WHILE puzzling over my role as commentator on this issue of New Literary History, I have tried to see the magazine itself as performance. A literary magazine exists to enhance community values among its readers. There is a sense in which a magazine is a vortex of energy, a mask which the reader puts on in order to perceive a field of action that would otherwise be outside his ken. If a reader must put on a magazine as a mask or a pattern of energy in order to organize his perceptions, the contributors must also put on the public created by the magazine, creating a reciprocal and complementary action. It is especially difficult for me as an outside commentator to focus both aspects of this process simultaneously. Perhaps I will be permitted the role of "the stranger" used by Plato to promote the ends of dialogue and to avoid the specialist exchanges of an "in-group." The function of "the stranger" as the trigger for dialogue appears even in the self-appointed role of cab-drivers as philosophers. There is usually a stranger in the back seat. It is likely that if the passenger in a cab were another cab-driver, both would tend to gossip about familiar matters. Such, for example, is the manner of committees. If, however, every member of a committee were to table his ignorance instead of his expertise, there could be no gossip. Dialogue demands ignorance as a resource and a spur to exploration. At a panel discussion on "Theatre and the Visual Arts" with W. H. Auden and Buckminster Fuller, I ventured to ask what effect, if any, Apollo 14 might have on the theatre of the present and the future. Auden proclaimed: "I am a nineteenth century man and proud of it!" This comes to mind as I turn to the "Poetics of Spectacle" by Stephen Orgel. His essay offers wonderful opportunities for those who wish to explore the dramatic diversities of the eye and the ear. He sets up a fascinating play between the dramas of Inigo Jones and