ABSTRACT
Last summer my friend Edwin Honig, poet and man of many letters, gave me an unusual birthday present-a famous photograph of Ernest Hemingway in boxing trunks and boxing gloves, his manly chest thrust out, gazing at himself in a body-length mirror with a pleased grin on his face. Only it wasn't his own face he now gazed at, it was mine. Honig had imposed a photograph of my head, with a similarly pleased grin on my face, where Hemingway's reflected head should have been. I should add at this point that among his many other books, Honig is the author of The Dark Conceit: The Making ofAllegory (1959). Apparently he had just created another dark conceit, in more than one sense, a pictorial allegory of the critic's conceited identification with, or perhaps repossession of, his authorial subject's sense of his own public image, his publicly visible self,
in one of his favorite guises. I have since come to accept this Lacanian effrontery as a legitimate critical act-my usurpation, that is to say, of another man's adult version of infantile selfdiscovery. This is what we all do as critics if and when we are honest with ourselves, as we attempt to "psych out" authorial intentions and in that sense begin our own takeover of authorial achievements. And by achievements, I mean of course the books we love or in some sense want to possess by authors whom we also love and want in some sense to possess.
