I am rereading Frances Ferguson's excellent early work, Wordsworth: Language as Counter-Spirit (1977). I remember the following statement well, though, not only because it is the first, most concise articulation of a position that will run through the rest of Ferguson's work, but also because I have always thought it the most sensible and most demanding of any possible position. In other words, I have--when push comes to shove--always come back and stuck to the approach it outlines:
The recent re-examination of literary language which has flourished increasingly in criticism is an attempt to articulate the implication of the statement that all literature is necessary linguistic. Yet this very preoccupation with language, which heuristically substitutes an interest in linguistic process for an interest in literary content (mythic, thematic, psychological), can itself become a rehearsal of pat answers and artificially persistent mysteries when "language" is taken as an absolute. The paradox that language is both the most familiar and the ultimately unknown element in any individual's experience seems overwhelming until we recognize once again that literary texts not only postpone but also mock whatever éblouissement the paradox inspires. Thus, this study anchors itself in texts--not because the text has iconic absoluteness but because the text is there to be read, and the reading itself can alone demonstrate the legitimacy of speaking as though any literary work reveals a consciousness of language and a simultaneous consciousness of its erosion of a mythically exalted status for language.
-Wordsworth: Language as Counter-Spirit, 2-3.
Remember this was said in 1977, at the height of what would be called, outside literature departments, "the linguistic turn." In other words it underscores what some people outside the discipline--as Tim Morton nicely puts it in a nice recent interview (and indeed Ferguson is talking about structuralism)--don't seem to understand in their (justified) backlash against postmodern excess (which it is misleading to heap on literature departments): language in some absolute sense was and is never, seriously, that big of a deal for most literary critics. Dealing mostly with words, sentences, meters, styles, plots, forms, genres, and other concrete things (over which we have an unparalleled, yet teachable mastery), what we know of languge is something abstract--not absolute. Absolutized, literary critics would never know what to do with it! How could we? The only people who did do this--those around de Man and some of the other star figures of yesteryear--were and are (and they merit this, though the suspicion is not always for the right reason) suspect throughout the discipline precisely for being so vague, and often treating the texts we read as props for something larger--and, let's just be frank, much less interesting. But Ferguson's suspicion towards the exaltation or absolutization of "language" is not the only thing or the main thing that I have found so useful here: the last sentence is in fact perhaps the most important, and is what makes the position both more positive and indeed most demanding, as I said above. What characterizes reading critically is this speaking "as though," which requires engagement with or a test of the text to be read--and not in any way that would (Wimsatt-like) absolutize this latter beyond the bounds of the test. What's more, to think of reading in this way is actually (like Ferguson does: the author of Solitude and the Sublime and Pornography, the Theory is certainly not anti-theory at all) to believe in and promote theorizing--not to reject it--for this is one way the "as though" can be refined (the "something larger" can be helpful and, depending on how it is developed, further concretize the often ambiguous operations involved in reading, though it is not really related to reading in the sense developed here--and indeed de Man can be extremely helpful). I might recall also a comment of one of my professors with which Ferguson's seems to resonate (and which I more and more agree with), even though he is looking backward at precisely the time she is writing this: as readers of literature, we never really were theorists but readers who hoped, who believed in, the possibility of theory--who were (and still are) in favor of having some theory.
