Abstract

The reductive nature of Kincaid's undertaking comes into sharper focus when we compare his kind of critical inquiry with that, say, of [Sheldon] Sacks or [Ralph] Rader. Kincaid concludes where they begin. For Sacks, the identification of some type, such as satire, is what initiates the critical process. What then remains is to move beyond type, which exists at the highest level of generality, to form and finally to those detailed analyses which will account for the peculiar powers of unique works. His types, as he says, are "only elementary distinctions," and he adds that "at some point in an adequate criticism of a single literary work, we will inevitably be discussing those variations which distinguish a particular literary work from all other literary works of its class, even if that class has been defined according to the most subtle and intricate combination of variables possible."1 Similarly for Rader, our intuitions about formal principles and intentions are but first steps in critical inquiry. "My theory, " he says, "attempts not to establish 'general laws' . . . but to render explicit the structural features of our tacit experiences of literature in a way that will allow us to bring all its implications to bear simultaneously upon our explanation of any particular literary work."2 Such procedures as these, which are designed to give us particular knowledge, are ruled out by Kincaid's program, the most specific formal principle of which is something quite general: the competition among narrative patterns. There is finally, then, very little knowledge to be shared, for our inquiries will always arrive at the same conclusion. Although readers, in his view, can intend one thing rather than another, writers cannot, and this assumption that agents are somehow set apart from the other members of the species means, I suspect, that Kincaid is right about one thing: his effort to mediate does indeed place him in a "no-man's land." · 1. Sheldon Sacks, Fiction and the Shape of Belief , pp. 25-26 n.· 2. Rader, "Explaining Our Literary Understanding," Critical Inquiry 1 : 905. Robert Denham, editor of Northrop Frye: An Enumerative Bibliography and the forthcoming Northrop Frye on Culture and Literature , is associate professor and chairman of the department of English at Emory and Henry College. In this essay Robert Denham replies to James R. Kincaid's "Coherent Readers, Incoherent Texts" Critical inquiry, Summer 1977