| (‘Contemporary’ by the way here means 55 years ago) |
| Duke Maskell |
Steven Tucker had an article in yesterday’s The Daily Sceptic saying that in the 25 years since he did his degree in English Literature the subject has lost its integrity and turned into woke grievance-mongering. If he weren’t so young a man, he’d know that things were going wrong with university ‘English’ at least 30 years earlier, when ‘theory’ was already theatening to replace criticism. In evidence, the following essay was published in the Cambridge Quarterly in 1971.
I confess at the outset that I have an interest in the matter. I am a contemporary critic myself. I have made my own contribution to knowledge. Not a very large contribution, yet. And not knowledge of a very useful or ennobling kind perhaps but a decent, workmanlike, businessmanly sort of knowledge that will float as buoyantly on the tide of scholarship as any other man’s. I have shown the world, that is to say, the academic world, that is, the literary critical world, the world, to be precise, of eighteenth-century studies or, to be more precise, of Sterne studies—I have shown, to be exact, the world of Sterne biographical studies that Sterne’s once-suspected, first recorded letter is, truly, his own letter after all.
The controversy over this letter—whether he wrote it to Elizabeth Lumley in 1740 and then re-used it, for convenience, twenty- seven years later, in a journal to Eliza Draper or whether his daughter Lydia forged it from the journal, for gain, eight years after his death—this controversy, which was first aired in The Times Literary Supplement on June the 23rd, 1927, and was walked about, there and in other places, on and off until June the 6th, 1935, I restored to the public gaze, briefly and (as I hope it will prove) for the last time, in a scholarly article dated August, 1970, viz. “The Authenticity of Sterne’s First Recorded Letter,” Notes and Queries, NEW SERIES, Vol. 17, No. 8 (Vol. 215 of the continuous series), pp. 303–307.
From my study of the emendations in the journal manuscript, paying particular heed to the variations in the strength of the ink, I proved (as a friend said) painstakingly, that this letter which, but for the gentleman-partner in the couple who conceived the whole controversy (to whom, might I add, both it and I are eternally grateful)—this letter which, but for that one man, no one had ever dreamt wasn’t by Sterne, I proved, modestly and unassumingly, was.
And having proved, I published.
What I know I tell. It is my belief that the grains and scruples of learning are as deserving of public regard as the more gross and evident truths and that in proportion as they are smaller and frailer so is their need of scholarly assistance the greater. So I research and I publish. That is my life. Lacking the advantages of connection and inheritance, a child as it were of the 1944 Education Act, naturally I have become a scholar.
And today I give a scholar’s praise to a most scholar-like thing, an anthology of critical essays, essays cut and tailored and pressed to order, a book of bespoke critical essays called Contemporary Criticism, edited by Malcolm Bradbury, published by Edward Arnold, London, 1970. A glance at the title was enough. The time and place did the rest. The editor’s own name could not say more. Here was boldness. Here was imagination. Here was a fine suppleness of mind on somebody’s part—to see in the facticities of ancient criticism, classical criticism, renaissance criticism and so forth the possibilities of a book called Contemporary Criticism. The table of contents alone was worth the price: eight essays, plus a justificatory preface and exploratory introduction, promising to reveal to the world eight quite different approaches to criticism, viz:
Criticism as a Humanist Discipline
Battering the Object: The Ontological Approach
Generic Criticism: The Approach through Type, Mode and Kind
The Criticism of Comparison: The Approach through Comparative Literature and Intellectual History
The ‘Unconscious’ of Literature: The Psychoanalytical Approach
The Structure of Criticism and the Languages of Poetry: An Approach through Language
Criticism as an Individual Activity: The Approach through Reading
Here was riches, I thought to myself. A book of books. An entire bible of books promoting contemporary scientific pluralism, what I call “reading for richness” and what the editor calls “seeing literature in as many different lights as possible”.
The preface? The preface was all that one could have wished. A model of its kind, everything that such a preface of such a book should be, a preface-writer’s preface. Its style — blending the scholarly-critical (“to offer an exploration of the various methods of critical procedure that”) so subtly with the publishers’ puff-like (“some leading contemporary critics”, “the most lively issues in criticism today”, “the lively, challenging piece by”) that one could hardly tell one from the other — was the right style. Its intentions — to bring the world “up-to-date” with “the current dialogue”, “the new tendencies and the new a proaches” and all the other “lively issues in the current ferment of literary criticism”— were exemplary.
