A third useful tool in generic interpretation is John Frows re-synthesis of rhetorical and

literary theories of genre into the triad theme-form-rhetoric. Frow (2006) identifies itself as an
Introduction to genre theory and has distinct introductory features (though not the one of
being easily read). Like other volumes in the New Critical Idiom series it is, however, also
more than an introduction as it contains a number of distinct and original
13 World is mentioned as a genre concept in the introduction in this volume (p. xiv,
xvi).
GENRE AND 172
claims about genre theory. In one of the books most productive parts, Frow
distinguishes these three aspects of genre. Theme is what is being said in the genre, form
is how it is being said, and rhetoric is how the genre communicates with its receiver. While
at first glance this seems a fairly simple way to describe genre, Frow makes two important
additional points about the relationship among theme, form and rhetoric: first, that at any
given time each of the three may function as the central concept, subordinating the other two
as functions of itself; and second, that at any given point where one of the three is present,
each of the other two will always be included. Frows use of the concept rhetoric must be
distinguished from uses of the same term in other contexts. Here rhetoric is defined not as
persuasion or effective communication, but much more as interchange between the utterances
within a genre and the surrounding culture. This communication is not extrinsic to the genre,
but is an inherent part of it: it arises in the interplay between the structure of expectation
connected to the genre and what is actually uttered. While Frows triadic account does
incorporate a rhetorical understanding of genres as formalized responses structured on
recurrent situations as derived from Miller (1984), it deemphasizes the fundamental concept
of the exigence and the corresponding focus on the rhetorical situation of genres. For this
reason, Frow gives the thematic and formal structures in genres equal weight with the
rhetorical. Frow thus fuses a literary and a rhetorical approach.14
The classification and hierarchical taxonomy of genres is not a neutral and 'objective'
procedure. There are no undisputed 'maps' of the system of genres within any medium
(though literature may perhaps lay some claim to a loose consensus). Furthermore, there is
often considerable theoretical disagreement about the definition of specific genres. 'A genre is
ultimately an abstract conception rather than something that exists empirically in the world,'
notes Jane Feuer (1992, 144). One theorist's genre may be another's sub-genre or even supergenre (and indeed what is technique, style, mode, formula or thematic grouping to one may be
treated as a genre by another). Themes, at least, seem inadequate as a basis for defining genres
since, as David Bordwell notes, 'any theme may appear in any genre' (Bordwell 1989, 147).
Chandler genre 1
. Swales also alludes to people having 'repertoires of genres' (Swales 1990, 58),
chandler 3
In this century, Northrop Frye followed a similar approach, contending that the basis of
generic distinctions appears to be the radical of presentation. Frye identified four such
radicals oral (epos), literature (fiction), drama, and lyric, the last a sort of
accidental overhearing. Subcategories of these larger groups he called forms, identifying

tales, novels, oratorical prose, and narrative poetry as forms.[24] Although the biblical texts
overlap the oral and literary radicals, they may be placed within Fryes fiction category,
because this is the only form in which they are now accessible for examination.
"The dilemma of genre history is the dilemma of all history: i.e., in order to discover the
scheme of reference (in this case, the genre) we must study the history; but we cannot study
the history without having in mind some scheme of selection." p. 260. 3
"Genre should be conceived, we think, as a grouping of literary works based,
theoretically, upon both outer form (specic metre or structure) and also upon inner form
(attitude, tone, purposemore crudely, subject and audience). The ostensible basis may be
one or the other (e.g., pastoral and satire for the inner form: dipodic verse and Pindaric ode
for the outer); but the critical problem will then be to nd the other dimension, to complete
the diagram. Wellek, R., Warren, A. (1956) Theory of Literature. New York: Harcourt, Brace
& World p. 231
Fishelov, D. (1993). Metaphors of Genre: The Role of Analogies in Genre Theory.
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press
Fowler, A. (1982). Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and
Modes. Oxford: Clarendon Press
Beebee, T. O. (1994). The Ideology of Genre: A Comparative Study of Generic
Instability. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press
Fictional and thematic serve to separate the four genres into two distinct groups. Under
the first category Frye locates drama and prose fiction; and under the second, epos and lyric.
