80
PARTISAN REVIEW
JAMES, WHITMAN
&
SEMANTICS
Sirs:
In part II of your symposium on "The
Situation in American Writing," Robert
Fitzgerald expressed himself vigorously,
and also made some significant statements,
concerning the nature of your questions.
His answers revealed an awareness of and
ability to control the techniques of seman–
tic analysis which for a literary man
(I
am not being patronizing) is very won–
derful. His analysis of your first ques–
tion, however, is based on an apparent
misconception of the nature of meaning–
ful statement. His technique is simply to
relate the sign with its reference, leaving
out the indispensable element of context.
Mr. Fitzgerald's whole notion of a "lead–
ing" question which is ambiguous, the
unconsidered conclusion of his analysis,
can be derived only from such a method.
Concretely,
1m
method is to examine
each phrase in your question separately.
He is able thus to show that the phrase in
question is possibly ambiguous; he does
not show thereby, as he claims, that your
whole question is ambiguous, or that it is
not a question. The title of the symposium,
the whole series of phrases which pre–
cedes or follows the particular phrase he
selects, give a significant meaning to each
included phrase. This is the context you
have provided your questions, and the
fact that Mr. Fitzgerald, despite his dis–
tinctions, is able to answer- each of them
to the point shows that their meaning is
clear. To demand more of questions, espe–
cially those formulated for a general
symposium, is semantic faddism. What
Mr. Fitzgerald is finally saying is that
your phrases are ambiguous because he
can provide them with other contexts of
his own. Which is hardly apropos.
An example of Mr. Fitzgerald's confu–
sion of contexts, and its sorry conse–
quences, is his reply to your James-Whit–
man question: "I'm damn well tired of
hearing the two of them built up into
Antithetical Forces in American litera–
ture. That isn't what they wrote for; it
certainly isn't what they wrote
as."
In
this case, Mr. Fitzgerald's substitution of
his own context for that given not only
shifts the meaning but alters the whole
direction of the question. He substitutes,
in fact, two separate and different ques-
tions, one of which is a question for
psychoanalysis, and the second of which
is based on neglect of historical facts. I
do not pretend to know what James or
Whitman wrote for; what they wrote
as
is a question easily answered from their
writings.
Whitman's poems reveal obviously that
he was writing as the Voice of the Peo–
ple, the poet en.
masse
calling upon Amer–
ica to beget its future poets in his image.
James wrote the bulk of his later work as
spokesman to a small select audience,
and his early critical work also calls for
a New American Writer, but one of quite
different shape from Whitman (as a study
of his work or of Cornelia Kelley's
The
Early Development of Henry lames
clearly
reveals). That the two men have histori–
cally pointed different directions to Amer–
ican writers is, despite Mr. Fitzgerald's
petulance, undeniable. That they were
themselves conscious of these differences,
and regarded themselves
as
Antithetical
Forces, is further attested by James's sar–
castic paper on "Mr. Walt Whitman" and
Whitman's statement, pregnant with rele–
vant meanings: "James is just feathers to
me" (in Traubel's
With Walt Whitman
fn.
Camden.).
Mr. Fitzgerald, surely, had better re–
consider his methods both of semantic
and historical analysis.
Sincerely,
DANIEL LERNER,
IN BRIEF
Manhatta11 Beach, N. Y.
Sirs:
I have just received the Fall issue of
PARTISAN REVIEW. I have had time to
read only the Interview with Si!one, a few
of the poems, some of the answers to your
questionnaire on American writing, and
the letters and communications. It is in–
expressibly heartening, in these
grim
days, to find a publication which speaks
so clearly for what Si!one calls "real
freedom," for intellectual integrity, for
the humane values by which alone we
can go on living. Some of the writing
in
pARTISAN REVIEW shines like a good deed
in a naughty world.
Faithfully yours,
BABETI'E DEUTSCH,
New York City.
