80.

Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays (1992), pp. 130 – 64.

19 Shakespeare and Boito

The Ultimate Art (1992), p. 216. Littlejohn has interesting observations on the pathology of jealous murderers. ‘I think much of the potential power of this role is related to the precision with which his behavior conforms not only to actual cases, but to what Freud saw as a near-universal impulse in normal people – in Othello’s case, an impulse yielded to so spectacularly that our own healthily repressed instincts may well be touched’ (p. 220).

I am indebted to Marvin Rosenberg’s The Masks of Othello (1961).

Possibly Trollope was touched in the way Littlejohn says is common. Victoria Glendinning remarks that he repeatedly quotes Brabantio’s words about Desdemona forsaking ‘the curled darlings of our nation’ for Othello’s ‘sooty bosom’ (Trollope) (1992), p. 29).

Information again from Rosenberg.

Opera as Drama, edn of 1986, p. 137.

‘Affections’ in the strong contemporary sense of ‘passions’.

In A. Groos and R. Parker, Reading Opera (1988), pp. 12 – 59; J. Budden, The Operas of Verdi, 3 vols (1981); M. Conati and M. Medici ed., The Verdi-Boito Correspondence, trans. and introduced by W. Weaver (1994), p. 89; J. A. Hepokoski, Giuseppe Verdi: Otello (1987), p. 25 and Reading Opera.

E. A. J. Honigmann, (Arden edn, 1997), p. 351.

The Verdi – Boito Correspondence, p. 63.

Ibid., p. 75.

Hepokoski, Otello, p. 104. Verdi stresses the high importance of clear diction, and says ‘in that part it is necessary neither to sing nor to raise one’s voice (save for a few exceptions)’.

See Gary Schmidgal, Shakespeare and Opera (Oxford, 1990), p. 245.

Kerman, p. 127.

Or, it would be proper to add, cut from the first.

E. A. J. Honigmann (Arden edn, 1997), p. 291.