The world deserves to be told by eight or nine contemporary critics where they have come to, where they are leading, and what kinds of growth and difficulty lie before them. It is time it learned not only, as the preface says, that criticism has become “engrossed with itself” but, as the introduction says, that “in many respects this is an advance and a fulfillment”.
For the contemporary critic to explore his own methods and procedures and to tell us what he finds there, for him to allow nothing about himself to escape his attention and to allow nothing to go unremarked, to keep nothing back, but to let us into the whole secret from first to last of everything that concerns him, to tell us not merely what habit he picked up last year or last week or even a moment or two ago but what habit he is in the very act of picking up, at this very instant, at this dimensionless, extensionless, durationless, this timeless point in time—O hora splendida! O advance! O fulfillment!
The editor’s introduction, “The State of Criticism Today”, is a true guide to the book as a whole, and its title, combining as it does suggestions of the dramatic in the subject with suggestions of the judicious in the author, is a true guide to its matter. The subject is dramatic. As the editor says, whereas at one time we critics were ourselves “men of letters” (he cites Ben Jonson, Dryden, Samuel Johnson, Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, Henry James, Eliot, Pound) nowadays we are “a large critical salariat” which is “safely lodged in departments of English or schools of literature”. Criticism has undergone a “bureaucratisation” and “the managerial revolution”. It has become a “(more or less new) profession”. And our newly-won professionalism is of a very particular kind. It is not the professionalism, of say, Dr. Johnson. It is “a good deal more academic than literary”; so much so, in fact, that “the common writer as well as the common reader often seems to lie outside its purlieus”. Criticism has “passed beyond being the intelligent debate of society about its literature”. It has moved “into the academy and out of the context of general thought”. Having disentangled itself from the unstudied talk of amateurs and dilettantes, it has become “indissolubly wedded to teaching and research”. It has become “a discipline, like sociology or biology … part of a general science of man”.
The critic no longer does what he once did, what any common man might do, read and reflect. Nowadays, he “works in a situation of intensive study”. What is now required of him is not what once was. Nowadays, what he needs is “not good taste but attentive effort”, “an effective training” and “a large capacity for keen theoretical thinking”. Reading itself has become “a highly professional activity, not lightly to be undertaken by amateurs”. Criticism has been professionalised, and being professionalised it has been democratised. Good taste and the habit of reflection are among the belongings of an aristocracy. Though theoretically accessible to all, in practice they are the possession of only a few. But attentive effort, professional training and theoretical thinking are within the grasp of anyone who can get himself into a university English department. These virtues, though accessible to only a minority, are to be had by many.
The happy consequences are that criticism has become “a growth area” and that “the critic has outstripped the creator in professional confidence”. “The rising intellectual population” has been kept pace with by “a critical expansion”, “a critical boom”. Today, we are all critics. And, ours being “a Tocquevilleian age”, the “age of the ordinary man”, we account ourselves no less of critics than Aristotle, Horace and Johnson and we account our San Antonios and Norwiches, Aberystwyths and Gower Streets, Freetowns and Hong Kongs no meaner cities than ancient Athens, classical Rome and Augustan London.
And yet, heady as the drama of this story is, Mr Bradbury remains calm telling it, remains judicious, sensible, and even shrewd. It was sensible of him, for instance, to claim not that we contemporary critics are “an absolute advance” over Johnson, Dryden and Coleridge but only “a kind of refinement”. And it was shrewd to set about justifying even this small a claim by comparing us not with anyone who was himself a “man of letters” but with one or two of our own, slightly older friends and acquaintances, by comparing us contemporary “revised new critics” with our immediate predecessors, the merely modem “old new critics”. After all, many people who would blindly refuse to think us an advance of any kind over Johnson, Dryden and Coleridge might well be prepared to think us an advance of some kind over Tumell, Tate and Read. Moreover, this tactic opened up to Mr Bradbury a whole wide range of metaphors of advancing and improving from which otherwise he would have been barred. As it was, though, he was able to send criticism “down the road it perhaps had logically to go”, to “move it out of the climate it was in”, to “extend it beyond” this point and “press it further” than that, to “grow” it here and “develop” it there, and generally to “advance”, “progress” and “improve” it at such a desperately fast rate that all we contemporary critics aboard the vehicle must infallibly have fallen off had our driver not kept it under the strictest control on even the very tightest of tight hard bends, making no wild unfettered claims on our behalf but ever modifying, ever qualifying, ever steering a gentle middle way with the touch of an “in many ways” here and an “in most respects” there, never obtruding himself and his own opinions but advancing only those belonging to “many critics” or “most modern critics” — or, if doing so, then not doing so in too monolithically positive a manner but asserting nothing more reckless than what “we are tempted to believe … tempted to doubt … and tend to see”.
