The difference between Poe's and [Paul] Valéry's theory of notes—between a theory that emphasizes the nonsensical unpredictability of notes and a theory that discovers in notes the essential logic not only of all reading but of the mind itself—cannot be resolved. To some extent, perhaps, it derives from a conflict between two genres: marginalia, and the marginal gloss. Marginalia—traces left in a book—are wayward in their very nature; they spring up spontaneously around a text unaware of their presence. Nor could (...) they have been considered publishable until the Romantic period had encouraged a taste for fragments and impulses, the suggestive part rather than the ordered whole. Significantly the term was introduced by Coleridge, that great master of the fragment; and Poe himself was the first author ever to publish his marginalia. The charm of such notes depends on their being on the edge: the borders of intelligibility or consciousness . The reader catches an author off his guard, intercepting a thought that may scarcely have risen to formulation. At their best, marginalia can haunt us like a few passing words overheard in the street; all the more precious because the context remains unknown. Lawrence Lipking, professor of English and comparative literature at Princeton University, is the author of The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England and coeditor of Modern Literary Criticism 1900-1970. Some of the material in this article is drawn from a book currently in progress, The Poet-Critics, a study of the relations between poetry and criticism in the work of authors who have excelled in both. "Arguing with Shelly" appeared in the Winter 1979 issue of Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

In the beginning was an aborted word. The first example of a woman’s literary criticism in Western tradition, or more accurately the first miscarriage of a woman’s criticism, occurs early in the Odyssey. High in her room above the hall of suitors, Penelope can hear a famous minstrel sing that most painful of stories, the Greek homecoming from Troy—significantly, the matter of the Odyssey itself. That is no song for a woman. She comes down the stairs to protest. “Phêmios, other (...) spells you know, high deeds of gods and heroes, as the poets tell them; let these men hear some other, while they sit silent and drink their wine. But sing no more this bitter tale that wears my heart away. It opens in me again the wound of longing For one incomparable, ever in my mind— His fame all Hellas knows, and midland Argos.”It seems a reasonable request. But her words meet an immediate brutal rebuff from an unexpected source: her own son Telemachus. “Mother, why do you grudge our own dear minstrel Joy of song, wherever his thought may lead? Poets are not to blame, but Zeuswho gives what fate he pleases to adventurous men.Here is no reason for reproof: to singthe news of the Danaans! Men like besta song that rings like morning on the ear.But you must nerve yourself and try to listen.Odysseus was not the only one at Troynever to know the day of his homecoming.Others, how many others, lost their lives!”9Men like to hear the news; women must learn not to take songs so personally! And Penelope gives in. Marveling at the wisdom of her son, she goes back to her room and cries herself to sleep.Telemachus’ words do not seem very much to the point. Penelope had not asked Phêmios to stop singing, after all, or to sing something fit for women; she only asked him to choose some other adventure. And to reproach her for not considering that others besides Odysseus had failed to come home seems irrelevant as well as cruel. The fact that others feel pain is hardly a reason for her not to feel it. Penelope cannot bear even to name her husband, but Telemachus seems to take pleasure in saying “Odysseus.” By proclaiming his own indifference to pain, he argues just like a man. And that, of course, is the point. The scene has been contrived exactly to show his new maturity. He proves himself no longer a boy in the time-honored fashion, by rejecting any tenderness of heart and by putting down a woman. Henceforth he will be equal to the suitors. Lawrence Lipking is Chester D. Tripp Professor of Humanities at Northwestern University and director of the program in comparative literature and theory. He is the author of The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England and The Life of the Poet, which won the Christian Gauss Award of Phi Beta Kappa in 1982. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are “The Marginal Glass” and “Arguing with Shelly” . The present essay was originally given as a lecture at the School of Criticism and Theory in the summer of 1982. It is part of a book, Abandoned Women and Poetic Tradition, which is to appear in 1984. (shrink)

Now Shelly should be allowed a word. The way I have formulated the problem, he reminds me, suffers from glibness if not actual misrepresentation; above all in my tendency to equate artistic ends with artistic conventions. I accuse him of rigidity, yet define the western far more rigidly than he would do, even to the point of suggesting that a novel with real Indians in it would no longer be a western. Generic laws are not so arbitrary. The end of (...) a work of art, as he understands it, cannot be located merely in some set of formal requirements or reproducible actions . We do not make works of art by satisfying a checklist of conventions. Rather, the ends obeyed by a work of art—a concrete whole—derive from the total effect that it tries to achieve. In a well-constructed piece of fiction, every element, including the ethical statements and implied moral judgments, contributes to and is subordinate to that total effect. Hence the seeming contradiction between artistic ends and moral means turns out, on analysis, to be illusory. An artistic end can accommodate any degree of moral complexity, even ethical ambiguities and contradictions, so long as they help shape the whole. Even Blifil could have been a richly complex character, if Fielding had wanted him to be, so long as his complexity had been made functional to the desired effect of Tom Jones. Only incompetent or convention-bound novelists find themselves compelled to make insincere judgments. A good novelist learns to advance his ends by every means, from his most outrageous leaps of the imagination to his most subtle ethical discriminations. If a good novel communicates some tension or internal contradictions, we have no right to conclude that such an effect was forced on the novelist against his will. Perhaps that tension manifests or articulates the author's most sincere and profound moral convictions. Lawrence Lipking, Chester Tripp Professor of the Humanities at Northwestern University, is the author of The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England and coeditor of Modern Literary Criticism 1900-1970. He is currently completing a work dealing with poetic careers, which is to be included in a larger project, The Poet-Critics, and is studying the literary tradition of "abandoned women." His previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, "The Marginal Gloss," appeared in the Summer 1977 issue. (shrink)