Literary Theory; Or, Botanizing on One's Mother's Grave: Reply to Sidney Shanker

Author(s): Martin Steinmann, Jr.

Source: College English, Vol. 35, No. 4 (Jan., 1974), pp. 489-490
Published by: National Council of Teachers of English
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/375586
Accessed: 31-10-2018 22:03 UTC

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

National Council of Teachers of English is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve

and extend access to College English

This content downloaded from 128.248.156.45 on Wed, 31 Oct 2018 22:03:46 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Comment and Response 489

article. In the name of truth and hu- that all myths contained within them-
selves
manity, if literature cannot be related to a core of truth. It is not without
irony that Vico's great insight is used in
reality, to what then can it be related?
How does one teach it? a way to which he would have pro-
foundly objected.
Vico, the genius who created the truth
of knowing-how (man understands civi-
lization because he himself has created SIDNEY SHANKER
it), always insisted, in the Scienza Nuova, Queensborough Comm. College

Literary Theory, or, Botanizing on One's Mother's Grave:

Reply to Sidney Shanker

In my essay, I advanced the thesis thatnized by the reader to exist in human

"Literature . . . probably cannot be abeings." By so punning on the verb to
potential source of knowing-that in exist, Mr. Shanker can also establish the
either the statement or the expression existence of phlogiston, the philosophers'
way; it can be in the betrayal way; and stone, griffins, Santa Claus, and the Easter
it can be a potential source of knowing-bunny.
how." Neo-scholastically (or was it When he does make a charge both
Bertrand-Russelly?) I carefully defined relevant and substantial-that my essay
such key terms as "knowing-that" and"abounds in contradictions" - Mr.
"the betrayal way." And I supported my Shanker offers virtually no support o
thesis in great detail. It may well beit, and what little support he offers
false, but Mr. Shanker has given me no based upon a demonstrable misreading
reason to believe that it is. Indeed, al- I do indeed say, (1) "Literature is syn
most nothing that he says is relevant to dochic: by referring to an individ
the question of its truth. human it refers to every member of t
He confuses my thesis with a quite class of which he is a member"; and (
different one: that "literature cannot be does indeed contradict (2): my stat
ments that character-names in literature
related or referred back to reality." This
absurd thesis I neither advanced nor be- generally do not refer to anything. But
lieve. Poets and novelists are real, and Isosay (1), not to affirm it, but to show
are the poems and novels that they write,that it is false. For, in the next two sen-
the world that inspires them to write
tences, I say, "This is a very tempting
them, the languages in which they write move. . . . But there are at least two ob-
them, readers' interpretations of and stacles
re- to giving a satisfactory account of
sponses to them, and the knowledge that this peculiar synecdochic sort of refer-
readers must have and use to interpret ence."
them correctly and respond to them ap-But I am not persuaded that Mr.
propriately. Fictional characters, more- Shanker is interested in questions of truth
over, often resemble, and therefore re- or falsity. As Lady Britomart tells Adol-
mind readers of, real people. phus Cusins in Major Barbara, he tells me
Mr. Shanker equivocates: "The truth that I "ought to know better than to go
is that Emil Lucius does exist. He exists about saying that wrong things are true.
while the reader is dwelling in the world What does it matter whether they are
of the novel. He exists, most specifically,
true if they are wrong?" He is, he says,
because he recalls salient traits recog- "less troubled by the contradictions than

This content downloaded from 128.248.156.45 on Wed, 31 Oct 2018 22:03:46 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
490 COLLEGE ENGLISH

vinsky, El Greco and Mondrian-for

... by the implications for teaching con-
their own sweet selves, not as words to
tained in the article." Our students, pre-
sumably won't read literature if they live by. Indeed, I love literature so much
that I want to know more about it-
don't believe that characters exist. Dejd
vu: people won't observe moral lawsabout if its relationship to knowledge, for
they don't believe that God exists. example-and so do many of my stu-
dents.
I dare say that I love Shakespeare and
Yeats just as much as Mr. Shanker does.
Perhaps the difference between us is that MARTIN STEINMANN, JR.
I love them-as I love Mozart and Stra- Univ. of Minnesota/Minneapolis

Lesbia and Love: Comment on "A Woman's Map of Lyric Poetry"

by Elizabeth Hampsten

he accepts "timely death" (a natural

I do not wish to quarrel with Eliza-
beth Hampsten's feminist approach
deathtoafter a lifetime of love, as opposed
lyric poetry (College English,toMay
untimely death in war) without regret
and in
1973), but I would urge that she not, asks that it be observed by cere-
her feminist preoccupation, take hermonials
eye of love and gladness rather than
off the poem. In her comments on
of mourning. More important, the poem
Thomas Campion's "My Sweetestdoes Les-
not envision immortality to be won
bia" about "the universalized experience
through any means. It says plainly-and
of the poem: the fear of death, thethrice
long-over-that our light is "little" and
ing of love, the imagined bravado ourthatnight "ever-during." The last two
lines of the poem may be interpreted in
immortality is to be won through a really
one of two ways: (a) Let Lesbia fill the
grand sexual encounter," she is wrong,
I think, on two counts out of three.
speaker's life with love up to his very
death, or (b) Let Lesbia observe his
First, Campion's poem does not express
deathiswith a final tribute of love. By
fear of death: it says only that life
short and ends in death and should there- either reading she will have given him a
fore be used as wisely as possible. For the full life. By neither reading does she
speaker the wise course is to spend life confer immortality upon him. The theme
in the enjoyment of love, not to waste it of the poem is, Let us live and love, for
and possibly lose it in the pursuit of there is nothing more.
LAURENCE PERRINE
glory; the burden of the second stanza is,
Make love, not war. In the third stanza Southern Methodist University

Comment on "A Woman's Map of Lyric Poetry"

Elizabeth Hampsten's "A Woman's periences she is never likely to have;

Map of Lyric Poetry" (CE, May 1973) consequently she does not know how to
is, I fear, symptomatic of an ailment that read it (p. 1075). But what should we
afflicts us all, men and women alike. read? Only those poems that reflect our
There is much English poetry, Pro- own small worlds of experience, actual
fessor Hampsten argues, that evokes ex- or likely, and our own attitudes? There

This content downloaded from 128.248.156.45 on Wed, 31 Oct 2018 22:03:46 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms