I SHALL begin with Louis Marin's formulation of the question we must put to our contemporary practice of literary criticism the moment we abrogate to it any power of scientific generalization. Marin poses the question, What could the relation be between literary theory and history if by theory one understood a general and exhaustive explanation of the facts? Is there any contemporary theory that might be applied in this way to Renaissance literature? Marin does not think so. He insists that in some sense the object for analysis must already reveal "some rudiments of the theory which it is supposed to illustrate" and cannot stand to its explanatory artifacts as nature stands to science. Every cultural artifact contains a seconddegree level, where it "mirrors" its own reading or interpretation. To suppose otherwise is to imagine art as wholly unconscious behavior waiting upon an external critic for its sense, the latter possessed of a transhistorical metalanguage given to no preceding generation. Such a theory of art would, of course, reduce us to the silence of stones. We do not possess a total cultural paradigm. Such a presupposition would, in my view, at best make sense only as a retrospective artifact of analysis-a reverential mode of turning our back upon things with the added hope that we might be facing into a future. Of course, we are obliged to treat subcultures, subtexts, institutions, and roles as more likely than not to cohere within a given period or episteme. Or else we should have to abandon intelligibility. Today, we favor discontinuity in order to practice a certain cultural charity that is ignored in those very histories of humanity that progress by abstracting from, relegating, and shunting over altogether aspects of history that condemn themselves by not easily fitting the schemas of rationality. Discontinuity is the measure of our wounded humanism.' We must suppose that all human conduct is at some level self-expressive and selfexplicating in accordance with its own schemas of sense, practicality, and value. The alternative to this view is to treat prior history as a third-world culture importing the meaning it lacks from a contem-