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Content THE EXPLORATORY ESSAY: CHARLES LAMB'S
"ANTITHETICAL MANNER," READER-RESPONSE THEORY,
AND COLLEGE COMPOSITION
by
William Paul Zeiger
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
July 1984
U M I Number: DP23100
All rights reserved
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UNIVERSITY O F S O U T H E R N CA LIFO R N IA
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LOS A N G ELES, C A L IFO R N IA 9 0 0 0 7
3oj lQ 5
My
This dissertation, written by
William Paul Zeiger
under the direction of his..... Dissertation Com
mittee, and approved by all its members, has
been presented to and accepted by The Graduate
School, in partial fulfillment of requirements of
the degree of
D O C T O R OF P H I L O S O P H Y
Dean
DISSERTATION, COMMITTEE
Chairman
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter Page
I HISTORY OF CRITICISM OF LAMB'S
ESSAYS OF E L I A ............................ 1
II READER-RESPONSE THEORY, THE THEORY
OF THE OPEN WORK, AND ROMANTIC
CRITICISM.............................. . 37
III THREE ELIAN ESSAYS FROM A READER-
RESPONSE VIEWPOINT....................... 71
IV THE EXPLORATORY ESSAY..................... 130
BIBLIOGRAPHY . ................................... 156
i i
Chapter I
HISTORY OF CRITICISM OF LAMB'S
ESSAYS OF ELIA
In his review of criticism of Charles Lamb's essays,
Stuart M. Tave begins by noting, that "the refusal to
criticize [Lamb] is a major tradition," and cites
Swinburne's expression of this attitude--
No good criticism of Lamb, strictly speak
ing, can ever be written; because nobody
can do justice to his work who does not
love it too well to feel himself capable
of giving judgment on it.
This statement is intended as praise, of course: one is
hushed in the presence of greatness. Less admiring
critics, however, interpret "the refusal to criticize"
Lamb's essays in a negative light: to refuse to analyze
the essays is to betray the fear that one will find
nothing, that analysis will "unweave the rainbow." In
either case, the failure to criticize stems from an awe
surrounding the essays and their author.
Another staple of Lamb criticism, also noted by
Tave, is the tendency to seek for the personality of the
author in his work. "It was the kind of criticism he
1
himself wrote, and the kind he most clearly invitedv"3
Lamb writes in the persona of Elia, an agihg but spirited
bachelor who lives with his cousin Bridget in his beloved
city of London. Like the personas of the eighteenth-
century periodical essays--Bickerstaff, Chinese Traveler--
Elia comments on the life he experiences and observes.
Unlike theirs, however, Elia's milieu is homely and
intimate rather than social and urbane. Unlike them,
also, Elia makes no attempt to advise the reader.
Diffident, he speaks tentatively, alters his views,
entertains contrary notions with equanimity; his tones
are those not of coffee-house debate, but of after-dinner
conversation, comfortable and open, free to engage any
topic, free from the embroilment of action. He opens his
mind to the reader as to the Shandian companion in the
next easy chair, permissive and tolerant of the mind's
vagaries, bemused at its unlikely turnings.
Despite warnings that Elia differs in important ways
from Lamb,^ enough similarity is apparent to invite
identification. The essays seem to be thinly disguised
expressions of a fanciful and charming personality.
Accordingly, those who admire the essays do so not so
much because of the essays' art as because of the con
geniality of the author. Hence, in part, the refusal to
criticize.
2
The essays have always been recognized as well
contrived--"exquisite," ’’curious, 11 "gemlike. 1 V-but the
most ardent praise has been reserved for the author/hero,
a "gentle," "sweet," "lovable," "wise," "humane" person
who seems to have the right measure of sympathy and
restraint for every human involvement; whose wistful
melancholy is checked by a sage humor; who represents
"the genius of the hearth, the ordinary man in excelsis,
good and simple.""* Readers tend to love Lamb's essays,
in short, because the essays seem to put them in touch
with an attractive personality. Lamb was even regarded
as a sort of local saint, at least by Thackeray, who,
fourteen years after Lamb’s death, when given a letter
that Lamb had written, put it to his forehead and. said,
St. Charles! " ' 7 Lamb had a reputation among his friends
T !
for a combination of wisdom, forebearance, and kindness,
which, although not unmixed with asperity, could be taken
as saintly. Leigh Hunt remarks warmly.
He likes to see the church-goers continue
to go to church, and has written a tale
in his sister1 s. admirable little book
(Mrs. Leicester's School) to encourage
the rising generation to do so: but to a
conscientious deist he has nothing to
object; and if an atheist found every
other door shut against him, he would
assuredly not find his,8
3
Another friend, an habitue of the weekly evening socials
at the Lambs', describes the atmosphere that prevailed
on these occasions,
The beauty of these evenings was that
everyone was placed upon an easy level.
No one out-topped.the others. No one--
not even Coleridge--was permitted to out
talk the rest. No one was allowed to
hector another, or to bring his own
grievances too prominently forward; so as
to disturb the harmony of the night.
Everyone had a right to speak, and to be
heard; and no one was ever trodden or
clamoured down (as in some large assem
blies) , Until he had proved his privi
lege. . . . [Lamb] liked and encouraged
friendly discussion; but he hated con
tentious argument, which leads to quar
rel rather than to truth.9
Expecting the Essays of Elia or any literary work,
to embody the spirit of a saint makes criticism irrelevant.
The value of a religious relic, or cherished memento,
lies in its being exactly what it is. The room in which
John Keats died in Rome, for example, is maintained as
he left it. It is not a work of art, but a "footprint in
the sand of time," and therefore not subject to criticism.
A similar attitude has often exempted Lamb’s essays from
serious analysis, veiling them in admiration.
Some critics, contrariwise, find Lamb to be not at
all a great personality, but an escapist who refused to
look life full in the face. They tend to see Lamb/Elia,
in the essays and in life, as "childlike," "whimsical,"
4
"weak," "immature," and "simpleminded," and to censure the
essays for their failure to engage serious issues and to
advance positive conclusions. Carlyle, "hierarch of the
anti-Elians, asserts about Lamb, "his talk is contempt
ibly small, indicating wondrous ignorance and shallow
ness."^ In our own time, Denys Thompson charges Lamb
with pandering in his essays to an undiscriminating public,
of cultivating "l'homme sensuel moyen," and of never
12
"requiring the reader to take stock of his opinions."
Graham Greene observes, "Lamb is not the only man to make
the charity which begins at home an excuse for evading a
13
world he fears." This opinion of Lamb the man, too,
like the "St. Charles" tradition, sometimes biases
criticism of his works: Lamb was fearful of life and
avoided serious contemplation, and so his essays were
timid and shallow. The works are interpreted as outward
signs of a personality which the reader knows through
prior acquaintance.
Lamb criticism vacillates regularly between these
two extremes of opinion, that the essays, in accordance
with their author's character, are either shallow and
evasive or deeply perceptive and even bold.
Paul Elmer More (1909) attempts to render a balanced
view of Lamb's essays by giving full weight to both
positions. More shows a genuine affection for Elia, but
refuses to let his sentiment cloud his better judgment:
5
He alone found the secret of sacrificing
his heart to stern and unrelenting duty
and of dwelling the while resolutely on
the surface of life, a patron of puns
and a devotee of the genial vices. And
this is the quality of his writings, as
well as of his character, although some,
I know, misled by their devotion, would
discover graver traits in his works. . . .
[His intellect is] turned from the deeper
questions and made to play over the sur
face of things with a coruscating light
that prevents the eve from penetrating
into their depths.1 ^
And if you ask me how I reconcile this
aspect of Lamb with that other aspect L.
which has gained for him the title of
saint, I reply that I do not attempt to
reconcile them. It all depends on the
reader, and on the reader's changing
moods. There is a time to look solemnly
into the face of life, and then these
letters and essays repel us. . . .
There is a time for laughter and for quaint
fancy that dallies lightly with the emo
tions, and then we reflect on the sublime
courage of this man who could smile where
others would despair. . . . And the latter
mood is wiser on the whole, and safer,
and more just.15
More seems to want to credit Lamb the man with a "sublime
courage" which enables him absolutely to deny his deeper
feelings in his works. The essays are appropriate only
for our lighter moods. More's uneasiness with this
summation is apparent, however, when he finally reverses
himself, and says that Lamb's regrettable weakness, his
failure to "look solemnly into the face of life," is
". . . wiser . . . . and safer, and more just." Making out
Lamb's "quaint fancy" to be wise and just is to restore
6
full credit for any shortfall in "graver traits." More
seems not to be content with his own assessment of the
essays as shallow, because he believes the author to be
deep. He explains this paradox only by claiming that
Lamb had "found the secret" of "sacrificing his heart"
in one place and "dwelling" in another.
While More regretfully judges the essays to be
shallow, Walter Pater (1922) finds them to be subtly but
keenly perceptive. Like More, Pater recognizes the
triviality of the essays' contents. But whereas More
finds the surface of the essays impenetrable, Pater finds
it to be a cunning maze which draws the reader into its
depths--
Unoccupied, as he might seem with
great matters, he is in immediate contact
with what is real, especially in its
caressing littleness. . . . Seeing things
always by the light of an understanding
more entire than is possible for ordinary
minds . . . [he] hints of the innermost
reason in things, the full knowledge of
which is held in reserve.^
Such gift of appreciation depends, as I
said, on the habitual apprehension of
men's life as a whole--its organic whole
ness, as extending even to the least
things in it . . .it involves a fine
perception of the congruities, the musi
cal accordance between humanity and its
environment of custom, society, personal
intercourse; as if all this, with its
meetings, partings, ceremonies, gestures,
tones of speech, were some delicate
instrument on which an expert performer
was playing.
7
The writings of Charles Lamb are an
excellent illustration of the value of
reserve in literature. Below his quiet,
his quaintness, his humor, and what may
seem the slightness, the occasional or
accidental character of his work, there
lies, as I said at starting, as in his
life, a genuinely tragic element . . .
as if at any moment these slight words
and fancies might pierce very far into
the deeper soul of things.18
The "slightness" of Lamb’s essays does not result from an
attempt to evade serious matters, but from an extreme
delicacy of touch, a poetic economy which only hints at
its deeper meaning. The essays' surface is not opaque,
but a fine latticework through which can be glimpsed "the
deeper soul of things." Lamb’s ability to apprehend and
to recreate this subtle pattern results from the rare
gift of seeing life "whole"; and it appears from Pater's
description that the reader, too, must have this gift in
order to follow Lamb's design. This gift is not an
attribute of "ordinary minds." It is the "fine perception"
of an "expert performer." Pater's assessment of Lamb's
art begins to sound like a description of the Emperor's
new clothes; one suspects that Pater's eloquence may be
more to be admired than Lamb's.
Pater is not alone, however, in his assertion that
Lamb's essays are subtly suggestive. Other, later critics
credit Lamb with a similar delicacy. "Instead of
expounding his wisdom in sermons, he insinuated it in
8
19
familiar essays." "If we find contact with his work to
be both refining and elevating, it is through an influence
which hides itself, and acts indirectly. . . .
The difference between Pater's reading of the essays
and More’s is that More wishes to believe Lamb to be
profound but cannot find sufficient evidence to warrant
this belief; whereas Pater supports the same belief by
positing for Lamb an overseeing intelligence that knits
the seeming fragments of the essays into a subtle design.
The difference between these readings seems, as More
suggests, to depend on the reader-—not on the reader’s
mood, but on the reader’s willingness and ability to catch
hints and to perceive indirect effects.’ More is less
willing than Pater to read between the lines, and so
More's interpretation is more descriptive and objective.
Yet More himself seems to feel that his reading leaves
something unaccounted for. Pater gives free reign to
his considerable insight in his reading, and credits Lamb
with almost alchemical powers to make much out of little.
Finally, although Pater and More take opposite sides on
the question of Lamb ’s depth or superficiality, both
support their views, by referring to a mysterious quality
of the author. When he asks himself how such a sensitive
and courageous man could write so shallowly, More
responds, "He alone had the secret." And when Pater
explains how Lamb could sketch the ’’deeper soul of things"
with such ordinary materials, he credits Lamb with an
extraordinary perceptive power..
21
F.V. Morley (1932) closely examines the relation
ship between Lamb and his Essays of Elia and agrees with
Pater and More that Lamb was possessed of a special
sensitivity, but that he carefully did not expose it in
the essays. The essays are an attempt to fence his mind
off from painful worldly thoughts, an attempt to recreate
for his mature years a protective environment like the one
he enjoyed in childhood. Like More, Morley finds the
essays disturbingly shallow, and he seeks to spell out in
biographical detail why and how Lamb managed to keep his
deeper feelings out of the essays. He finds that Lamb
was always cloistered as a boy, always surrounded by the
familiar and the friendly. When at the age of twenty he
was first exposed to the flux and intensity of London life,
he soon found himself in a mental institution. Shortly
after his recovery he received the shock from which, in
Morleyfs; view, he never recovered, the murder of his
mother by his sister. From that time on, although he
cared for and lived with his sister and supported them
both through his work in an accounting office, Lamb bore
his pain constantly. The small domestic world and homely
interests of his essays were a diversion, an attempt to
recapture peace of mind by dwelling in memory and fantasy.
10
The Elia of the essays, then, is not a candid
representation of Lamb, but an idealized version--Lamb
as he wished he were--and a version never troubled by
serious thought, never looking beneath the surface of
things. The essays were a refuge.
Did Elia satisfy Lamb, whose other writ
ings had so far failed to satisfy him?
I doubt it. The most artful dodger has
trouble in dodging himself. Elia could
only partially resolve Lamb's state of
frustration and dis-ease. . . . Was
Elia ever more than a device, a conscious
dramatization, a method of cheering one
self up? I do not think so. But let him
be the first to blame Lamb who, in such
circumstances, knows what else to do.
Partial or unsuccessful as Lamb felt the
device to be, it was the best that a
strong man could achieve as a solution to
his problems. 2 2
Morley, like More, believes Lamb to be a man of great
character and sensitivity, but regretfully concludes that
the essays, far from a subtle arrangement of hints into
life's complexities, are a barricade against any serious
reflection. In coming to this conclusion, Morley has
reference to no mysterious or extraordinary quality in
Lamb; on the contrary, he explains Lamb's escapism as an
appropriate, if insufficient, reaction to an extremely
difficult situation.
23
Bernard Jessup also assesses "The Mind of Elia"
(1954) as a strong mind coping appropriately with life,
11
but finds that Lamb, in the essays, faces life even more
boldly and successfully than other strong minds of his
time. Jessup does not refer to the circumstances of Lamb's
personal life, or attempt to discover in the essays the
evidence of Lamb's heroic personal courage. On the other
hand, Jessup does consider that there is a close relation
ship between the creator and his character--
My subject, Elia . . . is a somewhat
Uncertain person. His learned biogra
phers and scholarly interpreters disagree
whether he is in fact Charles Lamb, who
may be more fully known through his life
and letters, or whether he is a separate
being for whom Charles Lamb has no more
than literary responsibility.
The problem is not mine. I take Elia
as I find him--in the Essays which are
known by his name. I do note a certain
similarity between him and the person
who speaks in the letters of Charles Lamb,
and I shall make free use of it, but only
as one makes use of any two resembling
persons or things to "explain" the one
or the other--for to note resemblances
is one basic form of explana ti on .24
Lamb/Elia’s outstanding characteristics, in Jessup's eyes,
are his "opposition to formalism of any kind," and his
love for life "with its full factual and concrete
immediacy." Lamb’s anti-formalism makes him recoil from
following or making rules, from categorizing his ideas.
Life, he believes, is too complicated to
reduce to principles, and it is too indi
vidual to warrant anyone's setting him
self up as guide or judge. Particularly
1 2
cases always elude rules. . . . Rational
ity in the sense of reasonableness in
respecting facts and not confusing them
with wishes or habits, he regards highly
and follows with singular consistency.
But rationalism in the sense of believing
that man's thinking legislates the facts,
or that facts are the body of man's mind,
he disallows completely . . . That truth
is an absolute--a truth to be once and
for all intuited in metaphysical excursion
or demonstrated in an iron logic, he dis
allows just as firmly.25
Jessup is not the only critic to point out Lamb's
2fi
opposition to formalism. Bernbaum also calls this
characteristic a cornerstone of Lamb's world view. Lamb
had an abhorrence for being subsumed under any kind of
order but his own tastes and habits. A number of Lamb's
contemporaries, including Hazlitt, remark his independent
and contrary nature--
Mr. Lamb has succeeded not by conforming
to the Spirit of the Age, but in opposi
tion to it. He does not march boldly
along with the crowd, but steals off the
pavement to pick his way in the contrary
direction.27
In order to preserve himself from being caught in system-
ized thought, Lamb cultivated a changeable, unpredictable
attitude. He was charming, "but he must have his joke at
28
a funeral." The words "antithesis," "duality," "para
dox," "irony," and "contrast" occur often in commentary
on Lamb and his works, illustrating critics' observations
13
of Lamb's, desire to elude any static description. "He
delights to confound the borders of theoretical truth
and falsehood.
Jessup observes that since there are no absolutes
for Lamb, life must be met in its changing particulars,
moment by moment. Hence his preoccupation with ordinary
objects and ideas. That the mind has the power to
determine a fixed reality was an illusion Lamb rejected.
To Lamb, and likewise to Elia, examining things "in their
caressing littleness" was the best and only way of knowing
the universe.
Things are many, they change and they
differ. This, Elia seems to say, is the
first truth about reality. In that he
rests and from that derives his aestheti-
cism. It turns him to the unique, the
irregular, the odd--even the contradic
tory. [Lamb believed] that the real and
important is unique and individual rather
than general and universal.30
This is the propensity, Jessup says, which is mistaken
for escapism in Lamb. Lamb's preoccupation with
apparently trivial objects and ideas, rather than a
retreat from serious matters, betrays his keen desire to
know the world in the truest way possible. "The genuine
escapists," Jessup asserts, were "the German-Carlylian
transcendentalists, the Shelleyean visionary revolution
ists, and the Byronic spirits of denial," because they
14
distanced themselves abstractly from real experience.
Lamb’s great strength was the courage to recognize that
no formalism could successfully represent life as he
experienced it, and rather than adopt an abstraction for
the sake of consistency, he' rejected it and submitted
himself to the constant flux. The Essays of Elia seem to
be escapist because they lack certainty, offering no
comprehensive explanation for the variety of experience.
But they do not avoid experience; they express it in its
bare immediacy.
Jessup's account of Lamb' s thought would not have
satisfied Morley, because among the immediate facts it
expresses we do not find any hints about his feelings
toward his mother and the circumstances of her death. On
the other hand, it complements the views of both More and
Pater, because it attempts to justify Lamb's immersion
in trivia without attributing to him any extraordinary
powers. It was not because Lamb knew a secret about life,
or because he had unusually fine perception that he spent
his time continually on little things, but simply because
he believed that these were the important things to
attend to. He was convinced "that what matters finally is
the qualitative immediacy of things," and Jessup reminds
us that reputable philosophers have held similar views.
Jessup is the most vigorous of Lamb's defenders and
makes the strongest claims for the essays in regard to the
15
strength of mind they reffeet. Although he argues
effectively that Lamb's choice to attend to little thin,gs
is a valid philosophical choice, the question remains
whether it is a felicitous literary one, Jessup supports
his reading of Elia with several quotations selected from
the essays and from Lamb's letters. This procedure has
the advantage of affording a comprehensive vision, but it
is a vision pieced together by Jessup; it does not bear
the stamp of Lamb's own construction. Since each essay
is a whole, and the set of essays only loosely united,
something is lost in the failure to take account of the
evidence of the experience of his essays. Jessup defends
Lamb/Elia's stature as a thinker, but not as a writer.
He shows us that a coherent attitude is discoverable in
the essays, but not that this attitude determines the
effect of any one essay.
This failure is generally the case with Lamb
31
criticism prior to 1960. Pater, More, and Morley cite
very sparingly from the essays, and never treat one at
length. The result is that their interpretations fix on
elements, or themes, or prominent characteristics of the
works as a whole. All of them, moreover, are concerned
at least as much with solving the riddle of his personal
ity as with apprehending the craft of his literary work.
Their readings are sensitive, insightful, and informative,
16
and when they are finished, the question of whether
Lamb's essays are in jest or in earnest, superficial or
penetrating, is still moot.
Since 1960, a small number of close readings of
selected Essays of Elia have appeared. Most of them take
the position that the essays are worthy of serious
consideration because they engage meaningful questions
earnestly and skillfully. These modern.critiques differ
chiefly in their perceptions of how the essays engage
reality. In them, we find the same Elian characteristics
as emerged in the earlier criticism--saintliness and
escapism, subtlety, contrariness, tolerance. The recent
criticism, however, discovers in the essays the literary
expressions of these personal qualities.
The earliest close reading of Elia is by Richard
32
Haven, in the summer of 1963. Haven finds that what
Lamb is doing in the essays is something analogous to
what Romantic poets had done in the great odes. The
method of Lamb's art, Haven tells us, is to involve the
reader in a "dramatic situation" and then make the reader
experience the concrete images of that situation as
"symbolic or mythic forms," as Keats did with the Grecian
Urn and the Nightingale. In the symbol, the objective-
and subjective worlds "melt into each other."
17
An example of this interpretation of Lamb is Haven's
reading of "Old China." In this essay Elia and Bridget
discuss their past joys, Bridget saying how much happier
they were when they were poor, and Elia gently correcting
her, saying their joys came not from their poverty, but
from their youth. The theme of the essay in this reading
is the transience of youth, and the power of art to capture
its essence. A set of China tea cups symbolizes this
idea. Description of the teacups opens and closes the
essay, providing a frame and even suggesting the setting,
the room in which the conversation takes place. Painted
on the teacups are quaint figures frozen in pleasing
attitudes, and Lamb contrives to create an identity
between these images and the images the cousins hold in
memory. As the painted figures capture a moment of
fantasy in permanent form, so the essay evokes past joys
and confers on them a sort of permanence. Thus the
essay is itself a symbolic form not unlike the teacup,
eternizing in its artifice the feelings of a moment. This
symbolism, says Haven, is the general technique of the
essays, to create symbols of passing thoughts, and this
warrants their inclusion as works of art with the great
odes in the Romantic tradition.
