Literary Theory: The Basics PDF

Literary Theory The Basics This accessible guide provides the ideal first step in understanding literary theory. Hans Bertens: leads you through the major approaches to literature which are signalled by the term ‘literary theory’ places each critical movement in its historical (and often political) context illustrates theory in practice with examples from much-read texts suggests further reading for those especially interested in a particular critical approach shows not only that theory can make sense but also that it can radically change the way you read. Covering all the basics and much more, this is the ideal book for anyone interested in how we read and why that matters. Hans Bertens is based at the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands. He is the author of The Idea of the Postmodern (Routledge, 1995). Also available from Routledge in this series: Language: The Basics (Second edition) R. L. Trask Philosophy: The Basics (Third edition) Nigel Warburton Politics: The Basics (Second edition) Stephen Tansey Shakespeare: The Basics Sean McEvoy Sociology: The Basics Martin Albrow L O N D O N A N D N E W YO R K Literary Theory The Basics Hans Bertens First published 2001 or hereafter invented, including by Routledge photocopying and recording, or in any 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Simultaneously published in the USA publishers. and Canada by Routledge British Library Cataloguing in Publication 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Data A catalogue record for this book is Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & available from the British Library Francis Group Library of Congress Cataloging-in- This edition published in the Taylor & Publication Data Francis e-Library, 2002. Bertens, Johannes Willem. Literary theory: the basics / Hans Bertens. © 2001 Hans Bertens p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and The right of Hans Bertens to be index. identified as the Author of this Work has 1. Criticism – History – 20th century. been asserted by him in accordance with 2. Literature – History the Copyright, Designs and Patents and criticism – Theory, etc. Act 1988 I. Title. PN94.B47 2001 801'.95'0904–dc21 All rights reserved. No part of this book 00–065328 may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, ISBN 0–415–25061–7 (hbk) mechanical, or other means, now known ISBN 0–415–18664–1 (pbk) ISBN 0-203-44644-5 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-75468-9 (Glassbook Format) To my colleagues at 4 Mint Street Contents Contents Preface ix Acknowledgements xi 1 Reading for meaning: practical criticism and new criticism 1 2 Reading for form I: formalism and early structuralism, 1914–1960 31 3 Reading for form II: French structuralism, 1950–1975 53 4 Political reading: the 1970s and 1980s 79 5 The poststucturalist revolution: Derrida, deconstruction, and postmodernism 117 6 Poststructuralism continued: Foucault, Lacan, and French feminism 147 CONTENTS 7 Literature and culture: the new historicism and cultural materialism 171 8 Postcolonial criticism and theory 193 9 Sexuality, literature, and culture 217 Bibliography 237 Index 247 viii Preface There was a time when the interpretation of literary texts and literary theory seemed two different and almost unrelated things. Interpretation was about the actual meaning of a poem, a novel, or a play, while theory seemed alien to what the study of literature was really about because its generalizations could never do justice to individual texts. In the last thirty years, however, interpretation and theory have moved closer and closer to each other. In fact, for many contemporary critics and theo- rists interpretation and theory cannot be separated at all. They would argue that when we interpret a text we always do so from a theoretical perspective, whether we are aware of it or not, and they would also argue that theory cannot do without interpretation. The premise of Literary Theory: The Basics is that literary theory and literary practice – the practice of interpretation – can indeed not very well be separated and certainly not at the more advanced level of academic literary studies. One of its aims, then, is to show how theory and practice are inevitably connected and have always been connected. The emphasis is on the 1970s and after, but important earlier views of literature get their full share of attention. This is not merely a historical exercise. A good understanding of, for instance, the New Criticism that dominated literary criticism in the United States ix P R E FAC E from the mid-1930s until 1970 is indispensable for students of literature. Knowing about the New Criticism will make it a lot easier to understand other, later, modes of reading. More impor- tantly, the New Criticism, like other more traditional approaches to literature, has by no means disappeared. Likewise, an understanding of what is called structuralism makes the complexities of so-called poststructuralist theory a good deal less daunting and has the added value of offering a perspective that is helpful in thinking about culture in general. This book, then, is an introduction to both literary theory and a history of theory. But it is a history in which what has become historical is simultaneously actual: in the field of literary studies a whole range of approaches and theoretical perspec- tives, political and apolitical, traditional and radical, old and new, operate next to each other in relatively peaceful coexistence. In its survey of that range of positions Literary Theory: The Basics tries to do equal justice to a still actual tradition and to the radicalness of the new departures of the last decades. We still ask ‘what does it mean?’ when we read a poem or novel or see a play. But we have additional questions. We ask ‘what does it mean to whom?’ And ‘why does it mean what it means?’ Or, more specifically, ‘who wants it to have this meaning and for what reasons?’ As we will see, such questions do not diminish literature. On the contrary, they make it even more important. x Acknowledgements Thanks go first of all to Talia Rodgers, the mastermind in the background. I also would like to thank the anonymous readers who reported on my manuscript and who were almost invariably right. The same goes for Liz Brown, and it is one – but only one – of the reasons why she is a wonderful editor. xi Chapter 1 Chapter 1 Reading for meaning Practical criticism and new criticism English meaning If we want to understand English and American thinking about literature in the twentieth century we must begin with the nineteenth-century figure of Matthew Arnold (1822–1888), English educator, poet (once famous for his rather depressing but much anthologized ‘Dover Beach’), and professor of poetry at Oxford University. Arnold’s views, which enormously enhanced the prestige of literature, were not wholly new. In fact, his central idea that, apart from its aesthetic and pleasing qualities, literature also had important things to teach us, was already familiar in antiquity and we see it repeated time and again over the ages. So we find Thomas Jefferson, future president of the future United States of America, observing in a 1771 letter that ‘a lively and lasting sense of filial duty is more effectually impressed on the mind of a son or daughter by reading “King Lear” than by all the dry volumes of ethics and divinity that were ever written’. However, Arnold is not interested in 1 L I T E R A R Y T H E O R Y: T H E B A S I C S the more practical aspects of the idea that literature is a source of instruction – literature as a set of how-to books – but places it in a spiritual context. Writing in the second half of the nineteenth century, Arnold saw English culture as seriously threatened by a process of secu- larization that had its origins in the growing persuasiveness of scientific thinking and by a ‘Philistinism’ that was loosened upon the world by the social rise of a self-important, money-oriented, and utterly conventional middle class. With the spiritual comforts of religion increasingly questionable now that the sciences – in particular Darwin’s theory of evolution – had thor- oughly undermined the authority of Bible and Church, Arnold foresaw a crucial, semi-religious role for poetry especially: More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry. (Arnold 1970: 340) ‘The future of poetry’, Arnold tells his readers, ‘is immense, because in poetry … our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay’. This radical claim for poetry – made in an 1880 essay called ‘The Study of Poetry’ – is in fact the culmina- tion of claims that Arnold had for decades been making on behalf of what he called ‘culture’ and which in a book called Culture and Anarchy (1869) he had defined as ‘the best that has been thought and said in the world’ (Arnold 1971: 6). As this makes clear, that ‘best’ is not necessarily confined to poems, but there is no doubt that he saw poetry as its major repository. The special importance that he accords to poetry is not as surprising as it may now seem. It accurately reflects the status of pre-eminent literary genre that it enjoyed in Arnold’s time. Moreover, in giving poetry this illustrious, almost sacred, func- tion Arnold builds on ideas that earlier in the nineteenth century had been formulated by Romantic poets like Percy Bysshe 2 READING FOR MEANING Shelley (1792–1822), who had attributed a special, visionary status to poetry, and on a long tradition, going back to the clas- sics, that likewise gives literature, and especially poetry, special powers. It was only natural, then, for Arnold to put forward poetry as the major embodiment of ‘culture’. What does Arnold have in mind with ‘the best that has been thought and said in the world’? Strangely enough, Culture and Anarchy is very outspoken, but not very clear on this point. Arnold has no trouble making clear by what forces and in which ways that ‘best’ is threatened: the evil is summarized by the ‘anarchy’ of his title, which includes the self-centred unruliness of the working class and ‘the hideous and grotesque illusions of middle-class Protestantism’ (63). He is, however, not very precise in his definitions of ‘the best’. This is partly because he assumes that his readers already know: he does not have to tell them because they share his educational background and his beliefs (‘When I insist on this, I am all in the faith and tradition of Oxford’ (61)). But it is also due to its elusiveness. Arnold can tell us where to find it, for instance in Hellenism – the Greek culture of antiquity, with its ‘aerial ease, clearness, and radiancy’ (134) – but can only describe what it expresses: an attitude towards life, a way of being in the world. Included in this attitude we find ‘freedom from fanaticism’, ‘delicacy of perception’, the ‘disinter- ested play of consciousness’, and an ‘inward spiritual activity’ that has ‘for its characters increased