Rejoinder: Monsman to Harris

166 as a father for a vitalizing reunion with some future son." All three statements are more Delphically phrased than one might like, but they sum up the main contentions of the book as I understand them. Further, they are indeed illuminating guides for reading Pater. But unhappily I find them neither strengthened nor clarified by their manner of presentation. Wendell V. Harris Pennsylvania State University [Note: At Professor Harris' suggestion, Professor Monsman was given the opportunity to respond. His response follows. - Ed.] 2. Rejoinder: Monsman to Harris I'm delighted that Wendell Harris does not damn with faint praise (useful as that strategy may be at times). What irks him is entirely clear. His attitudes, molded by earlier critical positions and now long since past change, are unequivocally out of sympathy with Continental modes of discourse. Although there may be something a little déjà vu in attacking current criticism as a short-lived and senseless craze, Harris' distaste is palpable. He seems to regard Continental philosophic criticism as a kind of exotic French disease (an intellectual equivalent to the clap) caught by those who have deserted the more orthodox moralities of those rigorous teachers who, presumably, seized his youth - I. A. Richards, T. S. Eliot, or Wimsatt and Beardsley. Their terminology promotes intelligible meanings, unlike terms "drawn from the arenas of linguistic, or metaphysical, or aesthetic analysis, especially in a day when the originators and the congeners delight in transmogrifying their use." Yet to deny to the literary critic the use of terms from linguistics, metaphysics, or aesthetics would have limited the scope and impoverished the creative potential of criticism since the time language and thought themselves became objects of study in antiquity. Actually , I, too, sense an excess of shifty jargon in some of the current theoriticians (graduates in composition from the Grand Academy of Lagado, one might suppose), and I have made every effort to avoid arcane references or needlessly esoteric terms. My approach is eclectic, as it needs must be when one undertakes to explain a writer as protean as Pater. Since it's a natural part of a scholar's development to stay abreast of current debate and to advance the state of the art, it's inevitable that terms newly enriched by contemporary discourse will be employed by him with their intensified connotative resonance. If any reader is puzzled by a term's connotation - e.g., Other: is it the Other of "philosophy," of Sartre, of Derrida, of Freud and Lacan? - the rule always is that if the context does not demand a specific sense, then the more popularly understood sense(s) will apply. Radical as Barthes, Lacan , or Derrida may be, the "intelligent, educated reader" that Harris postulates could be filled in on their basic premises in a stroll around the quad. (We must, of course, assume that for the last decade our "educated" reader has encountered nothing but Hegel in darkest Peru, oblivious to on-going debates in Critical Inquiry, New Literary History, or, even, that vehicle of higher literary 167 awareness, the NYRB.) Clearly the issues Harris is raising are broader than any issues directly raised by my study; and although method and content cannot be wholly divorced, yet, unless the methodology is wholly idiosyncratic, every critical essay must be granted in some measure its methodological donnée. This is just what Harris will not allow. Because he finds everywhere in my English prose a Gallic multiformity of meaning (my notion of "textual sublimation " sketched in the Introduction is pounced on even before it has been given shape in the ensuing chapters), Harris would, if he could, deny me my stock of current terms - "even if we grant the vocabulary," he grudgingly concedes. But in granting the vocabulary, he has no choice-, all my words are to be found in an English dictionary and are, like it or not, integral to the expression of my ideas. I suspect Harris dislikes my terminology because what he really cannot abide is any hint of "deconstructive" philosophic principles. Having objected to the methodology (or what he takes to be my methodology ) , Harris then "is puzzled by the relationship of biographical fact to the...