33
Donald Reiman, writing two years after Haven, also
sees the essays as primarily symbolic, but he makes some
18
fresh observations concerning Lamb's purpose in the use of
his symbols. In "Two Races of Men," Reiman notes, Lamb
begins by criticizing certain book borrowers who take his
books for reasons other than a genuine love of ideas.
Such borrowers deprive the owner and fail to take
advantage themselves of the books' riches. The essay
then praises borrowers who do genuinely love the books
they take. These borrowers enrich not only themselves,
but also their lenders, in subsequent conversation and
in interlineations in the books returned. The point of
the essay in Reiman's view is to elevate the latter sort
of borrower into a kind of heroic personage, who takes
much and gives much:
The real theme of "The Two Races of
Men" is, then, that there is indeed a
great race of borrowers, men exemplified
by Alcibiades, Falstaff, Sir Richard
Steele, Richard Brinsley Sheridan . . .--
and by Coleridge; these borrowers, in
their turn, contribute much to the
world's welfare.34
Reiman argues that Lamb's essays are not trivial,
but that they use ordinary objects and events to symbolize
matters of real consequence in a way suited to Lamb's
own character. Recalling Lamb's aversion to formalism
and his tolerance of many viewpoints, Reiman observes
that it was not like Lamb to assert his own importance by
pronouncing opinions boldly; as we have seen, he preferred
19
a social climate in which people were congenial and
mutually deferential.
Still, Lamb did have opinions and he did wish to
express them. The seemingly trivial symbol world, Reiman
believes, was a medium through which Lamb could express
his opinions with characteristic tact--
Focusing his ideas around an unpreten
tious symbol, Lamb could remain nondog-
matic and skeptical through the light
tone appropriate to this ostensible sub
ject, and by ironically understating his
conclusions, could avoid all trace of the
mental bombast that, according to
Coleridge, occasionally marred Wordsworth's
poems of high seriousness.35
As much as Lamb disliked asserting himself directly, he
loved, in his contrary way, to hint and suggest ideas,
without committing himself or his reader "to the logical
analyses or marshalled facts that must have accompanied
O £
a discursive development of the thesis."
He therefore created a symbol world
through which he could explore universal
human problems in a truly imaginative
way; like the pastoral world of Robert
Frost's best poetry, the trivial universe
of Elia and Bridget, of whist games, bor
rowed books, and frail china tea cups,
provided a language for one who truly0 7
desired both to teach and to delight.
It is interesting to see the claim that Lamb desired
to teach, because the familiar essay characteristically
20
aims to entertain, and Lamb's essays particularly have
been criticized for lack of any serious intention.
Reiman believes that Lamb's dislike of dogmatism and
logical assertion1 ,:, coupled with his enjoyment of hinting
and playing, led him to choose an indirect means of
"instructing" the reader, a means subtle enough to be
mistaken for mere frivolity. Lamb's symbolism, according
to Reiman, is the vehicle of the subtle penetration which
Pater found in the essays and attributed to Lamb's
extraordinary perception.
Fred. V. Randel, writing in 1975, ten years after
Reiman, argues that Lamb/Elia uses his small world of the
essays as a way not of symbolizing, but of measuring the
38
great world. Through the themes of "time, space,
ingestion, and play," Randel interprets the essays as
records of attempts to solve the human problem of subject
and object, me and not me, what I control and what I do
not control. In "Dream Children," for example, Elia
confronts the gap in time between his grandmother's
generation and his own; in "Distant Correspondents," he
confronts a gap in space between himself and a friend.
In each case he desires to bridge the gap, to embrace
other times and places in the here and now. But memory
and fantasy can reestablish his family's past in the
present only for a few moments; and a letter written to
21
a distant friend loses all freshness and spontaneity.
Something Is salvaged, however, from this and similar
failures. Rather than the real bridge he hopes for between
his little world and another, Elia constructs "a scale
of hypothetical possibilities." His Imagination, stirred
by the desire to incarnate a departed reality, spins one
vision out of another until the present and the absent
seem to be connected by a series of dreams. This
"bridge" does not connect the two realms in reality, as
Elia/Lamb fondly hopesj but it does afford him a more
realistic appreciation of-what he wants and of what he
has. He knows the joys that are beyond him, but also
the "genuine but limited satisfactions" of his own
situation. Elia does not have the family he dreamed
of having, but he does have his cousin, Bridget, who is
very dear to him.
Randel believes that the "scale of hypothetical
possibilities" which results from the unsuccessful
attempt to join his little world with the great world
constitutes ”a consistent perspective of Impressive
intelligence," which is the foundation for Elia's wise
acceptance of his limitations. Elia has been criticized
for failing to assert positive conclusions, but Randel
defends him as a man who accepted his limitations, and
who, rather than pretend to more than he was able to
22
-------------------------
achieve, made the best of the truth as he found it.
This estimate of Elia recalls Jessup's defense that it
was not Lamb who was the escapist, but the transcendental,
revolutionist, and Byronic visionaries, who rejected the
evidence of their senses in favor of airy philosophies.
The restraint which Lamb shows in not claiming too much
for his perception is a source of the subtlety praised
by Pater ("the value of reserve in literature") and
Cazamian^-
A silent modesty, verging on the heroic,
curbs the over^effusive expression of
his feelings. And a certain fine and
subtle element, diffused in his thoughts,
saves them from any untoward display of
intensity, leading them back irresist
ibly to a supple sense of exact fitness.
. . . If we find contact with his work
to be both refining and elevating, it is
through an influence which hides itself,
and acts indirectly ... . . the writer's
supreme art . . . [is] his self-control
. . . his power almost always to stop
in time.^7
Randel explains this restraint as Lamb's acceptance of
his failure to find a means of making the whole world
his intimate home.
Daniel J. Mulcahey takes a different tack from the
symbolists Haven and Reiman, and a direction which
Randel does not fully appreciate, when he borrows
Lamb's own phrase, "antithetical manner," to describe
Lamb’s writing strategy.^® Publishing in 1963, a
23
month after Haven, Mulcahey calls attention to the strain
of "contrariness" in Lamb, his "abiding conviction that
there is more than one side to every question," his
"conviction that to commit oneself to a partial truth is
to deny the just claims of another truth," his "dual
awareness" of the universe. In Mulcahey's readings, this
dual awareness strikes a balance between the plane of
reality and the plane of imagination, and this balance
represents Lamb’s way of encountering the world.
Mulcahey discusses a number of essays in which he.
finds the interplay between reality and imagination to
be a central theme. "Witches and other Night Fears," for
example, expresses how the imagination unmitigated by
adequate grounding in reality leads to chaos and terror.
"Blakesmore in H--shire" provides the antithesis to
this view, showing the healing power of the imagination
to preserve what reality destroys. Similarly, "The
Sanity of True Genius" illustrates how necessary is the
imagination to a right understanding of ordinary facts,
and "The Barrenness of the Imaginative Faculty" balances
this opinion with the notion that without the constant
infusion of new information from the world, the imagina
tion yields nothing of value.
Lamb constructs antitheses, Mulcahey adds, not only
between essays, but within single essays, always
24
countering illusion with sober truth. Thus while Haven
sees "Old China" as primarily symbolic of the permanence
of the mind's art, Mulcahey reads it as a balancing of
reality (We are no longer young) with fancy (but we can
still create dreams). In "Distant Correspondents" the
antithesis occurs between a real act and an imagined act.
In this -essay, Lord C's romantic desire to be buried
under a secluded tree that caught his fancy while he was
traveling on the continent becomes grotesque in the act
of transporting his body there. Mulcahey concludes,
As an individual's way of experiencing
the world, a worthwhile sentiment is a
fine thing, capable of resisting all
external pressure toward change; trans
lated into action, it is liable not only
to ridicule, but also to the disintegration
and extinction symbolized by the corpse.
Mulcahey reveals a structural element which
expresses Lamb's contrariness, his duality of mind. The
mechanism that underlines and unifies the essays is a
regular alternation between the real and the imagined,
representing Lamb's belief that both were equally
necessary to a complete vision of the universe. "Lamb
attempts no synthesis," Mulcahey adds. True to his
contrary nature, Lamb preferred to poise between two
truths rather than to choose one and deny the other.
Asserting that Lamb had a clear vision of both reality
and illusion, Mulcahey gives Lamb more credit than those
________________________________________________________________________ 25
critics who believe him to be cowardly or partially blind.
Ultimately, Mulcahey poses for himself the perennial
question of Elian criticism, whether we should "agree
with those who call Lamb an escapist." His response is
that most of the time Lamb uses the antithetical manner
responsibly. On infrequent occasions, however, Lamb is
guilty of "palpable subordination of the reality
principle to the pleasure principle." One is reminded
of Paul Elmer More's doubts about the essays' shallowness.
Jessup's view of Lamb as the anti-formalist also comes to
mind: Mulcahey illustrates how Lamb in his essays
preserved the uncertainty which he regarded as the real
condition of the universe, and avoided absolute
assertion.
I believe that Mulcahey presents an important
insight into the "antithetical manner," but I think that
he denies this technique its full range and power by
seeing it operate only between reality and imagination.
At one point, Mulcahey refers to this device as a formal
rather than as a thematic element, a "tendency to
emphasize one side of an argument for effect, temporarily
submerging the more balanced view he actually holds,"
but he does not pursue this line of analysis. For
Mulcahey, the antithetical manner remains a balancing of
two specific values, illusion and reality.
26
Peter Brier emulates Mulcahey's use of the term
"antithetical manner" and applies it to a different pair
/ o
of values in Lamb. Brier points out the alternation in
Elia's viewpoint between the detachment of wit and the
involvement of compassion, an alternation Lamb learned to
use "both as an artistic methodology and a morally sound
life style." Lamb, and Lamb's characters, according to
Brier, were troubled by the desire to be safely detached
even when they most yearned for human involvement.
"Detachment," of course, corresponds to escape, and
"involvement" to accepting human responsibility. Elia's
"antithetical manner" is to move back and forth between
detachment and compassion until he, and his author,
achieve a fusion between them--
He came to understand that solitude,
and community were not mutually exclu
sive, that to be "self-possessed" did
not mean that one had to be socially
dispossessed. The great attraction of
the Quaker meeting is that "thou [canst]
possess the depth of thy own spirit in
stillness, without being shut out from
the consolatory faces of thy species."
When Lamb put on a face to meet the
faces around him, he was not being
untrue to himself; he was simply losing
himself in the variety around him, with
the ultimate result of having a richer
self to possess. . . .43
In Brier's reading, Elia has moments when he comments
wittily on others' actions, and then he is not involved;
27
he also has moments when he comments ardently. Brier
argues that the alternation between these two attitudes
"eases Elia into a kind of internalized dialogue. Wit
informs feeling and feeling informs wit. ..." with
the result that he, and the reader, experience the events
described both from a distance and from close up, and
this union of distance with intimacy characterizes
Lamb's essays--gives them, indeed, an air of universal
tolerance similar to the atmosphere remarked of social
gatherings at the Lambs'.
Thus Brier's reading differs from Mulcahey's in
that Brier believes that the antithetical manner achieves
a synthesis. Brier's reading differs from Mulcahey's
also in that Brier sees the antithetical manner operating
between a different pair of values. This latter differ
ence implies that the antithetical manner may be a more
general characteristic of the essays than any particular
pair of values.
Robert D. Frank, in the most recent (1976) extended
examination of the Essays of Elia, demonstrates how
Lamb makes his personal tolerance for a variety of
opinions a regular and characteristic feature of his
essays.^ The same equalizing atmosphere which Lamb's
friends enj oyed in the social gatherings at his home
is established and maintained in the essays in the
28
"controlling presence" of Elia. Frank shows from some of
Lamb's critical writing and letters that Lamb felt
audiences of his day had fixed expectations which inter
fered with their aesthetic appreciation of a work of art.
The audience at a play, for example, expected stage
characters to imitate real people, and stage situations
to parallel their own lives, with clear : moral lessons,
in the manner inherited from the eighteenth century.
Lamb deplored these attitudes because he preferred to
contemplate the shadowy areas between clear rights and
wrongs, and to use his art not to recreate life, but to
surpass life in imagination. Consequently, Frank
believes, Lamb addressed first the task of educating
his audience to read his essays aesthetically rather than
critically or morally.
The problem . . . as Lamb saw it, was
that the will to judge illusion as real
ity was depriving playgoers of a true
aesthetic experience . . . Lamb knew,
then, that the success of his Essays of
Elia depended to a great extent on his
ability to blunt and frustrate the
expectations of readers who would come to
the essays to sharpen their moral and
critical faculties. And so Lamb care
fully and unobtrusively created a context
for the essays that would disarm and for
the moment put to sleep these faculties
of his readers. They were asked to sus-^
pend their judgment and their disbelief.
29
Lamb's chief mechanism for creating the proper atmosphere
for his essays was the persona of Elia. Elia is not very
bright, so he does not challenge the reader's intellect;
Elia is extremely tolerant of a variety of viewpoints
(though he does have his prejudices) and is charmingly
diffident, so nearly any reader feels comfortable with
him. Frank explicitly likens the atmosphere established
by Elia in the essays to that which prevailed in Lamb's
own home. He cites Thomas Hood's recollection of
extempore assemblies at Colebrook
Cottage. It was wholesome for the
soul but to breathe its atmosphere.
It was a House of Call for All
Denominations. Sides were lost in
that circle, men of all parties post
poned their partisanship, and met as
on neutral ground.46
Lamb used Elia as a "controlling presence" in the essays
to ensure an attitude in the reader of "suspended
disapprobation." The suspension of moral and critical
faculties induced the reader "to enter imaginatively
into the essay," and to take pleasure in the aesthetic
experience.
Lamb's choice of trivial and homely objects and
scenes also helped to dispell the reader's expectation
of a critical or moral experience. Here Frank echoes
the idea that Reiman suggests, that Lamb tries very hard
in the essays not to appear dogmatic. Lamb wants the
30
readers, Frank says, to join him in a meditative exper
ience, with an open attitude, willing to see what happens,
"to read for sport.." The friendly, ingratiating, and
articulate character of Elia was the medium, of this
cooperation*
Once having established the atmosphere Of aesthetic
tolerance In the essays, Frank reads them essentially as
Haven reads them, as works of art comparable in form and
manner to the great odes:. The essay begins with a casual
observation of immediate reality, passes Into a medita
tion or reverie suggested by this observation, and
ultimately returns to the original scene.. In the process,
the trivial objects which provide subject matter for the
essays often also become symbols. Thus the cards in
"Mrs. Battle," the sundial in "Old Benchers," the china
cup in "Old China," are all objects which combine utili
tarian and aesthetic values. They come to symbolize,
in Lamb's treatment of them, the fusion of the visions
of the imagination and the understanding. In Lamb's
world, the beauty of the sundial is its stolid elegance,
its imperturbability and steadfastness, at the passing
of time, and this aesthetic quality mingles paradoxically
with its daily use as a time piece. The cards, too,
represented the merger of ordinary social events with a
deeply religious attitude-. The china teacup delicately
31
shows how In imagination we can retain what is most
important of life, which is neither money nor youth but
a consciousness which regularly appreciates the beauty
of ordinary things.
In Frank's view, then, Lamb must fii'st defuse the
reader's critical attitude and induce an attitude of
wide tolerance and sporting acceptance in order to create
the climate in which he can "teach" the reader that life
and art--understanding and imagination--can be one. The
lesson to be derived from the essays is that we can
enjoy life more if we temper our utilitarian goals with
aesthetic appreciation.
These recent critical treatments of the Essays of
Elia shift the focus of attention from Lamb's personality
to the themes and artifices of the essays themselves,
and in doing so they justify a high opinion of Lamb as
an artist. If we shift the focus again, from the works
themselves to their effects upon their reader, a broad
strategy becomes visible which is not yet apparent, and
which combines the Elian atmosphere of tolerance, the
antithetical manner, and Lamb's deft subtlety. I will
show in Chapter III that the essays not only suggest
that contrary elements may be combined, but provide the
reader with an opportunity and stimulation to practice
this mental fusion. First, however, I will examine
i'32
some current theories of literature^in-the-readet and
"open works."
Notes to Chapter I
Stuart M. Tave,. "Charles Lamb: Criticism," in
Carolyn Washburne Houtchens and Lawrence Huston Houtchens,
eds., The English Romantic Poets and Essayists (London:
University of London Press, 1966), p. 59.
2
Denys Thompson, "Our Debt to Lamb," in F.R. Leavis,
ed., Determinations (New York: Haskell House, 1970);
Mario Praz, The Hero in Eclipse in Victorian Fiction i ,
(London: Oxford University Press, 1969).
^Tave, p. 60.
^Leo Spitzer, "History of Ideas vs. Reading of
Poetry," Southern Review, 1941; John Mason Brown, ed.,
The Portable Charles Lamb (New York: Viking, 1949),
p . 23.
“*Tave, p. 61.
Save , p. 60.
^Paul Elmer More, Shelburne Essays, 2nd series (New
York: Putnam, 1909), p. 8 8 .
8
Leigh Hunt, Lord Byron and His Contemporaries
(London: Henry Colburn, 1828), pp. 297-8.
9
F.V. Morley, Lamb Before Elia (London: Jonathan
Cope, 1932), pp. 275-78.
■^Tave, p. 62.
■^More, p. 1 0 1 .
■^Thompson, pp. 213-15.
13
Graham Greene, "Lamb's Testimonials,"
The Spectator, No. 5518 (March 30, 1935), p. 512.
^More, pp. 93-94.
34
■^More, p. 103.
1 £ L
Walter Pater, Appreciations (London: Macmillan,
1922), pp. 110-117.
"^Pater, p. 116.
^Pater, p. 1 2 1 .
19
Ernest Bernbaum, Guide Through the Romantic
Movement, vol. 1 (New York”: Thomas Nelson, 1937) , p. 168.
20
Louis Cazamian, A History of English Literature--
Modern Times, translated from the French by W.D. MaClnnes
and the author (New York: Macmillan, 1935), p. 1104.
21
Morley, Lamb Before Elia.
22
Morley, p. 2 99.
23
Bernard Jessup, "The Mind of Elia," Journal of the
History of Ideas, 25 (1954).
^Jessup, p. 246.
^Jessup, pp. 252-3.
O C s .
Bernbaum, pp. 170-1.
27
William Hazlitt, Lectures on English Poets
and the Spirit of the Age (London: J.M. Dent, 1818),
__ 244 _
28
Lyn L. Irvine, Ten Letter Writers (London:
Hogarth Press, 1932), p. 203.
^Hunt, p. 298.
~^Jessup, p. 258.
^Tave, p. 72.
35
32
Richard Haven, "The Romantic Art of Charles Lamb,"
English Literary History 30 (June 1963), pp. 137-46.
"^Donald Reiman, "The Thematic Unity in Charles
Lamb’s Familiar Essays," Journal of English and Germanic
Philology, 64 (July 1965)7 470-78.
o /
Reiman, p. 476.
3S
Reiman, pp. 470-1.
^Reiman, p. 478.
■^Reiman, p. 478.
^^Fred V. Randel, The World of Elia; Charles Lamb's
Essayistic Romanticism (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat,
1975.
3 9
Cazamian, p. 1105.
^Daniel J. Mulcahey, "Charles Lamb: The
Antithetical Manner and the Two Planes," Studies in
English Literature 1500-1900 3 (Autumn, 1963), 517-542.
^Mulcahey, p. 532.
/ 9
Peter A. Brier, "Dramatic Characterization in the
Essays of Charles Lamb," Coronto 8 (1973), 3-24.
^Brier, pp. 22-23.
^Robert Frank, Don't Call Me Gentle Charles 1
(Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1976).
^^Frank, p. 16. .
^Frank, p. 25.
36
Chapter II
READER-RESPONSE THEORY, THE THEORY OF THE
OPEN WORK, AND ROMANTIC CRITICISM
Reader-response theory introduces to contemporary
literary criticism the idea that the printed text is only
a set of symbols which trigger the meaningful substance
of text in the, reader's mind. The theory of the open work
examines some of the ways in which texts are designed to
maximize the reader's participation in the text. These
theories will be presented here, as background to the
specific technique in The Essays of Elia and the explora
tory essay, which will be discussed in the next two
chapters.
The idea that the reader participates in making the
meaning of a text is generally associated with the
critical views of Stanley E. Fish. Fish has modified his
"reader response" theory since he broached it in
Surprised by Sin (1967),^ but one element which persists
as a hallmark of his work is the way he "rivets attention
on the sequence of decisions, revisions, anticipations,
reversals, and recoveries that the reader performs as he
negotiates the text sentence by sentence and phrase by
phrase.
37
In Fish's view, a reader is involved in a text in
much the same way that a listener is caught up in a joke;
the listener accepts some premise which is later violated
in an unexpected manner. The reader's participation is
evidenced by her surprise at the juxtaposition of her
initial attitude and an unexpected twist, and by the
adjustment of her understanding in response to this effect.
In Paradise Lost, for example, when one reads Satan's
exhortation to his fallen troops, one begins to admire
Satan's eloquence. This admiration is a lapse of
Christian vigilance. At the close of Satan's speech, the
epic voice reasserts the fact of Satan's utter degrada
tion, and the reader is made to realize that she has
admired, for a moment, a consummate falsehood: she ha^s
been taken in. This realization gives the reader the
experience of succumbing to temptation just as Adam and
Eve did. The text says that Adam and Eve fall to
Satan's'guile; and what the text does is to provide the
reader an experience of just such a fall. The reader
need not wonder at how the innocents could be tempted;
in reading, the reader is similarly seduced. The
reader's own mental acts create the meaning of the text.