sweetness, increased light, increased life, increased sympathy’ (60–64). What culture would seem to amount to is a deeply sympathetic and self-effacing interest in, and contemplation of, the endless variety that the world presents. For Arnold, poetry probes life more deeply, is more sympathetic towards its immensely various manifestations, and is less self-serving than anything else, and so we must turn to poetry ‘to interpret life for us’. Because poetry has the power to interpret life, we can also turn to it if we want to be consoled or to seek sustenance. With the persuasiveness of religious explana- tions seriously damaged, poetry has the now unique power of making sense of life, a sense from which we can draw comfort and strength. Moreover – and here we see the idea of ‘instruction’ – culture allows us to ‘grow’, to become more complete and better 3 L I T E R A R Y T H E O R Y: T H E B A S I C S human beings. As Arnold puts it in Culture and Anarchy: ‘Religion says, The kingdom of God is within you; and culture, in like manner, places human perfection in an internal condition, in the growth and predominance of our humanity proper, as distin- guished from our animality’ (47). The problem of time Let me for a moment turn to one of Arnold’s major examples of the culture he extols: ‘Hellenism’, the complex of intellectual and emotional attitudes expressed in the civilization of ancient Greece. Like all university-educated people of his time, Arnold was thoroughly familiar with classical history and literature. So familiar, in fact, that in some ways he sees Greek epics and plays that are more than 2,000 years old as contemporary texts. The classics and the ideal of culture that they embody are timeless for Arnold. This is a vitally important point: ‘the best that has been thought and said in the world’, whether to be found in the clas- sics or in later writers, is the best for every age and every place. From Arnold’s perspective, this makes perfect sense. After all, culture and its major means of expression, poetry, must take the place of a religion that equally was for every age and every place. But this introduces what many literary academics, in the fairly recent past, have come to see as a serious problem. Arnold does not consider the possibility that what is ‘the best’ for one age may not be ‘the best’ for another, when circumstances have completely changed, or that what within a given period is ‘the best’ for one party (say, the aristocracy) is not necessarily ‘the best’ for another (starving peasants, for instance). Arnold’s culture and the poetry that embodies it demand an intellectual refinement and sensitivity and a disinterested otherworldliness that under a good many historical circumstances must have been a positive handicap. Arnold would probably not deny this but he would argue that, all things being equal, there is only one cultural ideal – embodied in ‘the best’ – that we should all strive for. The way I am presenting this – with starving peasants pitted against the aristocracy – could easily create the impression that 4 READING FOR MEANING Arnold is an elitist snob. But that is absolutely not the case. Arnold’s ideal of culture is certainly exclusive, in the sense that it defines itself against money-grubbing vulgarity, narrow-minded fundamentalism, upper-class arrogance, and so on, but it does not seek to exclude anyone on principle. If we allow ourselves to come under the influence of ‘culture’, we can all transcend the limitations imposed on us by class, place, and character, and acquire the cultured sensitivity and respectful, even reverent, attitude towards the world that ‘culture’ holds up for us. In fact, this is what Arnold would like all of us to do: to escape from the place and the time we live in and to transform ourselves into citi- zens of an ideal world in which time does, in a sense, not pass and in which we are in some ways – the ways that count – all the same. After all, in Arnold’s view ‘culture’ is of all time: it exists in an autonomous sphere where time- and place-bound personal, political, or economic considerations have been left behind. We can only fully enter the realm of culture if we choose, at least temporarily, to disregard the here and now of personal ambi- tion, political manoeuvring, and economic gain. Liberal humanism Although that may not be immediately clear, this view of culture has important implications. Arnold is of course aware that culture will always to some extent reflect its time and place of origin – in the sense that, for instance, medieval and early modern literature will assume that the Sun revolves around a static planet Earth – but with regard to what it really has to tell us it stands apart from time and place, that is from history. With regard to its essence, culture transcends history. We must assume, then, that its creators – the poet supreme among them – also transcend time and place – at least as long as the act of creation lasts. A timeless culture must be the creation of timeless minds, that is of minds that can at least temporarily disregard the world around them. This brings us to an important question: where does a creative mind that has temporarily soared free of its mundane environment find the insights that will allow it to contribute to ‘the best that has been thought and said’? The 5 L I T E R A R Y T H E O R Y: T H E B A S I C S answer must be that the source of that wisdom can only be the individual creator. Poets find what is valuable and has real meaning in themselves; they just know. Arnold was by no means unique in his view of the creative individual. It was shared by the large majority of his contempo- raries and by the countless writers and critics who in the course of the twentieth century would more or less consciously follow his lead. More importantly, it is still the prevailing view of the individual – not just the creative ones – in Western society. This view of the individual – or subject, to use a term derived from philosophy – is central to what is called liberalism or liberal humanism, a philosophical/political cluster of ideas in which the ultimate autonomy and self-sufficiency of the subject are taken for granted. Liberal humanism assumes that all of us are essen- tially free and that we have at least to some extent created ourselves on the basis of our individual experiences. It is easy to see that this view of the subject is pervasively present in our culture and in our social institutions. The legal system, for instance, starts from the assumption that we have a certain autonomy. If your lawyer succeeds in convincing the court that the murder you thought you could get away with was not a conscious act that you could have decided against, you will be declared insane. Likewise, democracies do not set up elections with the expectation that people will wander mindlessly into a voting booth and make a completely arbitrary choice between the candidates. Our social institutions expect us to be reasonable and to be reasonably free. Because of that freedom, we ourselves are supposedly the source of the value and the meaning we attach to things. As liberal subjects we are not the sum of our experiences but can somehow stand outside experience: we are not defined by our circumstances but are what we are because our ‘self’ has been there all along and has, moreover, remained remarkably inviolate and stable. Not surprisingly, in much of Western literature, and especially in lyric poetry and realistic fiction, individuals present themselves, or are portrayed, along these lines. In the realistic novels of the mid-nineteenth century, characters again and again escape being defined by their social and economic situation because they are essentially free. Since 6 READING FOR MEANING what they are – their ‘self’ – is largely independent of their situa- tion, the circumstances in which they find themselves can be transcended. Realism suggests that the characters that it pres- ents find the reasons for their actions and decisions inside themselves. Because this liberal humanist view of the individual is as pervasively present in our world as it was in the nineteenth century, it also characterizes much of our contemporary litera- ture. One might, along another line, even argue that literature as such, and in fact every single artistic object, contributes to the ahistorical perspective that we find in liberal humanism in so far as it makes us forget about our immediate environment. Both the ‘eternal’ truths that we may find in a work of art, and its aesthetic dimension – its beauty, which, according to the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), promotes disinter- ested contemplation – invite us to disregard the here and now. In so doing, they collude to give us the impression that what is most essential to us – our ‘self’ – also transcends time and place. For many present-day critics and theorists this is a deeply problematic view. In the later chapters of this book we will encounter various objections to this liberal humanist perspec- tive. Let me here just point at one possible problem. What if access to Arnold’s ‘the best’ depends for instance on education? If that is the case, Arnold’s campaign for a ‘culture’ that suppos- edly has universal validity begins to look like arrogance: we would have a person who is convinced of their position as one of the elect implicitly telling the uneducated (or relatively unedu- cated) that they are barbarians. Arnold might object that ideally all of us should get the same – extended – education. But educa- tional opportunities are not evenly distributed over this world; there are, even within every nation, sharply different levels in education. A sceptic might easily see Arnold’s campaign for his idea of culture as a move in a struggle for power and status: for the power to define culture, to decide what the ‘best’ is, and for membership of the cultural elite. In fact, even if we grant Arnold’s claim and accept that his idea of culture does indeed represent the most humane, most tolerant, most morally sensi- tive perspectives that human civilization has come up with, we 7 L I T E R A R Y T H E O R Y: T H E B A S I C S would still have a problem. Would we have the right to impose that culture on people who couldn’t care less? In short, there are serious problems with Arnold’s humanist conception of culture and poetry. I should, in all fairness to Arnold, say that it has taken almost a hundred years for these problems really to register and that even now his views are still seductive. Isn’t it true that many of us, at least at some point in our life, want to see literature as a high-minded enterprise by and for sensitive and fine-tuned intellectuals that is somehow several steps removed from the trivial push and pull of ordinary life? It is an alluring prospect: to have a place to go where in a hushed silence, the sort of silence that we very appropriately find in a library, we meet with the kindred, equally sensitive people who have