Forum 919

closural because a set of formal expectations has
been satisfied. We understand that if after A comes B,
then after B comes C, and so forth. Based on that
perception, we .further understand that if after C
comes B, then after B comes A. Therefore, by the
limits of the set with which we are dealing, there is
no prace else to go. Hence, closure. In a narrative
that, by its nature, is not purely formal, such a
formal closural device (here, the reversal of shots and
movement) will gain credibility only insofar as it is
perceived as related thematically to the rest of the
work. To put it differently, our perception of the
device's thematic relation to the work diminishes our
perception of its "gimmickry." Thus, in Citizen Kane,
it is important that the opening and closing shots
suggest the plot's essential "No Trespassing" theme.
But it is more important that in doing so these shots
also shape our feeling about the film's structure.

Viewed rhetorically, then, the ending of Citizen
Kane shows more complexity than Carringer's fine
symbolic analysis suggests. In sum, it brilliantly
embodies what another great modernist-Henry
James-knew: "Really, universally, relations stop
nowh~re, and the exquisite problem of the artist is
eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, tne ..
circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.
He is in the perpetual predicament that the continuity
of things is the whole matter, forhim, of comedy and
tragedy; that this continuity is never, by the space
of an instant or an inch, broken, and that,: to do any-
thing at all, he has at once intensely to consult and
intensely to ignore it" (The Art of the Novel, New
York: Scribners, 1934, p. 5).

JERRY W. CARLSON
University of Chicago

To the Editor:
Robert L. Carringer's "Rosebud, Dead or Alive:

Narrative and Symbolic Structure in Citizen Kane"
(PMLA , 91, 1975, 185-93) is more than a little decep-
tive in its persistent tendency to ignore the obvious.
Too often, the essay demonstrates complexity in the
motion picture's structure by disregarding its sim-
plicity.

Carringer's model takes viewers in the wrong
direction. He associates the use of multiple points of
view to tell a story with "the Modernist period's
general preoccupation with the relativism of points
of view" (p. 185) and with the idea "that all mediums
of transmission are inherently distorting; that there is
no such thing as an objective or definitive account of
a personality or event; that all mediated (that is,
narrated) information is suspect" (p. 186). As
examples of works in this mode, he mentions The
Ring and the Book, The Sound and the Fury, and
Rashomon. His argument mixes one modem artistic

strain with a close cousin: He confuses a style of
cubistic portraiture which attempts to manifest inner
nature in a series of "objective" external fragments
with a narrative mode whose emphasis is the relativity
of human perspectives. To borrow some terms from
Wylie Sypher's Rococo to Cubism in Art and Litera-
ture, Carringer would have us see Charles Foster
Kane as merely a series of relationships, to observe in
the reporter's .search a disappearance of the object
instead of a revelation of meaning.

While this may be the tendency of pure form in the
movie, the content-the dogged literary development
of the theme-bespeaks something quite different. In
the middle of the picture, Jed Leland quite explicitly
analyzes Kane's character: "Love ... that's why he
did everything. That's why he went into politics. . . .
He wanted all the voters to love him, too. All he
really wanted out of life was love. That's Charlie's
story. How he lost it." The story idea has the quality
of a cliche. Throughout the movie, Kane is the man
who, because he was snatched from the bosom of his
family at an early age, searches for some love rela-
tionship to take its place but fails to find the emo-
tional understanding and acceptance he seeks.
Though fragmenting the narrative, the structure con-
sistently develops this theme. Much of the story con-
centrates on Kane's marriages and his friendship
with Jed Leland-and, as Bernstein tells us, "There
were plenty of girls in the early days." These relation-
ships with individuals are complemented and compli-
cated by Kane's relationship to what he likes to
imagine as an adoring public. His newspaper career
and his political adventure are orchestrations of his
affair with his public and it is quite fitting that the
happy days in this relationship are manifested in the
song and dance number that features young CharHe
and his musical fan club. Under Kane's aggressive
management, The Inquirer cultivates a personal rela-
tionship to its readers, its impulses to a crusading
honesty always confined within the context of Kane's
emotional dramatics (as evidenced by Charlie's
"noble gesture" of finishing Leland's negative review).

From the young boy's headline-like cry while sled-
ding-"The Union Forever"-politics and patriotism
(perhaps with a notion of togetherness) are part of the
dream of being loved again. Thatcher, of course,
represents the lovelessness characteristic of a capital-
istic enemy of the people. (The cold indifference of
the sterile images of his library and the emotionally
neuter librarian are echoed ironically in the cavern
emptiness of Xanadu.) As Leland discovers, Kane's
crusading in politics is also personal in a childishly
egotistical manner. Not much is made of his first
wife's political association, but the reaction to the
wedding announcement hints this may have been an
obscure part of her attractiveness for Kane.