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Monday, May 10, 2010
Empson on Smart
I'm not particularly fond of William Empson--especially the early work, which many people not overfond of him (fewer than you might think) are willing to admit isn't as good as the looser, wilder, later stuff--but at certain times his eye, his ear, his strident way of characterizing what is going on in a poem is indispensable, even if misguided. He produces "strong readings" of the minutest details--if I can say that, the oxymoron not shading too much into paradox. Take Empson too seriously--as seriously as he takes himself (he is, after all, patron saint of ambiguity, never irony--and there's something useful and refreshing about that too)--and you won't be able to get his particular emphasis on a word out of your head for years: people are still unable to escape Empson's influence in their approach to Shakespeare's Sonnet 73, even if they dismiss his tenuous jab at history via the "bare ruin'd choirs" in Seven Types of Ambiguity--it's his immense control of the mind-blowingly complex intersection between phrasing (even just the grammar), metaphor (not the leaves, but the time is the vehicle to be extended!), and form (not to mention the famous, sublime numerical puzzle of the sequence some, none, few) in the three lines prior ("That time of year thou mayst in me behold / When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang / Upon those boughs which shake against the cold") that makes Empson's sort of daring on the following line possible and probable. But then, if you take him skeptically, realize that specific phrasings are elements over which we interpreters indeed have the most control, and place him beside other readings, knowing that his chief skill is in grasping the many possible active alternatives that a poet could have taken but didn't--if you realize all this, he becomes extremely enlightening, thus reduced in scope and definitiveness, though not in wit, insight, and concision (see the absolutely unbelievable "like dancing in heavy skirts," below). The problem is only that Empson in particular--but the poet more generally as he or she confronts a critic--has a way of bullying you into thinking that you never really have known much about the small-scale inner workings of language, but have only moved at some higher, less concrete level in your deepest scrutiny and exactest attention. Thus, we get statements like this one:
The mode of action of a double plot is the sort of thing critics are liable to neglect; it does not depend on being noticed for its operation, so is neither an easy nor an obviously useful thing to notice. [...] It is an easy-going device, often used simply to fill out a play, and has an obvious effect in the Elizabethans of making you feel the play deals with life as a whole, with any one who comes into the street the scene so often represents; this may be why criticism has not taken it seriously when it deserved to be.
-Some Versions of Pastoral, 27
The claim, really, is that there are two types of notice--and perhaps more essentially, two types of neglect. But even the most formalist sort of critic--the one who looks so often for the functional upshot of this sort of thing, how it adds to the whole--doesn't employ any different sort of gaze than the uncritical (in the descriptive sense) gaze, and doesn't have any sort of neglect that is qualitatively different than the uncritical neglect. We just look at things or don't look at things for different reasons. This doesn't mean we notice or fail to notice different things. To say otherwise is not only to commit a logical injustice, but also to be more like Richards--always supposed to be so much less sophisticated than Empson--than Richards himself: he, at least had the good sense to confer upon such perspectivized poems an objective psychological existence. And many who uncritcally (here in the perjorative sense, the sense in which it means something descriptively different) love these strong-minute readings of Empson, these "quaint opinions wide," indeed are willing to say otherwise with their hero. In short, most good statements about literature in general precisely involve the sort of neglect or semi-notice that Empson says the critic always misses, too busy murdering to dissect (here in more way than one: what's faulted is--just to be clear--a lack of attention that does not, Empson assumes, allow any subsequent notice, when his gaze will, when not noticing, at least admit the feature in question). What's not noticed here, indeed, is that criticism precisely tries to talk about this "dim and undetermined sense," and moves from it--and much more often than the non-critical, I'll add--to its statements. In short, as usual, it's a straw man here: the non-critic or the uncritic or even the poet simply is using the same gaze, and has the same dim appreciation--which is no less able to be worked up into notice--of the double plot. But why this is particularly offensive--why it would just have to be otherwise, with a difference in kind--I'll never quite understand: indeed, there are different kinds of experience involved in creation or enjoyment as opposed to analysis, but experience is something different than attention, and it is criticism that allows us to actually reinforce the connection between the two, rather than crudely assert and reassert their identity.
Nevertheless, you want Empson to say these sorts of things, as they foster his deep sense of the internal workings of the poem, and spur him on to stronger and stronger readings. It's just that you have to brush these "bland words" away--along with the tired general sentiment to which it gives voice.