written the works we read. It is a place where time does not pass and where in some ways – the ways that count – we are all the same. We, the readers, are of course only the passive consumers of what they, the writers, have actively produced, but doesn’t that difference tend to fall away? Especially so since the texts we read are in the act of reading lifted out of their historical context and so to a certain extent cut loose from their creators? It is too good to be completely true, even if it is not neces- sarily wholly untrue. How can we, apart from everything else, possibly know whether the seemingly kindred spirits that we meet in that timeless place do indeed share our perspectives and concerns? What guarantee is there that we do not only see our concerns in such sharp relief because we ignore what we do not want to see? Perhaps Arnold is right about Hellenism’s ‘aerial ease, clearness, and radiancy’, but where in that phrase are the murder and mayhem of so many of the Greek classics? Can the Greeks, or can Chaucer, Dante, or even Shakespeare, who all lived in worlds dramatically different from our own, really have been in some important way similar to ourselves? Perhaps ‘deli- cacy of perception’, the ‘disinterested play of consciousness’, and the other qualities that Arnold attributes to his ideal culture are indeed of all times, even if in different periods and places they will have been framed by ever-changing historical circum- stances. But since we cannot travel back in time we will never know. In the final analysis, Arnold’s historical continuum 8 READING FOR MEANING between Hellenism and the high culture of his own time – the poetry that must interpret life for us – is an act of faith. Literature as civilization’s last stance Arnold’s campaign for poetry as the superior interpreter of life did not immediately lead to the establishment of literature courses in English schools and universities, let alone courses in English literature. Strangely enough, English as a subject only existed outside the United Kingdom, in Scotland, where the University of Edinburgh had already in the eighteenth century taught English literature, in the United States, where Harvard University had created a chair in English in 1876, and in British India, where since the 1830s English literature served to famil- iarize the ‘native’ elite with ‘Englishness’ and to anglicize them as far as they were prepared to have themselves anglicized. In England itself, English literature was not taught as it is today at all. English had first been introduced as an academic subject by University College London in 1828 (Oxford would only follow in 1893 and Cambridge in 1911), but the study of English litera- ture – later expanded to include American literature – as a serious intellectual discipline dates only from the 1920s. When Matthew Arnold died, in 1888, English was fairly well established in both England and the United States, but not in a form we would now easily associate with it. Academic English was largely devoted to the history of the English language and to its older forms, such as Middle and Old English (the absolutely unintelligible language of Beowulf). The study of English litera- ture was largely the province of well-educated men of letters who preferred high-minded evaluations and discussions of an author’s sensibility to critical analysis and attention to the struc- ture – the actual workings – of literary texts. What really changed things and moved them in a direction we can more readily recognize is the intervention of a young American poet, T.S. Eliot (1888–1965), who had moved to England before the outbreak of the First World War, and the British government’s desire to find a place for the study of English literature somewhere in its educational schemes. While 9 L I T E R A R Y T H E O R Y: T H E B A S I C S Eliot, with whose views I will deal in a moment, was primarily influential in the universities, the government-controlled Board of Education gave English literature a solid place in secondary education. It is worth noting how closely the so-called ‘Newbolt Report’ of 1921 that the Board had commissioned follows in Arnold’s footsteps, even if its language would have been too sentimentally worshipful for Arnold’s more robust taste: ‘litera- ture is not just a subject for academic study, but one of the chief temples of the Human spirit, in which all should worship’ (‘Newbolt Report’ 1921). However, the Report also employs more straightforwardly Arnoldian tones. ‘Great literature’, it tells us, is ‘a timeless thing’. It is ‘an embodiment of the best thoughts of the best minds, the most direct and lasting commu- nication of experience by man to man’. But this is, interestingly, not all that literature can show to recommend itself to a Board of Education. Literature, the Report suggests, could also serve to ‘form a new element of national unity, linking together the mental life of all classes’. We should see this against its historical background. Why this particular role for literature at this particular time? There is, first of all, the emotional devastation and widespread disillusion- ment that had resulted from the First World War. More important, however, is surely the extension of the right to vote in the years before and after the First World War to large groups of the population that had up till then been excluded from the fran- chise. Since labourers and women were now active participants in the new mass democracy they had better be civilized and be made aware of the fact that there was a higher realm of culture that was virtually detached from the practical world with its day- to-day problems and conflicting interests. English, with its focus on a spiritual realm of unselfish harmony where all petty quar- rels are forgotten or have become irrelevant, could overcome social conflict and anti-patriotic sentiment. What the Report in fact suggests, although it never says so in so many words, is that social and economic inequality pales next to the equality we can find in the study – or perhaps the mere reading – of great texts. It is always easy to criticize the ideals of the past and we should not come down too hard on these English educators or 10 READING FOR MEANING on their American counterparts, who somewhat earlier had put forward the study of English – and some American – literature as an important binding principle in a nation trying to assimilate large numbers of immigrants. We must give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that, apart from everything else, they also had the spiritual well-being of British and American students at heart. Still, the idea that literature might be instrumental in forging national unity has some consequences we must look at because it introduces a criterion that is absent from Arnold’s poetry as the interpreter of life. If literature is supposed to promote national unity it makes good sense to throw out texts that emphasize disunity – tension between social classes, between religious denominations, between regions – or that are openly unpatriotic. For Arnold such texts, if they were sensitive and intelligent enough, were perfectly admissible. In fact, Arnold’s ‘disinterested play of consciousness’ will inevitably – although of course not exclusively – lead to critical assessments of the outside world. But if literature is used to foster national unity, in other words, if it is used to create or keep alive a national identity, critical assessments of the nation’s mercenary politics or its cultural vulgarity are no longer very welcome. We should always be aware that good intentions, too, have their agenda and their politics. Arnold’s academic heritage: the English scene As I have just noted, in the more academic sphere the most influ- ential spokesman for Arnold’s vision was the young expatriate American poet T.S. Eliot who had settled in London before the First World War. In the early 1920s Eliot did what Arnold had largely avoided: he set out to define the criteria that ‘the best that had been thought and said in the world’ would have to meet and he undertook the mission actually to identify them in so far as they had been expressed in literary form. In other words, after drawing up the admission requirements he used them to estab- lish which texts met his criteria and which failed to do so. The canon – the list of good and even great literary works – that he set out to construe in the 1920s would dominate virtually all 11 L I T E R A R Y T H E O R Y: T H E B A S I C S English and American discussions of literature until the 1970s and is still a powerful influence. Eliot’s early essays immediately discredited the writings of the men of letters who before the First World War had mused about a writer’s sensibility and those of the Victorian moralists who had found so much lofty truth and profound sentiment in literary works. For Eliot, poetry – the genre in which he was most interested – was profoundly impersonal. This is not to say that he denied poets the right to express themselves in their poetry, although it would not be too difficult to extract that posi- tion from his writings. In ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, for instance, we find him claiming that the poet has ‘not “a personality” to express, but a particular medium’ (Eliot 1972: 75). Eliot’s main aim, however, is to deflect his readers’ attention from everything he considers of at best secondary importance – the poet’s personal or social circumstances, and so on – and to get poetry itself centre stage. Eliot, then, objects to highly emotional outpourings and personal confidences because they tend to focus our attention on the poet rather than the poetry. What is more, from Eliot’s perspective they also make for bad and superficial poems. This does not mean that he is against the expression of deep feelings in poetry. However, expressions of profound emotion should not have an autobiographical dimension. Even if the emotion is unquestionably the poet’s, it should be conveyed in such a way that the poet’s private life plays no role in its presentation. What the poet needs to look for, Eliot tells us in ‘Hamlet’, another essay from 1919, is an ‘objective correlative’: ‘a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion’ (Eliot 1969: 145). Emotion must be conveyed indirectly. The poet’s emotion should be invested in such an ‘objective correlative’, which will then evoke the proper response in the reader. Moreover, emotion must always be kept in check by what Eliot called ‘wit’, a quality that he required of all poetry and by which he means an ironic perception of things, a (sometimes playful) awareness of paradoxes and incongruities that poses an intellec- tual challenge to the reader. It follows from this that Eliot had 12 READING FOR MEANING little use for, for instance, the low-keyed soft-focus emotionality of Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892): Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean, Tears