More from Steiner

[alice wellintown]

We alluded to M.H. Abrams's The Mirror and the Lamp and his four
elements: the work, the artist, the universe, the audience. Thi is
quite a useful start, and from it we can look to any of these, say,
the universe or Nature, and its imitation, if art is viewed a an
imitation of Nature or if we examine the Material world and/or the
Ideal entitites from which the artist takes his subject. One can not
avoid these questions entirely, not if one reads literature, not if
one reads Shakespeare, not if one studies Hamlet. Or Eco or Pynchon.
The Mimetic, such a pressing critical question in Hamlet, a critical
mouthpiece who instructs players how to play a play withing a play, a
thing to capture the corrupt conscience of the king, by holding a
mirror up to Nature, reflects a shift after Shakespeare and Milton
that, as our recent glance into Tender Night, Romanticism  & Schiller
suggests, shifts first towards and then away from the audience and
what may be or not be, even in dreams, the stuff in Horatio's
philisophy.

 How the audience follows Hamlet's mad acting, or, as Phyllis Rakin's
fine essay, "The Role of the Audience in Shakespeare's Richard II"
argues, how Shakespeare's plays are not only a mirror held up to
Nature, but to the audience, is the Pragmatic Theory.

The Expressive Theory looks into the artist.

The Objective Theory, at the work itself.

Of course, these terms and ideas are not fixed or agreed to and are
open to debate or rejected as so much ivory tower babble; here at P-L
we speak of P or TRP or Pynchon, and most of the time we are not
speaking of Thomas Pynchon, but of an indefinte process by which we
make, for practical purposes,  finite, what may be infinite (so many
of us hope).

Still Pragmatic Theory, and surely the Americans on the List, if
they've not been bled away by one practiced in the art of deception,
favor the pragmatic, much as they pretend to a European Hermeneutics
and stubornly cling to those translations of French theories.

If Jack & Jill fall, is this a Fall from grace? Or is it a Marxist
fall to the working class? Or, hey, why is Jack first? Why not Jill
and Jack? What were they doing withthat cigar up on the hill? Why the
&? Have they identities of their own? How are they like Mason and
Dixon? More like Ishamel & Queequeg? Even more like Thing One and
Thing Two?