Fish applies his technique to several Renaissance
works in Self-Consuming Artifacts (1972).^ In each case,
the reader discovers the meaning of the text in
38
adjustments she makes to the text's changes. In his
reading of Milton's The Reason of Church Government, for
example, Fish explains that the point of the text is to
demonstrate that there is no reason in Church government:
In every unit of The Reason of Church
Government, there coexist two structures,
an outer structure which promises rational
deliberation, progressive clarification,
and encapsulated knowledge, and an inner
structure whose points are made at the
expense of the other's promises and at
the expense, too, of the readers who
believe in them.5
The superstructure of apparent reasoning actually proves
nothing and leads nowhere, and the reader who tries to
follow it is confounded and finally, by default, fetches
up upon the infrastructure of "right reasoning." Thus
the reader's experience expresses the point of the tract,
that there is no (rational) reason in Church government,
and that those who attempt to establish religious
practices by rational means are lost.
In Bacon's Essays, similarly, Fish declares, the
point is not, as first appears, to celebrate truisms,
but always to show the dubiousness of these formulae
and to provoke the reader to test them empirically. This
effect is achieved when a given essay proclaims "one or
more familiar and 'reverenced' witticisms" as if they
were to be supported and exemplified in the rest of the
39
essay, but follows these witticisms with "data that calls
their validity into question," The reader eventually
becomes aware that the confident opinion with which she
began has eroded, and this provokes her to inquire
further. The reader cannot relax in the certainty of an
accepted truth, but must set out independently to
discover truth. Thus the message of the text, the
desirability of empirical research, emerges as the
reader's response to the textual stimuli.
In each of these examples, the "experience" of the
reader refers not to a line of thought followed vicar^-
iously, which the reader may accept or reject, but to a
line of thought which is born in her own mind, as a
response to the text, and so is not something she can
easily disown. The meaning of the text is actually
created in the mind of the reader, not merely decoded or
deduced from the text's symbols.
Although the meaning of the text is created in the
reader's mind, in Fish's analysis, the reader is almost a
slave to the text in terms of what responses she shall
6
have. There is, for Fish, only one right reading of
Reason in Church Government, for example, only one set
of right responses to the text.
Wolfgang Iser grants the reader more freedom.^
Rather than as a respondent to the text, Iser sees the
40
reader as a collaborator with the writer. The writer
deliberately invites collaborations by leaving "gaps"
in the text, A clever writer omits enough incidental
information to entice the reader to supply details and
formulate conjectures about what the text does not say.
The writer who "tells all" bores the reader by limiting
the possibilities of the reader’s interpretation.
Through retrospection of the text already read, and
anticipation of the text to come, the reader creates a
gestalt which is partially dependent on the text and
partially dependent on her own imagination and experience.
Reading is a process o,f "formulating the unformulated."
"The unformulated" refers, on: one hand, to "gaps" left
in the text; but it may also refer to the reader's sub
conscious. By imaginatively filling out the text, the
reader exposes and shapes ideas which until that moment
were unseen and formless. Thus, reading is an act of
self-discovery. In this view, as in Fish's, the meaning
of the text is constructed in the reader's mind; but
unlike Fish, Iser grants the reader considerable latitude.
"Gaps" may be filled validly in different ways by differ
ent readers. The text is not a series of stimuli to force
the reader from one position to another; the text is "an
arena in which reader and author participate in a game
Q
of the imagination."
41
The notion that the reader Imaginatively creates
a "gestalt" of the text by calling on his own subcon
scious thought is supported by a significant body of
Q
research in reading theory. According to this research,
reading consists of two simultaneous, reciprocal
processes. The "bottom-up" process is the reception and
decoding of symbols from the page, a process which has
itself been considered the whole of the act of reading,^
and corresponds to the formalist-positivist position
against which Fish rebels. Current theorists believe
that this "bottom-up" process is complemented by a "top-
down" process which consists of guesses or hypotheses
11
about the meaning of the text. As information comes
"up" from the text, the mind attempts to fit this informa
tion into the cognitive structures it already possesses.
These cognitive structures, called "schemata," or schemas,
are constellations of accumulated ideas which suggest
each other, so that when one is stated, the others are
implied, or at least expectable. The word "kitchen," for
example, brings a host of associations: curtains, knife,
stove, linoleum, morning, coffee, etc. Such associations,
schema theorists claim, explain our different concepts
of "knife" in the following two sentences--
He went into the kitchen and got a knife.
He went into the tent and got a knife.
42
The different contexts created by the words "kitchen” and
"tent" influence the reader to put different constructions
on the same word in the different texts. On a much more
complex scale., the reader's mind, stimulated by data from
the "bottom-up” process, continually "hypothesizes” about
the overall meaning of the text and what the forthcoming
text is likely to say. As long as incoming information
continues to confirm these hypotheses, the reader proceeds
confidently. This "top-down" processing enables the
reader to neglect some of the incoming information and so
to read faster. More importantly for our purposes, this
model of reading explains how the reader's mind contri
butes to the formation of the meaning of a text, and why
there can be great variety in these contributions. Each
textual symbol evokes not simply a corresponding
meaning-value, but a constellation of associations, many
of which will be the same for all readers, some of which
will be shared only by particular reading communities,
and some of which will be unique.
When a reader-response critic like Iser avers that
the reader supplies the unwritten portion of the text,
fills in "gaps" or areas of "indeterminacy," reveals the
"unformulated part" of the text, it is easy to conceive
his meaning in accord ;.with schema theory. The reader's
creativity is expressed not only in the schemas she
43
accesses with reference to the text, but also in the
links she establishes in her own mind from one schema to
another.
The same model accommodates Fish's "way of reading."
As the reader reads, she may find that one of her hypoth
eses Is contradicted by new Information from the text..
This of course is an unconscious or semi-conscious event
until It emerges as a surprise or a hesitation. It is
illustrated In psycholinguistic theory by the following
example:
"Mary heard the ice-cream man coming down
the street. She remembered her birthday
money and rushed Into the house, . . ."
Upon reading just these few lines, most
readers are able to construct a rather
complete interpretation of the text.
Presumably, Mary is a little girl who
heard the Ice-cream man coming and
wanted to buy some ice cream from this
ice cream man. Buying ice cream costs
money, so she had to think quickly of a
source of funds. She remembered some
money which she had been given for her
birthday and which, presumably, was in
the house. So she hurried into the
house to try to get the money before
the ice-cream man arrived. 1 2
Thus far, the example illustrates how much of the
understanding of even a simple text depends on the
reader's background knowledge. Suppose now that the
text concluded, ". . . and slammed the door." Imme
diately the context shifts. The ice-cream man is
44
transformed from a bringer of treats into a villain. In
schema theory, what has happened is that an initial
hypothesis has been refuted by new input from the text,
and an appropriately reformulated hypothesis has replaced
it. Such revisions of a reader's understanding of the
text happen repeatedly in Fish's description of reading
literature:
At this point, the reader is expecting,
and even predicting, a single word--
"doubt"; but instead he finds "certainty";
and at that moment the status of the fact
that had served as his point of reference
becomes uncertain. . , . As a result, the
terms of the reader's relationship to the
sentence undergo a profound change. He
is suddenly involved in a different kind
of activity. Rather than following an
argument along a well-lighted path . . .
he is now looking for one.13
Fish's analysis here can be applied almost without a
change to the "ice-cream man" example above. Thus schema
theory corroborates and clarifies reader-response theory
by providing a model for the reader's contribution to the
text. It emphasizes that the reader is necessarily and
intimately involved with the creation of meaning, and
that the meaning of a text is a mental experience which
is not absolutely determined by the text, but which
arises in association with it.
. . . the basic point is that much of
the meaning understood from a text is
really not actually in the text, per se,
45
but in the reader. . . . What is under
stood from a text is a function of the
particular schema that is activated at
the time of processing (i.e., reading)
the text.
Schema theory illustrates the difference between the
ways that Fish and Iser describe the reader's participa
tion in the text. In one view, the reader creates
meaning by making a series of sudden reformulations or
revisions in her interpretation of the text; in the other
she creates meaning by filling in "gaps" in the text,
enriching it by the addition of personal knowledge.
These two aspects of the reader's contribution to
the text are also treated in Umberto Eco in his analysis
of the "open work," L'Oeuvre Ouverte and The Role of the
15
Reader. Eco's European publications antedate both
Fish and Iser by a few years, and his English publication
comes a few years after them. Confirming the necessity
and the intimacy of the reader's participation in the
creation of meaning, Eco turns to look at how texts
encourage and shape this participation.
To illustrate the "open work," Eco begins with
works of music. The performer of a musical piece, whose
role is to interpret the work to an audience, corres
ponds to the reader of literature, whose role is to
interpret a work to himself. Every "reading," "contem
plation," or "enjoyment" of a work of art represents a
46
tacit or private form of performance. Eco cites several
examples of contemporary musical scores which leave the
performer free not just to modulate tone, volume, 'and
rhythm, but to determine the sequence of phrases and to
vary the length of tones. I quote in full Eco1s first
three examples of the open work to illustrate the degree
and the necessity of the performer’s collaboration in
the composition of these works.
(1) In Klavierstuck XI, by Karlheinz
Stockhausen, the composer presents the per
former a single large sheet of music paper
with a series of note groupings. The per
former then has to choose among these
groupings, first for the one to start the
piece and, next, for the successive units in
the order in which he elects to weld them
together. In this type of performance, the
instrumentalist's freedom is a function of
the ''combinative'' structure of the piece,
which allows him to "mount” the sequence
of musical units in the order he chooses.
(2) In Luciano Berio's Sequence for solo
flute, the composer presents the performer
a text which predetermines the sequence
and intensity of the sounds to be played.
But the performer is free to choose how
long to hold a note inside the fixed frame
work imposed on him, which in turn is
established by the fixed pattern of the
metronome 1s beat.
(3) Henri Pousseur has offered the follow
ing description of his piece Scambi:
Scambi is not so much a musical composi-
tion as a field of possibilities, an
explicit- invitation to exercise choice.
It is made up of sixteen sections. Each
of these can be linked to any two others,
without weakening the logical continuity
47
of the musical process. Two of its
sections, for example, are introduced
by similar motifs (after 'which they
evolve in divergent patterns); another
pair of sections, on the contrary, tends
to develop towards the same climax.
Since the performer can start or finish
with any one section, a considerable
number of sequential permutations are
made available to him. Furthermore,
the two sections which begin on the
same motif can be played simultaneously,
so as to present a more complex struc
tural polyphony. It is not out of the
question that we conceive these formal
notations as a marketable product: if
they were tape-recorded and the pur
chaser had a sufficiently sophisticated
reception apparatus, then the general
public would be in a position to develop
a private musical construct of its own
and a new collective sensibility in
matters of musical presentation and
duration could emerge.16
The performer cannot possibly play works of this sort
without making independent choices about how the piece
shall be structured. There can be no assertion of a
"definitive reading" in the traditional sense of a
reading mandated by the text. On the other hand, there
are constraints against an interpretation that over
whelms the work's integrity: All the different rendi
tions of Scambi are still recognizable as Scambi.
Against the open work, Eco sets the "closed work,"
one which admits of a single interpretation. It is in
this sense a shallow work; not art. The essence of art,
Eco says, is the work's "manifesting a great variety of
48
17
aspects and resonances." A closed work is as one-
dimensional as a traffic sign. Eco offers as literary
examples popular novels such as those of Ian Fleming.
Here, Eco says, the text is constructed to limit its
ambiguity, to arouse a precise response in a single-
minded audience, to lead the reader along a predetermined
path, exciting specific emotions at specific points,
creating and satisfying specific expectations. The
success of such a work depends, of course, upon the
accuracy of the author's estimate of the audience. Since
people are unpredictable, the author cannot prevent the
text from being read with unforeseen assumptions, render
ing its meaning very different from the author's intent.
This was the case of Sue's Les Mysteres
de Paris, which, written initially in a
dandyish mood to please cultivated
readers, aroused as a result a passionate
process of identification on the part of
an illiterate audience; when, on the con
trary, it was written to educate such a
"dangerous" audience to a moderate vision
of social harmony, it produced as a side
effect a revolutionary uprising.
Thus the "closed" work may have other readings from the
one intended, but the different readings are mutually
exclusive. The work does not present a many-faceted
representation of reality; it presents an undifferen
tiated surface, and two different viewpoints of it do
not blend, but clash. The plurality of readings of an
49
open work, on the other hand, are mutually coherent, all
comprehensible as aspects of the same whole. Every
performance explains the composition, but does not exhaust
it. Every performance makes the work an actuality, but
is itself only complementary to all possible other per-
19
formances of the work.
The open work in the field of literature is
characterized by incompleteness, ambiguity, or multiple
possibility. Eco’s frequent examples are James Joyce’s
Ulysses and Finnegan 1s Wake. In their wealth of possi
bility and the numerous, viewpoints from which they are
intelligible, they resemble the musical works described
above. A single word evokes a multitude of associations,
as the plucking of a string creates overtones. In a
brief context, a pun doubles or triples this number of
associations. Add to these the possibilities inherent
in the interweaving of motifs and themes, and the
potential number of mutually coherent readings of the
novel is enormous:
In Finnegan's Wake we.encounter a veri-
table Einsteinian universe, turned back
upon itself (the last word of the book is
the same as the first), a universe thus
complete, and at the same time unlimited.
Every event, every word can be placed in
relation with every other, and the semantic
interpretation of a term reverberates
within the whole. . . . The basic element
of this integrating ambiguity is the pun:
50
two, three, ten different roots make of
a single word a web of significations, of
which any one can illuminate or attach
to those of other words, themselves
open to new constellations, new inter
pretations . 2 0
When we compare this characterization of literary openness
with Iser's view of the text as an "arena," and with
schema theory's concept of "top-down" processing, the
similarity is apparent. All three imply the relatively
free association and rearrangement of textual elements in
the consciousness of the reader. This free ordering of
elements, rather than a step-wise development of thought,
creates a gestalt, a multi-dimensional cosmos all the
meanings of which simultaneously interact.
Another kind of literary openness, which Eco
discusses, presents a single poignant ambiguity, or
dilemma, and demands that the audience provide a solution
for it. Here Eco's examples are the dramas of Bertold
Brecht. These plays present "a conflict of unresolved
problems taxing the ingenuity of playwright, actors, and
21
audience alike"; a play is not a puzzle for the
audience to solve, a puzzle whose solution the author
knows and to which the actors pretend ignorance. The play
is a representation of a human problem in which all are
mutually involved, and its performance is a means of
"raising the consciousness" of actors and audience alike
51
in order to evoke or incite a solution which, at the
beginning of the performance, is unconceived. The open
ness of the work lies, then, not only in the potential
variety of its interpretations, but also in its demand
for resolution.
It is up to the audience to draw its own
conclusions from what it has seen on stage.
. . . Here the work is "open” in the sense
that a debate is "open." A solution is
seen as desirable and is actually antici
pated, but it must, come from the collec
tive enterprise of the audience. 2 2
Here the openness of the work resembles Fish's version
of the reading experience as one which calls for sudden
revisions of the reader's gestalt of the text, A seem
ingly consistent and coherent field of thought develops
smoothly until at some point there is a contradiction or
a novelty which requires that the gestalt of the text be
reformed.
It is clear, however, in Eco' s treatment that the
success of this technique depends upon the closeness of
the reader's involvement with the text up to the moment
when the "solution" is "anticipated." In other words,
the technique of providing a multiplicity of possibilities
for the reader to sort among logically precedes the
technique of evoking a conclusion. The first technique
involves the reader in a problem, and the second
52
stimulates him to create, from his own resources, a
novel solution.
The former sort of openness, the involvement of the
reader in a multitude of possibilities, is a quality of
virtually every work. At one extreme on this scale we
have Ulysses and Tristram Shandy, and at the other,
popular romances. But most literature requires some
23
degree of this sort of reader participation, and the
author has some control in varying this degree. The
openness created by the need for a conclusion, on the
other hand, seems less a matter of degree than a matter
of fact. A literary work either comes to an artistic t
conclusion or it does not, and generally speaking, it
does. The reader may be more or less satisfied with the
author’s choice of conclusion, but this experience is
distinct from responding to the author’s deliberate
refusal to conclude.
Thus Eco shows that the writer can affect both the
extent and the nature of the reader's collaboration with
the text. The closed work limits the creative participa
tion of the reader to the smallest possible range. It
does this by filling in relevant collateral information
as the text proceeds, and by reducing the variety and
ambiguity of the text, so that there may be, ideally,
nothing unpredictable in the reader’s response. The open
work, on the other hand, exploits the reader’s
_______________________________________ 53
participation and makes the unpredictable response of the
reader part of the intention of the text. It does this
both by omission, and by inclusion. First, the writer
may open the work by omitting some relevant collateral
information, stimulating the reader to fill in what is
missing. By presenting a wealth of loosely connected
elements within an ample but limiting framework, the
author invites and even compels the reader to increasing
levels of imaginative cooperation with the text. Second,
the author may open the text by deliberately inserting
inharmonious details and turns of thought, as in the
"self^-consuming artifact." These inconsistencies change
the nature of the reading process from the ongoing con
tribution of "background" information to the sudden
revision of part or all of the reader's concept of the
text.
Some attention has been paid to the reader's
participation in the text and, specifically, to the ways
in which texts are designed to manipulate this partici-
24
pation, in the criticism of Romantic literature. One
early study presents a particularly Romantic instance
of reader involvement in text, and illustrates the
cooperation of both aspects of reader participation
discussed above.
2 5
In "The Fragment as Romantic Form" (1969),
D.F. Rauber sketches a process by which the poet
54
contrives to "catapult’' the reader into regions far
beyond the actual expression of the poem. Rauber
observes how ardently the Romantic poet seeks to convey
a vision of the infinite, to transport the reader to a
world ruled by the imagination, where the slightest
thought may instantly become reality. . The poet attempts
to create this effect through a "finite, discrete, and
sequential medium," a few lines of verse. The mere fact
that the verse must end, Rauber points .out, in order to
be complete as a form, forces the verse to give the lie
to its own creation. In the sense that the Romantic is
boundless, no ending can be Romantic. Rauber finds in
the fragment "the perfect formal solution to the
problem." The ideal model, he says, is "Kubla Khan.”
This exalted description broken off in mid-career leaves
the reader longing for its completion, and also with the
sense that the whole poem did exist, at least for a
moment, in the poet's mind.
. . . the abrupt ending is experienced
by us as being purely accidental, and it
is this variation which makes all the
difference. It is as though we were
listening to the poet from another room
and unexpectedly a door were closed; we
hear no longer, but we feel that the
poet's voice continues. That is, because
the stop is accidental, the poet can
count on something analogous to the
physical principle of inertia; the mind
of the reader, caught up in the velocity
of the movement, continues along the
55.
accidentally interrupted curve, and in
an important sense the poem never really
ends ,.26
When the reader assumes the continuation of the Romantic
fragment, she adds to the text ail that it suggests to
her. This continuation consists of more than a few
obviously missing and inferable pieces; it is based on
and built up from elements which are presented in the
text, but it incorporates the resources of the reader's
mind. Every reader imagines her own Xanadu, and while
each may be different from every other, each still
clearly belongs to that poem. This notion of the Romantic
fragment, begetting its own immortality in the reader's
mind, approximates very closely what Eco describes as an
open work, except that Eco speaks not of continuation,
but of completion:
. . . the author offers the interpreter,
the performer, the addressee, a work to
be completed. He does not know the
exact fashion in which his work will be
concluded, but he is aware that once com
pleted, the work in question will still
be his own. It will not be a different,
work, and, at the end of the interpretive
dialogue, a form which is his form, will
have been organized, even though it may
have been assembled by an outside party
in a particular way that he could not
have foreseen. The author is the one
who proposed a number of possibilities
which had already been rationally organ
ized, oriented, and endowed with speci
fications for proper development.27
56
Thus the giving of a solution to a Brechtian play, like
the imagined continuation of a fragment, depends on the
reader's earlier ongoing involvement with the text. A
poem that does not end has power to stimulate its own
continuation only in a reader who has participated in
the beginning, and a solution can be devised only by
someone who is familiar with the problem.
Rauber's analysis of the Romantic fragment focuses
on a single Romantic ideal, the longing after the
infinite. The general theoretical background of Romantic
criticism is couched largely in two contrary critical
28
formulations, M.H. Abrams' Natural Supernaturalism, and
2 9
Anne K. Mellor's English Romantic Irony. In both of
these studies, Romantic literature is seen to embody
contemporary German philosophy. Abrams emphasizes the
Hegelian vision and characterizes Romantic literature as
expressing a dialectical spiritual journey from painful
alienation to triumphant reintegration. Mellor favors
Schlegel's view, adumbrating a related Romantic tendency
to recognize bittersweet alienation as the inescapable
human condition.
Abrams traces the development of Christian and
secular mysticism to the German Romantic philosophers
whose thought received its consummate expression in the
work of Hegel. The Christian doctrines of the Fall and
57
Redemption and the Neoplatonlc doctrine of the one a,nd the
many merge in the late eighteenth century into the meta
physical notion that the world is animated by a natural
antithetical process, a movement from an original,
unified, innocent and ideal condition, through a period
of alienation and struggle between self-generated
opposing tendencies, to a new and higher unity. Hegel’s
clockwork formulation of this process has become familiar
in the succeeding centuries: a thesis generates its own
antithesis and each of the two resulting principles
seeks its own fulfillment; they struggle together until
their interaction creates a higher unity in which they
are peaceably comprehended, a synthesis; this synthesis
constitutes a new thesis, which again generates its anti
thesis, etc. The common metaphor for this process is a
rising spiral: each new synthesis represents a circular
return to the position of the previous synthesis, except
that it is on a higher level, enriched and exalted by
the intervening struggle. In Hegel's philosophy, the
dialectical process manifests itself in every kind and
at every level of natural activity. On the largest scale,
it is a transcendental universal spirit; as such it
accounts for the processes of the physical universe, for
the course of human history, and for individual growth.