So with that said, I have no qualms of just quoting another--this time brilliant--bit from Some Versions of Pastoral, where Empson is, if not right, then attuned to something really excellent about Christopher Smart's (amazing, as with all of Smart's works) Song to David in his chapter on (or about, or around) Marvell and what he calls "the Orpheus idea, that by delight in Nature when terrible man gains strength to control it":
This grand theme too has a root in magic; it is an important version of the idea of the man powerful because he has included everything in himself, is still strong, one would think, among the mountain climbers and often the scientists, and deserves a few examples here. I call it the idea of the Hymn to David though being hidden behind the religious one it is nowhere overtly stated, except perhaps in the line
Praise above all, for praise prevails.
David is a case of Orpheus-like behavior because his music restrained the madness of Saul.
His furious foes no more maligned
When he such melody divined,
And sense and soul detained;
By divining--intuiting--the harmony behind the universe he "makes it divine," rather as to discover a law of nature is to "give nature laws," and this restrains the madman who embodies the unruled forces o nature from killing him. The main argument of the verses describing nature (or nature as described by David) is that the violence of Nature is an expression of her adoration of God, and therefore that the man of prayer who also adores God delights in it and can control it.
Strong the gier eagle on his sail
Strong against tide, th' enormous whale
Emerges, as he goes.
But stronger still, in earth or air
Or in the sea, the man of prayer
And far beneath the tide.
The feeling is chiefly carried by the sound; long Latin words are packed into the short lines against a short one-syllable rhyming word full of consonants; it is like dancing in heavy skirts; he juggles with the whole cumbrous complexity of the world.
-Some Versions of Pastoral, 120-1.
The mode of action of a double plot is the sort of thing critics are liable to neglect; it does not depend on being noticed for its operation, so is neither an easy nor an obviously useful thing to notice. [...] It is an easy-going device, often used simply to fill out a play, and has an obvious effect in the Elizabethans of making you feel the play deals with life as a whole, with any one who comes into the street the scene so often represents; this may be why criticism has not taken it seriously when it deserved to be.
-Some Versions of Pastoral, 27
The claim, really, is that there are two types of notice--and perhaps more essentially, two types of neglect. But even the most formalist sort of critic--the one who looks so often for the functional upshot of this sort of thing, how it adds to the whole--doesn't employ any different sort of gaze than the uncritical (in the descriptive sense) gaze, and doesn't have any sort of neglect that is qualitatively different than the uncritical neglect. We just look at things or don't look at things for different reasons. This doesn't mean we notice or fail to notice different things. To say otherwise is not only to commit a logical injustice, but also to be more like Richards--always supposed to be so much less sophisticated than Empson--than Richards himself: he, at least had the good sense to confer upon such perspectivized poems an objective psychological existence. And many who uncritcally (here in the perjorative sense, the sense in which it means something descriptively different) love these strong-minute readings of Empson, these "quaint opinions wide," indeed are willing to say otherwise with their hero. In short, most good statements about literature in general precisely involve the sort of neglect or semi-notice that Empson says the critic always misses, too busy murdering to dissect (here in more way than one: what's faulted is--just to be clear--a lack of attention that does not, Empson assumes, allow any subsequent notice, when his gaze will, when not noticing, at least admit the feature in question). What's not noticed here, indeed, is that criticism precisely tries to talk about this "dim and undetermined sense," and moves from it--and much more often than the non-critical, I'll add--to its statements. In short, as usual, it's a straw man here: the non-critic or the uncritic or even the poet simply is using the same gaze, and has the same dim appreciation--which is no less able to be worked up into notice--of the double plot. But why this is particularly offensive--why it would just have to be otherwise, with a difference in kind--I'll never quite understand: indeed, there are different kinds of experience involved in creation or enjoyment as opposed to analysis, but experience is something different than attention, and it is criticism that allows us to actually reinforce the connection between the two, rather than crudely assert and reassert their identity.
Nevertheless, you want Empson to say these sorts of things, as they foster his deep sense of the internal workings of the poem, and spur him on to stronger and stronger readings. It's just that you have to brush these "bland words" away--along with the tired general sentiment to which it gives voice.
