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are conventions , genre traditions , chance events , obvious in the nov–
els of Nabokov, to whom he devotes several perceptive essays . Even
Ada ,
surely a highly contrived nonrealistic novel, is seen as a serious
"ontological enterprise to rescue reality from the bland nonentity of
stereotypicality ." The deconstructors cannot get around the inevitable
fact that literature speaks about the world outside; it is not merely a
linguistic game . In a splendid essay on
Tristram Shandy ,
which was
singled out by the Russian Formalists as the model of novels about
novel-writing, Alter shows convincingly that for all of Sterne's wit and
artifice, for all the parody and puns, Sterne presents a small world
of human beings motivated by sexual passion . I am wondering why
A. D . Nutall's
A New Mimesis. Shakespeare and the Representation
oj
Reality
is not being cited in this context.
It
is an elaborate, well-written and
well-argued essay, showing that Shakespeare, in spite of all stage
convention and artifices, gives us a picture of his age where we can
even clearly distinguish the different decades in it.
One of the texts most admired and constantly appealed to by
the currently fashionable critics is Roland Barthes's essay on the
death of the author. Gass and Alter both reject this announcement of
Barthes's, which Gass rightly considers rather a wish : "The removal
of the author is a social and political and psychological gesture and
not an aesthetic one." The anonymity Barthes asks for may mean
many things, and Gass is good in thinking of all the possibilities, but
concludes quite rightly that it cannot possibly mean that no one did it .
Alter's
Motivesfor Fiction
also has an essay on "Literary Lives ," praising
such recent biographies as Walter Jackson Bates's
Samuel Johnson,
Phyllis Rose's
Virginia Woolf
and Joseph Frank's
Dostoevsky,
which are
all clearly aware of the difference between work and life and reject
the simpleminded views which derive the work from life . But Alter
argues that good literary biographies have crossed the hiatus be–
tween life and work with a strong "intuition of the human subject's
distinctive presence ."
I wonder whether the assault on the very existence of self can
be taken seriously . We may know Hume's
Treatise,
which I believe
argued for the incoherence and discontinuity of our mental life for the
first time, but we will know that Hume's good judgement allowed
him to continue speaking about the self and feel the continuity of his
own self from the earliest childhood . There may be all kinds of argu–
ments for playing down the role of the author in literature. John Crowe