Prose forms which are more thematic than fictional, like oratorical prose, and verse forms
which are more fictional than thematic, like the purely narrative poem, take their respective
places in the dichotomy (AC, 243).
Frye's programme of 'archetypal criticism' involves the attempt to extend 'the kind of
comparative and morphological study now made of folk tales and ballads into the rest of
literature',42 but it is his account of pre-generic structures - the four primal narrative types or
mythoi he calls tragedy, comedy, romance and irony - rather than his 'theory of genres' as such
(that is, his treatment of literary forms in their rhetorical dimension) that proved so influential
in Anglo-American criticism of the 1960s and 1970s. As far as genre theory per se is
concerned, the real value of his work lies in his demonstration of the sheer complexity of the
process by which literary forms originate and develop, and his illuminating hypothesis that
such structures evolve through different degrees or stages of literariness (Frye identifies five
such stages: myth, romance, high mimetic, low mimetic, ironic). To comprehend this process
in anything like its full complexity requires an alertness not only to the technical possibilities
and constraints of a given literary medium, but also to an enormous range of other
psychological, historical and anthropological factors. Frye's ability to move between these
different levels of explanation is well illustrated by the celebrated account of romance from
his Anatomy of Criticism (1957), which appears below (Chapter 6). 13 duff
Altman (1999: 14) sees the concept of genre in film theory working as a blueprint, as a
structure, as a label, and as a contract regulating relations with audience (Frow 2005: 52).
[E]very text that we recognise as a text either conforms to the conventions of a
particular genre or deforms generic convention. (Kent : 1988, p. 16). Chapman 616

The Modernist movement brought a new assault on the classical ideas of genre.
Modernism created new models, in rejecting the practice and theory of preceding writers, but
refused to accept set models. The novelists extended the uncertainty about fiction as a genre
by their exploration of themes untreated before. The stream of consciousness technique
opened wider the question of authorial voice, as characters were allowed to respond from their
inner worlds instead of being brought into the objective narrative by authorial statement.
Joyce in particular emphasised the abdication of the author in a famous passage: The artist,
like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork,
invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails. (Joyce : 1916, p. 245)
Joyce made a radical challenge to novelistic technique with the inclusion in Ulysses of a
section in dramatic form, and further by the dream sequence of Finnegans Wake. New voices
in poetry also subverted the subtleties of genre. Any identification of the poetic voice with
that of the author was killed by Eliot's dramatic monologues, which concealed the poet more
effectively than the earlier work of Tennyson and Browning in this style. Yet the Romantic
ideal of the lyrically intense moment was echoed in the concern of the Imagists for specific
and direct communication of experience. The old genre categories, already dethroned from
their prescriptive authority, largely ceased to be regarded as even usefully descriptive, though
readers and reviewers continued to use them. Revisionists could appeal to the radical monism
of Benedetto Croce, which resulted in the most forceful attack on traditional genres. Literature
was a whole genre in itself, in which each work was unique and defied further categorisation.
620 chapman
621Frye then went his own way by identifying a new set of literary genres : comedy,
romance, tragedy, satire which would be found to correspond with human response to the four
seasons of the year. The theory was part of his belief in a great Urmythos which lay behind all
human culture. It was the response that mattered ; aesthetic values could be set aside. The
question of response which Frye raised leads to the most significant recent genre studies.
First, though, two current ways of treating genre may be
622 RAYMOND CHAPMAN
briefly considered. One is in effect a reversion to the Victorian taste for sub- categories
of the novel. New descriptive terms are sought for books which are similar in approach and
content. We have the feminist novel, the post-colonial novel, the Utopian novel. This is not
true genre-criticism, but rather a convenient way of grouping texts which have a common
appeal. The campus novel is not a sub-genre, any more than the Victorian Church novel .
