ALTHOUGH NATURE and art are no doubt here to stay, the nineteenth century has for some time now been getting on in years. In the lead article in this issue, Carl Woodring is concerned with all three—art, nature, and the nineteenth century—but from the perspective of our own decade, writing the kind of literary history that attempts, at least in part, to see ourselves as others have not yet seen us. Recognizing that “the road we are trying to repair passed through nineteenth-century travail,” Woodring relates current attitudes to nineteenth-century concerns with ai t and nature, concluding that today both Wordsworth's environmentalism and the selfsufficiency of Oscar Wilde are still alive. Woodring is by no means the first to ponder such matters, but the range and lucidity of his recapitulation make the essay valuable to specialist and nonspecialist alike; we all have a vested interest in art and nature and all come trailing at least some clouds of glory from the preceding century. The essay has energy and philosophic insight in large measure, and abundant instances of Woodring's wit (“In their ignorance and folly, the Romantics missed a great opportunity to be as miserable as we are”).

AS PMLA BEGINS its third year of publishing articles accepted under our now not-so-new editorial policy, it occurs to me that in writing these “Editor's Columns” I have failed to stress what is perhaps the most radical feature of the new policy—the idea that PMLA is intended to be read. Most of the articles written for scholarly journals are not, I think, so intended, not, at least, at the time they first appear in print. They are written to be consulted, not necessarily today but at some time in the future, probably the distant future. Articles in PMLA are also, of course, intended for future consultation, but the hope is that, unlike most scholarly articles, those appearing in PMLA—which have had up to nine favorable readings before acceptance—are of such importance that they can be read by scholars with the same interest, if not fervor, that one brings to the reading of an article in, say, Harper's or The New Yorker. Recognizing that the articles for scholarly journals are traditionally not expected to entrance and delight readers in the same way that New Yorker articles are expected to entrance and delight, one still hopes that there are in each issue of PMLA at least a few articles that can be read on receipt with something approaching pleasure.

THE PRESIDENCY of the MLA is a short-term office, perhaps designed to represent the usual academic attitude to official positions. As president, I have had the honor of writing begging letters to some of you, but the title of PMLA, which I might assume on the analogy of the Royal Academy, is otherwise engaged, and chairing half a dozen meetings does not, even in these instant-administration days, leave much of an odor of charisma behind. I understand that in the recent election campaign President Ford's advisers tried to take advantage of the fact that the American system does not distinguish between the head of state and the head of government. They felt that, if an incumbent President would just stand there, his impressive position would have the best chance of being confirmed by the vote. But the MLA does distinguish the two, and Bill Schaefer will remain the head of government after the head of state has vanished into limbo tomorrow night, like one of the divine kings in The Golden Bough, who hears the grinding of axes in the background as soon as he has failed to satisfy one of his wives. However, the ritual banquet on his body and blood has been commuted to an allegory. He is required only to make the equivalent of a speech from the throne, a speech that is an expression neither of royal will, as in Tudor times, nor of government policy, as now, but is rather an effort to express a collective consciousness, to gain some perspective on this confused and crowded assemblage.

Interpreted along structuralist lines, the Clackamas Chinook story “Seal and Her Younger Brother Dwelt There” is a skillful dramatization of a fatal conflict between two goods: decorum and empirical alertness. Seal’s adult concern with propriety keeps her from heeding her daughter’s warning that Seal’s brother’s new “wife” “urinates like a man.” In the subsequent murder of Seal’s brother, the motives and identity of the homicidal “wife” are deliberately obscured so as to emphasize the tragic conflict between Seal and her daughter. Another Oregon Indian text, “The Revenge against the Sky People” (Coos), contains a version of the Clackamas story, but overall it is a narrative of heroic revenge, in which the killer’s motives and feelings are made known to us before he kills his victim. The two stories complement each other structurally and together represent Indian narrative art at its best.

In Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon shows his indebtedness to the school of psychoanalytic culture criticism best exhibited in the two major works of Norman O. Brown—Life against Death and Love's Body. Brown's neo-Freudian view of repression as the source of man's uniqueness in nature is mirrored in virtually every thematic aspect of Gravity's Rainbow. In one sense, the physical gravity of the title is a metaphor for the human repression that engages Pynchon on the psychological level. Pynchon's understanding of history, like Brown's, reflects “the slow return of the repressed.” Other themes include the hypertrophy of the death instinct as manifested in weapons of destruction, the pernicious influence of Calvinist dualism opposing true dialectics, the interdependent abuses of sexuality and power, and the need for an antirational conception of art based in transcendental symbolism. The novel enacts the struggle of life against death, and its style affirms man's freedom.