So with that said, I have no qualms of just quoting another--this time brilliant--bit from Some Versions of Pastoral, where Empson is, if not right, then attuned to something really excellent about Christopher Smart's (amazing, as with all of Smart's works) Song to David in his chapter on (or about, or around) Marvell and what he calls "the Orpheus idea, that by delight in Nature when terrible man gains strength to control it":
This grand theme too has a root in magic; it is an important version of the idea of the man powerful because he has included everything in himself, is still strong, one would think, among the mountain climbers and often the scientists, and deserves a few examples here. I call it the idea of the Hymn to David though being hidden behind the religious one it is nowhere overtly stated, except perhaps in the line
Praise above all, for praise prevails.
David is a case of Orpheus-like behavior because his music restrained the madness of Saul.
His furious foes no more maligned
When he such melody divined,
And sense and soul detained;
By divining--intuiting--the harmony behind the universe he "makes it divine," rather as to discover a law of nature is to "give nature laws," and this restrains the madman who embodies the unruled forces o nature from killing him. The main argument of the verses describing nature (or nature as described by David) is that the violence of Nature is an expression of her adoration of God, and therefore that the man of prayer who also adores God delights in it and can control it.
Strong the gier eagle on his sail
Strong against tide, th' enormous whale
Emerges, as he goes.
But stronger still, in earth or air
Or in the sea, the man of prayer
And far beneath the tide.
The feeling is chiefly carried by the sound; long Latin words are packed into the short lines against a short one-syllable rhyming word full of consonants; it is like dancing in heavy skirts; he juggles with the whole cumbrous complexity of the world.
-Some Versions of Pastoral, 120-1.
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Weird Wordsworth
Timothy Morton has his fascinating Romanticism class at Davis available for podcast download here (link will open iTunes). Particularly good are the sessions on Wordsworth. Morton's sense of the poet is pitch perfect, and while he stresses all the essential characteristics, he also makes them interesting--not just by infusing them (or rather, as is the case in his amazing book on Shelley's vegetarianism, revealing them to be infused) with the profound (but really wonderfully levelheaded) ecological concerns for which he is perhaps more widely known (that is, outside literature). No--he also makes these features interesting by doing that great thing you simply have to do with Wordsworth, which is show how unbelievably weird his poems really are. His reading of "Old Man Travelling" (later called merely by its subtitle "Animal Tranquility and Decay," but with some of its most crucial lines cut out) is particularly excellent, since it labors over so many of the pauses and negatives, which are so prevalent that they appear (if they can appear) even in the first (shockingly abrupt) sentence (line 2):
The little hedge-row birds,
That peck along the road, regard him not.
He travels on, and in his face, his step,
His gait, is one expression; every limb,
His look and bending figure, all bespeak
A man who does not move with pain, but moves
With thought--He is insensibly subdued
To settled quiet: he is one by whom
All effort seems forgotten, one to whom
Long patience has such mild composure given,
That patience now doth seem a thing, of which
He hath no need. He is by nature led
To peace so perfect, that the young behold
With envy, what the old man hardly feels.
--I asked him whither he was bound, and what
The object of his journey; he replied
"Sir! I am going many miles to take
"A last leave of my son, a mariner,
"Who, from a sea-fight has been brought to Falmouth,
"And there is dying in an hospital."