Yet this proliferation of labels has usefully drawn attention to the coming of new types of text,
often crossing the established boundaries. How can we characterise the novels of authors like
Truman Capote and Angela Carter who combine fact and fiction in the same book ? What of
the fiction written by C. S Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and Charles Williams, which introduced
into regular narrative form elements of fantasy with a theological purpose ? Is the fantasy
novel a true sub-genre ? Is fantasy a genre or a method within a genre ? These are the sorts
of question which critics of the present time have to address. Particularising by subject, or by
the individuation of the author as in the Black American novel, may be useful but it does not
add greatly to the theory of genres. The author, sidelined by Modernism, returns as the
apparent determinant of genre. Secondly, the well-tried traditional categories which developed
from the Aristotelian model - poetry, drama, the novel - have been given new life. In many

university literature syllabuses genre courses supplemented or replaced the traditional period
course. The practice has been widespread in England from the 1960s, coinciding with the
foundation of many new universities after the Robbins Report. One determining factor was
probably the contempt for literary history in revolt against the Oxford and Cambridge
schools which were accused, particularly the former, of teaching facts rather than developing
responses. The charge was not wholly justified, but it had its effect. The general ambition of
new schools of English to depart from tradition was influential. The result was a spate of
courses on the Novel, Tragedy, Autobiography and so on. The danger inherent in genre
courses is obvious : a chosen form can be studied without full regard for its place in the total
literary output of its times. The comparative status of a form at any given time, and its sharing
of influences with other genres, can be overlooked. This need not happen, but it often did.
Nevertheless, concentration on a genre certainly helped to sharpen students' critical response,
and when taken together with period courses often produced a well-balanced syllabus. It
might have been expected that Post-modernism would follow and complete the iconoclasm of
the Modernists, denying all categories, all shared suppositions about literature. Certainly the
Crocean assault on the whole notion of genre has found new advocates, such as Maurice
Blanchot ; his position is unequivocal : A book no longer belongs to a genre ; every book
stems from literature alone, as if literature held in advance, in their generalities, the secrets
and the formulas that alone make it possible to give to what is written the reality of a book. It
would be thus as though, the genres having faded away, literature were asserting itself alone
in the mysterious clarity that it propagates and that each literary creation sends back,
multiplied - as if, then, there were an essence of literature. (Blanchot : 1959, pp. 243-244)
CHANGING PERSPECTIVES IN GENRE THEORY 623
However, a more positive approach has been made by critics who in other ways would
reject most of the classical critical criteria. Post-modernist repudiation of categories and
connections requires the reader to see things afresh, without presupposition. With the growth
of reader-response criticism, response has taken on a less esoteric significance than Frye gave
it, and it is here that we may find the most valuable current approaches to genre. The
emphasis now is not on the prescriptions which may guide and constrain the author, but on the
expectations of the reader, whose approach to a text can be helped in recognition and
discrimination. A great deal of work has been and is being done ; in this, as in other aspects of
literary criticism, the sheer bulk of work exceeds the accumulated writings of the past and
defies detailed analysis. It may, however, be possible to identify some ideas which are likely
to be important for the future of genre theory. A clear statement of the reader-response
approach has been made by H. R. Jauss : The theory of literary genres is at the point of
seeking a path between the Scylla of nominalist scepticism that allows for only a posteriori
classifications, and the Charybdis of regression into timeless typographies, a path in which the
historicization of genre poetics and of the concept of form are upheld. (Jauss : 1982, p. 78)
Jauss recognises, as many in this and earlier centuries have done, that genres are
continually developing as new literary forms appear : The new text evokes for the reader
(listener) the horizon of expectations and rules of the genre familiar to him from earlier
texts, which as such can them be varied, extended, corrected, but also transformed, crossed
out, or simply reproduced. (Jauss : 1982, p. 88)

the relationship between the makers and audiences of texts (a rhetorical dimension). To
varying extents, the formal features of genres establish the relationship between producers and
interpreters. Indeed, in relation to mass media texts Andrew Tolson redefines genre as 'a
category which mediates between industry and audience' (Tolson 1996, 92). Note that such
approaches undermine the definition of genres as purely textual types, which excludes any
reference even to intended audiences. A basic model underlying contemporary media theory is
a triangular relationship between the text, its producers and its interpreters. From the
perspective of many recent commentators, genres first and foremost provide frameworks
within which texts are produced and interpreted. Semiotically, a genre can be seen as a shared
code between the producers and interpreters of texts included within it. Alastair Fowler goes
so far as to suggest that 'communication is impossible without the agreed codes of genre'
(Fowler 1989, 216).