I won’t review all eight approaches which follow this Introduction. Some are more finely evidential than others. One or two are not written with that fullness of professional self-confidence one likes to see. Mr Rodway, the genericist, for example, is afraid that his approach will “possibly fatally” dehumanise its practitioners and Mr Fletcher, the comparativist, that his will be thought “a waste of time”. Others are even outrightly hostile to contemporary academic professionalism. Mr Hough, the humanist, says it has been responsible for “an inert mixture of scholarship, factitious ingenuity and pedestrian moralising” written in “a mid-Atlantic gabble”. Mr Wimsatt, the ontologist, complains about “the appalling escalation” that has taken place in scholarly publishing because of “the explosion of the university population”. And Mr Gregor, the individualist, asks in an old-fashioned way that the critic “relate his discourse to the world of men and employ the language they commonly use”. Mr Holland, the psychoanalyst, is confident in his professionalism. He says, for instance, that if only we would psychoanalyse poetry instead of reading it we would “achieve a timeless moment of at-oneness, transforming our deepest wishes and fears into meaningfulness”. And his essay would serve to illustrate the advances made by contemporary criticism but for the fact that those of Mr Hoggart, the sociologist, and Mr Fowler, the linguist, do so even better.
Mr Hoggart’s essay is a nice portrait of contemporary critical method. It shows how to create a whole new approach ab ovo. It shows clearly just what sort of thing the contemporary critic does. Mr Hoggart rightly says that the characteristic activity of us contemporary critics is not reading or reflecting but studying or, as he calls it, ‘reading’. And, ideally, he says, we ‘read’ books not only for their ‘literary meaning’ (“at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies we call this ‘reading for tone’ and ‘reading for value’”) but also for their ‘cultural meaning’. This is an important and indeed a useful step. “Reading for the cultural meaning” will greatly extend the scope of literary criticism. Firstly, from good books to bad, for a bad or, as Mr Hoggart calls it, a “non-traditional” book is just as rich in cultural meaning as a good one, however poor it may be in its merely literary meaning. And secondly, from books to things. As nothing lacks its cultural meaning (how could it?), it must be the legitimate job of the sociological literary critic to ‘read’ anything and everything or, as Mr Hoggart puts it, to read all “these non-formal but nevertheless richly expressive phenomena of contemporary culture”. Here, I say, is riches. A mine. A deep ontologic treasury, unfathomable and inexhaustible! How many of us guessed that we might be specialists not just in books but in things, in all things!
Mr Hoggart isn’t, of course, bidding us merely to re-create the variegated surfaces of contemporary life as the poet or novelist does but to devise an “adequate vocabulary for describing their cultural meanings”. He isn’t bidding us to engage our imaginations directly with things, to go out into the world and catch the look of things, the colour, the relief, the expression, the surface-substance of the contemporary human spectacle, to look up mini-skirts or into that vivid slit in the maxi-coat, but to ponder their “inner meanings”, which as he says, “are not easily read or dismissed. At Birmingham we have learned this most of all by working in long weekly seminars over two or three months on a single short story from a women’s magazine. And one of our graduate students has had a similar experience from three years’ work on Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels.”
Where Mr Hoggart sees the need only for an “adequate vocabulary for describing”, Mr Bradbury, his editor, sees the need for a whole “language of relevance both for appreciating and for assessing”. And what we see in Mr Fowler, the linguist’s essay (the one described by Mr Bradbury as that “lively, challenging piece by”), is just such a language:
A culture is one set of people’s particular organisation of the chaos of physical universals.
A language is a structured repository of concepts, and every use of language is a particular ordering in a (partly language- dependent) circumscribed cultural situation.
A text is structured in a certain way because it is a distinct use of certain distinctive materials given in advance.
Of linguistic artefacts, such as poems, we may say that they are built with abstract non-physical, formatives to which we give names like ‘sentence’, ‘noun’, etc.
An habitual and successful reader of literature broadens and refines his sociolinguistic competence.