from the depth of some divine despair Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes, In looking on the happy autumn-fields, And thinking of the days that are no more. (‘Tears, Idle Tears’, 1847) In contrast with this sort of poetry, Eliot’s own poetry presents what might – somewhat unkindly – be described as a terse, tight- lipped, ironic melancholy that signals in its striking use of images, juxtapositions, inversions, and so on just how intellectu- ally agile and alert it is. It is a poetry that fully demands the reader’s close attention. The complexity of its language and form forces us to take it seriously in its own right and makes it difficult to see it in, for instance, autobiographical terms. The integration of intellect and emotion and, less insistently, of profundity and playfulness, that Eliot sees as an absolute condition for good poetry drastically limits his list of worthwhile poets. In fact, for Eliot, writing in the 1920s, literature had taken a wrong turn more than two centuries before. In ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ he argues that the so-called ‘Metaphysical poets’ of the seventeenth century still knew how to fuse thought and feeling, and seriousness and lightness, in their poetry. After their heyday, however, a ‘dissociation of sensibility’ had set in in which intellect, emotion, and other formerly integrated qualities had gone their separate ways (Eliot 1969: 288). For Eliot this had led to poetry that errs either on the one side – sterile rationality, for instance – or on the other – excessive emotion or a levity that turns into irresponsibility – and that because of such failures is always condemned to superficiality. With hindsight we can see that Eliot proclaims his own poetic practice and that of his fellow modernists of the early twentieth century as the general norm. With hindsight we can also see that Eliot’s nostalgia for a past when people were supposedly still whole in the sense that they knew how to combine harmoniously 13 L I T E R A R Y T H E O R Y: T H E B A S I C S thought and feeling – reason and emotion – was fed by a deep dissatisfaction with the contemporary world in which harmony was sadly lacking. It may at first sight not be clear what this has to do with Eliot’s views of literature. However, Eliot consciously places poetry – and by implication all literature that meets his criteria – in opposition to the modern world. He seeks in poetry the sort of profound experience that the modern world, in which material- istic values and a cheap moralism have come to dominate, cannot offer. For Eliot, the natural, organic unity that is missing from the world and that we ourselves have also lost with the advent of scientific rationalism and the utilitarian thinking of industrialization – the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ – is embodied in aesthetic form in poetry. So even if poetry has no answers to any questions we might ask, it is still of vital importance and it allows us to recapture temporarily a lost ideal of wholeness in the experience of reading. As Eliot’s fellow American (and – briefly – fellow expatriate) Robert Frost (1874–1963) phrased it from a slightly different perspective, poetry provides ‘a momen- tary stay against confusion’ (cited in Perkins et al. 1985: 979). Because of its integration of thought and feeling and of opposing attitudes in a coherent aesthetic form poetry could, rather paradoxically, even serve that function if the confusion itself was its major theme (as for instance in Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ of 1922). Simultaneously, poetry deepens our awareness of the important things in life. Although Eliot is obviously very much interested in poetic technique and in the form of specific poems – an interest that would be worked out by a group of American poets and critics, the so-called New Critics – he is ultimately even more interested in a poem’s meaning. Poetry should convey complex meanings in which attitudes that might easily be seen as contradictory are fused and which allow us to see things that we otherwise would not see. Our job, then, is to interpret poems, after which we can pass judgement on them; that is, establish how well they succeed in creating and conveying the complexity of meaning that we expect from them. ‘Here lies Fred, / He is dead’ would not pass muster. The idea that we read poems, and literature in general, 14 READING FOR MEANING because they contain meanings is obvious. This search for the meaning of poems, novels, plays, and other works of literature has from the 1920s well into the 1970s absolutely dominated English and American literary studies and still constitutes one of their important activities. However, as will become clear in the course of this book, the meaning of a specific literary work cannot have a monopoly on our interest. An interest in the form of the poem, novel, or play in question – and, by extension, in the form of literature as a whole – is equally legitimate, as is an interest in a literary work’s politics. But those complications will have to wait. Cambridge, England Eliot, although trained as a philosopher, was not affiliated with a university. But he was one of the most exciting poets of his generation and also one whose philosophical interests made him think long and hard about the nature and function of literature. Inevitably, his views of literature were immediately picked up by young university teachers. Eliot’s most influential following emerged at Cambridge University with the literary academic I.A. Richards (1893–1979) and the group that would somewhat later be led by the critic F.R. Leavis (1895–1979). Although each of them in his own way disagreed with some of Eliot’s claims, Richards and Leavis initiated two intimately related ‘schools’ that would give shape to English and American thinking about literature for almost fifty years. In Richards’s hands Eliot’s emphasis on the poem itself became what we call practical criticism. In a still fascinating experiment Richards withheld all extra-textual information – no author, period, or explanatory commentary – and asked students (and tutors) to respond to poems that were thus completely stripped of their context. It would be difficult to think up a more text-oriented approach. We are now so familiar with this that it is difficult to imagine how revolutionary Richards’s experiment once was. Since Richards developed his practical criticism – the label was popularized through the title of a book he published in 1924 15 L I T E R A R Y T H E O R Y: T H E B A S I C S – generations of students on both sides of the Atlantic have struggled with the assignment to make sense of an unfamiliar and at least initially hostile text. We can therefore now hardly appreciate how his method turned reading into an intellectual challenge. Without the help of the biographical, historical, or linguistic information that readers were used to, interpreting a poem, especially an older one, was a formidable task. This should not obscure the fact that Richards stands firmly in the line of Matthew Arnold and T.S. Eliot regarding the importance of literature and, more in particular, poetry. Like so many young intellectuals of the period, Richards had deep misgivings about a contemporary world which seemed to have lost its bearings. He, too, saw in poetry an antidote to the spiritual malaise that seemed to pave the way for chaos. If the moral order would indeed fall apart because of the loss of traditional values that he saw around him, we would, Richards suggested, ‘be thrown back, as Matthew Arnold foresaw, upon poetry. It is capable of saving us; it is a perfectly possible means of overcoming chaos’ (Richards 1926: 83). Poetry, and the arts in general, could save us because it is there that we find what is truly, and lastingly valu- able – what gives meaning to our lives: The arts are our storehouse of recorded values. They spring from and perpetuate hours in the lives of exceptional people, when their control and command of experience is at its highest, hours when the varying possibilities of existence are most clearly seen and the different activities which may arise are most exquisitely reconciled, hours when habitual narrow- ness of interests or confused bewilderment are replaced by an intricately wrought composure. (Richards 1972a: 110) This statement is not in the last place interesting because it so clearly illustrates Richards’s view of the creative subject. The keywords are ‘control’, ‘command’, ‘reconciled’, and ‘compo- sure’. For Richards the minds of artists are in control of whatever may befall them; they reconcile contradictions, and 16 READING FOR MEANING transcend our usual self-centredness. This command and tran- scendence would originate within the artists themselves: we are offered a perfect picture of the liberal humanist individual or subject. Because the arts are our storehouse of recorded values, they ‘supply the best data for deciding what experiences are more valuable than others’ (111). Literary art, then, helps us to eval- uate our own experience, to assess our personal life. It is all the better equipped for this because its language is not scientific but emotive. Scientific language is for Richards language that refers to the real world and makes statements that are either true or false. Emotive language, however, wants to produce certain emotional effects and a certain attitude in those to whom it addresses itself: ‘many, if not most, of the statements in poetry are there as a means to the manipulation and expression of feel- ings and attitudes, not as contributions to any body of doctrine of any type whatever’ (Richards 1972b: 119). Literature, then, conveys a certain type of knowledge which is not scientific and factual but has to do with values and meaningfulness and which makes use of language that expresses and manipulates emotions. As I have just noted, practical criticism focuses upon the text and the text alone. Because of this exclusively textual orienta- tion, it was an ideal programme for teasing out all the opposites – thought versus feeling, seriousness versus high spirits, resigna- tion versus anger, and so on – that for Richards (following Eliot) were reconciled and transcended in poetry, often through the use of irony. Practical criticism became a major instrument in spreading the idea that the best poems created a vulnerable harmony – a precarious coherence – out of conflicting perspec- tives and emotions. As we will see, in the United States this view would develop into the New Criticism that in the 1930s and 1940s became the major mode of criticism there. The novel as great art So far, we have been almost exclusively concerned with poetry. F.R. Leavis, the other Cambridge academic who would put a – 17 L I T E R A R Y T H E O R Y: T H E B A S I C S highly personal – stamp on especially English literary studies, was, at least initially, no exception. Leavis, too, started out with poetry