Chandler, D. (1997) An Introduction to Genre Theory [online] URL
http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/intgenre/intgenre.html [28.08.2015]
Henry James affirmed in 1908 that literary kinds are the very life of literature (Duff
2014:1).
Wolf-Dieter Stempel goes even farther in emphasising the critical role of the reader.
Generic aspects of a text are established by the reader ; reception is itself a generic process
which produces semiotically a new genre configuration. From the very beginnings of the
novel, readers have been confronted by mixed genres which defy old expectations and create
new ones : the line stretches from Sterne to Joyce and beyond. (Stempel : 1979, pp. 353-362).
This is an insight of the greatest importance, shared in various ways by other critics. If genre
is regarded as semiotic and indicative rather than predetermined, the reader is both liberated
and given new responsibility. Literature, perhaps, is a whole genre which can be infinitely
sub-divided as reader-expectations are satisfied or disappointed. In that case, no text is too
deviant, too experimental, to be accommodated. Tzvetan Todorov maintains that literariness the property that allows us to distinguish a literary text from a subliterary or popular one -is
really our intuitive ability to recognize genre categories. (Todorov : 1977, p. 43). Frederic
Jameson has approached the question by working from speech-act theory. Genres can be
regarded as essentially literary institutions or social contracts between a writer and a
specific public, whose function is to specify the proper use of a particular cultural artifact .
The signals of speech must, in written
624 RAYMOND CHAPMAN
literature, be replaced by other conventions. To relate to readers today, traditional genres
have to be regarded as a brand-name system against which any authentic artistic expression
must necessarily struggle ...old generic theories persist in the half-light of the subliterary
genres of mass culture . (Jameson : 1981, pp. 106- 107). Reader-sophistication has advanced
in the past half-century : not that readers in the past were lacking in either intelligence or
critical perception, but simply that more objective knowledge, more ideas and theories, are
brought to the act of reading. Even the most determined Post-modernist has to recognise that
no one comes to the act of reading with the mind as a tabula rasa. There is more potential
interference with literary response than ever before, a fact recognised by Northrop Frye :
[L]iterary experience is only the visible tip of the verbal iceberg : below it is a subliminal area
of rhetorical response, addressed by advertising, social assumptions, and casual conversation,

that literature as such, on however popular a level of movie or television or comic book, can
hardly reach. (Frye : 1976, p. 167)
Extra-textual awareness is bound to react with the givens of the text ; if response is
sensitive, the reaction will be itself a creative act in which genre- expectations will be
instrumental. This raises the question of synchronie and diachronic elements in the formation
of genre. A genre is displayed in a corpus of texts at any given time, but also has its place in a
developing series : to which Propp perhaps did not give sufficient attention. This use of
Saussure's linguistic distinction, has been observed by Jauss and Barthes among others, and is
clearly put by Kent : The synchronie dimension of a genre reflects the fixed elements of a text
that correspond to certain reader expectations ; the diachronic dimension corresponds to the
cultural baggage, the ideology, values, fears, and beliefs -the heteroglossia to employ
Bakhtin's term - that every genre incorporates and that every reader brings to the text. (Kent :
1986, p. 146)
Jauss too explains that previous experience is inseparable from judgement of a new
text : The new text evokes for the reader (listener) the horizon of expectations and rules
familiar from earlier texts, which are then varied, corrected, altered, or even just reproduced.
