Plain dealing

A week or so ago I chanced upon perhaps the best academic review that I have ever seen (and reviews in my corner of academia--literary studies--tend to be extremely good). The review is by Arnold Stein, an amazing, principled critic of Donne and Milton, as well as a subtle theorist of the high humanist movement in literary studies after the war. It concerns Wesley Trimpi’s interesting 1962 book Ben Jonson’s Poems, A Study of the Plain Style, and is published in the third number of the thirtieth volume of ELH in 1963 (p. 306-316), and is entitled “Plain Style, Plain Criticism, Plain Dealing and Ben Jonson.” It begins with a whopper:

It is now a braver thing than all the Worthies did to write the history of a literary tradition (306).

I knew I was in for something special, though, when I read what followed:

Even the loyal historian of a religious or political vision, whatever his difficulties, may at least begin with a cheerful confidence in the firm shape of what he is chronicling. But the modern historian of a literary tradition must assemble the materials by which he is to establish the existence of what he proposes to describe. A certain amount of strain and overdecisiveness are therefore to be expected, nor does one demonstrate the existence of a literary tradition without some awareness that history may be made by being written. It will require unusual generosity on the part of the historian not to be influenced by the thought that literary objects which uninstructed taste has been admiring are in the process of having their value corrected (306).

The apology utterly damns Trimpi, but what struck me was the degree to which Stein frames it as an apology. Histories of literary traditions are extremely difficult to write, because they usually end up not being histories at all: such a statement ends up revealing itself as wonderfully sarcastic, but tarrying with it so long in a serious vein, thinking hard about how a project’s lack of accuracy actually is a burden the nonliterary historian does not have to encounter--this comes out on the other side of sarcasm and makes us think hard about how much we indeed should indulge misguided projects. A certain amount of strain and overdecisiveness is expected when one is willing into being the history one wants to write, but how much should such bravado be excused, when the problems of the brave task are so much more global? I was thus happy to find that Stein gave such prominence to what I found most disturbing about Trimpi’s work: a certain unwarranted forcefulness that takes advantage of your indulgence rather than rewarding it. But that Stein here also suggests we might consider such bravado to be more inexcusable than the aim of the study--this was almost as impressive as seeing Stein go on to argue it:

The basic charge to be made against the scholarship of this book is that it practices an eclectic dogmatism. It disparages rhetoric in poetry and does not hear its own rhetoric. The degree of critical self-awareness is limited. As F. H. Bradley wrote, "You are left in short with brute conjunctions where you seek for connexions." In this book the "brute conjunctions" are many, and confidently pass themselves for "connections"; a few key points are brought in as if their truth were to be proved by the frequency with which they can be made to appear.

The account of the plain style culminating in Jonson is not believable as argument partly because the saw and glue are too much in evidence. To begin with, in rummaging among the ancient rhetoricians Trimpi takes what he needs without much concern for what he leaves behind. Firm discriminations are made and supported by a quotation or two from Quintilian, or Cicero, or Demetrius, or Dionysius of Halicarnassus, or Horace--though in some instances the ancients themselves differed over fine points which may still be debated. The origins and development of the plain style as we get them in Fiske's account [another study of the fate of ancient rhetoric] are more varied and do not grow cleanly in straight lines. The origins are Socratic but also Cynic and Stoic. The "freer and looser tradition of the nature and limits of the plain style," which Fiske finds in Lucilius [Stein cites Fisk], and the contribution of sententious writing, do not belong in Trimpi's version of the classical model, but with quiet astuteness he converts these hints to the English scene where they reappear in the native tradition and in Senecan excess (310-11).

I’ll continue this look at Stein’s piece in another post soon.