It is a wonderfully ironic, even bitter piece--but it is also just extremely weird (in ways the "Old Cumberland Beggar," say, from which Wordsworth said "Old Man" is merely an "overflowing," isn't). The irony is easy to detect: "insensibly subdued/ To settled quiet," when he is indeed making the "effort" of--precisely--traveling. Then there is--and this is more bitter--the fact that he is "by nature led/ To peace so perfect" (again on the second syllable, preceded by [almost building up a mental inversion even as the stress is regular] a directional indicator [in a poem teeming with prepositions and indeed prepositional oppositions: look at "by whom" and "to whom" in l. 8-9] horribly misapplied or mistaken: the speaker does not really know the way the man is subdued or traveling, what he is is subdued or where he is traveling to), when he is precisely going to meet the result of a "sea-fight": his dying son. All this is there, but then there is just the sheer weirdness that comes from the almost overbalance (to use a Wordsworthian term) of this irony, and which Morton's focus on the speaker's use of negative perception (the birds "regard him not," and he is presented as "a man who does not move with pain") really excellently underscores. In other words, more striking even than the irony is the way the ironic misperception of the speaker is built up so excessively: in the second instance that I noted especially ("To peace," and I should stress that there are many more instances), the irony shades into a bitterness so intense that it is hard not to attribute even a sort of cruelty to Wordsworth--perhaps the single quality that that is most thoroughly un-Wordsworthian (even though Wordsworth could be cold, his poetic voice is constructed so as to make cruelty almost impossible: a sympathy so profound that it is too deep for tears--or perhaps so profound that it seems a thing "of which/ he hath no need," a sympathy that is not even sympathy--pervades his work). So we are left with not just the irony but its weirdness, something precisely like--because this is perhaps most ironic--its "poetic justice." Why? Penetrating to this level of unanswerable questioning (if I can say that) is what reading Wordsworth is all about.
The little hedge-row birds,
That peck along the road, regard him not.
He travels on, and in his face, his step,
His gait, is one expression; every limb,
His look and bending figure, all bespeak
A man who does not move with pain, but moves
With thought--He is insensibly subdued
To settled quiet: he is one by whom
All effort seems forgotten, one to whom
Long patience has such mild composure given,
That patience now doth seem a thing, of which
He hath no need. He is by nature led
To peace so perfect, that the young behold
With envy, what the old man hardly feels.
--I asked him whither he was bound, and what
The object of his journey; he replied
"Sir! I am going many miles to take
"A last leave of my son, a mariner,
"Who, from a sea-fight has been brought to Falmouth,
"And there is dying in an hospital."
It is a wonderfully ironic, even bitter piece--but it is also just extremely weird (in ways the "Old Cumberland Beggar," say, from which Wordsworth said "Old Man" is merely an "overflowing," isn't). The irony is easy to detect: "insensibly subdued/ To settled quiet," when he is indeed making the "effort" of--precisely--traveling. Then there is--and this is more bitter--the fact that he is "by nature led/ To peace so perfect" (again on the second syllable, preceded by [almost building up a mental inversion even as the stress is regular] a directional indicator [in a poem teeming with prepositions and indeed prepositional oppositions: look at "by whom" and "to whom" in l. 8-9] horribly misapplied or mistaken: the speaker does not really know the way the man is subdued or traveling, what he is is subdued or where he is traveling to), when he is precisely going to meet the result of a "sea-fight": his dying son. All this is there, but then there is just the sheer weirdness that comes from the almost overbalance (to use a Wordsworthian term) of this irony, and which Morton's focus on the speaker's use of negative perception (the birds "regard him not," and he is presented as "a man who does not move with pain") really excellently underscores. In other words, more striking even than the irony is the way the ironic misperception of the speaker is built up so excessively: in the second instance that I noted especially ("To peace," and I should stress that there are many more instances), the irony shades into a bitterness so intense that it is hard not to attribute even a sort of cruelty to Wordsworth--perhaps the single quality that that is most thoroughly un-Wordsworthian (even though Wordsworth could be cold, his poetic voice is constructed so as to make cruelty almost impossible: a sympathy so profound that it is too deep for tears--or perhaps so profound that it seems a thing "of which/ he hath no need," a sympathy that is not even sympathy--pervades his work). So we are left with not just the irony but its weirdness, something precisely like--because this is perhaps most ironic--its "poetic justice." Why? Penetrating to this level of unanswerable questioning (if I can say that) is what reading Wordsworth is all about.
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