The Romantic literature on which Abrams focuses is
58
concerned with the latter., personal level of activity.
The dialectical process describes the growth of the mind
from infancy to maturity.. The mind
develops through successive stages of
division, conflict, and reconciliation,
toward the culminating stage at which,
all oppositions having been overcome, it
will achieve a full and triumphant aware
ness of its identity, of the signifi
cance of its past, and of its accom
plished destiny. The course of human
life [is] a Bildungsgeschichte.30'
Abrams notes that while Coleridge and Carlyle took
an active interest in Germany philosophy, many other
English writers of the time--Wordsworth, Shelley, Blake--
did.not. The English writers did not need to read German
philosophy in order to be aware of the ideas it espoused,
he said, for they could not have avoided hearing these
31
ideas spoken of in social interaction. More importantly,
however, English and German educated people of the late
eighteenth century shared "the same historical and
intellectual milieu . . . similar precedents in the
32
religious and cultural tradition," so that the elements
of this philosophy , if not its finished form, were
commonplace.
The concurrence in topics and design among
[the English Romantic] writers was less
the result of mutual influence than it was
of a common experience in the social,
intellectual, and emotional climate of
59
the post-Revolutionary age, and of a
grounding in a common body of materials--
above all in the Bible, especially as
expounded by radical Protestant vision
aries, many of whom had assimilated a
modicum of neo-Platonic lore.33
Abrams illustrates in the works of a number of
Romantic poets how a Hegelian metaphysics emerges as
"the Romantic plot of the circular or spiral quest."
Although there are considerable individual differences
among these poets, the works of Wordsworth serve Abrams
as most representative of the group. Wordsworth felt
that he had a mission as poet to heal the native wound of
life. This mission is expressed in The Prelude: A baby
is born in a condition of perfect, harmony between "Mind"
and "external World." As the child grows it distin
guishes more and more between itself and the world, and
between different parts of the world. The habit of
analysis, at first the partner to unreflecting joy, soon
overwhelms it and fragments the original unity. Mind
separates itself from Nature. By a conscious effort,
the sufferer recognizes that his happiness depends upon
reestablishing his mental harmony with nature, and
through a gradual process he achieves this reintegration,
"although now on a level of consciousness which pre
served the critical experience through which he had
Q /
passed." The poem presents itself as the spiritual
60
journey of just one individual, but it also claims that
every spirit passes through similar trials, Wordsworth
believed that this poem recapitulated a process which
everyone undergoes in the search for happiness.
Not only the content, but also the form of
Wordsworth's poem, and of much Romantic poetry, reflects
an outward motion and a return. The "circuitous journey"
is formally represented by the recurring image of a
journey. The Prelude opens with the poet on a walk.
In the course of this episode the aimless
wanderer becomes "as a Pilgrim resolute"
who takes "the road that pointed toward
the chosen Vale," and at the end of the
first book the road translates itself
into the metaphysical way of his life's
pilgrimage. . . .35
Throughout the poem this motif of the wanderer recurs,
until at the end of the poem the poet-wanderer finds his
spiritual home.
It is clear from this brief discussion that the
whole dialectical process is contained within the poem,
both thematically and formally. Thematically, the poet
experiences an internal division, suffers and struggles,
and finally achieves the reunification of his mind with
Nature. Formally, the poem's unity depends on the
journey image, a journey which passes over difficult
terrain until at last it leads home. The synthesis, or,
61
to use another important Wordsworthian image, the
"marriage" of Mind and Nature occurs in and is the
triumphant culmination of the work.
Mellor takes a different stand concerning the
prevailing spirit of Romanticism. She notes that Abrams
omits Byron from his examples because of Byron's irony,
and that he also fails to discuss Schlegel's concept of
romantic irony. These, she says, deserve a full explica
tion because they are distinct from the Hegelian order
which Abrams traces, and prominent in many important
Romantic works.
Not all romantic works present a confi
dent movement from innocence to exper
ience to a higher innocence, that cir
cuitous journey which leads the protago
nist spiraling upward to a more self-
aware and therefore more meaningful com
munion with the divine. To the contrary
many central romantic works exhibit a
structure that is deliberately open-
ended and inconclusive.3°
The philosophy of Schlegel, which Mellor pursues, a
philosophy of art as well as of metaphysics, holds that
there is no resolution, or synthesis, of the opposed
forces that struggle together. Rather, this opposition
itself, this condition of unending conflict, is the
ultimate reality. The only victory possible is to
recognize and accept this condition. Moreover, the
philosophical vision achieved by this recognition and
62
acceptance is not entirely communicable in language.
One may suggest, in "hints and cyphers"; one may reach
out through symbol and allegory for an encompassing
representation; but a structured, rational system such
as language cannot adequately articulate changeful and
chaotic reality. One must fail in such an attempt.
Mellor points out, however, that Schlegel's philosophy
is not one of despair. There is a synthesizing process,
and the mind is capable of joining together opposed
ideas or phenomena. But this tendency is the equal, and
not the master, of the other, dissociating tendency.
The two coexist, in constant interaction.
The artist who accepts this view of the universe
produces a markedly different sort of art from the
triumphant synthesis which Abrams reviews. The Romantic
ironist produces a work which recognizes the eternal
conflict of opposites and his own inability to transcend
or escape this struggle even in his art.
The artist who perceives the universe as an infi
nitely abundant chaos ; who sees his own consciousness as
simultaneously limited and involved in a process of growth
or becoming; who therefore enthusiastically engages in
the difficult but exhilarating balancing between self
creation and self-destruction and who then articulates
this experience in a form that simultaneously creates
63
and decreates itself is producing the literary mode that
Schlegel called romantic irony. As a literary mode,
romantic irony characteristically includes certain
elements: a philosophical conception of the universe as
becoming, as an infinitely abundant chaos;, a literary
structure that
reflects both this chaos op process of
becoming and the systems that men impose
upon it; and a language that draws atten^
tion to its own limitations„
Specifically, Mellor mentions two features characteristic
of a work of Romantic irony. One is "an authorial
consciousness that is simultaneously affirming and
mocking its own creation,” and the other is "two opposed
voices or personae, or two contradictory ideas or themes,
which the author carefully balances and refuses to
synthesize or harmonize .
Mellor"s and Abrams' treatments of Romanticism thus
give contrasting descriptions of the philosophical vision
which the literature is based upon and expresses. In
Mellor's view, a work of Romantic irony describes the
world as ever-changing; it arrests the Hegelian dialectic,
as it were, at its middle stage, saying that this is all
the process there is. In the works Abrams studies, the
universe's motion is not simply back and forth, but ever
upward to a final resting place. Since Mellor and Abrams
64
concentrate on different works, their visions of
Romanticism do not clash,'but embrace complementary
aspects of a larger whole. Still, it will be interesting.,
when considering a particular Romantic work or body of
works, to determine which aspect of Romanticism it favors.
Neither Abrams nor Mellor analyzes the manner of
the reader's active involvement with the text. Mellor,
however, clearly assumes that the work which "commits
itself enthusiastically both in content and form to a
hovering or unresolved debate between a world of merely
3 9
man-made being and a world of ontological becoming',’
will inevitably enmesh the reader in its dialogue and
draw the reader into practicing its precarious philosophy.
Mellor claims indeed that this mode of thought has a
beneficial effect upon the reader:
Romantic irony demands . . . exuberant
playing with the possibilities of an ever-
changing world and life, . . . expanding
participation in a variety of selves and
modes of consciousness. . . . openness to
new ideas and experiences. In so doing,
it embraces a mental habit of tolerance
and a discourse of ambiguity. Romantic
irony is thus opposed to the "gross
dichotomizing" or rigid thinking in polar
ities that has become the prevailing
imaginative structure of modern times.
Romantic irony, therefore, can potentially
free individuals and even entire cultures
from totalitarian modes of thought and
behavior.40
65
Mellor calls the structure of works of Romantic irony
"deliberately open-ended and inconclusive." In Eco's
terms, these works are open as Joyce's and Sterne's,
works are open--they invite the reader to play with a
multitude of possibilities. They are also open when seen
beside texts which express a full Hegelian cycle, for
they provide no resolution. Romantic irony as Mellor
describes it, however, is not "open-ended” in the sense
of seeking to "catapult" the reader beyond the text, for
there is nowhere beyond the text to leap to. The
incompleteness of the text is not an invitation to go
further; it is a statement of an inescapable condition.
In Abrams's analysis, on the other hand, there is
no suggestion of any particular "openness" of the text,
of any invitation to the reader to add to or look beyond
the text. This is not to say that the texts Abrams
discusses are not read as open texts, but that in
Abrams's terms the text invites the reader to share
vicariously in the poet's experience, rather than urging
the reader to supplement the text from his own resources.
Abrams's comparative neglect of the reader's participa
tion in the text represents the critical attitude of the
New Criticism which dominated English letters in the
middle of this century. Mellor's sensitivity for the
effect of the text upon the audience represents a more
66
recent trend, in which Fish, Iser, Eco., Rauber, and
others participate. I believe that the lack of attention
until recently to the reader's role in literature has kept
us from fully appreciating Charles Lamb's skill and his
involvement in the literature of his own time.
In the next chapter I will examine several essays
of Charles Lamb in the light of the critical attitudes
developed in this chapter. I will make a case for
these essays as open works, designed to maxiipulate the
reader's participation so as to inspire the reader to
speculations and conclusions beyond those expressed in the
text. In doing this, I will place Lamb's essays in the
context of Romantic criticism as established by Abrams
and Mellor. I will show that there is a good case to
be made for Lamb as a Romantic ironist, and further that,
against a backgrond of Hegelian metaphysics, he can
fruitfully be read as a creator of Romantic fragments.
67
Notes to Chapter II
Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin (Berkeley: I
University of California Press, 1971); and Is There A
Text in This Class? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1980) , ~
2
Jane P. Tompkins, ed. , Reader^Response Criticism
from Formalism to Post-Structuralism (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins, 1980), p. xvi. ~
3
In the absence of a neuter pronoun, and in the
interest of an open mind, for every general use of the
third person in this chapter and in Chapter IV I will use
the feminine.
^Stanley Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1972).
5
Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts, p. 274.
^Fish, Is There A Text, pp. 1-17.
7
Wolfgang Iser, "The Reading Process, A
Phenomenological Approach," in Tompkins, pp. 50-69.
8 T ri
Iser, p. 51.
9
For a review of literature in the development of
schema theory, see Patricia L. Carrell and Joan C.
Eisterhold, "Schema Theory and ESL Reading Pedagogy,"
Tesol Quarterly 17 (December 1983), 556-560.
■^Eleanor J. Gibson and Harry Levin, The Psychology
of Reading (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1975), pp. 538-
4?f:
^David E. Rumelhart, "Understanding and Summarizing
Brief Stories," in David LaBerge and S. Jay Samuels, eds,
Basic Processes in Reading: Perception and Comprehension
(Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1977).
68
^Carrell and Eisterhold, pp. 558-9.
13
Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts, p. 385.
Car re 13, and Eisterhold, p. 559,
"^Umberto Eco, L 'Oeuvre Quverte, trans Chantal Roux
and D'Andre Boucourechliev (Paris r Editions du Seuil,
1965); The Role of the Reader (Bloomington: University
of Indiana Press, 1979),
1 fi
Eco, The Role of the Reader, pp. 47-48.
17
Eco, L'Oeuvre Quverte, p. 17, my translation,
18
Eco, Role of the Reader, p. 8 .
IQ
Eco, Role of the Reader, p. 59.
20
Eco, L 1 Oeuvre Quverte, pp. 23-24, my translation.
^■^Eco, Role of the Reader, p. 55.
oo
Eco, Role of the Reader, p. 55.
23-r
Iser, p. 51.
n / ....
McFarland, The Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin;
Wordsworth, Coleridge and Modalities of Fragmentation
(Princeton; Princeton University Press, 1980); ~
Tilottama Raj an, Daxk Interpreter: The Discourse! of
Romanticism (Ithaca: Cornell University, 1980.
25
D.F. Rauber, "The Fragment as Romantic Form,"
Modern Language Quarterly 30 (June 1969), 212-221.
■^Rauber, p. 216.
^Eco , The Role of the Reader, p. 32.
69
28
M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (New York:
Norton, 1971).
29
Anne K. Mellor, English Romantic Irony (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1980).
3 ^Abrams,
P-
188.
3 ■''Abrams,
P-
255.
32
Abrams,
P-
193.
3 3 Abrams,
P-
256.
3 ^Abrams,
P-
284.
33Abrams ,
PP
. 284-5.
3 8 Mellor,
P-
6 .
3 ^Mellor,
P-
CM
3 8 Mellor,
PP
. 17-18.
3 ^Mellor,
P-
186.
^Mellor,
P-
188.
70
Chapter III
THREE ELIAN ESSAYS FROM A READER-RESPONSE VIEWPOINT
As we saw in Chapter I, Lamb’s essays are both
criticized for shallowness and irresponsibility, and
praised for subtlety and insight. This dichotomy seems
to result from the reader's confusing Elia the narrator
with Lamb the essayist, a confusion which permeates much
1
Elian criticism. The reader interprets the casual,
carefree, inconsistent Elia with Lamb, A number of more
perceptive critics warn us away from this error. George
Barnett’s study of Lamb's composing process shows that
Lamb took great care with his writing, revising often,
2
and choosing words and balancing phrases like a poet.
If Elia seems to be cavalier, then we may assume that, his
attitude is carefully contrived by Lamb. In the same
vein, Robert Frank demonstrates that Elia's blitheness
is calculated by Lamb to disarm the reader's critical
apparatus and to establish a receptive attitude in the
reader.^
The analysis below extends Frank's argument. Elia's
waywardness does not only beguile the reader; it piques
the reader into supplying the depth of vision which Elia
71
lacks. The essays take advantage of Elia's genial cha,rm
to win the reader to an initial viewpoint and then, under
cover of this charm, undermine this viewppint with a
counter-theme which grows in proportion until it balances
the first. The reader is posed with an antithesis. In
this development, the thought of the essay expands, so
that the essay finally embraces a wide range of possi
bilities between the two extremes of theme and counter
theme. This range of possibilities and each essay's
lack of an explicit conclusion make Lamb's essays "open
works." Each essay, in the course of its amusing, some
times hilarious narrative, poses a real question and
invites the reader to seek an answer.
The three essays chosen for analysis in this study
all come from the six-year period of Lamb's richest
literary productivity, the period in which he wrote for
the London Magazine. My purpose is not to trace a
chronological development, but to detect a relatively
constant pattern. The texts are from the E.V. Lucas
edition.^
"Poor Relations" (1823) comprises five substantial
paragraphs. Elia's simple purpose in the first three is
to describe humanity humorously to his reader. The poor
relation is a person of low social station with a blood
tie to people of higher social station. The poor relation
72
presumes on this blood connection to gain entry, if only
momentarily, to the higher society, and in so doing makes
himself an obnoxious encumbrance on his more wealthy
kinsman. Elia begins the essay by lampooning the social
climber, setting off at a brisk pace and exercising his
versatile wit:
A Poor Relation is the most irrelevant thing
in nature, a piece of impertinent corres
pondency, an odious approximation, a haunt
ing conscience, a preposterous shadow,
lengthening in the noon-tide of our pros
perity; an unwelcome remembrance, a per
petually recurring mortification, a drain
on your purse, a more intolerable dun upon
your pride, a drawback upon success, a
rebuke to your rising, a stain in your
blood, a blot on your 'scuncheon, a rent
in your garment, a death’s head at your
banquet, Agathocle's pot, a Mordecai in
your gate, a Lazarus at your door, a lion
in your path, a frog in your chamber, a fly
in your ointment, a mote in your eye, a
triumph to your enemy, an apology to your
friends, the one thing not needful, the
hail in harvest, the ounce of sour in the
pound of sweet.
He is known by his knock. Your heart
telleth you "That is Mr.-- ." A rap,
between familiarity and respect; that
demands, and at the same time seems to
despair of, entertainment. He entereth
smiling and embarrassed. He holdeth out
his hand to you to shake, and draweth it
back again. He casually looketh in about
dinner-time--when the table is full. He
offereth to go away, seeing you have com
pany, but is induced to stay. He filleth
a chair, and your visitor's two children
are accommodated at a side-table. . . .
The second paragraph continues to .considerable length,-
multiplying instances of the ill-timed guest with great
73
vivacity and trenchant humor. The third paragra-P ^ 1
continues the humorous tirade on the neighboring subject
of female poor relations. At the end of this tour de
force the reader is thoroughly amused, and persuaded of
Elia's exasperation with poor relations. Elia speaks
from the viewpoint of the wealthy kinsman, and his good-
natured laughter at his own impatience with his rela
tives' importunities and obsequiousness make this the
obvious attitude for the reader to adopt as well. The
reader squirms in commiseration even as he laughs at
the catalogue of complaints. These first three para
graphs treat poor relations in general, creating a
stereotype of an unavoidable social misfit, while the
wealthier kinsman, who has the sympathy of both Elia
and the reader, is cast as a gentleman who bears his
guest’s Improprieties with as good a grace as possible.
In the fourth paragraph, Elia introduces two
examples of "the disadvantage to which this chimerical
notion of affinity constituting a claim to acquaintance
may subject the spirit of a gentleman.” This announce
ment promises a continuation of jocose complaints. The
first instance concerns a character from a play, Richard
Amlet, whose desire to rise In society Is thwarted by
the steadfast but comical refusal of his mother, who is
common, to remain behind the scenes. Amlet finally
74
attains the fortune he seeks by the aid, surprisingly, of
his mother, and all ends happily. Elia dispatches this
tale of the theatrical Amlet in a few sentences, and pro
ceeds to "an Amlet in real life, who, lacking Dick's
buoyancy, sank indeed," The notion of sinking is somewhat
ominous, but Elia 1 s. gaiety forbids any expectation but of
an even more deliciously comical anecdote to come.
This new episode compares in length to the whole
first section of the essay. It concerns'-a school friend
of Elia whose pride makes his poverty bitter. His friend,
"W--.," is recovering his equanimity, however, when his
equally poor, and humble, father appears and renews the
boy's embarrassment before his peers. The comedy of
circumstances continues hardly abated. The father
was a little, busy, cringing tradesman,
who, with his son upon his arm, would
stand bowing and scraping, cap in hand,
to anything that wore the semblance of a
gown--insensible to the winks and opener
remonstrances of the young man, to whose
chamber-fellow, or equal in standing,
perhaps, he was thus obsequiously and
gratuitously ducking.
Young W--, in his pride, feels he cannot endure the
atmosphere of Oxford because it is poisoned for him by
his father's groveling, and determines to leave school.
The reader and Elia are not prepared for the outcome.
75
A letter on his father's table, the next
morning, announced that he had accepted a
commission in a regiment about to embark
for Portugal. He was among the first who
perished before the walls of St. Sebastian
This sudden and unexpected death--the death, apparently,
of a real person in a real battle (England supported
Portugal in wars against : Spain and France in the first
decade of the nineteenth century)--dashes cold water on
the reader's levity. Elia, like the reader is thrown
into some consternation wben he realizes he has wandered
from his course, and he immediately apologizes.
I do not know how, upon a subject I began
with treating half seriously, I should
have fallen upon a recital so eminently
painful; but this theme of poor relation
ship is replete with so much matter for
tragic as well as comic associations,
that it is difficult to keep the account
distinct without blending.
Elia persists in the notion that he is comically describ
ing poor relations. The insinuation of a tragic strain
is an unfortunate accident, the result of the complexity
of the subject, and of Elia's momentarily and innocently
having lost control of his material.
Lamb, of course, is in complete control of his
material, and a rereading of this second portion of the
essay shows that the author has introduced a number of
subtle changes in "this theme of poor relationship."
76
First, the poor relation is no longer quite so obnoxious
as in the opening paragraphs. Amlet's mother is an
encumbrance to her son, but ultimately is the means of
his success. Old W--, while he also is a keen embarrass
ment to his son, is in his own right good-natured and
well intentioned. He does not seek social preference by
associating with his son: A house-painter, he comes to
Oxford because he gets a contract to paint some public
buildings. By the time his son flees, Old W--'s affairs
"were beginning to flourish."
Not only are the poor relations in these examples
less obnoxious, but the "wealthy" relations, contrari
wise, do not quite come up to the social position of
modest gentility which Elia paints in the opening section.
Amlet is at first without means, seeking to make his
fortune by marriage. He has a much less tenable social
position than the bourgeois gentleman of the opening
section.
With the story of Young W--, the figure of the "rich
relation," takes on more complexity. In the beginning
section, Elia himself takes the role of the superior
kinsman, winning the reader over with his urbane humor.
As represented by Young W--, however, the "superior
kinsman," while still a sympathetic character, is less
winning. For W-- is a person who creates problems for
77
himself. The source of these problems is pride. When
Elia first mentions W--'s pride, he defends and excuses
it:
If he had a blemish, it was too much pride;
but its quality was inoffensive; it was not
of that sort which hardens the heart, and
serves to keep inferiors at a distance; it
only sought to ward off derogation from
itself. It was the principle of self-
respect carried as far as it could go,
without infringing upon that respect which
he would have every one else equally main
tain for himself.