920 Forum
Initially, Susan's sole appeal seems to be that she

likes Charlie without knowing who he is. Then, when
his political relationship to the public collapses, Kane
uses her as a means to regain the affection and ap-
plause of an audience by becoming a Svengali im-
presario. The fact that Susan obviously has no talent
and tha't the opera career is manifestly an emotional
strain for her indicates that she is reduced rather
quickly from a source for love to a device for gaining
approval.

After such a relentless emphasis, for ,Carringer to
see Rosebud and the globe Kane drops as symbols of
such recondite complexity is to ride a thesis.particu-
larly hard. Harkening back to the brief, almost insig-
nificantly presented, childhood situation does seem
rather simplistically sentimental. But Bernstein's
anecdote of the impression a glimpse of a young girl
in a white dress made upon him has in effect provided
an argument for the "real" nature of such sentiments.
The link between the globe and the Colorado
boyhood reveals the same sense of subjective signifi-
cance. And when the boy is first presented, he does
seem like a small figure in one of those snowstorms
stirred by the tipping of such a liquid-filled globe. The
grownups pathetically reassure him that he won't be
lonely, but it turns out that he is.

Rather than presenting us with "a sense of his
[Kane's) complexity," the film seems rather to show
us how simple human impulses get complicated by
the refusal to recognize the Otherness of the world.
Carringer's other point-"in Kane~s attachment to
what he calls Rosebud, we ought not to think of how
the past intrudes into the present" (pp. 191-92)-also
seems quite unconvincing in terms of what we are
shown in the film.

WALTER SHEAR
Kansas State College of Pittsburg

Mr, Cam'nger replies:

I think there was a stage in the evolution of Citizen
Kane when even Welles would have agreed he was
doing the kind of story Walter Shear outlines. A sense
that Kane ought to be provided with a definitive
psychological motive persisted well into the film's
production, though the burden seemed to fall more
heavily on different motives at different stages. Only
a week before the script was to go to the Hays Office,
for instance, Kane's final break with Leland, his best
friend, over the opera review was being placed early
in the story, where it would emphasize the psycho-
logical compulsion associated with Kane's name.
Only gradually (as I tried to show in my essay) did
Welles come to realize where his narrative method
was leading him-toward a "prismatic" view of his
subject. Kane, as Welles said, is all the things said

about him, or none-it "depends on who's talking
about him." To ignore this warning and look for a
real Kane in one of the stories told about him inevi-
tably will be to do what Shear does, to distort and
trivialize the story. In my essay I tried to provide an
alternative to his view that the obvious, surface mean-
ing represented by Rosebud is the only acceptable
one. I think if Shear felt obliged to comment he ought
to have tried to discredit my methods or refute my
arguments, rather than just to repeat a familiar old
interpretation of the film.

ROBERT L. CARRINGER
University of Illinois

UNITY IDENTITY TEXT SELF

To the Editor:

Heinrich Henel's comments on Norman Holland's
"UNITY IDENTITY TEXT SELF" raise several im-
portant issues that Holland's reply did not address
(PMLA, 91, 1976,293-95). Any theory, for example,
that requires that we rule out of court all shared
responses to literary works as mere accidents. is itself
ignoring a potentially fruitful avenue for inquiry.
For all the popularity of the notion of "plurisignifi-
cance" (whether it be New Critical ambiguity or
Holland's brand of idiosyncratic response), the
experience of most teachers of literature is that there
are important shared inferences when we read (say)
King Lear. Good evidence for this assertion was
provided by the audience's response to a paper
Holland read at the 1975 MLA Convention in San
Francisco. In trying to demonstrate that readers
"match up" their own unique identities to texts,
Holland argued that when he read King Lear he found
himself glad at the end of the play when Lear and
Cordelia die .. Lear, it seems, has been guilty of
causing all the trouble, and Cordelia has been irre-
sponsible in allowing the old fool to get away with it.
Holland reacted this way, he explained, because he
had always resented weak father figures.

I venture to say-from my conversations with
others who attended this session-that a uniform
response was that this was the most original and
idiosyncratic interpretation of King Lear they had
ever heard. Something, in other words, required
many of Holland's listeners intuitively to reject such
an interpretation as somehow false to their own ex-
perience with the play. Although Holland rejects the
notion of a "regulative force" that "limits" response,
precisely such an immanent force had functioned for
most of his listeners when they had read the play.

This is not to say that even two members of the
audience would have agreed on one interpretation of
King Lear, evidence Holland alludes to when he