The polarities of the nineteenth century, from the glorification of nature to art for art’s sake, with an intervening positivism, bear upon our own time. Because civilization had driven nature from the individual, the Romantics sought reunion, through the imagination, with perceptible external forms. Photography, accompanying the simpler doctrines of realism and positivism, relieved the imagination of the burden of creating a world external to the mind. Darwin, by demonstrating that nature works by accident, displaced Wordsworth’s affective version of the Deists’ universe fitted to human needs. Naturalism and the replacement of nature by art rose together. Today the environmentalism of Wordsworth and the self-sufficiency of Wilde are each half alive.

Overshadowed by “The Thorn” and “The Idiot Boy,” Wordsworth's “Simon Lee” has attracted little attention. It is, however, a complex and ambitious poem, the product of a collision between narrative form and the demands of the imagination. “Simon Lee” does three things: it seeks to wean the reader from his low taste for stories; it displays a dramatic speaker learning to exchange narrative for lyric poetry; and, surprisingly, it undermines the whole proceeding, mourning for the very tales in verse that it abandons. Analysis of the poem from these three points of view sheds light on Wordsworth's ambivalence toward narrative. At the same time it helps us reassemble and relate three competing views of Wordsworth: as evangelist or moral teacher; as dramatist; and as the elegiac poet of the “Ode” and “Tintern Abbey,” whose tendency toward self-involution underlies and influences even his attitudes toward audience and genre.

Critics have averted their eyes from the specifics of Lovelace’s rape of Clarissa almost as hurriedly as did the principals in Richardson’s novel. Modern studies of the phenomenon of rape suggest that a closer look might be rewarding. Of the three people certainly present at the episode, there is good reason to suppose Lovelace impotent, Clarissa blankly rigid, and Sinclair, the presiding androgynous harlot, the purposeful actor in the scene. If Sinclair and the “women of the house” are at the heart of the book’s action and are not simply Lovelace’s “implements,” then a prime issue of Clarissa is not only whether Clarissa “lives” but also whether Sinclair “dies.” In fact, despite her famous Gothic death scene, Sinclair too lives, and rules Richardson’s imagination of woman, perhaps even of Being, to the end of the novel.

Rousseau opposed both traditional and modern (empiricist) thinking when he made self-love the cornerstone of his system. Other modes of thought treat self-consciousness as constituted primarily by temporal desire. Rousseau raises love, for him the suspension of desire, to a position of ontological primacy in regard to self-consciousness. Like Pascal, he throws the empirical existence of the self into radical question and finds it to be as insubstantial and empty a concept as the Western tradition has found it—from Ecclesiastes and Socrates on. Rousseau declines the moralistic reproof of the self, however, and emphasizes its insubstantiality as its one strength, although a fictional one. The self exists only in the mode of a hypothesis (the fictional “as if”); it is a failure at being. But to amour (and to pitié) it makes all the difference and is worthy of their support.

While recent scholarly attention to the medieval aspects of Troilus and Criseyde has overshadowed the older custom of critics to associate it with modern fiction, its kinship with such later literature is authentic. The poem’s plentiful medieval materials—for which Chaucer draws extensively on Dante, Machaut, and Boethius—invite interpretation of it in terms of traditional modes: the epic, the romance, and the philosophical demonstration. Chaucer, however, completely undercuts the usual effects of these modes with irony, at the same time employing the elements and techniques of realism. The irony cooperates with the realism to make a work that finally is like modern fiction in identifying the essentially human through the particularity of its presentation.

The invention of Tartuffe is decisive in the evolution of Molière’s art. As parasite, he shifts the action of the comedy indoors, accenting both inwardness and concealment. As agent of the father’s “holy experiment,” he inaugurates the Andromeda scheme whereby Molière’s fathers regularly will hand over a beloved daughter to the misfit who mirrors the dark state of their own souls. As charlatan of piety, he poses a challenge to the age which his creator was to pay for dearly in a five-year struggle to gain for his play the freedom of the stage. Though the denouement of Tartuffe is essentially political—reflecting the challenge by a political cabal to its right to exist—the comedy proper ends with its villain stripped of the protective cloak of the religion of an unseen Presence, by an appeal to the palpable truth of the religion of ancient Greece where comedy originated.