This pride, however, was the cause of "many a quarrel"
between the school chums. "I would not thread the alleys
and blind ways of the town with him to elude notice."
W— seems a less sympathetic character, too, when Elia
comments, "He thought himself ridiculous in a garb, under
which Latimer must have walked erect, and in which Hooker,
in his young days, possibly flaunted in a vein of no
discommendable vanity." W--'s pride was the sort that
made him turn inward, as Elia's further description
reveals: "In the depth of the college shades, or in his
lonely chamber, the poor student shrunk from observa
tion." Despite, and even because of Elia's defending
W--, the reader becomes conscious of the difference
between the two. Elia easily accepts and appreciates his
student status, but W-- seems not only shy, but peevish.
/
78
Eventually, however, the solitary pursuit of
learning mends W--'s spirit, and "[h]e was almost a
healthy man, when the waywardness of his fate broke out
against him." This is the fate, of course, which brings
Old W-- to Oxford. Elia cites the cruel discrepancy
between town and gown to mitigate the judgment of his
friend's behavior, and when W-- decides to leave Oxford,
Elia again speaks up in his behalf: ". . . let the sturdy
moralist, who strains the point of the filial duties: as
high as they can bear, censure the dereliction; he cannot
estimate the struggle." This passage satirizes W-- even
as it defends him. Although Elia remains W--'s friend
to the last, the description makes clear that VI--'s own
pride and moodiness are as responsible for his discom
fort with his father as his father's obsequious behavior.
W*— is not the genial burgher of the opening section of
the essay.
Elia's quarrels with him, moreover, and the notice
Elia takes of VI--'s unseemly behavior create a division
between the narrator and his character. In the opening
section, Elia himself takes the role of the offended
"wealthy" relation. Now Elia dissociates himself from
this role and lets it be played by a less affable
fellow. VI--'s ill-humor is clearly less attractive than
Elia's aplomb.
. 7 . 9 J
All of these innovations in the second portion of
the essay--the increased attractiveness of the poor
relation, the reduced attractiveness of the "rich"
relation, and Elia's own distancing from his protagonists,
go unnoticed by the narrator himself. Nor, I believe, are
these changes often given their full value by the reader.
Conditioned by the pace and lightness of the introductory
sketches, and informed by Elia that these next anecdotes
are specific illustrations of the general theme, the
reader expects the essential elements of the comic
situation to remain constant. He tends to overlook small
discrepancies as eccentricities of Elia's. This comic
conditioning is the principal reason that the report of
W--'s death is a shock.
Another factor which contributes to this shock is
the fact that the reader loses the focus of his identi
fication in the essay. At first, as we have seen, the
reader identifies with Elia as the gentleman encumbered
by poor relations. Because of Elia's good nature, this
is a comfortable position for the reader. The hero of
the brief tale of Amlet, because of his success and
"buoyancy," is also a person suitable to the sympathies
of Elia and the reader. W-- is a less sympathetic
character. Elia continues to protest, to the reader that
W— is a good lad, even as Elia removes himself to a
80
neutral position. The reader, accordingly, expects that
W'— will perhaps snatch triumph from tragedy, or at least
come to some acceptably comic modus vivendi. When the young
man abruptly dies, the reader is caught backing the wrong
side. Laughter dies in his throat not simply because death
intrudes on comedy, but also because it is in a rhetorical
sense the reader's own death: the attitude in which the
reader invests, the successful, "buoyant" attitude of bear
ing up good-naturedly in the face of the pretentions of a
poor relation, diminishes first into a mean, and finally
into a self-destructive attitude. Genial tolerance is
transmuted into haughty intolerance.
This transmutation occasions more than just a moment's
discomfort. Condescension to poor relations seems an
acceptable attitude when directed heartily and humorously
against a stereotype in the opening section of the essay.
But when directed toward the real person of Old W--, who
after all has virtues as well as faults, condescension
mixes with aloofness and pride, and becomes intolerance.
The subtlety with which the second attitude emerges from
the first suggests that condescension and intolerance are
closely related species of a general sense of superiority.
In its initial manifestation, that of good humor, this
attitude confirms one's sense of importance and satisfac
tion with one's position; in its later manifestation, that
of ill humor, it undermines one's sense of importance and
81
destroys one's position. Lamb has made this antithesis
grow out of his essay by first inducing the reader to adopt
an attitude of harmless superiority, and then stealthily
removing its justification. The death of W--. brings home
to the reader that an amused condescension toward poor
relations is dangerously close to a self-destructive pride,
and makes the reader face not just the unacceptability of
W^-'s vanity, but the inadvisability of the more genial
vanity to which the reader originally subscribed.
Thus, the death of young W-- leaves the reader in
an uncomfortable position by calling into question his
social grace. The question raised by poor relations is
the question of how to justify one's own ambivalence
between social ambition and family ties.
This question is Lamb's of course, and the reader's,
but not Elia's. The death of W-- is a momentary shock to
Elia, but he quickly rescues his tone from sobriety
with a fluster of distracted apology,
The essay at this point is "open" in two senses.
First, it is "replete with . . . much matter for tragic
as well as comic associations." A simple relationship
of tolerant superiority to intrusive inferiority has
become a complex set of relationships with a range of
possibilities at each pole. Second, the text is open in
82
the sense that it incorporates a surprising turn
calculated tp disturb the reader's general idea of the
text, and to cause him to reformulate it.
Lamb closes the essay with one more long paragraph,
which aids the reader in reformulating his concept of the
essay. The problem before the'reader is how to preserve
one's social pretensions without snubbing one's less
fortunate kin. Lamb makes no-explicit suggestion, but he
comes to the reader's aid by making Elia tell one more
story, and this time, Elia promises, it will be one "not
attended with anything painful, or very humiliating."
Elia tells the story of a guest in his boyhood, home,
whom he takes to be an old acquaintance of his father's.
The guest is neither an encumbrance nor a delight, but
something in between.
A particular elbow-chair was appropriated
to him, which was in no case to be violated.
A peculiar sort of sweet pudding, which
appeared on no other occasion, distin
guished the days of his coming. I used to
think him a prodigiously rich man. . . .
Often have I wondered at the temerity of
my father, who, in spite of an habitual
general respect which we all in common mani
fested toward him, would venture now and
then to stand up against him in some argu
ment touching their youthful days. . . .
But my father, who scorned to insist upon
advantages, generally contrived to turn
the conversation. . . .
The guest, John Billet, like the other poor relations
in the essay, is a misfit in his kinsman's home. He is
83
grave and taciturn, and "a sort of melancholy grandeur
invested him." He engages Elia's father on equal footing
when they talk about their "youthful days," but he is
also capable of rudeness, as when he retaliates for an
inadvertent tactlessness on the part of Elia's aunt by
finding occasion later to "utter with an emphasis that
chilled the company, . . . "Woman, you are superannuated!"
The family, however, treat Billet with patience and
kindness. They are solicitous and delicate. After the
tactlessness on the aunt's part and Billet's outburst,
great care is taken to amend the affront. Elia's tone
is now., hushed and respectful, whereas before it was
bright and saucy. In the first part of the essay the
reader laughed with Elia at the guest's awkwardness and
the host's discomfort; now both look sympathetically on
the discomfort of the guest. In the first two sections
of the essay, Elia speaks from the perspective of a
sophisticated man. Only a person of the world, who had
learned to distinguish and select among his feelings,
could isolate the humor of the host's discomfort from
the pathos ,of the guest's. In this third section,
Elials boyhood perspective fails to distinguish among
emotions, but sees, and desires to see, all whole. The
child Elia perceives in totalities. "He came from the
Mint. . . . and I thought he was the owner of all that
money.". The guest is "clothed in neat black," and Elia
__________________________ 84_
"fancied him to be obliged to go about in an eternal suit
of mourning." Aghast at his father’s arguing with his
guest, "chilled" at the inadvertent affront, Elia is
soothed at the making of peace. In the earlier sections,
Elia represents his feelings as his own, but in this
final section he speaks of "my father's table . . . all
in common . . . the general preference . . . conciliating
level . . . the company."
This youthful, passionately inclusive attitude
suggests the attitude which the reader should adopt
toward poor relations. It is most clearly expressed,
characteristically, in an oblique way. The childhood
differences between father Elia and John Billet concern
a rivalry based upon Elia's having lived "on the hill"
and Billet "in the valley." In pacifying a conversation
which threatens to grow fractious, father Elia
contrived to turn the conversation upon
some adroit bycommendation of the old
Minister; in the general preference of
which, before all other cathedrals in the
island, the dweller on the hill, and the
plain-born, could meet on a conciliating
level, and lay down their less important
differences.
Rather than leaving the reader to devise a resolution
for the paradox of the essay, the final anecdote illus
trates an attitude which successfully supplants the first.
While a jocose condescension is "humiliating" and a
_____________________________________________________________ 85_
haughty intolerance "painful," the Elia family embrace
both humor and pathos and "blend" them into a delicate
tact. The Elias are still superior, both in social
position and in repeatedly taking the initiative to pour
oil on troubled waters; but superiority is now tempered
by considerateness and sometimes vanishes altogether.
The overly mirthful and the overly proud kinds of
superiority are synthesized into a thoroughly humane
regard.
This essay illustrates a complete Hegelian cycle,
from thesis to antithesis to synthesis. In other essays,
Lamb initiates a similar cycle but does not complete it,
leaving the essay open-ended,, and the synthesis to the
reader.
Lamb leaves the antithetical pattern unresolved in
"A Chapter on Ears" (1821). This essay begins: "I have
no ear," and if the prediction of the antithetical
strategy is correct, it should close with the statement,
"I have an ear." This it does in the subtle and naive
Elian manner. The opening statement is a four-word
announcement that stands alone. In the next paragraph
Elia hastens to qualify it by saying that he does not
mean that he was born physically without ears. In making
this statement, Elia shows off his verbal virtuosity by
varying his theme with a copiousness that would have
86
delighted Erasmus, He refers to his ears as "exterior
twin appendages," "hanging ornaments, and (architecturally
speaking) handsome volutes to the human capital,"
"conduits," "ingenious labyrint'he inlets," "indispensable
side-^ intelligencers. " After this brief but brilliant
display, Lamb returns to the theme, "I have no ear,"
only to qualify it again, assuring the reader that he
does not mean that he has had his ears cut off, like
Defoe, Garrulously he recalls Defoe's history, cites
Pope's "Earless on high stood, unabashed, Defoe," and
then thanks his stars that he himself was never in the
pillory.
Thus the essay opens with the briefest possible
statement of the theme, and two short asides which
restrict its meaning in the tone and manner of a gossip
who would like to impart an urgency to his message, but
who would stop short of indecency.
When he opens the fourth paragraph, by declaring
that he means he has no ear for music, Elia emerges at
last on the high road of his purpose. In the next
sentence, indeed, he stops himself again to say that
there are certain songs which he once liked to hear; but
he reverses himself again, by intimating that he liked
these songs less for musical reasons than because they
were sung by women he adored.
87
The next paragraph begins with another qualification,
"I even think that sentimentally I am disposed to harmony.
But organically I am incapable of a tune," and then Elia
mocks himself cheerfully and half-consciously with a
display of his inability to construe a melody:
I have been practicing "God Save the King"
all my life? whistling and humming of it
over to myself in solitary corners; and
am not yet arrived, they tell me, within
many quavers of it. Yet hath the loyalty
of Elia never been impeached.
I am not without suspicion that I
have an undeveloped faculty of music within
me, For thrumming, in my wild way, on my
friend A.'s piano, the other morning, while
he was engaged in an adjoining parlor--on
his return he was pleased to say, "he
thought it could not be the maid i" On
his first surprise at hearing the keys
touched in somewhat an airy and masterful
way, not dreaming of me, his suspicions
had lighted on Jenny. But a grace,
snatched from a superior refinement, soon
convinced him that some being--technically
perhaps deficient, but higher informed
from a principle common to all the fine art--
had swayed the keys to a mood which Jenny,
with all.her (less cultivated) enthusiasm,
could never have elicited from time. I
mention this as a proof of my friend's
penetration, and not with any view of dis
paraging Jenny.
Elia deceives himself, of course; his friend's comment
indicates that he thinks the piano is being played with
remarkable lack of musicality. Elia's effort to illus
trate some natural affinity for music exposes a "tin ear."
88
Several patterns have emerged by this point in the
essay. First, the thesis is apparently that Elia is a
musical imbecile, the more so because he flatters himself
that he has some sympathy with music. Second, the essay
will apparently be composed of a series of humorous
anecdotes about Elia's cheerful but foredoomed efforts
to be musical. Another pattern that has been established
is a conversational flow. As in "Poor Relations," Elia
seems to set down his thoughts as they occur to him,
assuming no argumentative burden, but rambling aimlessly.
Within this conversational pattern occurs Elia's
tendency to qualify his statements--to say that he does
and he does not have an ear for music. Despite this
trait, the reader is convinced at this point that Elia
is virtually tone deaf.
The reader who is himself musical will smile indul
gently at Elia's clumsy affectation and enjoy the essay's
humor. The unmusical reader will also enjoy the humor,
the more so because he will.be gratified to encounter a
soul-mate in exclusion from the world of music. For, at
this point in the essay, there could hardly be anyone
with less musical perception than Elia;
Elia goes on to avow his bewilderment at the
"science" of music, by which he means its technical
terms. He does not know what a note in music is, or
89
how one note should differ from another.
Much less in voices can I distinguish a
soprano from a tenor. Only sometimes the
thorough-bass I contrive to guess at, from
its being supereminently harsh and disagree
able. I tremble, however, for my misappli
cation of the simplest terms of that which
I disclaim. While I profess my ignorance,
I scarce know what to say 1 am ignorant of.
I hate, perhaps, by misnomers. Sostenuto
and adagio stand in the like relation of
obscurity to me; and Sol, Fa, Mi, Re is as
conjuring as Baralipton.
This paragraph continues the theme of Elia's estrangement
from music. "Baralipton" is a mnemonic vocable invented
by scholastic philosophers for the first proposition of
a syllogism. Few things could be less meaningful to a
nineteenth-century Romantic, and Elia asserts that music
is equally bewildering to him. It is interesting to
note, however, that the Oxford English Dictionary cites
a line from one Earl Roscom (1660), "Apollo starts at the
rude noise Baralipton makes." If Lamb has this line in
mind, it allies Elia with the god of music, and implies
that his ear may be better than either- he or the reader
thinks, and that the fault for his dislike of music lies
not with his ear, but with the music that he hears. This
is just the sort of reflection that would be most satis
fying to the person--Elia or the reader--who feels
distressed at his failure to appreciate music. In light
of this reflection, the next paragraph contains, a slyly
satisfying innuendo against the reigning taste in music:
90
It is hard to stand alone in an age like
this (constituted to the quick and criti
cal perception of all harmonious combina
tions, I verily believe, beyond all preced
ing ages, since Jubal stumbled upon the
gamut), to remain, as it were, singly unim-
pressible to the magic influences of an art,
which is said to have such an especial
stroke at soothing, elevating and refining
the passions.
This statement is easily read as another evidence of
Elia's musical frustration. But it also hints that the
one who "stands alone" has a better sense of music than
all the society around him. Besides being flattering to
one's vanity, this suggestion implies the questions,
"What is music?" and "Is it any more likely that a person
should be born bereft of musical capacity than that he
should be born without ears." We shall see that these
questions ultimately lie well within the field of thought
that the essay creates.
In the next line, Elia introduces a change in his
relationship to music as if it were no change at all.
Yet, rather', than break the candid cur
rent of my confessions, I must avow to
you that I have received a great deal
more pain than pleasure from this so
cried-up faculty.
Up to this point Elia has presented himself as unaffected
by music, beyond a mild bemusement. To "continue the
candid current" as it began, Elia would have to say that
91
both his pleasure and his pain at music.are slight and
superficial. Instead he avers that although his pleasure
is mild, his pain can be extreme. Accordingly, the next
three paragraphs reveal a higher degree of intensity and
involvement in music, as they continue the chain of
humorous anecdotes.
The core of the oppressiveness of music, Elia
declares, is its failure to convey a meaning. A'car
penter's hammering is annoying, but at least "it hath
no task to con." Music adds to noise the burden of
demanding understanding. Elia's ear "will strive . . .
to thread the maze; like an unskilled eye painfully
poring upon hieroglyphics." He rushes out of an Italian
opera to "take refuge in the unpretending assemblage
of honest common-life sounds." He is tormented at the
audience's lack of mirth in response to an oratorio.
Instrumental music is even less communicative since
it lacks words altogether:
Words are something; but to be exposed
to an endless battery of mere sounds; to
be long a dying; to lie stretched upon a
rack of roses; to keep up languor by
unintermitted effort; to pile honey upon
sugar, and sugar upon honey, to an inter
minable tedious sweetness; to fill up
sound with feeling, and strain ideas to
keep pace with it; to gaze on empty
frames, and be forced to make the pictures
for yourself; to read a book, all stops ,
and be obliged to supply the verbal
92
matter; to invent extempore tragedies
to answer to the vague gestures of an
inexplicable rambling mime--these are
faint shadows of what I have undergone
from a series of the ablest-executed
pieces of this empty instrumental
music.
This protestation at the emptiness of music adds elo
quently to the evidence of Elia's lack of ability in
music, but at the same time it distracts the reader from
the change that takes place in Elia in this passage. No
longer a clownish bumbler at music, whistling woodenly
and striking wildly at the piano, his suffering now
betrays a spirit ardently engaged and greatly disappointed.
This passage evokes a picture of an audience in Kafka-
esque torment trying to make sense of the senseless.
This torment is aggravated, moreover, by the underlying
sense that music can be beautiful as roses, sweet as
honey. Although the literal message of the paragraph
remains, "I have no ear," Elia's attitude has intensified
from cheery insouciance to perspiring care.
This mounting tension crests in the next paragraph,
which opens with a by-now familiar concession, again
as if the only message were still, "I have no ear."
"I deny not," Elia confesses, "that in the opening
of a concert, I have experienced something vastly
lulling and agreeable." This admission is immediately
qualified by, "afterward followeth the languor and
93
oppression." Nevertheless, it is clear that the hints
of a sensitive and positive response to music in the
preceding paragraph are now augmented. This paragraph
carries a long quotation from Burton on the delight of
the onset of melancholy, to which Elia likens his own
experience at a concert. It is remarkable to hear Elia
describing music as "Most pleasant . . . delightsome,"
and comparing it at length to an idle fantasy of a
summer afternoon. This is not the response of someone
who is tone deaf. Indeed Elia maintains his original
comic pose as a man confounded by his singular impene
trability to music, and the heightened intensity of his
frustration may serve only to increase the humor of his
predicament. Yet even the partial enjoyment of music to
which Elia confesses in this paragraph is wholly beyond
his scope as he illustrates it in the beginning of the
essay.
In the penultimate paragraph, Elia's music apprecia
tion reaches a new height. A friend likes to entertain
at evening parties by playing the organ:
When my friend commences upon one of
those solemn anthems, which per adventure
struck upon my heedless ear, rambling in
the side aisles of the dim Abbey, some
five-and-thirty years since, waking a
new sense, and putting a soul of old reli
gion into my young apprehension . . . a
holy calm pervadeth me. I am for the
time
--rapt above earth,
And possess joys not promised at my birth.
94
At this point we have reached the opposite end of the
spectrum of music appreciation from that at which the
essay begins. Elia, despite.himself, now reveals that he
sometimes has as keen and fine an enjoyment of music as
anyone. In the closing paragraph, although he resumes
his raillery against music, it is tempered by a "capacity
to receive," and we learn that what oppresses Elia is
not that he is impervious to music, but that he is
easily overburdened by it. He can enjoy a little music,
[b]ut when the master of the spell, not
content to have laid a soul prostrate,
goes on, in his power, to inflict more
bliss than lies in her capacity to
receive--impatient to overcome her
"earthly" with his "heavenly," still
pouring in for protracted hours, fresh
waves from the sea of sound . . . I stag
ger under the weight of harmony, reel^
ing to and fro at my wits' end. , . .
Elia is invaded. He is overwhelmed. He is desperate to
preserve his. very identity from this onslaught that
seems to possess his mind. It is not tone deafness or a
failure to understand that incites this desperation:
it is an extremely keen sensitivity, an overly developed
susceptibility to music that "lays the soul prostrate."
The one who "stands alone,” excluded from music by his
own dullness, has become one who voluntarily excludes
himself to protect his own sensitivity.
95
The essay still holds together as a comical account
of one man's approach-avoidance to music; if we accept
Elia at face value, the episodes may be read as more and
more extreme instances of Elia's frustration with music.
Yet the elements of his discomfort are not consistent.
As Elia glides and storms hilariously from concert to
concert, we are shown a variety of responses to music
capable of cataloguing all possible responses. We have
the harmless musical imbecile of the opening passage,
the auditor maddened by his inability to "understand"
music, the gentleman soothed by sweet sounds, and the
prostrate soul in an orphic frenzy.
At the beginning the essay seemed to be a simple
exposition of the thesis, "I have no ear," proceeding
by a series of illustrative anecdotes. The essay then
develops, as it were, a counterpoint between "I have no
ear" and "I have an ear," until at the close the two
themes are equally strong. Elia's description of himself
at the piano, which at the beginning of the essay
seemed ridiculously boastful, now appears literally
true: "technically, perhaps, deficient, but higher
informed from a principle common to all art." Elia
knows none of the "science" of music, with which to
articulate his feelings, but he apparently does respond
to music in a variety of ways. The conceptual field of
96
the essay includes not only tone-deafness, but a
range of musical responses as complete as any "since
Jubal stumbled upon the gamut,"
Mario Praz charges Lamb with debasing his art by
catering to a bourgeois audience, and cites "A Chapter
on Ears" as an instance in which "he confesses himself,
in a joking and quite unpretentious way, to be insensible
to classical music,Although Elia's apparent obtuseness
comprises the humor of the essay, the essay also reveals
a deep appreciation of music, . It is only the narrating
Elia who is obtuse. The essay is open to a much broader
range of responses in the reader.