and also took Eliot’s views as his guiding light. In the course of the 1930s he accordingly subjected the history of English poetry to an icy scrutiny in order to separate the wheat from the chaff, in the process relegating a good many English poets of up till then fine repute (including John Milton) to minor status. In particular nineteenth-century poets, standing collectively accused of a ‘divorce between thought and feeling, intelligence and sensibility’ – a condemnation in which we clearly hear Eliot’s ‘dissociation of sensibility’ – did not fare well. As the major driving force behind the important journal Scrutiny (founded 1932, folded 1953) Leavis built up a large, and often fanatical, following in virtually all Departments of English in the United Kingdom and in Western Europe. However, his work of the later 1940s, in which he sets out to revaluate the English novel, is more pertinent here. After all, Eliot himself, Richards, William Empson – one of Richards’s students – the American New Critics and a growing number of lesser figures all discussed poetry from a perspective that was similar to that of Leavis. But until Leavis changed the picture, fiction had gone largely unnoticed. Novels cannot very well be subjected to the same sort of analysis that we use with poems, especially not the substantial, if not actually sprawling, novels that until the end of the nine- teenth century were more or less the rule. But Leavis’s discussions of fiction would in any case have departed from the course set out by Eliot and Richards. By the 1940s Leavis had already in his discussions of poetry begun to include a moralistic dimension that is almost completely absent from the work of his American contemporaries, the New Critics. Although Leavis, too, puts a premium on oppositions, juxtapositions, inversions, and similar techniques, he increasingly comes to judge poems in terms of the ‘life’ and the ‘concreteness’ they succeed in conveying. In other words, he begins to discuss content as rela- tively independent of form while for the New Critics, as we will see below, form and content were inextricably interwoven. In fact, for the New Critics that interweaving determined to a 18 READING FOR MEANING considerable extent the quality of the text under discussion. While for the New Critics and an ever greater number of affili- ated academics a text’s form created the ironic maturity of its content, for Leavis form became increasingly of secondary importance. What the literary work should provide was a mature apprehension of authentic life, and certainly not one that was too ironic and therefore emotionally sterile (he was not charmed by the ironies of James Joyce’s Ulysses , which Eliot had thought a great work of art). For Leavis, authentic representa- tions of life depended on a writer’s personal authenticity and moral integrity. As he said in his 1948 The Great Tradition of the novelists he considered great: ‘they are all distinguished by a vital capacity for experience, a kind of reverent openness before life, and a marked moral intensity’ (Leavis 1962: 17) (Note how these novelists are presented as subjects who once again are fully in command of everything.) One of Leavis’s ‘great’ novel- ists, the English writer D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930), had already offered a characteristically provoking illustration of such open- ness: If the bank clerk feels really piquant about his hat, if he establishes a lively relation with it, and goes out of the shop with the new straw hat on his head, a changed man, be-aure- oled, then that is life. The same with the prostitute. If a man establishes a living relation to her, if only for a moment, then that is life. But if it doesn’t: if it is just for the money and function, then it is not life, but sordidness, and a betrayal of living. If a novel reveals true and vivid relationships, it is a moral work, no matter what the relationships may consist in. (Lawrence 1972a: 129) Because they believe that because of its scope and its attention to authentic detail the novel can represent life in all its fullness, it is for Leavis and Lawrence superior to whatever the other arts or the human sciences (such as psychology or sociology) may have to offer. It can, moreover, make us participate in that fullness. As 19 L I T E R A R Y T H E O R Y: T H E B A S I C S Lawrence said: ‘To be alive, to be man alive, to be whole man alive: that is the point. And at its best, the novel, and the novel supremely, can help you’ (Lawrence 1972b: 135). This is an attractive programme for the novel – and for us. Who would not want to live authentically and to defend the forces of life against whatever may happen to threaten it? However, like so many attractive programmes it falls apart upon closer scrutiny. Who is to define a mature apprehension of life, a vital capacity for experience, or a reverent openness before life? What is ‘life’ for me may very well be so monotonous and boring that it seems like ‘death’ to you. And what about the morals that are felt so intensely? In any case, given his interest in full repre- sentations of life in its totality, Leavis almost inevitably came to focus on the novel, with its endless possibilities for presenting character, setting, theme, social background, and everything imaginable. If you want scope, the novel has more to offer than lyrical poetry. So, somewhat belatedly, Leavis brought the novel into the amazing professionalization of the study of English as it had started in the 1920s (drama, and in particular Shakespeare, many of whose plays lent themselves to an approach in poetic terms, had already been embraced in the 1930s). This is not to say that novels had been completely ignored. But Leavis elevated this interest into a programme. Moreover, he significantly expanded its scope. Meaning in the United States In the 1930s, the work of Eliot, Richards, and Leavis found a warm welcome on the other side of the Atlantic among a group of poets, including John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks, who in the mid-1930s initi- ated a professionalization of American literary studies comparable to the developments in England. These New Critics, as they came to be called (the label derives from the title of Ransom’s 1941 book The New Criticism), shared the misgivings of their English colleagues about the contemporary world. They, too, saw around them a world driven by a desire for profit in which the so-called triumphs of modern 20 READING FOR MEANING science, in combination with capitalistic greed, threatened to destroy tradition and everything that was not immediately useful – including poetry. Like their English mentors, they turned to the past, in their case a past of the Southern states, in which organic unity and social harmony had not yet been destroyed by the industrialization and commercialization of the contempo- rary world. That such a past had never existed, or only for a happy few, was as little to the point as the fact that Eliot’s unified sensibility had never existed. On both sides of the Atlantic writers and critics created a mythical past to counterbalance the utilitarian, mercenary present. The New Critics, then, saw poetry as a means of resisting commodification and superficiality. Because of its internal organization – its formal structure – a poem created harmony out of opposites and tension and thereby presented a vital alter- native. In creating coherent wholes out of the full variety and contradictory complexity of life, poetry halted and transcended the chaotic flux of actual experience. As John Crowe Ransom (1888–1974) put it in a 1937 essay called ‘Criticism, Inc.’: ‘The poet perpetuates in his poem an order of existence which in actual life is constantly crumbling beneath his touch. His poem celebrates the object which is real, individual, and qualitatively infinite’ (Ransom 1972: 238). In so doing, one of the poet’s main strategies was the use of paradox with, as Cleanth Brooks (1906–1994) said, ‘its twin concomitants of irony and wonder’. By means of paradoxes ‘the creative imagination’ achieves ‘union’. That ‘fusion is not logical,’ Brooks continues, it apparently violates science and common sense; it welds together the discordant and the contradictory. Coleridge has of course given us the classic description of its nature and power. It ‘reveals itself in the balance or reconcilement of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with differ- ence; of the general, with the concrete; the idea, with the image; the individual, with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness, with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order’. (Brooks 1972: 300–301) 21 L I T E R A R Y T H E O R Y: T H E B A S I C S In this emphasis on paradox – a statement containing contradic- tory aspects – and irony the New Critics clearly follow Eliot and Richards. They, too, see poems as storehouses of authentic values and as expressing important truths about the complexi- ties of life that no other medium can convey nearly as effectively. (This is so, Brooks suggests, because ‘apparently the truth which the poet utters can be approached only in terms of paradox’ (292).) In some ways, however, they diverge from their examples. Richards had been seriously interested in the effects of poetry upon its readers. In fact, as we have seen, he argues that the ‘emotive’ language of poetry seeks to manipulate the reader’s feelings and attitudes. The New Critics exclude both the poet – as Richards had also done – and the reader from their approach to poetry. As a result, they focus more on the actual form of literary works than their English counterparts. In fact, within the context of English and American criticism their approach to literature might well be considered formalist and it does indeed often go by that label. However, compared to the European formalists that I will discuss in the next chapters, their interest in form is rather limited. They are not interested in form for its own sake, but in form as contributing to a text’s meaning. The New Critics’ lack of interest in the effects of poems does not mean that they denied the special character of poetic language. As Brooks tells us, ‘the poet’s language … is a language in which the connotations play as great a part as the denotations’ (295). Moreover, for the New Critics, too, a poem had to be fully experienced in order to be effective. ‘A poem should not mean, but be’, as they said, meaning that the ‘message’ that we can extract from a poem cannot possibly do justice to its complexity. Anything but the entirety of its para- doxes, opposites, and reconciling ironies is reductive and damaging. The habit that we all have of summarizing a poem – and other works of literature – in one or two phrases was for the New Critics a deadly sin against the poem and against our own experience of the poem. Turning a poem into a thematic state- ment – the speaker of this Christian poem regrets that life is so