Variation and correction determine the scope, whereas alterations and reproduction determine
the border of a genre-structure. (Jauss : 1982, p. 23)
Paul Hernadi makes a similar distinction, drawing on the classical genre of tragedy for
illustration : Concepts of drama or tragedy make us see literature as a synchronie order of
coexisting works ; such concepts stress the similarity between Oedipus the King and Macbeth
at the expense of the historical difference between them. On the other hand, the diachronic
sequence in which literary works are read and interpreted has considerable impact on genre
CHANGING PERSPECTIVES IN GENRE THEORY 625 concepts : our conscious or
unformulated idea of tragedy partly relies on the nature of our acquaintance with Oedipus the
King yet our understanding of the play partly relies on the ideas of tragedy which we have
derived from our previous literary experience. (Hemadi : 1970, p. 2) This is important, and
neglect of the difference and interconnection between novelty and experience has been
responsible for much unnecessary controversy. Conservative critics have too often approached
new work with prescriptive genre rules derived solely from past performance. The more
radical have not always recognised that a genre is not superseded when its boundaries are
extended ; a sort of family resemblance may well reconcile old and new. It may be added that
visual impression may precede close reading. The shape of a sonnet, or the regularity of
traditional metre as distinct from the irregular pattern of free verse, will bring past
expectations into present encounter. Roland Barthes offers a more holistic model, combining
synchrony and diachrony. He sees a genre as a set of literary codes which may alter from one
period to another but will at any time be implicitly shared by the author and the reader. Such
constructive collusion makes possible the writing of a text and allows the author either to
follow or to subvert the convention. As a structuralist critic, he predictably looks to a set of
relationships by which texts may be understood : traditional genres do not cover new
complexity : [I]t is possible that the historical significance of modern literature will become
apparent only when it is possible to group together, for example, Sartre, Brecht, abstract
literature and even structuralism as so many variations on a single idea. (Barthes : 1964, p.
261)

Thomas O. Beebee, defining genre as the "use-value" of texts, in part applies what Bakhtin
claims for speech genres to written genres. For Beebee, "primarily, genre is the precondition
for the creation and the reading of texts" (250), because genre provides the ideological context
in which a text and its participants function and attain cultural value. Genres, in other words,
embody texts with use-value (7)- "a text's genre is its use-value. Genre gives us not
understanding in the abstract and passive sense but use in the pragmatic and active sense"
(14). This use-value is socially determined and so makes genres in part bearers and
reproducers of culture- in short, ideological. In turn, genres are what make texts ideological,
endowing them with a social use-value. As ideological concepts or categories, then, genres
delimit all language-not just poetic language-into what Beebee calls the "possibilities of its
usage," transforming language from a denotative to a connotative level (278). Philippe Gardy
describes this transformation as a "movement of actualization" in which "brute information"
or the "brute 'facts' of discourse" (denotation) become actualized as "ideological information"
(connotation) (qtd. in Beebee 278). So genre is an "actualizer" of discourse, transforming
general discourse into a socially recognized and meaningful text by endowing it with what
Foucault calls a mode of being or existence. It is genre, thus, that gives a text a social reality.
Beebee concludes, "The relation of the text to the 'real' is in fact established by our
willingness to place it generically, which amounts to our willingness to ideologically
appropriate its brute information" (278). Because genres function on an ideological level,
constituting discursive reality, they operate as conceptual schemes that also constitute how we
negotiate our way through discursive reality as producers and consumers of texts. Barwashi
350 Bawarshi, A. (2000) The Genre Function. College English, vol. 62, nr. 3 (January 2000).
pp. 335-360

Rosmarin: Let us begin with Gombrich's thesis that all art, even that which strives to conceal
this fact, begins with a schema. Thus when we make a snowman we "work the snow and
balance the shapes till we recognize a man. The pile of snow provides us with the first
schema, which we correct until it satisfies our minimum definition" (p. 100). The point,
repeated throughout Art and Illusion, is that images are not made from nothing: one has to
begin somewhere, with something. More than anything else, this emphasis on starting places,
particularly on their pragmatic definition, signals Gombrich's rhetoricity .3S Rather than
beginning with an object of knowledge and a transparent medium, Gombrich's maker begins
with a mound of snow, a blot, a circle, a patternbook/?#o, or, as Gombrich generally terms
the starting place, a "schema." The maker then "proceeds through the rhythms of schema and
correction" (p. 74), working to match or fit this beginning to something not itself. The
"distinctive features" of this something "are entered, as it were, upon a pre-existing blank or
formulary. And, as often happens with blanks, if they have no provisions for certain kinds of
information we consider essential, it is just too bad for the information" (p. 73). Here as
virtually throughout Art and Illusion Gombrich grants constitutive power to the schema. Our
intuitive sense, of course, is not schematic but a posteriori or inductive. We seem always to be
responding to the particulars before us: any generalization seems to be caused by those
particulars and to happen after our response. The attraction of the representational language is

in large part due to its "fit" with this intuition. But Gombrich here joins many post-Kantian
thinkers in arguing that we actually begin with the schema or generalization and then perform
its "correction": "Neither in thought nor in perception do we learn to generalize. We learn to
particularize, to articulate, to make distinction where before there was only an undifferentiated
mass" (pp. 100-101). Indeed, "All thinking is sorting, classifying" (p. 301). The idea is
counterintuitive, deductive, pragmatic, and, in a word, rhetorical. It is no accident that LA.