If the reader perceives the growing duality in the
course of reading the essay, he may expect some sort of
resolution at the end--a recognition by Elia, for example,
of a moderate or selective appreciation of music, which
would supply a sort of synthesis to the two theses. In
this hope, the reader would be disappointed. If, on the
other hand, the reader fails to perceive the counterpoint,
carried along by Elia's wit and his insistence on his
aversion to music, the absence of a resolution begets a
moment's doubt, in which the reader may suddenly see
that Elia is in effect two people--a lover of music and
a musical dolt. In the final passage, Elia is still in
the throes of his frenzy at the organ recital of his
97
friend. He recapitulates the extremes of his responses to
music with a religious metaphor and brings the essay to a
swift close on a note of normalcy, a return to the "tonic":
. . . clouds, as of frankincense, oppress
me--priests, altars, censors, dazzle before
me--the genius of his religion hath me in
her toils . . . I am converted and yet a
Protestant; at once malleus hereticorum,
and myself grand heresiarch: or three here
sies center in my person*. I am Marcion,
Ebion and Cerinthus--Gog and Magog--what not?
till the coming in of the friendly supper-
tray dissipates the figment, and a draught
of true Lutheran beer (in which chiefly my
friend shows himself no bigot) at once
reconciles me to the rationalities of a
purer faith; and restores to me the gen
uine unterrifying aspects of my pleasant-
countenanced host and hostess.
This final vision of Elia, with its stunning contrast
between his wild desperation and his stoic comfort, is
on its surface hilarious. He has survived in good form
a particularly grueling encounter with the muse. The
terrors of music are past, and the snug complacency to
which Elia returns recalls the lightheartedness of the
opening of the essay. As far as the chain of anecdotes
is concerned, this is as good a place to stop as any.
Yet this cavalier cessation of his tale is an exclu
sively "musical" ending, a conclusion in feeling but not
in thought. It brings Elia’s passions to a quietus, but
98
it does not account for the changes that he has undergone,
nor for the crescendo of intensity and receptivity to
music that mounts throughout the essay. On the contrary,
it dramatically presents the contrast between sensibility
and insensibility and then abandons it. The reader who
has not perceived the duality of the essay up to now is
left with the image of an Elia who asserts his insensi
tivity to music in spite of his having recently felt
"rapt above earth" at a performance. To this reader, the
ending may provide more than a comic contrast--it may
awaken him to its duality of perspective on music appre
ciation, expanding his conceptual field. Its message is
not that some people, like Elia, are excluded from
musical pleasures, but that anyone, if he is more willing
than Elia, can enjoy music to some degree.'
The reader who has perceived the essay's counterpoint,
on the other hand, does not find in Elia's conclusion the
resolution he might have hoped for. To the end, Elia
fails to acknowledge unequivocally that he does like
music; he pretends to prefer to do without it. The smug
assertion, "I have no ear," however, clearly will not
do any more. Although Elia fails to sense the anomaly
of his narrative, the perceptive reader sees that the
sense of the text has escaped the thesis, and so he only
partially shares in Elia's relief at the end. The
_________________________ 9 ,9 .
reader sees that Elia pretends to be a man ijisensitive to
music, even as Lamb shows him to possess a profound
sensitivity. Thus Elia himself is a paradox. Just as
in "Poor Relations" Elia both resents and loves his
extended family, in this essay he believes himself to
have no ear for music even as he demonstrates a sensitive
ear and a responsive spirit. The implication is that a
person may be more than he thinks he is and from this
point of view, Elia’s blind complacency at the end is
unsatisfying. One would like to see him take possession
of his true capacity. This lack of resolution on Elia's
part embodies the restless quality of antithesis demand
ing a synthesis. Elia is cautious, even cowardly, in
choosing to deny his gift rather than to risk his
identity in an experience that frustrates and frightens
him, The reader’s perspective is wider and more ambi
tious. In its oblique way, the essay challenges the
reader to reflect on his use of his own capacities.
I am not far from asserting that "A Chapter on Ears"
is a serious exposition of human courage and cowardice.
It is indeed a humorous essay, but it contains an
ambiguous undercurrent amounting at last to a counter
theme which greatly expands the field of thought which
the essay represents.
In "A Dissertation on Roast Pig" (1822), Lamb's
most anthologized essay and his best loved and most
.10.0
commented upon, the antithetical manner relies again on a
mixture of Elia's'assumed naivete and Lamb' s authorial
cunning. Outwardly, the essay is a celebration of the
pleasure of the palate, casting aside all other considera
tions. It describes the choicest pigs for roasting, the
variety of savors this delicacy affords, and the ways of
preparing the pig to release the most flavor. Description
of such unrestrained enjoyment makes the essay like a
holiday. Fred V. Randel even asserts that "Elia is
advocating incorporation of a new hedonism into tradi-
£
tional morality."
The sweet self-indulgence of this essay good-
humoredly spurns the usual social restraints upon the
appetite. Within the bounds of the essay, the gratifi
cation of a private desire is honored consistently above
generosity or continence or any kindness or duty. The
essay gives laughing sanction to the impulse, "me first.”
It is the rarity of such license, along with Lamb's wit
and gusto at taking advantage of it, which’makes this
essay such a treat. Like Jem White to the chimney-sweeps
at their Bartholomew's banquet in another Elian fantasy,
Elia tells his readers to have as much as they want of
what they like best, and helps them .to it.
Before settling to this delightsome task, Lamb/Elia
prefixes a long tale of the discovery of roast pig. The
101
purpose of this preamble is to introduce the subject of
roast pig and to warm the reader to the topic.
The introductory tale purports to come from a Chinese
manuscript which records the first time humankind ever ate
roast pig, untold ages ago. At this early period, people
ate raw flesh, "clawing and biting it from the living
animal, just as they do in Abyssinia to this day." One
day, however, the brutish country lad Bo-bo accidentally
sets his house afire, and among the casualties is "a fine
litter of new-farrowed pigs." Bo-bo happens to touch
one, burns his fingers, and "in his booby fashion" puts
his fingers to his mouth to soothe them. The sweet taste
of roast pig is discovered. Bo-bo introduces this
discovery to his initially horrorrstruck father (for
roasting meat seemed a barbarism, and a sin against "the
good meat which God had given them"), and his father is
soon won over. Father and son then burn down their
house frequently, because they know no other way to cook
the pigs, and also to camouflage their lawless consump
tion of burnt flesh. Finally they are discovered and
tried, but the presentation of the principal evidence at
their trial converts both jury and judge, and soon
everyone in the district is eating roast pig. Houses
burn everywhere.
This long preamble prepares the reader for Elia's
description of his own gustatorial pleasures in three
102
ways. First, it provides an extreme example of gluttony
in a primitive setting. Compared with "biting and claw
ing flesh from the living animal," no culinary extremities
on the part of nineteenth-century Londoners will seem
uncivil. Second, the introduction associates the apprecia
tion of roast pig with the progress of civilized under
standing, The primitives of the opening fable, with
exotic names like "Ho-ti” and "Bo-bo," are made to seem
stupidj the dawn of understanding coincides with the
discovery of eating of burnt flesh. Third, the dullness
of these early people makes their discovery of roast pig
tantalizingly slow, and this delay heightens the reader's
appetite for what is sure to follow. Bo-bo is described
as maddeningly slow-witted, for example, in the act of
discovering roast pig:
. . . an odor assailed his nostrils,
unlike any he had before experienced.
What could it proceed from? not from the
burnt cottage, he had smelt that smell
before; . . . Much less did it resemble
that of any known herb, weed, or flower.
A premonitory moistening at the same time
overflowed his nether lip. He knew not
what to think. He next stooped down to
feel the pig, if there were any signs of
life in it. He burnt his fingers, and
to cool them he applied them in his,
booby fashion to his mouth. Some of the
crumbs of the scorched skin had come away
with his fingers, and for the first time
in his life (in the world's life, indeed,
for before him no man had known it) he
tasted--crackling! Again he felt and
103
fumbled at the pig. It did not burn him
so much now, still he licked his fingers
from a sort of habit. The truth at
length broke into his slow understanding,
that it was the pig that smelt so, the pig
that tasted so delicious; and surrender
ing himself up to the new-born pleasure,
he fell to tearing up whole handfuls. . . .
Of course the slowness of Bo-bo's understanding is for-
giveable, since he has never tasted roast pig before, but
his plodding discovery--smelling, wondering, tasting,
tasting again--make the reader impatient to get on to a
delight he knows well. It serves to sharpen the appetite,
by making the reader feel he is already arrived at a point
to which the text is slowly advancing. This description
also clearly shows Bo-bo emerging from his ignorance into
the light of knowledge of roast pig, "cramming it down
his throat." Throughout this tale, uninhibited indulgence
in roast pig is identified with the "final cause" of the
long process of human history. The spark of understanding
is always accompanied by a meal. Not only did the jury,
upon tasting the evidence, vote unanimously for acquittal,
but the judge:
who was a shrewd fellow, winked at the
manifest iniquity of the decision: and
when the court was dismissed, went privily
and bought up all the pigs that could be
had for love or money. In a few days,
his lordship's town-house was observed to
be on fire.
104
The slow enlightenment of society eventually arrives at
"the rude form of a gridiron," and "roasting by string
or spit," By the end of the introductory account of the
clumsy, slow advance of society, Lamb has so cunningly
and so mercilessly heightened the reader's anticipation
of the satisfaction to follow, that he can joke in the
fable's conclusion about the slowness of civilization to
arrive at roast pig.
Thus this custom of firing houses contin
ued, till in process of time, according
to my manuscript, a sage arose, like our
Locke, who made a discovery that the
flesh of swine, or indeed of any other
animal, might be cooked (burnt, as they
called it) without the necessity of con
suming a whole house to dress it. Then
first began the rude form of a gridiron.
Roasting by the string or spit came in
a century or two later, I forget in whose
dynasty. By such slow degrees, concludes
the manuscript, do the most useful, and
seemingly the most obvious, arts make
their way among mankind.
Thus the progress of society is progress toward the
culinary perfection of eating roast pig. Whereas the
eating of raw flesh is the mark of a backward people,
eating roast pig is the hallmark of civilization. This
association effectively sanctions any pleasure Lamb's
Londoners might take in roast pig as no gluttony, but
the proper exercise of cultivated taste. Add to this
license the anticipation created by the teasing
105
leisureliness of the historical account, and Lamb has
primed his reader to leap without restraint at the "main
course" of the essay.
Elia begins his declaration of his own gustatorial
pleasure by jettisoning everything about the introduction
except its license.
Without placing too implicit faith in
the account above given, it must be
agreed that if a worthy pretext for so
dangerous an experiment as setting houses
on fire (especially in these days) could
be assigned in favor of any culinary
object, that pretext and excuse might be
found in ROAST PIG.
He exults over every phase of the process of roasting
pigs, from selecting the most succulent piglets, to
manners of preparation, to the subtle variety of oral
and alimentary pleasures the various parts of the pig
provide. The suspension of even Victorian table manners,
achieved in the introductory section, permits Lamb to
gloat over and savor the delights of roast pig without
inhibition. Yet if we read these descriptions with
detachment, they have a pronounced shade of heedless
cruelty. The choicest pig is described as
but a young and tender suckling--under a
moon old--guiltless:as yet of the sty,
with no original speck of the amor
immunditiae, the hereditary failing of
the first parent, yet manifest--his
voice as yet not broken, but something
between a childish treble and a
grumble. . . .
1.0.6.
The young pig is likened in tenderness and in moral
purity to a child, yet the next sentence, italicized in
the text, gives vent to a heartiness that borders on
savagery: He must be roasted. Conditioned by the playful
theme of honoring one's appetite, the reader sees in the
pig's "innocence" only a metaphor for the delicacy of its
flavor. This moral vocabulary marks the beginning,
however, of a substructure of moral allusions and
grotesque imagery which develop into the antithesis within
the essay's overall structure. The references to the
pig's innocence and child-like purity continue to mingle
with the imagery of killing and burning:
fat cropped in the bud--taken in the shoot,
in the first innocence, the cream and
quintessence of the child-pig's yet pure
food. . . .
Behold him while he is "doing"--it
seemeth rather a refreshing warmth than a
scorching heat, that he is so passive to.
How equably he twirleth round the string!
Now he is just done. To see the extreme
sensibility of that tender age! he hath
wept out his pretty eyes--radiant jellies--
shooting stars.
See him in the dish, his second cradle,
how meek he lieth! wouldst thou, have had
this innocent grow up to the grossness
and indocility which too often accompany
maturer swinehood? Ten to one he would
have proved a glutton, a sloven, an obsti
nate, disagreeable animal--wallowing in
all manner of filthy conversation--from
these sins he is happily snatched away. . . .
In child-like innocence, in meekness and passivity, the
pig comes even to resemble Christ, and the hearty company
107
of pork-roasters to resemble tormentors of the innocent.
The pig is supposedly rescued from a maturity in which
"he would have proved a glutton," and gluttony is
associated with "all manner of filthy conversation." The
contrast of the pig's youthful innocence, moreover, with
its supposed debauchery in later life, inverts the progress
motif of the introductory fable. There we believed that
the early phases of civilization were "underdeveloped,"
and the later stages superior in their understanding.
Now it appears that the innocence of youth is superior in
its purity, and is succeeded by moral decline. Elia and
his fellow revelers receive a tinge of this taint, for
the thorough goodness of the pig is soon contrasted with
"mankind's mixed characters, a bundle of virtues and
vices, inexplicably intertwisted, and not to be unraveled
without hazard. . . ." Beneath the single-minded and
simple-hearted glee which Elia urges upon the reader from
the beginning of the essay a strain of cruelty and
depravity develops. The moral imagery has a credible role
in the essay's overt celebration of the pleasure of eating
roast pig, as metaphor for the delicacy of its taste;
yet the more serious reading is also available, and
becomes more noticeable as the essay continues.
A substantial "digression":interrupts Elia's reverie
on roast pig. Seeming to develop the idea that roast pig
108
is something everyone enjoys, Elia pursues the notion of
sharing good things. "I love to taste them, as it were,
on the tongue of my friend." This sharing, the first
mention of an act of generosity in the essay (contrasting
with Bo-bo's offering his father "the lesser half" of a
pig to taste), Elia immediately curtails: "a stop must
be put somewhere." Then follows a bit of casuistry
which argues that it is more virtuous to enjoy a pleasure
oneself than to share it with another:
Methinks it is an ingratitude to the
Giver of all good flavors to extradomi-
ciliate,^or send out of the house- slight
ingly (under pretext of friendship, or I
know not what) a blessing so particularly,
adapted, predestined, I may say, to my
individual palate. It argues an insensi
bility.
The naked agility of this argument, while it partakes of
the general dispensation of the essay, is superfluous.
Nothing in the essay before the digression demands a
defense of selfishness. But now, laughingly and by-the-
way, Elia wanders into a reflection which establishes
the theme of selfishness vs. generosity.
This faint moral note sounds again when Elia
continues the digression with an illustration of "a
touch of conscience in this kind." He recalls in his
boyhood his "good old aunt” packing him off to school
with "a smoking plum-cake, fresh from the oven." On the
_________________________________________________________________________ 109
way. he meets an old beggar, "and in the vanity of self-
denial, and the very coxcombery of charity, school-boy
like," Elia gives the beggar the whole cake. Soon the
boy regrets his action, feels "how ungrateful I had been
to my good old aunt," misses the cake, and "above all I
wished never to see the face again of that insidious,
good-for-nothing old gray imposter."
This anecdote reinforces the essay's theme, that it
is good to indulge one's appetite, but it does so in a
negative way: failure to get what one wants leads to
pain. The "touch of conscience" appears ironic because
it is invoked on behalf of the inversion of a familiar
rule: it is better to receive than to give. While the
boy's discomfort supports the thesis in a logical sense,
it interrupts the light and carefree tone of the essay,
and as this tide of feeling ebbs, the reader can see
more clearly the "retrograde" morality of the essay.
The license of self-indulgence is slightly taxed. The
suffering of the pig has evoked no sympathy, but the
victimized child, empty-handed and miserable, is
pathetic..
The next paragraph, without transition, resumes
the discussion of roast pig as if no digression had
intervened: "Our ancestors were nice in their method of
sacrificing these tender victims." By this reference to
110
"tender victims" Elia means, of course, young pigs; but
it can as easily refer to the cheated boy just spoken of
as to the pig of a few paragraphs before. In the ensuing
passage, at last, the contrast of tenderness and cruelty
is too forceful to be overlooked. The humorous momentum
of the essay has abated with the digression. The essay's
license to overlook rough treatment of an innocent
creature lapses. The mercilessness of the action here,
as well as the Insensitivity of the tone is unmistakable:
We read of pigs whipped to death with
something of a shock, as we hear of any
other obsolete custom. The age of dis
cipline is gone by, or it would be cur
ious to inquire (in a philosophical
light merely) what effect this process
might have toward intemperating and dul
cifying a substance, naturally so mild
and dulcet as the flesh of young pigs.
It looks like refining a violet. Yet
we should be cautious, while we condemn
the inhumanity, how we censure the wis
dom of the practice. It might impart a
gusto.
I remember an hypothesis, argued upon
by the young students when I was at St.
Omer's, and maintained with much learn
ing and pleasantry on both sides, "Whether,
supposing that the flavor of a pig who
obtained his death by whipping (per
flagellationem extremam) superadded a
pleasure upon the palate of a man more
intense than any possible suffering we
can conceive in the animal, is man justi
fied in using that method of putting
the animal to death?" I forget the
decision.
The scholastic detachment of this passage lacks the
careening high spirits of the earlier part of the
111
essay. Elia's own spirit, of course, is in no wa,y
blighted, Elia's innocence is like the young pig's, and
we assign any apparent insensitivity on Elia's part to
his innocent enthusiasm--he really is the sort of person
who can reflect without offense on the killing of pigs.
The reader, however, always "superior” to Elia, belongs
to the more sophisticated community whose characters
are "a bundle of virtues and vices.” Even Elia realizes
that he must assure the reader that he is speaking
"philosophically merely," and that he "condemns inhuman
ity." Nevertheless Elia's earnest consideration, "It
might impart a gusto," begets a shudder. Despite Elia's
"pleasantry," there is a peculiar coldness in the
question of whipping the pig to death, and a callousness
in "forgetting the decision."
Elia's bona fides, and his utter simplicity, are
confirmed in the closing paragraph, when he turns
blithely to the matter of the pig's sauce, as if his true
intention had never wandered from the innocent pleasure
of eating. In terms of tone, however, this paragraph
is starkly anticlimatic, following lightly - and inconse
quentially on the darkly dramatic speculations which
precede. This sequence reiterates the contrast between
a jolly, harmless gratification of appetite and thought
less cruelty. It recalls the laughing mood of the early
112
part of the essay without eclipsing the grimness of the
later part.
The reader is left, as it were, with his mouth open.
The epicurean rollercoaster ride has a stomach-dropping
dip at the end. After accepting the thesis that conven
tional morality should admit some hedonism, he gets a
flash of the terrible excesses to which "pleasure" can
go. The ancient debate, which Elia refers to casually,
between self-love and social responsibility, is revived
in earnest. Elia takes no responsibility for it; his
conscience is untroubled. But behind Elia, Lamb is
responsible for the essay's tone and structure. The
essay first establishes an innocent zest in eating one's
favorite food. The association of this gourmandise with
advanced civilization, as well as with personal pleasure,
masks at first a concurrent pruelty: the pleasure of
one person implies the pain of another person or creature.
While this reciprocal rule is illustrated only by the
plight of the pig, it remains trivial and humorous. When
Elia's reminiscence indiscreetly places a young child
in the position of the "tormented," however, the cruel
obverse of self-indulgence can no longer be ignored.
The conceptual field of the essay doubles. Pleasure is
seen to entail pain. The thesis bears its own antithesis,
and presents the ambiguity to the reader.
113
Once again, the conclusion is disturbing. It takes
no cognizance of the paradox it expresses. It only
provides stimulus for the reader to consider the intimate
involvement of pain and pleasure, and the proper restraint
of appetite.
Lamb *s brief career as Elia established him as one
of the foremost practitioners of the familiar essay.^
With Lamb's writings, as well as those of William Hazlitt,
Thomas DeQuincey, and others, the familiar essay, which
began with Montaigne and which Joseph Addison and
Richard Ste#le. ; adapted to their own purposes and cir
cumstances, achieved its fullest expression.
One quality which distinguished the early nineteenth-
century essay from its predecessors, as we have seen in
Chapter I, was the free expression of the personality of
the writer:
In such essays we may expect to find
the minds of interesting men unfolding
themselves in various engaging moods.
. . . Behind the printed page of the
essayist one feels a warm, human quality--
a man. This man has the power, through
his essay, of spreading his charm to
us. . . .8
A second hallmark of the familiar essay is its
inconclusiveness, an aspect of its freedom of form.
Since the aim of the essay is to entertain, and since
it has no argumentative point to make, whatever issues
114
it 'happens to raise may remain unresolved. To argue a
particular viewpoint would be to remove the essay from
the category of the familiar essay:
From Montaigne on, essayists have
voiced their moods in no argumentative
or dogmatic way, but in an implicit--
if not an expressed--tolerance of other
people's moods and points of view.
[Essays] are not propaganda, and aim
neither to persuade nor to convince.^
The familiar essay sometimes is referred to as the
informal essay. It is called "familiar" or "personal"
when one thinks primarily of the writer's personality
in the work. When one thinks of the essay's incon
clusiveness, or its tendency to ramble, the more apt
label is "informal." The familiar and informal aspects
of the essay both reflect the dominance of the freely
associating mind of the author, as the following comment
implies:
[The familiar essay] has in it an indi
vidualistic touch wliich one does not
find in the informative article and in
the scholarly or scientific treatise.
