[Another post from the dead letter file. These two were written six weeks apart, three and four months ago. Hence, I failed to see their unity.]

            I have a mentor in what I suppose I could call post-punk rock. He tells me of all the splintering labels that rock music has fallen into lately. He has tried to make me understand the difference between 'industrial' and 'hard core', for example. But when we play the music, it all sounds like rock'n'roll to me. But then, you know, I am of that old fart persuasion for whom the height of music - at least as an expression of my personal history - extends from Sun label Cash and Buddy Holly through Bob Dylan to Beatles, Cream, Canned Heat, Jimi Hendrix, Traffic, Grateful Dead, and so on and so forth up through perhaps 1974, when I began to fade into the deep literary and meditative silence that seems to have become my personal aural medium.
            Canned Heat may be boogie-woogie. Cream may lead to hard rock (although I don't see the filiation, to be honest. Cream is musically vital.) Dylan may be folk-rock. Cash may be the first country-rock crossover, if in the reverse direction. But, as I say, it's all rock'n'roll to me.
            So all of these new divisions begin to remind me of the scattershot salt and scrap metal that seem to be chasing me, shotgun style, down the literary highway that I have apparently chosen to travel upon. I came up in the last carnage of the New Criticism, the heavy breathing, the eccentric window rattling and earth tremor producing thump of the T. S. Eliot industry, in both poetry and poetics. But growing up in the hinterlands, where we only read primary texts, my candidian detachment not only allowed me to view it as the final throes of the beast / business, but also to notice the internal contradiction between the valid poetry and the poetics of the man. 'The Waste Land', it seemed to me, could not have been produced using the stringent rules of critical theory propounded by the same author.
            Perhaps that's why he felt obliged to obfuscate its basic success - an intrinsic simplicity and directness, apart from the subtle subtext - with the mind-numbing deflection of his notorious notational apparatus.

            Normally I avoid references to textbooks, even when I am secretly using them to clarify definitions or arguments. Besides which, the nature of my library and my reading is such, that when I do make uncited references, the textbook is reasonably ancient - which in the present environment of greed means a minimum of two or three years old and therefore, if not out of print, at least a superseded edition.
            But my wife is taking an introductory course in literary theory. And the outline of the recent history of critical theory, in her first text, is simultaneously concise and sophisticated. Besides, it tallies with all the reverberations and resonances that I have heard in the offing from my purely anarchic reading schedule in literature and philosophy. Being one of those strange characters - a non-academic who reads the footnotes if they tend toward the substantive, as well as prefaces and postscripts, and other errant fragments - I can hear the echoes that in many cases are more general and clarifying than first texts, in the present terrain of philosophical and critical theory.
            Saturday, as we were driving toward her parents' home - a two-hour journey - she began reading me the defining squibs from Steven Lynn's Texts and Contexts: Writing about Literature with Critical Theory, and I felt that strange, almost physical rumbling that coincides with my less tangible synthetic machinery as it crushes the raw materials and delivers them to the furnace.

            Hearing it read to me, I had heard it as more concise than it is. That is, for example, with the New Criticism, I thought I had heard one or two comprehensive capsules. Such is not the case. But the introductory page or two presents a concise and cogent argument. The New Criticism is concerned with the 'organic unity' of the work under consideration. While the 'New Critics are not allergic to talking about the responses of readers or the intentions of authors, [. . .] they believe that the work itself ultimately must stand on its own as an artistic object.' 'In a unified work, every element works together toward a theme. Every element is essential.' But the unity must not be simplistic. Tension, ambiguity, irony and oppositions add to the 'complexity' of the work, but must be resolved into the unity. 'A mediocre work might be unified but have little complexity, or it might be complex but never really come together.'
            Hence the New Critics engage in a 'close reading', an investigation of the elements and a searching out of the 'complexities', thus defining the success or failure of the unity, while simultaneously assessing its depth.
            Presumably this begins and ends in a thematic understanding of the work.

            Where I found myself reacting to this is in its elevation of the substantive nature of unity itself. And my reactions grew stronger as Jessica read squibs from the brief outlines of subsequent critical theories. They reacted not so much against the specific premises for close reading as out of the basic assertion of Unity with respect to art.
            But let us hesitate before we proceed to these subsequent theories.