Richards in The Philosophy of Rhetoric argues the same thesis: "a rhetorical theorem of
meaning holds that we begin with the general abstract anything, split it ... into sorts and then
arrive at concrete particulars by the overlapping or common membership of these sorts."36
Nor is it accidental that this thesis condenses to the same words: "all thinking ... is sorting."37
The explanatory power of the schema, of thinking by sorting, is enormous: it enables the art
historian to plot a history of art, even illusionistic art. Analo
A THEORETICAL INTRODUCTION 15
gously, it enables the literary critic to plot a history of critical readings. In the case of any
particular text, it enables him to give reasoned accounts not only of our disagreements (the
critics have used different schemata) but of that more elusive phenomenon, our agreement
(they have used the same schemata).38 But placing constitutive power in the schema alone
always leaves us unable to explain why one schema is used and not another. It also leaves us
unable to explain how and why schemata change over time, and how and why the schema is
changed in the process of making a particular painting or explanation, how and why it is
"matched" to the not-itself. The important question raised by this explanatory muteness is
whether there is something yet more powerfully determining than the schema, a yet more
basic a priori something that determines its choice and use. The representational thinker
would answer "yes" to this question, but Gombrich answers pragmatically and rhetorically.
We begin, he tells us, with a purpose or, in his word, a function. And just as making comes
before matching, function comes before formnot, as our intuition tells us, the other way
around. According to Gombrich, the painter's eye is first on his audience and what he would
convince them of, then on his schema, and only finally on his object. A rhetoric of visual
representation imagines him as asking himself: What do I want my beholder's experience of
this landscape to be like? What schema will best enable me to create this experience? How
and how far shall I modify it? And just as the maker of a snowman does not make from
nothing, Gombrich's painter does not answer his questions in a vacuum. He answers in a
context: choosing from among the various received schemata at his disposal, calculating
where what Hans Robert Jauss calls the "horizon" of reception lies, deciding how far he can
and would move it with his particular design. But doesn't this answer beg the question? Does
it not simply replace a precise schema with the amorphous schema currently called "context"?
Only if we fail to recognize that "context" is itself a terminological tool, which serves a
distinct but limited critical purpose: it tells us what is or was possible, not what is or was
done. Put otherwise, it is an effective way of reminding ourselves that in any given situation
the so-called determining variables number themselves into indeterminacy, that the painter
and the critic alike have innumerable topics to paint or say and innumerable ways of painting
or saying them. "Context" is not, however, an effective way of discussing either choice of
topic or choice of terms: why, for example, Picasso painted the bombing of Guernica or Miller
wrote about Wuthering Heights, why one painted in cubist terms or the other wrote in

deconstructionist terms.39 What we explain and how we explain it are always contextual
questions, but they are questions that can only be asked by context, never answered. In part
this is so because "context" can never be sufficiently specified to compose an answer with
power to persuade.40 More importantly, it is so because the answer is made by a person, not
by an essence or schema.
16 A THEORETICAL INTRODUCTION
This point raises the second constituent of Gombrich's three-way conflict: the painter's or
critic's act. A rhetoric of visual representation would reconcile a powerful schema with an
active interpreter thus: by conceiving that interpreter as knowingly choosing his schema and
conceiving that choice as determined by his painterly or critical purpose, as is his subsequent
modification of the schema, his "matching" it to the not-itself. His choice is constraining, but
it is itself constrained by this purpose rather than by an essence or schema below or beyond.