These are impersonal, dispassionately
correct and systematic. The writer of
such an article or treatise feels that
he must present every scintilla of evi
dence, that he must not allow a single
exception to escape his notice, that he
is duty bound to face each point which
might be urged against the position he
maintains. . . . The essayist, on the
other hand, fills the page with his
presence, . . . . 10
115
In, the Essays of Elia these two aspects of the
"personality" of the familiar essay are of course
prominent. In the three essays analyzed above, the charm
of the writer and the failure to conclude a line of
thought are devices strategically employed to develop an
antithetical or dual pattern and to move the reader not
to laugh, but to reflect.
The "writer" in Lamb’s essays, first of all, is both
Lamb and Elia. Even if ail of Elia's traits are identical
with Lamb’s, and of course they are not, Elia is still a
creation of Lamb’s and the narrator of the essays. Elia
functions in two important ways to help Lamb achieve
his oblique intentions. First, Elia wins the confidence
of the reader by his diffidence, his geniality, and his
evident spontaneity. Second, Elia's tolerant attitude,
extending sometimes to simple-mindedness, permits a
variety of conflicting ideas to coexist in the context
of the essay. The context or "scene" of the essay in
an important sense is Elia’s mind. Any familiar essay
is governed by the casual associations of the writer's
ideas rather than by the rigorous pursuit of a line of
thought; but Elia's wandering is just a bit more "aim
less" and whimsical than most, and the reader, bemused
by Elia’s charm and innocence, is induced to permit a
wider and wider variety of ideas into the essay. The
116
mind of Elia is the medium of the essay's ambiguity. It
admits contrary notions without seeming to notice.
The inconclusiveness of the essay, too, is especially
important in the examples discussed above because each
of the essays dramatically emphasizes its lack of resolu
tion. The failure to conclude is a device akin to the
"Romantic fragment," urging the reader to continue the
text. "Poor Relations," to be sure, provides a synthesis
for its antithesis; but this synthesis is implied, and
even this implicit conclusion is expressed as the under
standing of a child. In the other two essays discussed,
the antithesis is dramatically revealed at the end, and
no sequel provides the desirable synthesis. These essays
flaunt their inconclusiveness. The seductive charm of
Elia and the anticlimax of the essay cooperate in a
strategy to move the reader to think seriously.
Each of the essays analyzed begins by securing the
reader's concurrence in a particular attitude or opinion.
It wins the reader's trust through Elia's volubility
and good humor. No sooner is this initial position
♦
established than Lamb begins to undermine it under the
cover of Elia's blitheness. Ideas contrary to the essay's
"thesis" begin to emerge and accumulate until they consti
tute a counter-thesis or antithesis. In "Poor Relations"
Elia suddenly realizes how far he has wandered from his
117
original idea, and he is shocked. In the other two
essays, Elia never notices the presence of the counter-
theme .
In each of the essays, the counter-theme arises
incidentally: Elia relates a series of anecdotes
intended to illustrate his original thought; but the
anecdotes are so rich in detail that they illustrate more
than Elia intends; and under Lamb's careful hand, this
natural ambiguity comes to substantiate both Elia's
intention and its opposite. In a formal essay, this
ambiguity' would be intolerable. In the essays discussed
here the ambiguity is admissable because the reader
perceives it to be outside the mind of Elia. The moment
Elia recognizes an inconsistency in "Poor Relations,"
he rectifies it. But in the other two essays Elia does
not perceive the inconsistencies in his own tales. The
"scene" of the essay, then, which began as Elia's freely
associating mind, now includes and exceeds Elia's mind.
The reader is aware of Elia's intention, but he also
becomes aware of a collateral, contrary, sense in Elia's
own words. Thus the "scene" of the essay shifts from
Elia's mind to the reader's. Elia's attitude is well
supported, but the reader can see, in a broader context,
the futility of Elia's conviction.
118
Lamb's strategy to "tease the reader into thought,"
then, first engages the reader in Elia's charming
loquaciousness, and then, through Elia's simplicity,
permits the reader to comprehend a deeper reality.
The potential impact on the reader of the antitheti
cal strategy is more, however, than just to broaden his
vision. At the beginning of the essay, the reader
presumably embraces the opinion Elia proffers and laughs
with Elia as this viewpoint is elaborated. Elia's appeal
is such that the reader is likely to accept him as a
peer at first, and concur amiably in his opinions. The
evidence of decades of readership indicates that on the
majority of readers Elia indeed has such a charming
effect. When the reader perceives the essay's counter
theme , therefore, he must admit that the notion which is
compromised is not just any notion, but a heartfelt
conviction of his own. The anticlimax is thus especially
poignant because it leaves the reader questioning his
own values. Elia takes no responsibility for a paradox
he does not recognize. Whether drinking beer or
contemplating barbeque sauce, Elia seems entirely satis
fied with his closures. His very contentment, however,
adds to the reader's frustration at being denied closure
in the essay's wider context.
That Lamb should choose to write essays intended
to bedevil the reader in the way just described is
119
entirely in accord, with his character and with the
intuitive observations of some of his critics. Thomas
Carlyle no doubt intended to belittle Lamb with the
remark, "He is witty by denying truisms,but the
remark epitomizes aptly the strategy of these essays.
Each engages the reader in a commonplace idea, or truism,
which it then calls into question. Lamb does not do
12
this just to be witty, however, but to be provocative.
Another of lamb's critics, in a more complimentary vein,
notes the expression of Lamb's contrary nature in his
essays:
He delights to quiz our complacent judg
ments, to look beneath our smug convic
tions. He is always getting behind some
sentimentality, priggishness, or pedantry
where he can poke delicious fun at it.13
Here again, the critic strikes intuitively upon the
quality which the above analysis reveals as a rhetorical
strategy. Alfred Ainger, too, in his introduction to
an edition of the Essays in 1885, detects the whole
antithetical process in miniature.
. . . how exquisitely unforeseen, and
how rich in tenderness, is the follow
ing remark as to the domestic happiness
of himself and his "cousin Bridget" in
Mackery End: "We are generally in har
mony^ with occasional bickerings, as it
should be among near relations." What
is the name for this antithesis of irony,
this hiding of a sweet aftertaste in a
120
bitter word? Whatever its name, it is a
dominant flavor in Lamb's humor.14
Ainger's perception anticipates the argument of this paper.
Lamb's first clause establishes a happy idea, and this
is darkened by the antithesis of the following phrase.
The final clause brings a "sweet aftertaste" in the form
of a synthesis. This is the pattern I find at work on a
large scale in the essays discussed above--complete in
"Poor Relations," truncated in "A Chapter on Ears" and
"A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig."
As documented in Chapter I, critics have repeatedly
noted and chafed at the inconclusive quality of Lamb's
essays. Pater and Cazamian find this to be delicately
suggestive, but Morley amd More regretfully see this
"delicacy" as a refusal to engage serious issues. While
the familiar essay is not expected -to "persuade" or
"convince," even Birrell, an ardent Elian, feels that the
Essays of Elia lack substance.^ Other of Lamb's
Ifi
admirers are content to enjoy the "atmosphere" of the
essays, or, as Basil Willey suggests, are "content with
fragments. One disaffected critic gives Lamb's
elusiveness its worst interpretation. "With Lamb the
essay changed from a vehicle for serious writers with
something to say to an occasion to show off their whimsi-
18
cal attitudes in a highly mannered style." It should
121
be clear from the preceding analysis that these charges
of soft-headedness, from the most muted to the brassiest,
may be leveled at Elia but not at Lamb. The long tradi
tion of taking the limits of the text to be the mind of
Elia, I believe, kept readers from detecting how Lamb
communicated with his reader outside Elia's consciousness.
When one assumes that the text is limited only by the
available responsiveness of the reader, a whole new
category of textual symbology comes to light. The essay
may communicate to the reader, to borrow Fish's words,
not only by what it says, but also by what it does.
Lamb's essays pretend to be simple-minded. Many readers,
nevertheless, have found them wise and perceptive without
being able to say quite how these qualities were
achieved. I hope that the present analysis of the
antithetical strategy exposes one of Lamb's techniques
for veiling wisdom in folly.
It remains to place Lamb's essays in the context of
Romantic literature--in the ironic universe of Schlegel
and Mellor, or on the upward spiral of"Hegel and Abrams..
Mellor's description of romantic irony so closely
fits the Essays of Elia that it is surprising she does
not use them as examples:
. . . the work of art must reveal the
presence of an authorial consciousness
122
that is simultaneously affirming and
mocking its own creation. . . . More gen
erally, artistic irony can manifest itself
in the work of art as a process of simul
taneous creation and de-creation: as
two opposed voices or personae, or two
contradictory ideas or themes, which the
author carefully balances and refuses to
synthesize or harmonize.19
Lamb's essays simultaneously affirm and deny the asser
tions of Elia, as theme and counter-theme develop mutually.
Lamb, in making Elia oblivious to the inconsistencies of
his narratives, seems to create around Elia a universe of
"infinitely abundant chaos" such as Mellor describes.
In this universe:
being and becoming stand side by side,
in unresolved and unresolvable conflict.
Borrowing a phrase from F. Scott
Fitzgerald's The Crack-Up, we might say
more simply that philosophical irony is
the ability to hold two opposed ideas
in mind at the same time, while still
retaining the ability to f u n c t i o n . 2 0
This seems to be just the universe suggested by the
essays of Lamb we have looked at. As we have seen, Lamb
carefully contrives to leave the reader in possession of
an ambiguity as Elia retires from the arena of ideas.
Elia himself cannot be called a true denizen of this
universe, because he conspicuously lacks the "ability to
hold two ideas in mind at the same time," at least
consciously. Although his stories are ambiguous, Elia
123
is usually unaware of their alternative meanings, When he
notices a contradiction, he seeks to amend it. The
reader, on the other hand, perceives both Elia’s intention
and Lamb's~-thesis and antithesis. Thus it is arguable
that the final "gestalt" of the essay in the reader's mind
is an "abundantly chaotic universe" in which contraries
coexist, and that Lamb’s ultimate intention is to convey
this impression of the universe.
While this ironic conception of the universe
envisions a repetitive conflict, the Hegelian model "is
progressive and transcendental . . . in an upward and
21
outward spiraling growth of human consciousness,"
According to Abrams, rather than a perpetual uneasy
balance:
Romantic philosophy is . , , primarily
a metaphysics of integration, of which the
key principle is that of "reconciliation,"
or synthesis, of whatever is divided,
opposed, and conflicting.22
According to this view, there is an "energy inherent in
polarities" which does not permit them long to coexist,
but drives them to wrestle together until they have
merged in a higher unity. An antithetical mechanism
underlies all thought and action, urging them to ever .
higher and more inclusive syntheses.
124
Literature expresses this concept in a variety of ■
ways. From the evidence of "Poor Relations,” we can say
that Lamb holds with this Hegelian position. For when
Elia notes the ambiguity which has arisen in his own
speech, he is virtually driven to supply a further
anecdote, and this anecdote effectively transcends and
"blends" the earlier contrasting viewpoints. It is
reasonable, therefore, in "A Chapter on Ears" and "A
Dissertation Upon Roast Pig," where Elia remains
unconscious of his contradictions, that Lamb expects or
desires the reader to sense the urgency and to resolve
the conflict which Elia ignores. In these cases, the
essay sets the antithetical process in motion by creating
incompatible alternatives and then calling the reader's
attention to them, over the head of Elia. The tactics
of dramatizing the paradox at the close of the essay,
and of making Elia blind to it, implant the contradictory
notions in their unstable condition in the reader's mind.
If we see the antithetical movement toward synthesis as
a necessary process, the essay which ceases in the midst
of this process is a sort of "Romantic fragment." It
begins a pattern which is interrupted, and the momentum
of the beginning carries the reader to continue and
complete the project, so that the text achieves its
conclusion only in the mind of the reader. In "A Chapter
.125
On Ears," the reader is left to decide whether individual
taste should prevail over social convention, and how
open one should make oneself to the convictions of others.
In "A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig," the reader considers
how far one may carry a private appetite before it
infringes on another's well-being. These essays invite
conclusions in the same way that Brecht' s plays, according
to Eco, invite their audiences to resolve the problems
that the plays enact.
23
A similar strategy governs other Elian essays.
This use of the antithetical pattern "opens" the works.
They are similar to romantic fragments, initiating a
design for the reader to complete from his own resources
as well as from elements of the text. They suggest
that ambiguity is a natural condition of the world in
which we live. They may even be read as amusing excur
sions, ignoring the serious undertones. The variety of
possible readings initially consistent with each
other. The essays are amusing throughout; the universe
is amusingly ambiguous whether or not we. seek to
resolve its conflicts; and we do seek to resolve the
universe's conflicts, whether or not we are ultimately
able to do so.
The final chapter will apply the strategies under
lying these essays of Lamb's to the composition practices
126
of college students in the 1980s. This unlikely-seeming
enterprise is based on the distinction between exploration
and exposition as patterns of thought and modes of
expression. Lamb's essay strategy, will provide a model
for writing an essay which is "open" in the sense that it
cultivates novelty and variety. Like the essays of Lamb
discussed in this chapter, the exploratory essay seeks to
expand its field to facilitate a thorough examination of
an issue. The exploratory essay is a means of inquiry
for both reader and writer; as such it is a natural
complement to exposition.
127
Notes to Chapter III
Stuart M. Tave, "Charles Lamb: Criticism," in
Carolyn Washburn Houtchens and Lawrence Huston Houtchens,
eds., The English Romantic Poets and Essayists, rev.
(London: University of London Press, 1966), p. 60.
2
George L. Barnett, Charles Lamb: The Evolution of
Elia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964),
pp. 189, 231.
^Robert Frank, Don't-Call Me Gentle Charles!
(Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1976), pp. 13,
31.
^E.V. Lucas, The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb
(St. Clair Shores, Mich.: Scholarly Press, 1903-05.
^Mario Praz, The Hero in Eclipse in Victorian
Fiction (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), p . 74.
^Fred V. Randel, The World of Elia: Charles Lamb's
Essayistic Romanticism (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat,
1975), pp. 70-74.
^Louis B. Wann, "The Development of the Essay in
English," in Century Readings in the English Essay (New
York: App1eton-Century, 1926), p. 25.
^Bernard L. Jefferson, "Essayist and Essay," in
Essays and Essay Writing (New York: Thomas Nelson,
1931), pf xii.
q
Robert Withington, Essays and Characters: Lamb
to Thompson (New York: Macmillan, 1933), p . xvii.
"^Jefferson, pi xiv.
■^John Mason Brown, ed. , The Portable Charles Lamb
(New York: Viking, 1948), p . 15^
12
Lamb's tactics here bear a close resemblance to
Fish's account of Bacon's in his essays, which I mention
in Chapter II. See Self Consuming Artifacts, pp. 78-
155.
; 128
13
C.T. Winchester, A Group of English Essayists
(New York: Macmillan, 1910) , p . 105 .
"^Alfred Ainger, ed. , The Essays of Elia (New York:
A.L. Burt, 1885), p. xx.
"^Augustine Birrell, Obiter Dicta (London:
Duckworth, 1910), p. 282.
^Wann, p. 25.
^Basil Willey, "Charles Lamb and S.T. Coleridge,"
Charles Lamb Bulletin 5 (Jan. 1974), 83-104.
18
Denys Thompson, Reading and Discrimination
(London: Chatto & Windus, 1954), ppT 45-46.
19
Anne K. Mellor, English Romantic Irony
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980),
pp. 17-18.
^Mellor, p. 12.
^Mellor, pp. 11-12.
22
M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (New York:
W.W. Norton, 1971), p . 182.
23
Other Elian essays in which I detect the same
strategy are "The Two Races of Men," "New Year's Eve,"
"All Fools' Day," "Old China," and "Dream Children."
Randel remarks the moment in "Dream Children" when a
sudden turning in the text calls the reader's attention
to the second "world" in the essay, p. 46.
129
Chapter IV
THE EXPLORATORY ESSAY
This chapter first demonstrates the aptness of the
term "Exploratory" for the kind of essay analyzed in
Chapter III. Then it contrasts the exploratory with the
expository essay, and argues that teaching the exploratory
essay in college composition courses will establish a
more communicative relationship between writer and
audience, and will freshly promote the traditional values
of liberal education.
The idea of exploration implies an openness to new
ideas, a willingness and a desire to see new things, or
to see things in a new way. It also implies a suspicion
or intuition or conviction that there is something novel
to be discovered. The conviction that there is something
to be discovered and the desire to make such discovery
comprise the attitudinal basis of the act of exploration.
The act itself of exploration is a searching out, a
persistent trial of novel alternatives. One would expect,
accordingly, that the "exploratory essay" would examine
an issue from various angles. Lamb's essays are explora
tory in this sense because they develop alternative views
130
of a single issue. As demonstrated in the previous
chapter, however, Lamb's essays do not aim so much to
explore as they do to move the reader to explore. Thus
their function is less to recreate the act of exploration
than to instill the attitudes that beget exploration.
Lamb's essays instill these attitudes in three ways.
First, the antithetical manner brings the reader to doubt
an idea which earlier she complacently accepted. This
doubt implants the notion that there is more to be known.
Second, the essays end without resolving the doubt they
raise, creating a sense of incompletion, and hence a
desire to know more. Around this doubt and this desire,
the essays create a mood or atmosphere which encourages
and supports the seeking and making of new ideas. The
first two of these tactics were illustrated in the
preceding chapter. The third requires some further
explanation.
A number of modern theorists have examined the
attitudes which underlie creative thinking,^ and the
conditions they find most conducive to creative thought
are the conditions which prevail in the milieu of the
familiar essay. Carl Rogers summarizes these conditions
2
as "psychological safety" and "psychological freedom."
According to Rogers, a person feels psychologically safe
in an atmosphere where her own worth is unconditionally
assured, where she fears no judgment or criticism, and
131
where she is understood empathetically. One feels
psychologically free when one has "complete freedom of
symbolic expression," These two conditions "foster and
3
nourish the internal conditions" which constitute
creativity.
These conditions of creativity are met for the
reader to a considerable degree by the atmosphere
established in the familiar essay, and particularly in
Lamb's essays. The familiar essay treats a trivial topic,
or a serious topic trivially.^ In the familiar essay
the reader encounters a personality in an informal
setting: "one feels a warm, human quality.""* One has
a sense of intimacy, of aimless, casual conversation
between equals. The lightness of the topic and the sense
of personal, friendly, encounter beget a feeling of trust.
Robert Frank, as we have seen, observes that Lamb takes
care through the persona of Elia to establish an amiable,
non-contentious atmosphere in the essays similar to the
congenial attitude that reigned in Lamb’s home. In this
atmosphere, the reader, like one of Lamb's guests, feels
safe from criticism. (When the reader's attitudes do
come into question it is emphatically not Elia who
questions them, but the reader herself.) As the peer of
her "interlocutor," too, the reader feels that, her worth
is recognized. And although this interlocutor cannot
132
literally empathize with the reader, Elia's blithe
candidness displays him as so thoroughly human that
readers have rarely failed to recognize their kinship
with him. Thus the elements of the familiar essay,,
especially as crafted by Lamb, fulfill to a considerable
extent the conditions of "psychological safety."
The essay is equally supportive of "psychological
freedom," or the freedom to express oneself symbolically.
The reader, as we have seen in Chapter II, is always
thinking actively in the process of reading. A text
may encourage and give scope to the reader1s thought by
being "open," or it may discourage and restrict the
reader's thoughts--at least insofar as their compatibil
ity with text--by being "closed." The reader's freedom
of thought within Lamb's essays is permitted by three
factors: First, the reader is not requested to follow a
logically exclusive line of thought. Rather, she
encounters the whimsical associations of Elia's mind which
pass, for example, from pig to boy back to pig, or from
love of music to retreat from music, apparently without
his noticing any irony. In such a context the reader,
too, must feel more inclined to range freely in thought
than she would in a strictly discursive essay. Second,
the anecdotes which are common to the familiar essay
contribute a high degree of ambiguity. Although Elia
133
makes thematic bridges to his anecdotes, they sometimes
digress, as in "Dissertation Upon Roast Pig" when he
talks of his plum cake, and often imply more than Elia
seems to intend, as in "A Chapter on Ears" and "Poor
Relations." These anecdotes are "open" in Eco's sense of
permitting a plurality of possible readings, and this
plurality presumes that the reader is free to "guess" at
the significance of each story. Finally, the inconclu
siveness of the familiar essay, in addition to creating
a desire for more information, permits the reader, in the
manner of the "Romantic fragment," to imagine the
continuation of the essay.
The exploratory nature of the Essays of Elia, then,
is not overt in the sense of actively exploring an issue,
but implicit, marshalling the feelings and conditions
which lead to exploration.
All of the characteristics which make an essay
exploratory in this sense distinguish it from an
expository essay. The expository essay sets out to
demonstrate or prove a proposition.^ Its methods are
O
the methods of logic. The expository essay, would keep
its reader to a single, clear, consequential line of
thought, so that the reader feels compelled, step by
step, to accept the essay's conclusion. This context
rejects the simultaneous cultivation of contrary views,
134
and psychological safety and psychological freedom do not
have priority. The tone of exposition is typically
serious, not light, so the consequences of error seem
great. The writer’s personality is subdued and formal
rather than friendly. The writer expects the reader to
criticize, and anticipates objections. The atmosphere of
the essay is one of intense rationalism rather than
relaxed conversation. One critic characterized "scholarly
or scientific treatises" fifty years ago in these words,
whose import still applies:
These are impersonal, are dispassionately
correct and systematic. The writer of
such an article or treatise feels that
he must present every scintilla of evi
dence, that he must not allow a single
exception to escape his notice, that he
is duty bound to face each point which
might be urged against the position he
maintains;. . . 9
The area of exposition is not "safe"; one would call it
rather an area of contention and risk.