The above theory—suggesting external causation of verbal distinctiveness by distinct cultural situations—allows for varieties of language in literature to be sifted by a categorisation of situational types.
Mr Fowler “would argue that we do not need a justificatory ontology, nor a speculative, quasi-logical ontology, but a scientific ontology” and, oh, how I would love to have argued that! I love all such sonorities, all such grand, filling orotundities. They make the true professional style, not hard to imitate and once acquired impossible to lose. If it is true what they say about the style being the man, ecce homo! See the contemporary critic! See him stark naked! Observe all his motions and his movements from their beginnings to their very end!
These two essays, the sociologist’s and the linguist’s, were the ones that told us most about what it means to be a critic today. Today’s critic is a professional. The complete student-professional. His methods and his language alike belong not to the world of men but to students. The contemporary critic not only talks but reads professionally. The world has moved on since literacy was thought sufficient to qualify a man to read. The day has passed when it could be remarked that the poet writes under the restriction of giving immediate pleasure to a fellow human being possessed only of that information to be expected of him as a man. Literacy is no longer enough because we no longer read as men. We no longer read at all. We study. As the editor of this book has said elsewhere, nowadays, instead of reading we “are attentive to” or even “are extraordinarily attentive to”. Mere reading can’t be done in more than one way and it can be done anywhere by anyone, rich or poor, man or child, in the living-room or the lavatory. A man, any man, sits down with his book (he can do it anywhere), opens it, begins at the beginning and reads until he comes to the end. And that is it. There’s no more to it. Nothing could be simpler or allow of less variation. And at the end, or even part-way through, without any sense of incongruity, he can eat or defecate or do any of a thousand-and-one things proper to him as a man.
Studying is different. Studying has nothing to do with what a man is and knows as a man. And it can’t be done anywhere by just anyone. The student must first study how to study. He must train and be trained before ever he will be able to postulate or premise, hypothesise or evidence, illuminate or conjecture. His terms and his categories, his skills and procedures, his methods and approaches must be taught him. He must be taught how to make his comparisons and axioms, to recognise his archetypes and to classify his genres, his types, his modes and his kinds. He must learn the difference between taking and making a note, between the oral, the anal, the urethral, the phallic and the oedipal. His register and his metalanguage, his clines and his competence, his langue, parole and performance must be acquired. Untrained and untaught he will never be able to make an introduction, carry an argument or draw a conclusion. All this must be learned. For this he must come to the schools. It is not information to be expected of anyone merely as a man.
As a man, a man does not give to books that minute and penetrating attention he gives as a student. He reads as he breathes, thoughtlessly. He reads for the story. His eye is so engrossed with shapes and surfaces, his heart is so full of character and deeds that his mind has no room in it for ideas and meanings. Consequently, he has nothing to say for himself. And when he does, he says it not as the master of a subject but as a man reflecting on experience. Even in his speech there is a certain dumbness.
Study changes all this. Study is articulate. Study is fluent. Study gives a man a tongue, gives the most unpromising student a tongue and something to say with it. The student no longer reads as a man. He reads deliberately, thoughtfully. He reads for the meaning. And his dumbness is taken off him. He can talk philosophically or historically, biographically or sociologically, comparatively or generically, ontologically, archetypally or bibliographically, psychoanalytically, linguistically or stylistically. Or he can talk eclectically. Or he can talk about the strength of the ink in the manuscript.
Before the coming of the student, when all men were dumb together, criticism was at the mercy of the common reader, of public opinion, of general thought and the intelligent debate of society at large. No more. No longer. Now only he who has studied has speech. He who has not studied must remain silent as before. Our science has been saved from the amateur. It is now ours. It became ours when we stopped talking dumbly of what was public, what was general, what was common and became masters of our studies, when we stopped using the language of men and learned the language of specialists. We now say nothing that the common reader either could or would reply to. And, truly, what have we to say to him? Him with his cravings for useful information and philosophical consolation? We know nothing of utility or metaphysics. What we know lies outside their purlieus. We are professionals. We follow a trade. What good will it do the common reader to know that such and such a man was the only true author of his very own letter? Will it feed him? Will it put clothes on his back or a roof over his head? Is it shelter for body or soul when he is naked and unaccommodated? Will it protect him from his enemies? Gladden his heart in distress? Restore his soul when he has sinned? We follow a trade. Something high and aloof. Something we have made safe from the wolf’s black jaw, the dull ass’s hoof.