And if his text is rigorously reasoned from a powerful premise, his painting or argument will
strike us as true. In other words, this truth, which is another name for our conviction, is less a
consequence of a text's actual correspondence to or grounding in the not-itself than of its
maker's reasoning being both consistent and comprehensive. In Gombrich's words, the
"correct portrait" is like the "useful map": "It is not a faithful record of a visual experience but
the faithful construction of a relational model" (p. 90). In literary studies this truth amounts to
the critical text's dramatized capacity to solve an interpretive problem, to construct a
"relational model" that works. It is a "useful map" that gets us to our goal. But because the
goal of criticism so frequently involves laying out the literary text's particularity, this map
must meet not only the requirement of coherence but the additional requirement of
complexity. That is, we value the critical or explaining text much as we value the literary or
explained text: in terms of its order, which, as is increasingly noted, may be a calculated or
"uncanny" disorder, and its richness of substance, its power to make us "see" matter to which
we were previously blind. But does not such "seeing" imply the prior existence of this matter,
whether it be in the text or in its interpretive history? This question raises the third constituent
of the conflict, namely, "matching," and a rhetoric of visual representation answersor
should answerthat the priority of the represented matter is not actual but apparent, an
appearance that is a triumph not of antecedent matter but of suasive technique. Yet this
answer, despite its obviousness, has in theoretical practice proven exceedingly difficult to
give. The Kantian tradition provides a way of defending the schematic nature of
interpretation, and the rhetorical tradition, beginning with Aristotle's premise that "rhetoric
may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of
persuasion," provides a way of defending the pragmatism of interpretation.41 But the
theoretical defense of representation for its own or pleasure's sake must always, at least
implicitly, do battle with Plato. For this reason but also because it seems to fit our inductive
intuition, the notion of "matching" presents the greatest obstacle to a three-way reconciliation.
Demystifying this intuition requires prolonged analytic attention, as does replacing this
intuition with another: that all representation is inevitably incomplete and trace-laden, that the
face made with pencil and paper can never repeat the face matched because we can neither
eliminate the trace of the very pencil
A THEORETICAL INTRODUCTION 17

used to draw, nor add the dimension of depth, nor repeat each of thousands of hairs and pores.
The "made" face must always in practice be trace-laden ("pencilish" and "paperish") and
incomplete (too flat, lacking in some of all possible detail). And if we think about it, this
"made" face must even in theory be a "mistake." While it would seem that the more perfect a
representation the less its ambiguity, in actuality the perfection of representation constitutes
not the elimination of ambiguity but its guarantee: to take a painting of a particular face as
that face is to mistake it for that face. As Gombrich notes, the successful trompe I'oeil is "the
height of visual ambiguity. It is a multicolored canvas that we can interpret as a dining table"
(p. 276). And the successful verbal representation is no less a triumph of ambiguity: when we
read Browning's "My Last Duchess" we seem to hear the Duke speaking and tend to forget
that he and his speech are themselves spoken or, to be precise, written. The words on the page
have convinced us, however provisionally, that they are what they seem. We "mistake" them
for what they are not. Thus does the unexpected deviousness of theoretical fulfillment (the
better the representation, the greater its ambiguity) join the manifest impossibility of practical
fulfillment (the representation is always imperfect) to suggest that the illusionist's goal is
never actual matching but always apparent matching. Always gesturing toward the not-itself
and striving to convince its audience that that gesture is a grasp, visual representation is
asking its audience to entertain a paradox: that the face beheld or the text read is
simultaneously itself and not-itself, both what it is and what it seems. This paradox creates
problems even for the realist, who places constitutive power in the face: achieving his goal is
impossible practically and self-subverting theoretically. But the problem of the idealist, who
places constitutive power in the schema, is worse: if his matching is actual then some or all of
that power must reside not in the schema but in the particular. Gombrich's rhetoric of visual
representation wrestles with and very nearly resolves this conflict. He explains that while the
schema can never be perfectly corrected to match the particular, it can be sufficiently
corrected. The painter thus corrects his beginning schema until, as in Courbet's Man with the