short while realizing simultaneously that its very brevity will all the sooner take us to heaven – was for them the ‘heresy of para- 22 READING FOR MEANING phrase’. They were, more in general, rather severe on approaches to poetry that to them did not do full justice to the poem itself. W.K. Wimsatt (1907–1975) and another somewhat younger New Critic, Monroe Beardsley, caught two of their sharpest objec- tions in two famous essays, ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ (1946) and ‘The Affective Fallacy’ (1949). The ‘intentional fallacy’ is to confuse what the author intended in the writing of a poem (or other work of literature) with what is actually there on the page. The actual text should be our guideline, not what the author has perhaps wanted to say. As the English novelist D.H. Lawrence had said earlier: ‘Never trust the artist. Trust the tale’ (Lawrence 1972c: 123). In other words, when we interpret a literary text, the author’s commentary, or what we know of the author’s intentions, is of secondary importance. It is not only that the author does not have full control over the text’s meaning because in the actual writing process things may slip in of which the author is wholly unaware (which is what Lawrence had in mind), but that the author has in a sense officially relinquished control over the text: it has, after all, been made public and been distrib- uted. The text has become a freestanding object and the rest is up to us. While the ‘intentional fallacy’ has to do with the author, the ‘affective fallacy’ has to do with the reader. Readers who are prone to this fallacy confuse their own emotional response to the poem with what the poem really tells them. The way the poem affects them blinds them to its reality. Tears blur the picture, both literally and figuratively. ‘Close reading’, that is the focus on the text that Richards and Leavis had promoted so vigorously in England, in the hands of the New Critics became closer than ever. With the author’s intentions and the reader’s response removed from the scene, the study of literature restricted itself to analysing the tech- niques and strategies that poems used to deliver their paradoxical effects: the system of checks and balances that creates the diversity in unity that we experience. Although it probably seems counterin- tuitive, from this perspective it is not the poet – about whose intentions we usually know next to nothing – but indeed the poem itself that does the delivering. What organizes the poem – brings its diverse elements together – is not so much authorial intention as an 23 L I T E R A R Y T H E O R Y: T H E B A S I C S abstract principle, the principle of coherence, which the New Critics assumed present and active in any ‘good’ poem. In good poetry, and, by extension, all good literature, the principle of coherence keeps the text’s paradoxes and possible contradictions in check. Some may object that this does not make much sense because literary texts do not spring up overnight and all by them- selves in remote and mysterious areas, so that it might seem a bit perverse to exclude the author from the discussion of a text. But it makes a good deal of practical sense. In some cases we do not even know who the author is and in many cases we can only guess at the author’s intentions because we have no information and when we have that information it does not necessarily illuminate the poem, at least not from the perspective that I am discussing here. As we have seen, these critics assume that good literature is not bound by time and place. It transcends the limitations of its place of origin (including the author) and addresses the complexities of an essen- tially unchanging human condition. The concrete intentions of the author, or the circumstances that triggered the poem, are there- fore mostly or even wholly irrelevant. What does it matter if we know that poet X wrote this particular poem because he was hope- lessly in love with the undeserving Lady Y? The poem in question will only be worthwhile if it does not give us all the details but focuses on scorned love in general. In this sense, information about authorial intention or the direct occasion for a work of literature may be damaging rather than helpful. For humanist critics such as Eliot, Richards, Leavis, and the New Critics, human nature and the human condition have not changed over time and are essen- tially the same the world all over. Human nature is not black, or white, or brown; it does not speak English or Tagalog; it is not prehistoric, medieval, or postmodern; it does not lean towards deep-sea fishing, pig farming, or business administration. Such details will inevitably feature in a literary work, but they are secondary to what a good poem, novel, or play has to offer. The reign of the critics and its limitations In his 1937 essay ‘Criticism, Inc.’ the New Critic John Crowe Ransom tells us that criticism ‘might be seriously taken in hand 24 READING FOR MEANING by professionals’ (Ransom 1972: 229). Aware that he is perhaps using ‘a distasteful figure’, he nonetheless has ‘the idea that what we need is Criticism, Inc., or Criticism, Ltd.’ The essay catches the new professionalism that literary academics on both sides of the Atlantic were not unreasonably proud of and invites us to look at the role that Ransom had in mind for himself and his fellow professionals. One part of their self-appointed task stands out. As we have seen, for the New Critics and their English colleagues literature, and in particular poetry, consti- tuted a defensive line against the world of vulgar commerce and amoral capitalist entrepreneurialism that they held responsible for the moral decline of Western culture. But who was to decide which works of literature among the plenitude that the past has left us (and to which the present keeps on adding) actually contain ‘the best that has been thought and said in the world’, to use Arnold’s words again? Who was to expose the at first sight attractive poems that because of their limited view and superfi- cial emotions ultimately, even if unwittingly, undermined Arnold’s ‘culture’? If literature takes the place of religion, as Arnold had proph- esied, then poets and critics, in their mutual dependency, are the priests who spread the new gospel. This is indeed the impression one more than occasionally gets (not least in the writings of F.R. Leavis). For a period of fifty years the large majority of literary academics on both sides of the Atlantic saw themselves as the elect, as an intellectual and moral elite that had as its central task to safeguard ‘life’, the fullness of human experience. In the minds of the New Critics, the Leavisites, and others who partly or wholly shared their views, criticism and social critique were so intimately interwoven that they could not be separated from each other. As we will see later in this book, the interrelatedness of criticism – even if it now usually goes under other names – and social critique is still a hallmark of English and American literary studies. But let me return to the specific view of literature that we find among the first generations of literary academics. With hind- sight, we can easily see the intimate relationship between their discussions of structure, irony, and so on, and a good many indis- 25 L I T E R A R Y T H E O R Y: T H E B A S I C S putably important literary works of the period: Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ (1922), Ezra Pound’s Cantos (1925–1960), Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929), and countless other poems, novels, and plays. What was essentially an early twentieth-century view of literature, formed under the influence of specific historical circumstances, became a prescription for all ages. Predictably, the large numbers of writers who for one reason or another had operated in a different mode (Walt Whitman, for instance, with his long descriptive passages) fell from grace. Literary history was reshaped in the image of the early twentieth century. Whereas we can see the ‘irony’ that the writers and the critics of the period valued so highly as a defensive strategy in a confusing world of rapid social and technological change, they themselves genuinely believed it to be an infallible sign of ‘matu- rity’ and proceeded to demote all texts (and writers) that did not meet the required standard. (As I have noted, the later Leavis abandoned irony for other signs of maturity.) We can also see now that the required standard is heavily gendered. (This anticipates a much fuller discussion of ‘gender’ in a later chapter, but it must be mentioned here.) Eliot’s ‘wit’, the ‘irony’ of Richards and the New Critics, and the ‘maturity’ of Leavis all serve to underline a shared masculinist perspective. This is not to say that they have no place for female writers – in its first instalment Leavis’s ‘great tradition’ of English novelists includes two male and two female writers. But in a period in which self-discipline (the self-discipline of the poet who refuses to personalize the poem), wit, a controlling irony, and related qualities are all seen as typically male, whereas overt emotions and a refusal to intellectualize experience are seen as typically female, the female writers elected for inclusion in the literary pantheon were admitted because they met a male standard. Practical criticism and New Criticism have had a lasting influence. Their preoccupation with the text and nothing but the text would live on after its demise. Even now their textual orien- tation is still a force to reckon with, although always tempered by other considerations and usually – but not necessarily – stripped of its prejudices. It is of course only natural that texts, 26 READING FOR MEANING and not for instance landscaping, should play a central role in literary studies. It is less obvious, however – counterintuitive as it may seem – that meaning should be so prominent. In the next two chapters we will look at approaches to literature in which the meaning of individual texts, which in England and the United States provided the major drive for literary studies, is of at best secondary importance. Summary English and American literary studies traditionally focus on the meaning of literary texts. Practical criticism (the United Kingdom) and New Criticism (the United States) first of all provide interpretations, with the New Critics paying partic- ular attention to the formal aspects of literature, which for them contribute directly to its meaning. Within this Anglo- American tradition, literature is thought to be of great importance because in poems, novels, and plays we find ‘the best that has been thought and said’. Literature offers the most profound insights into human nature and the human condition that are available to us. Because of its profundity and its authenticity it offers us a vantage point from which to criticize the superficial, rationalized, and commercialized world we live in. Literary criticism, which seeks out and preserves the very best of what millennia of writing have to offer, functions simultaneously as social critique. Finally, in this traditional form literary studies takes liberal humanism and its assumptions for granted. It sees the individual – the subject, in technical terms – as not determined and defined by social and economic circumstances, but as fundamentally free. We create ourselves, and our destiny, through the choices we make. 27 L I T E R A R Y T H E O R Y: T H E B A S I C S Suggestions for further reading There is no shortage of books on the English and American literary–critical heritage. Two very accessible and even-handed studies are Chris Baldick’s The Social Mission of English Criticism, 1848–1932 (1983), which has chapters on Arnold, Eliot, Richards, and Leavis, and his more recent Criticism and Literary Theory 1890 to the Present (1996), which covers some of the same ground, but also discusses the New Criticism and later developments. Francis Mulhern’s The Moment of ‘Scrutiny’ (1979) is a detailed study of Leavis and the group around Scrutiny from a leftist perspective. Michael Bell’s F.R. Leavis (1988) is a fairly recent defence of Leavis’s views. Gerald Graff’s Professing Literature: An Institutional History (1987) is a very readable study of the institutionalization of literary studies in the United States. Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (1989) by Gauri Viswanathan is a fascinating history of ‘English’ in colonial India. Eliot’s early essays – ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, ‘Hamlet’, ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ – are still worthwhile reading. The same goes for Wimsatt and Beardsley’s ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ and ‘The Affective Fallacy’. Those who would like to see practical criticism or New Criticism in action can also still go directly to the source. Cleanth Brooks’s The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry ( 1968) contains a number of now classic essays while his collabo- ration with Robert Penn Warren in Understanding Poetry ( 1976) led to an enormously influential textbook on the New Critical method of interpretation. Leavis’s approach to poetry and the poetic tradition comes through vividly in his New Bearings in English Poetry (1932) and Revaluation (1936); The Great Tradition ( 1962) is a good example of his equally uncompromising criticism of the novel. Finally, English studies feature prominently in a number of recent novels. For those who want to have a look behind the scenes I can recommend David Lodge’s three novels dealing with ‘English’in both England and the United States (Changing Places: 28 READING FOR MEANING A Tale of Two Campuses (1975), Small World: An Academic Romance (1984), and Nice Work (1989)) and A.S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance (1990). 29 Chapter 2 Chapter 2 Reading for form I Formalism and early structuralism, 1914–1960 In spite of the enormous influence of Eliot, Leavis, and the New Critics, our current perspec- tives on the study of literature owe perhaps more to continental Europe than to England and the United States. The continental European tradi- tion of literary studies that is responsible for this begins in Russia, in the second decade of the twentieth century, in Moscow and St Petersburg. It finds a new home in Prague in the late 1920s, when the political climate in the Soviet Union has become too repressive, and travels to France (by way of New York City) after the Second World War, where it comes into full bloom in the 1960s and begins to draw widespread interna- tional attention. It is in France, too, that it provokes a countermovement that achieved its full force in the 1970s and 1980s and that is still the dominant presence in literary – and in cultural – studies. Like its Anglo-American counterpart, this origi- nally Russian approach to literature initially concentrated on poetry. But that is about all the 31 L I T E R A R Y T H E O R Y: T H E B A S I C S two had in common. The English, later Anglo-American, line of development and the Russian one had nothing whatsoever to do with each other. The Russians who developed the so-called formal method – which gave them the name Formalists – were totally unaware of what happened in England, while the English and the Americans were completely ignorant of the debates that took place in Russia (and later in Prague). It is only when a prominent Formalist, the Russian linguist Roman Jakobson (1896–1982) moved to New York City, just before the outbreak of the Second World War, and when his fellow Formalists began to be translated into English in the late 1950s and 1960s, that the English-speaking world began to take notice of their wholly different approach to literary art. But even then the response was slow, no doubt because the Formalist approach was so foreign to what Eliot, Leavis, the New Critics, and their ubiquitous heirs saw as the mission of literature and of writing about literature. Significantly, the Formalist perspective had to be picked up, assimilated, and further developed by the French before it really made an impact on English and American literary thought. The French had something of an advantage, because the prominent French anthropologist and all-round intellectual Claude Lévi- Strauss (1908), who also had left Europe because of the Second World War, in 1941 became one of Jakobson’s colleagues at the New School of Social Research in New York and after the war took what by then had come to be called the structuralist method, or structuralism, back home to France. In what follows I will concentrate on the work of the Russians and only look briefly at their Prague colleagues. What is relevant here is not historical comprehensiveness but a certain way of looking at literature that would much later have great impact in the English-speaking world. Early Formalism As the phrase ‘formal method’ will have suggested, the Form- alists were primarily oriented towards the form of literature. That focus on formal aspects does not mean that they could not imagine a possible moral or social mission for literature. As one 32 READING FOR FORM I of them, Viktor Shklovsky (1893–1984), put it in 1917, literature has the ability to make us see the world anew – to make that which has become familiar, because we have been overexposed to it, strange again. Instead of merely registering things in an almost subconscious process of recognition because we think we know them, we once again look at them: ‘art exists that one may recover the sensation of life …. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known’ (Shklovsky 1998: 18). The result of this process of defamiliarization is that it enables us once again to see the world in its full splendour or, as the case may be, true awfulness. But although the Formalists were prepared to recognize this as a not unimportant effect of literature, they initially relegated it to the far background. The social function of literature, either as the repository of the best that had been thought and said, or as one of the great revitalizers (with the other arts) of our perception of the world around us, largely left them cold in the first phase of their explorations. What they wanted to know is how literature works, how it achieves its defamiliarizing effects. For the New Critics the formal aspects of literary works were not unimportant because from their perspective meaning was always bound up with form. Still, they were first of all interested in the form in which a poem presented itself because a close scrutiny of its formal aspects would reveal the complex of oppositions and tensions that constituted the poem’s real meaning. But the Formalists were after what they considered bigger game and in order to do so ignored literature’s referential function, the way it reflects the world we live in, and gave it an autonomous status – or gave at least the aesthetic dimension of literature an autonomous status, as Jakobson qualified their position in 1933. From their earliest meetings, around 1914, the Formalists are focused on what Jakobson in 1921 started to call ‘literariness’ – that which makes a literary text different from, say, a piece in The Economist or Time. In other words, although they always work with individual texts, what they are interested in is what all literary texts have in common, in a literary common denomi- nator. Seeing the study of literature as a science, they concentrated like true scientists on general rules. Whereas 33 L I T E R A R Y T H E O R Y: T H E B A S I C S practical criticism and the New Criticism focused on the indi- vidual meaning of individual texts, Formalism wanted to discover general laws – the more general the better. The secret of ‘literariness’, the Formalists decided, was that in poetry – the initial focus of their interest – ordinary language becomes ‘defamiliarized’. While an article in Time is satisfied to use fairly ordinary language, poetry subjects language to a process of defamiliarization. It is this linguistic defamiliariza- tion that then leads to a perceptual defamiliarization on the part of the reader, to a renewed and fresh way of looking at the world. How does poetry defamiliarize what I have just called ‘ordinary’ language? It employs an impressive range of so-called ‘devices’. It uses, for instance, forms of repetition that one does not find in ordinary language such as rhyme, a regular meter, or the subdivision in stanzas that we find in many poems. But poetry also uses ‘devices’ that one may come across in non- poetic language (although not with the same intensity) like metaphors and symbols. In so doing, it often also exploits the potential for ambiguity that language always has. Whereas a Time article tries to avoid ambiguities because it wants to be as transparent as possible, poetry makes use of all the second meanings that its words and phrases have, plus all the associa- tions they evoke. What these devices have in common is that they always draw attention to themselves: they constantly remind us that we are dealing with language and not with the real world because they signal their own difference from the non-literary language that we ordinarily use (and which we take to represent the world). Advertising agencies are well aware of this. At one time the Heinz company tried to boost its baked beans sales with the brilliant slogan ‘Beanz Meanz Heinz’, a phrase that inevitably draws our attention to its own language. Because its ingenious play with language catches the eye and makes it stand out among other ads it probably also effectively served its purpose: to sell more beans. For the Formalists, then, poetry is not poetry because it employs time-honoured and profound themes to explore the human condition, but rather because in the process of defamiliarizing the language it draws attention to its own artificiality, to the way it says what it has to say. As 34 READING FOR FORM I Roman Jakobson