            What is peculiar to me, culturally, is that a critical theory should finally elevate Unity as the essential critical principle for literary art at precisely the time when philosophy was burying Unity as an identifiable principle of logical analysis.
            Unity, it seems, is such an intrinsic principle in all criticism, one assumes that it must have always been an operative principle in all criticism from the beginning. But isolating it as a principle changes everything. A theme, by nature, is cogent. But to isolate cogency as the core principle of criticism places 'cogency' over 'theme', Unity over value.
            But, almost simultaneously, the analytical philosophers come to the conclusion that Unity cannot be assigned either an axiomatic or strictly functional place in logic, which, for the analytical philosophers, is the last bastion of philosophy itself. But, in a philosophy in which formal logic is the key, Unity is the last substantive that stands between the syllogism and common language. Not that common language, as it is used, is necessarily logical. But, without the premise of Unity in either assumption or practice, 'analytical' expression becomes formal language itself, and the 'form' of the 'formal' becomes problematic.
            Why is it, that while apparently moving in diametric directions, philosophy and criticism simultaneously lose their basis in value?

            Or is the loss of value the key?
            In philosophy, value had been equated with logic. Value, of course, is 'substance', in one of the two meanings of that word. And while the 'critical philosophy' begun by Kant had dislodged logic as a generator of 'substantive' knowledge about the 'external' or 'sensory' world, logic itself retained its tacit substantive base in Unity until the Americans of the Metaphysical Club, the Vienna Circle with its latter-day positivism and the British logicians, the direct progenitors of analytical philosophy, began to attack logic itself with the 'critical' weapons. Naturally, if logic lacks the capacity to generate 'substantive' knowledge, that 'substantive' abnegation applies to logic as well. This is the ultimate 'antinomy' implicit in Kantian critical theory if we assume that it is strictly logical and without empirical content.
            What had originally saved Kantian critical philosophy from circularity and nihilism was a kind of implicit empiricism: Kant's presumption that logic and experience, in their origins, are essentially synonymous; although Kant held that while we can infer the originating process in terms of logic, we cannot observe the originating process in terms of experience. We cannot witness how the self emerges, but we can infer its logical basis. This, in essence, is his 'transcendental dialectic'.
            But it was inevitable that the gathering analytical force generated, historically, by the critical philosophy should ultimately attack logic itself in terms of its implicit 'baggage' of empirical content. Perhaps paradoxically, the result is that 'logic' reverts to principles governing grammar - a 'meta-grammar', in the concurrent terminology - which nevertheless relies almost entirely on the observed empirical nature of language.
            In other words, not only does logic lose its substantive nature, it loses any substantive object apart from linguistic function.

            The New Criticism emerges more or less simultaneously with the last stages of this critical process with respect to logic. As a literary movement, however, its primary aim is the immediate aesthetic analysis of the written work. We can assume, I suppose, that the New Critics are generally aware of contemporary philosophical developments, but since they move, as I have said, in almost diametric vectors with respect to the question of Unity, one assumes that the link is cultural rather than direct. The philosophers are suggesting that the formalism which is the Unity has no inherent place in logic, and therefore no place in the analytical function per se. It is from this ground that logic presumably resolves back into the structural basis of language as expression - that the analytical involves the formulation of statement and finds its keys in syntax. This may explain the emergent confluence of general philosophy and literary criticism, but defies the cultural turn, by the New Critics, toward the unity of the work.
            But, of course, focusing on the question of Unity, precisely, removes us from the question of theme, invariably problematic in any legitimate literary work of art. If we can formulate the theme analytically, then the work is probably tendentious rather than aesthetic. And this is as true of the essay as it is of a memoir or work of fiction. If the structure resolves into a linear thematic presentation, the essay is essentially propagandistic rather than literary. Shifting the focus toward Unity corresponds then, in the literary, with the shift away from Unity in the philosophy: it releases us, to some extent, from the question of 'substance' or value.
            But, of course, this loss of value is a separate question. That is, we can trace the loss of value in terms of the philosophical turn toward the analytical. But if, in fact, the turn is essentially arbitrary - that is, an artificial narrowing of the actual possibilities of philosophy - then its cause is probably not philosophical, but cultural.