Leather Belt, his painting looks like a face, the poet his couplets until, as in Browning's "My
Last Duchess," his poem sounds like someone speaking, the critic his premises until, as in
Miller's reading of Wuthering Heights, his explanation convinces us that it is a more "total
accounting" of that novel than is any previous explanation.42 A representationalist would in
theory argue that we stop correcting only when a full and trace-free representation has been
achieved, when solid ground has been reached. Even in theory, however, a rhetorician readily
acknowledges that this contextless goal is impossible and that this impossibility is finally
beside the point. For the stopping place depends not upon the image's accuracy but upon its
function, upon what it would do or how it would affect its audience. An anatomy drawing
accordingly requires much correction of the
18 A THEORETICAL INTRODUCTION
beginning schema, a voodoo doll very little: "The test of an image is not its likeness but its
efficacy within a context of action" (p. 110). To be sure. But "context," once again, is a term
more useful for questioning than for answering: it casts doubt on the pretensions of visual
representation but cannot explain how it works. Gombrich, however, mounts just such an
explanation by positing "the beholder's share," the interpretive work done by the beholder as
he mentally erases traces of the schema he expected to see and completes the incompletions
he expected to find. Thus, when "reading" a pencildrawn face, the beholder attributes neither

leaden color nor two-dimensionality to the face but, rather, corrects for both. The immediate
implication here, which Gombrich states, is that the processes of painting and of reading
paintings are closely analogous: "the very process of perception is based on the same rhythm
that we found governing the process of representation: the rhythm of schema and correction"
(p. 271). But the further implication is that we are persuaded to have an illusion in large part
by our own effort, by the interpretive work of reading or correcting, work that quite literally
makes our conviction ours. And the yet further implication is that the illusion becomes
convincing not despite but because of its schematic presence, because the schema's reduction
and distortion of the gestured-toward particular so strongly demand our completion and
correction. The suasive power of visual representation and, indeed, of all representation turns
out to be the power to schematize in a way that works.
Rosmarin: But if Gombrich had reversed the order of "schema and correction," the problem
would have dropped away. This reversal places the beginning of either making or matching in
the interpreter's purposeful act, what Gombrich calls the text's "function." The maker begins,
in effect, by asking a questionWhat do I want to do and how may I best do it?and
answers himself by choosing, correcting, or, to use the traditional rhetorical term, inventing a
schema. Gombrich has throughout argued that form follows function; this reversal pushes his
thesis to its logical and pragmatic conclusion. It is also a rhetorical conclusion: as in
Aristotle's definition of rhetoric, making is preceded by the maker's analysis of previous
makings, and this analytic prelude is given primary if not exclusive importance. The painter
or critic is "knowing" insofar as he knows previous usage, insofar as he knows how to assess
the suitability of extant schemata for his present purpose, and, having adopted a schema,
insofar as he knows how to correct or modify this schema for that purpose. The claim is
obviously intertextualthat each visual text, like each verbal text, is a rewriting of previous
textsbut what makes it rhetorical as well is its placement of power in the interpreter's
purposeful act rather than in those texts (which would be a variant of the "realist" solution) or
in some underlying "condition" (which would be a variant of the "idealist" solution). For
although previous usage of a schema is temporally prior, it is no more necessarily determining
than is the schema used or the topic painted. Just as Picasso need not have painted the
bombing of Guernica nor have painted in cubist terms, he need not have chosen to correct a
particular previous usage of those terms, whether Braque's or his own. Topic, schema,
previous usage, audience, suasive purposeall are constraining but none are necessarily so.
All may be temporally prior to the act of making, but this priority does not make them either
logically prior or pragmatically necessary. It simply makes them available for the interpreter's
knowing use. Of course, by explicitly correcting previous usage he implicitly invites
correction of his own. But the rhetorician readily extends this invitation, recognizing not only
that his own solution of a problem must be provisional but also that the process of correction
is the birthing place of thought and, yet more precisely, texts. The implication is that each
painting interprets not only the particulars with which it "matches" but also previous paintings
of such particulars. Manet's
20 A THEORETICAL INTRODUCTION
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