said in 1921, poetry is a form of language characterized by an orientation towards its own form. What it first of all allows us to see in a fresh manner is language itself. What that language refers to – what it communicates – is of secondary importance. In fact, if a work of art draws attention to its own form, then that form becomes part of its content: its form is part of what it communicates. (This is obvious in paint- ings that are completely abstract: since such paintings do not refer us to the outside world they can only ‘be’ about themselves. They force us to pay attention to their form, because that is all they have to offer.) Now the idea of defamiliarization works well enough in the case of poetry and the difficult, wilfully innovative and defamil- iarizing Modernist poetry of their own period perfectly confirmed the validity of defamiliarization as the ultimate crite- rion in establishing ‘literariness’. (With hindsight we can seen how much the Formalists’ idea of literature, too, was influenced by contemporary poetic practice.) But not surprisingly they ran into trouble in their attempts to make the defamiliarizing ‘devices’ of poetry work for fiction: the most obvious ones – rhyme, for instance – simply do not occur in fiction and the less obvious ones, like imagery, can also be found, even if not to the same degree, in ordinary usage. It is true that there are novels that in spite of this achieve an impressive degree of defamiliar- ization. This, for instance, is how Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker of 1980 takes off: ‘On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs’ (Hoban 1982: 1). But novels like this are rare. Usually we have to look pretty closely to find real deviations from ordinary language. Fabula and syuzhet In 1925 Boris Tomashevski, building upon earlier efforts of his colleagues, formulated the fullest Formalist answer to the ques- tion of how to distinguish the language of fiction from ordinary language. The difference, he argued, is not so much a difference in language but a difference in presentation. In order to clarify 35 L I T E R A R Y T H E O R Y: T H E B A S I C S this he juxtaposed two concepts: fabula (introduced by Shklovsky in 1921) and syuzhet (or suzhet, depending on how one transcribes the Russian alphabet). The fabula is a straight- forward account of something, it tells us what actually happened. For instance, John Doe kills his cousin Jack to become the sole heir of a fortune and sits back to wait for the demise of the aged and infirm uncle – old J.J. Doe, his cousin’s father and only remaining kin – who controls the money. The police work hard at solving the case but fail to do so. J.J. Doe hires a private eye who naturally succeeds where the police have failed. John Doe is arrested and duly sentenced. These are the bare bones of the sort of story that one finds in countless private-eye novels. But this is not how the standard private-eye novel, which is usually narrated by the private eye him- (or her)self, would tell it. The novel would begin with the private eye being invited by J.J. Doe to come to his mansion to talk about the case. It would probably describe how the private eye clashes with J.J. Doe over the latter’s superior and insulting attitude (our moneyed fellow citizens being an unpleasant lot in private-eye novels) and it would then follow the private eye’s investigation. The fact that the murder has been committed by John will not become clear until we have almost reached the end. As in all detective novels, the author manipulates the fabula to create maximum suspense. Such a manipulation of the fabula creates the syuzhet (the story as it is actually told) and it is the syuzhet that has the defamiliarizing effect that devices have in poetry: like for instance rhyme, the syuzhet calls attention to itself. (I will discuss in a moment why we usually do not experi- ence that attention-calling effect when we read, say, a detective novel.) It will immediately be obvious that one and the same fabula can give rise to a good many syuzhets. That insight became the basis for a book that much later would enjoy wide- spread influence, Vladimir Propp’s 1928 The Morphology of the Folktale, which I will briefly look at because it forms an impor- tant link between the Formalists and the French so-called structuralists of the 1960s. 36 READING FOR FORM I Folktales It had struck Propp (1895–1970) that if you looked closer at many Russian folktales and fairytales you actually found one and the same underlying story. In Folktale he tries to show how a hundred different tales are in fact variations upon – in other words, syuzhets of – what seemed to be one and the same under- lying fabula. This is a rather free use of the fabula/syuzhet opposition and it must be stressed that Propp was not a Formalist. He is not interested in literariness and in any case in many of his tales there is hardly any difference between fabula and syuzhet as understood in Formalist terms. In a simple, chronologically told fairytale without flashbacks and other narrative tricks the syuzhet rather closely follows the fabula. Still, Propp’s revolutionary idea at the time that a hundred rather widely varying folk- and fairytales might actually tell one and the same underlying story is clearly inspired by the distinction between fabula and syuzhet. How is one and the same fabula possible if in some fairytales we have characters who play important roles – a prince, a forester, a hunter, a miller, a good fairy, an evil queen – and who are yet wholly absent from others? Or if certain actions, like flaunting an interdiction, lead in some tales to disaster while in others it brings rich rewards? How could all these tales possibly be presentations of the same basic story? Propp very ingeniously solves this problem by thinking in terms of actors and functions, by which he means acts or events that crucially help the story along. Let me try to give an idea how this works. One of the actors that Propp identifies – and which he sees returning in all his tales – is the ‘helper’. Since that is not relevant to the function – all that he or she has to offer is an act of help that keeps the story moving – Propp need not further specify who or what the ‘helper’ is. The ‘helper’ can be either male or female, can be a forester (as in ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, if memory serves me right) or hunter (as in ‘Snow White’), can be old or young, rich or poor, and so on – the possibilities are infinite. In one of his examples Propp illustrates the act of helping with examples from four fairytales. In the first one the hero is given an eagle which 37 L I T E R A R Y T H E O R Y: T H E B A S I C S carries him to another kingdom, in the second one the hero is given a horse that gets him there. In the third tale he is presented with a boat, and in the fourth one he is given a ring that magi- cally produces a number of young men who carry him where he wants to go. The people who help the hero are different, the hero himself has different names, and the means of conveyance (if we can call an eagle a means of conveyance) are different. But the actor – and the function of the event – is in each case exactly the same. We might say that various syuzhet-elements correspond to one fabula-element (if we take the liberty of seeing all the fairy- tales in terms of one single fabula). Theoretically this can also work the other way around, with one and the same syuzhet- element representing more than one fabula-element. This possibility is what I have in fact smuggled into the discussion with my example of the flaunting of the interdiction and its contradictory results (my embellishment of one of Propp’s func- tions). In this imaginary case we must be dealing with two functions – one leading to disaster and one leading to a happy ending – that are represented by one and the same act. Propp distinguishes a limited number of actors (or, in his term, ‘dramatis personae’) – hero, villain, seeker (often the hero), helper, false hero, princess – and thirty-one functions that always appear in the same sequence. I should add that all thirty- one of them do not necessarily make an appearance in every single fairytale. Propp’s fairytales get along very well with only a selection, even if the final functions – the punishment of the villain and the wedding that symbolizes the happy ending – are always the same. It is also possible for a fairytale to interrupt itself and start a new, embedded, sequence (and another one) or to put one sequence after another. The individual qualities of the characters, however, are always irrelevant. At Propp’s level of abstraction only their acts – which derive from the functions – really count. The villain and the helper are unimportant except for what they do and what they do always has the same function in the various tales. This approach in terms of actors – embodied by interchangeable characters – and functions allows Propp to collapse a hundred different syuzhets into the skeleton of one single fabula. In my example of the detective story, all the 38 READING FOR FORM I different ways in which the story would be told – it could for instance begin with a description of the murder without giving away the identity of the murderer – would still have John Doe as the murderer and his cousin Jack as the victim. At Propp’s level of abstraction, however, we ignore the actual characters and concentrate on their function within the story. With the method he uses for his tales, Propp might have proposed one single fabula for all detective stories. He might have proposed a basic fabula with three acts or functions: that of murdering, that of getting murdered, and that of exposing the killer. If we look at Propp’s tales from this abstract vantage point we see similarities between them that otherwise would have escaped our notice. By presenting things in this way, Propp makes us see his folk- tales as systems in which the functions that he identifies have a specific place. In my discussion of the New Critics I have suggested that they – a decade after Propp – saw the literary work, and in particular the poetic text they were preoccupied with, as a system of checks and balances, with the checks and balances obviously interrelated. In Propp’s book the interrelat- edness of the various elements of a text gets more emphasis because his clearly defined functions are part of an equally clearly defined chain (there is, after all, only one underlying fabula). The ‘helper’ is always there to offer help, and not to the ‘villain’, even if what he or she actually does may vary widely from tale to tale. Each of Propp’s folktales, then, contains an underlying structure of which the unsuspecting reader will usually not be aware. But if folktales contain such a structure, then maybe other narratives, too, can be made to reveal an underlying structure. That idea would, in an admitt

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