Neither is the reader of exposition intended much
freedom. The logical process is at its best when it
allows the reader the least opportunity to vary from its
course. The anecdote, with its ambiguities, is rarely
encountered, and an expository essay which avoids an
explicit conclusion defeats its own purpose.
The essential difference between the expository
essay and the exploratory essay is the difference between
135
"closedness1' and "openness" in texts. The virtue of a
closed text is to restrict the reader's thought to a
single line of development. Openness,, on the other hand,
encourages and even requires the reader's thoughts to
range freely.
Of course, this is a characterization of two
extremes. Expository essays generally accommodate some
degree of free thought, and the exploratory essay, with
its underlying pattern, circumscribes the range of free
thought, it permits. These two kinds of essay, neverthe
less, represent two distinct and complementary modes of
thought.
James L. Kinneavy treats the process of exploration
as an equal partner to the process of exposition.
Exploratory discourse, he says, fundamentally asks a
question and suggests a tentative answer. Expository
discourse, which Kinneavy prefers to call "scientific
discourse," asserts an answer and supplies proof. The
thought processes represented by these two types of
discourse, he says, represent two halves of the "full
cycle" of what we know as the scientific method.
"Exploration leads to a testable hypothesis which
11
scientific proof then demonstrates as tenable or not."
The exploratory and expository processes are complemen
tary, and nourish each other. Exploration provides
136
hypotheses for exposition to critique, and exposition
asserts conclusions which explorahion may question.
An essay by W» Ross Winterowd, "'Brain, Rhetoric,
12
and Style," lends support to the notion that explora
tory and expository writing represent complementary modes
of thought. In this essay, Winterowd argues that "the
writer needs those skills which are characteristic of
both the left and right hemispheres of the brain."
Winterowd typifies two "dramatically opposed styles," of
which I believe the following are fair representations.
One style, the propositional, is characterized by organi
zational rigidity, a clear thesis, little descriptive
13
detail, general examples, and little presence. It
expresses the function of the brain’s left hemisphere,
which is sequential and time-ordered. The other style,
the appositional, is marked by flexible organization, an
implied thesis, rich detail, specific examples, and
great presence. This style reflects the function of the
right hemisphere, which is holistic and time-independent.
Winterowd presents these two styles as complementary
aspects of expository writing, but in the terms given
above, the appositional/propositional distinction applies
remarkably well to exploratory and expository writing.
Exploratory writing is appositional in its frequent use
of anecdotes, which entail rich detail and specific
_________________________________________________________________ 137
illustration. The strong influence of the writer's,
personality imparts great presence. Exploratory writing
is flexible in organization, and implies rather than
states its final thesis, Similarly, expository writing,
as characterized earlier, bears the stamp of the proposi-
tional style. Exposition is appropriately associated
with the left, or "rational." hemisphere of the brain,
moreover, and exploration with the right, "intuitive"
hemisphere.
Winterowd reasons that the best writers are adept
in both appositional and propositional styles, as the
two hemispheres of the brain cooperate and feed each
other. He recommends that students of writing should
have equal opportunity for exercise and training in each
of these styles of writing. One way of providing this
equal opportunity would be to teach exploratory writing
on an equal basis with expository writing.
Current practice in college composition courses
does not furnish this even-handed treatment. The
Dartmouth Study of Student Writing (1963) shows that
composition classes prefer the expository form of writing,
and teach it almost exclusively.^ Exploration is
indeed getting more attention in recent composition
theory than it did in the first half of the century, but
it still serves essentially as a preparatory phase for
138
the real work of composition, exposition. A glance at
the tables of contents of contemporary rhetorics will
show a preponderance which devote a chapter to prewriting,
journal-keeping, freewriting, brainstorming, and the
need to envision one's audience, a chapter each on. ::
narrative, descriptive, and persuasive writing, and
several chapters on the modes of exposition: classifica
tion, definition, illustration, comparison and contrast,
analysis, etc.
A recent study of the "knowledge gap" between
comp os it ion theory and classroom practice reports that
despite a cluster of new concepts and methods which
have emerged in the last two decades, teaching and
15
writing in college classes have changed little. These
new concepts and methods include the following, which
are relevant to promoting exploratory thinking:
1. Strategies for invention and discovery.
2. Rhetorical base: audience, purpose, and
occasion figure prominently in the assign
ment of writing tasks.
3. Holism: viewing writing as an activity that
involves the intuitive and non-rational as
well as the rational faculties.
4. Writing as a way of learning and developing
as well as a communication skill.
This study finds that these and other new ideas in
composition theory have had little effect in the
139
classroom: the classroom is still dominated by the
"current-traditional" approach to teaching, characterized
by the following notions, among others:
1. Emphasis on the composed product rather than
the composing process.
2. The classification of discourse into description,
narration, exposition, and argument.
3. The preoccupation with the informal essay and
the research paper.
The discussion makes clear: that "the informal essay" in
this case does not mean the familiar or personal essay,
but an academic essay of somewhat less formal rigor than
the research paper. After reviewing 263 recent college
catalogues, the report concludes,
The concepts, methods, and goals reflected
in these course descriptions are severely
currentstraditional: 89% of basic writing
courses are so described, 83% of inter
mediate, and 8 6 % of advanced. Only 1% to
5% of writing courses described in college
and university catalogs reflect any influ
ence whatever from contemporary knowledge
about writing and the teaching of writing.
. . . I also discovered a widespread
emphasis on exposition: across levels,
it appears in §9 % of basic, 82% of inter
mediate, and 6 8 % of advanced writing
courses. Even though exposition some
times appears in the company of other
rhetorical modes, it more often does not,
and it is clearly the most emphasized ele
ment in most general writing courses.16
140
Along with this preponderance of expository writing,
current composition classes are suffering from a dilemma
concerning the essay's audience. Russell C, Long observes
that the student often conceives the audience as an
17
antagonist.
The student accordingly conceives her own activity as
defending or attacking! The writer must attack the
audience and force them to concur with the writer’s thesis;
or, the writer must hedge her remarks so carefully that no
critical attack can discredit them. In the best of worlds,
a strongly assertive essay written with the expectation
of a spirited and intelligent criticism is a cornerstone
of liberal education. John Henry Newman's. description of ,
a university extols just such a stimulating encounter:
. . . a University is a place . . . in
which the intellect may safely range and
speculate, sure to find its equal in some
antagonist activity, and its judge in the
tribunal of truth. It is a place where
inquiry is pushed forward, and discover^-
ies verified and perfected, and rashness
rendered innocuous, and error exposed, by
the collision of mind with mind, . . ,18
The sense of audience as antagonist in the contemporary
university classroom is less bracing and more threatening
than Newman envisions here, however. One reason that the
adversary theory of audience does not work productively,
according to some commentators, is that the real audience
of the student's work, the teacher,
141
is not, however, simply a one-man audience,
but also the sole arbiter, appraiser,
grader and judge of the performance. He
becomes an audience on whom pupils must
focus a special kind of scrutiny in order
to detect what they must do to satisfy
him. The peculiar feature of this rela
tionship is that the pupil will see the
teacher's response as a means by which
his progress is to be charted. It is part
of a larger and more elaborate system of
making judgments and not simply a question
of the reader's pleasure or understanding
or insight.19
The teacher's authority as a judge of writing and as a
"thinker-at-large” by virtue of age or experience out
weigh the student's in nearly all cases. To this
authority the power of the grade is added, from which
there is virtually no appeal. The student finds herself
"attacking" an impervious foe, or defending herself
against an irresistible assailant.
Remedies have been suggested recently for the
imbalance of the teacher as audience, including the
teachers' assuming multiple roles as readers, and evalua-
20
tions of essays by students' peers. Although these
measures do ease the difficulty of addressing an over
powering audience, the labor of this writing situation
continues to sap students' wills:
[The student's] writing may be dominated
by the sole consideration of meeting
minimum requirements. In other words it
may be shaped solely by the demands of
his audience and not by the complementary
142
pressure to formulate ideas in a way
which satisfies the writer. 2 1
The expectation of severe criticism breeds an excess of
caution:', or an excess of rashness in the student. In
the first instance, she uses information only if it
supports her thesis, and tacitly omits any suggestion
contrary to her thesis. This kind of writing tends to
close rather than open the mind; it is the antithesis
of liberal education. In the second instance, the
student dismisses counter arguments with shrill disdain,
rather than with sober consideration. Here, too, the
spirit of liberal education is lost.
It seems likely that this difficulty with
audience of student papers results in part from the
over-emphasis on exposition. If the two modes of
thought, . inquiry and demonstration, reinforce each
other, as argued above, then long concentration on
only one mode is bound to reach a point of diminishing
returns. The student needs to retire from the battle
ments of exposition for a period to rebuild strength
and confidence, and to rediscover the pleasure of
writing, in the safer atmosphere of exploration.
The exploratory essay assumes a friend as its
audience. It aims to change this friend's mind, but
only in the most tactful, circumspect, and entertaining
143
manner. The initial means of this persuasion is agreement,
finding and expressing an attitude which the reader and
writer share. The essay requires that the writer develop
an intimate knowledge of two sides of a question of
principle, and illustrate these viewpoints to the reader.
The aim of the essay is to stimulate inquiry, to prove
that even in an issue that seems comfortably decided,
there is much thought to be mined. The writer of this
essay needs pretend no superiority to its audience, nor
fear any. The tone of the essay is conversational, its
manner suggestive. Disagreement is expected but tolerable
in the pluralistic milieu. The result of the essay is
that writer and audience, even if they disagree about the
ultimate stand to take, may agree about the importance of
the question and the need for careful reflection before
taking a decision. As exploratory writing, the essay ends
only in a hypothesis, not in a conviction. Writer and
audience sit, as it were, on the same side of the table.
In college composition classes we cannot expect
to find writers like Charles Lamb, but we can teach
students to write essays in the persuasive-exploratory
manner. The essential features on which such teaching
would concentrate would be the lightness of topic and
treatment, the familiar, anecdotal style, the conflict
of principles, and the refraining from conclusion.
144
These features cooperate to create the essay's fertility
for ambiguity, its tolerance of ambiguity, and its
stimulus to creative thought.
The first step in teaching the exploratory essay in
a college composition class would be to address a complex
and controversial issue. It is common in composition
classes for students to be asked to treat such controver
sial topics as abortion, capital punishment, and U.S.
foreign policy. Teachers who make such assignments do
so with the intention that the students grapple with
real and important issues. The difficulty with such
topics, of course, is that students, perhaps lacking
sufficient acquaintance with the subject, and fearing
criticism, often espouse opinions which they have adopted
en toto from their environment rather than formulated in
their experience. As a result they tend to write static
defenses embodying cherished biases, rather than
considered arguments.
The exploratory essay approaches a controversial
topic like abortion by first abstracting the principles
underlying the opposing sides of the issue. This can
require at first an appreciable period of mulling over,
discussing, or otherwise probing the "pro life" and the
"woman's body" arguments until one feels ope can epito
mize the issue in two opposed principles. The opposed
145
principles are expressed as aphorisms. The aphorism is
suitable for this purpose because aphorisms are known as
rules of conduct: stating a principle as an aphorism
identifies it as an assumption which guides one's
22 23
actions. Aphorisms are also unfalsifiable: when
two aphorisms contradict one another (Look before you
leap. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.), neither is
judged to be wrong, but either may be considered more or
less aptly applied. This expression of the simultaneous
truth of two opposed principles provides the stimulating
conflict of the essay even as it participates in its
tolerance of ambiguity.
In my own analysis of the question of abortion, I
find the underlying question to be whether to go ahead
with something or to call it off. This analysis does
not neglect the life-or-death issue? life is the most
extreme example of what one may pursue or let go. The
opposed aphorisms I come to are, "Don't throw good money
after bad," and "It's always darkest before the dawn."
These aphorisms seem to be ridiculously trivial tools
with which to treat a serious subject, but their
apparent innocuousness is part of their virtue. Removing
the principle of an issue from its contentious context
makes it possible to consider both.sides of the question
calmly and curiously. The use of aphorisms elevates dis
cussion to the level of principle.
146
After abstracting opposed principles and expressing
them as aphorisms, the second step is to recontextualize
the aphorisms. The essayist chooses a familiar and less
quarrelsome context in which to examine the merits of the
opposing principles. For the aphorisms above, one might
choose the context of planning a party and then consider
ing whether to cancel it. Going ahead with something or
calling it off is still the issue, but the context is
one which engages and does not immediately polarize an
audience. In such a context, principles may be examined
without the distortion of strong emotion.
In this light context, the essayist begins to write.
The initial goal is to write personably and entertainingly
of the wisdom or joy or necessity of applying one of the
principles. When the initial attitude has been well
established, it becomes the essayist’s. goal to write
with equal verve in support of the opposing principle.
There seems to be a danger in this approach that the
essay will fall into two loosely related parts, The
danger is not so great as it seems, however.
The act of writing, and especially of writing
familiarly or informally, is attended by the occurrence
of surprises, of developments in the text which the
writer did not plan or anticipate. Donald Hurray calls
these events the most valuable moments in his own writing
147
r\ i ' ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
and that of his students. It is likely that in the
course of illustrating an idea at length, one’s writing
will take some accidental turns which, rather than leading
to the intended conclusion, will point in the opposite
direction. In expository writing the student arrests and
corrects such a tendency, . In the exploratory essay,
however, the unexpected turn is prized. Permitting,
recognizing, and cultivating the untoward developments of
one's writing becomes an important part of creating the
exploratory essay. Murray asserts the importance of
these skills as parts of the writing process in general:
Writers seek what they do npt expect tp
find. Writers are,, like all artists,
rationalizers pf accident. , , , The
writer, surprised by what is appearing
on the page, must cultivate the craft
to take advantage of it,25
The essayist learns to incorporate the ambiguities of her
text into her intention. Since the explotatpry essay
advances in a conversational and anecdotal way, ambigui
ties may occur as a normal part of its fabric. The
essayist selects and elaborates those unexpected turns
which contribute to the development of a counter-thesis.
It may be, as in ’’Dissertation Upon Roast Pig" and "A
Chapter on Ears," that the essayist will discover a way
of advancing both theses simultaneously for several
paragraphs, writing in a persona which prefers one
------------------------------------ _ -L48J
principle even as her prose betrays evidence for the
contrary principle. The least one aims for, however, is
to effect a plausible and conversationally natural
transition between the two opposing principles. Such a
transition delivers the essay's duality in an outwardly
coherent form, veiling the antithesis for the reader's
discovery.
The essay should stand on its merits as a well
informed account of the joys and griefs, in this case,
of planning parties. By the end of the essay, however,
the issue broadens to embrace the pleasure and pain of
commitment to plans generally. No passage of abstract
exposition is necessary to establish this broadening.
The fact itself of simultaneousiy entertaining opposed
principles moves the reader to abstract reflection. The
writer's choices of illustrative material, also, are
tacitly guided by the consciousness that the underlying
principles must be applicable not only to the planning
of parties, but also to the serious issue of responding
to a pregnancy. This consciousness helps to assure
that the writer's text will be open to broader readings
than its local topic suggests.
When the author has achieved a satisfactory
development of each side of the question, closure may
be achieved by reasserting the initial attitude. The
149
accumulation of counter-evidence in the essay should
temper this assertion, so that its strength is noticeably
less than at the beginning of the essay, and the reader's
9 fi
understanding of it broader and deeper.
The practice of writing earnestly on two sides of* a
question is one of the many techniques composition
teachers have always used to exercise their students.'
minds and free them of unnecessary bias. The exploratory
essay raises this practice to an art.
As far as I know, an exploratory essay as described
here has never been proposed as a classroom exercise.
I believe that the lightness of its tone and the oblique
ness of its assertion would provide a welcome change in
students' manner of engaging their audience. This new
relationship to audience would be stimulating: the
exploratory essay is a broadening experience for writer
as well as for reader. Each has the opportunity to
examine the virtues of opposed principles in a leisurely
way, outside the arena of debate. Such a retreat would
not constitute an escape from serious intellectual
pursuits. On the contrary, leisurely, friendly conver
sation, as Socrates says in the Phaedrus, is the surest
and shortest way to truth.
As the initial phase of "scientific method,"
exploration is a necessary preparation for debate. In
27
Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent, Wayne Booth
-------— ___________________________________________ 150
declares that "the supreme purpose of persuasion [is not]
to talk someone else into a preconceived view; rather
it must be to engage in mutual inquiry or exploration."
Maxine Hairston, in "Carl Roger's Alternative to
28
Traditional Rhetoric," holds that fruitful communication
depends on each party demonstrating "without fakeryar
hypocrisy" that he or she knows and appreciates the
other's position. The exploratory essay is a vehicle
which will help train students to examine an issue
thoroughly and without bias, in an atmosphere of mutual
inquiry. It offers a respite from the expository essay,
and, as that essay's natural counterpart, prepares for
returning to exposition with a balanced mind.
When teachers talk about the value of writing, they
usually include the notion that practicing writing
29
teaches one to think. In the press of socioeconomic
events of the past few decades, however, writing instruc
tion is justified more and more by the claim that it
provides a service, the service of helping students write
academic papers. In 1982 the Association of American
Colleges warned,
financial pressures could force some
colleges and universities to cater almost
exclusively to students more interested in
getting a liberal education.30
A few months ago, the Association reiterated this warning,
describing the situation as a "crisis," and announced that
151
it would establish a national Council for the Improvement
11
of Liberal Education to address the problem.
The National Endowment for the Humanities has
voiced a similar concern:
Richard Ekman, director of the education
division, of NEH, said the endowment hoped
to receive proposals designed to help
faculty members address such concerns as
"the 'presentmindedness,' cultural nar
rowness, vocationalism, and lack of
reasoning skills" among students.32
If the teaching of writing is to contribute to the
student's well-roundedness and cultivate imagination and
perspicacity as well as practical efficiency, then the
dominance of exposition in the classroom must yield
equal time to the cross-fertilization of exploratory
writing.
152
Notes to Chapter IV
i
See Harold H, Anderson, ed., Creativity and Its
Cultivation (New York: Harper, 1959); and Silvano
Arieti, Creativity (New York: Basic Books, 1976).
o
Carl Rogers, "Toward a Theory of Creativity," in
Harold H. Anderson, ed., Creativity and Its Cultivation
(New York: Harper, 1959)1 pp, TBVB'Ol 99.
^Rogers, pp. 78-80.
^Charles E. Withmore, "The Field of the Essay,"
PMLA, 1921, 551-64,
^Bernard L, Jefferson, Essays and Essayists (New
York: Nelson, 1931), p. xii.
Robert D. Frank, Don't Call Me Gentle Charles!
(Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1976) , p. 25.
^James L.Kinneavy, A Theory of Discourse
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971), p. 89.
^Kinneavy, pp. 108-119.
9
Jefferson, p. xiv.
^Kinneavy, pp. 99-104.
■^Kinneavy, p. 100.
12
W. Ross Winterowd, "Brain, Rhetoric, and Style,
in Donald McQuade, ed., Linguistics, Stylistics, and the
Teaching of Composition.
13
Winterowd cites Perelman's concept of presence.
Essentially an object has presence if attention is drawn
to it or dwells on it.
153
Albert R. Kitzhaber, Themes, Theories, and
Therapy: The Teaching of 'Writing in College (New York:
McGraw- Hill, 1'9 63)1 pp^ 21-22.
■^Clinton S. Burhans, Jr., "The Teaching of Writing
and the Knowledge Gap," College English, 45 (Nov. 1983),
639-656,
■^Burhans, pp. 646-647.
17
Russell C, Long, "Writer-Audience Relationships:
Analysis or Invention?" College Composition and
Communication, 31 (May 1980), pp. 221-226.
18
John Henry Newman, "What is a University?" in
Charles Frederick Harold, ed., Essays and Sketches,
vol. II (New York: Longmans, 1948), pp. 288-289.
19
James Britton, Tony Burgess, Nancy Martin, Alex
McLeod, and Harold Rosen, The Development of Writing
Abilities (11-18) (London: Macmillan Education, 1975),
p"I 64.
O A
Betty Pytlik, "Audience: A Bibliographical Essay,"
Ph.D. dissertation, University of Southern California,
1981.
21
Britton et al., p. 64.
22
Beverly Coyle, " An Anchorage of Thought: Defining
the Role of Aphorism in Wallace Stevens' Poetry," PMLA
91 (March 1976, 206-222.
23
Brian Vickers, Frances Bacon and Renaissance
Prose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968),
pp. 60-63.
^Donald Murray, "Writing for Surprise," College
English, 46 (Jan. 1984), 1-7.
25
Murray, pp. 1, 6 .
154
2 f \
An example of the exploratory essay from our
own day is Garrison Keillor, '"Attitude," in Garrison
Keillor, Happy To Be Here (New York: Penguin, 1983),
pp. 119-124.
27
Wayne Booth, Modern Dogma- and the Rhetoric of
Assent (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974),
pT“l37\
28
Maxine Hairston, "Carl Rogers's Alternative to
Traditional Rhetoric," College Composition and
Communication,27 (Dec. 1976), pp. 373-77.
29
Kitzhaber, pp. 2-3.
30
"Bachelor's Degree A Worthless Credential,
Conference Concludes," Chronicle of Higher Education,
November 24, 1982, p. 8 .
■^"College Liberal Arts--A 'Disaster Area,"’ Los
Angeles Times, January 16, 1984, pt. I, p. 3.
32
"Endowment to Stress Teaching of Humanities to
Students in Schools and Colleges," Chronicle of Higher
Education, September 29, 1982, p. 12.
1
155
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