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Electronic Reserve Text: John Guillory, "Paradoxy" All that is solid
melts into air, all that is holy is profaned .... It has long been a received idea that the New Criticism depoliticized the study of literature by rejecting the significance of overtly political or philosophical ideas for the evaluation or interpretation of literary works, and by restricting the object of criticism to the text itself, supplemented by only so much contextual information as would enable the proper understanding of topical references or archaic usages. The received idea has been definitively revised by Gerald Graff's recent Professing Literature, which reconstructs the institutional history of criticism in the American university, within which the New Criticism established hegemony by the 1950s.20 |
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Graft
emphasizes the fact that "the New Critics were originally neither
aesthetes nor pure explicators but culture critics with a considerable
'axe to grind' against the technocratic tendencies of modern mass civilization"
(149). In Graff's useful mapping of the literary academy in the 1930s
and 40s, the New Critics represent a splinter group within the category
of what Graff calls the "Generalists," those critics who saw
the objectives of literary study as immediately social and edifying. These
descendants of the bourgeois public sphere cohabited uneasily in the university
with the philological specialists, who were likely to define their practice
more narrowly as the accumulation of a specific kind of knowledge. Graff
points out quite rightly that the emergence of the "literary critic"
within the generalist faction did not imply a simple repudiation of the
disciplinary style of the philologist, but rather the development of a
more or less rigorous countermethodology of "interpretation"
which could be put in the service of "Generalist" aims, the
aims of cultural criticism. Therein lies the answer to the puzzle of the
received idea, the sense in which it is both correct and seriously inaccurate;
for the New Critics, "the point was to define these social and moral
functions as they operated within the internal structure of literary works
themselves" (148). This agenda is already implicit in Eliot's fetishizing
of form, but as with Eliot it is difficult to see how form or "internal
structure" can convey a critique of modernity unless it is in some
way read as adversarial. The inability of form to express its own adversarial
meaning is betrayed in Eliot's deliberate translation of tradition (fidelity
to form) into orthodoxy (fidelity to doctrine). Graff's analysis of how the New Criticism solved this problem argues initially for the implicitly critical nature of literary form: "These critics' very insistence on the disinterested nature of poetic experience was an implicit rejection of a utilitarian culture and thus a powerfully 'utilitarian' and 'interested' gesture" (149). Now this hypothesis converges in an interesting way upon a left critique of modernity such as we might find in Adorno, a convergence which is immediately suspicious. Granted that modernism produced both left and right critiques of modernity, does the difference between these critiques make no difference? We may suppose that if the New Critics ever passed through a pristine moment of faith in the social effects of disinterestedness per se, they would never have had to explicate the meaning of form in other than formal terms. But there is much evidence to suggest, as Graff goes on to insist, that literature was never entrusted to make its point by itself: "First generation New Critical explications of literature were rarely explications only: they were cultural and philosophical essays in which texts like 'The Canonization,' 'Sailing to Byzantium,' and the poems of Poe became allegorical statements about the dissociation of sensibility, technical rationality, the collapse of the Old South, or some other equally large theme" (150). After a certain point, however, the "allegory" tended to drop away, and "the argument that the politics of literature should be seen as part of its form modulated subtly into the idea that literature had no politics, except as an irrelevant extrinsic concern" (150). Presumably it is only at this point that the received idea becomes true, but true in a rather paradoxical sense. For is it not also a constituent of the received idea that the purging of the political from the study of literature has a tendentially conservative effect, conservative by default? What did it matter, then, when the "allegory" dropped away from the practice of New Critical reading if in any case that reading proved ten-dentially conservative? Graff's historical account of the New Criticism raises an interesting question about the moment at which the allegory drops away (Graff dates it precisely to 1951, with the publication of Reuben Brower's Fields o[ Light), since that moment coincides with the triumph of the New Criticism in the university (150). It is also the moment (the decade following the war) when modernist poetry is irrevocably established in the curriculum (in our terminology, "canonized'). The connection between these several triumphs is extremely intimate, because a large part of the adversarial agenda of the New Criticism in the thirties and forties was expressed as a direct extension of Eliot's revisionary literary history, in the form of a double polemic on behalf of modernist poets and the metaphysicals. Graft observes that by the time Cleanth Brooks publishes The Well Wrought Urn (1947), it is no longer necessary for the New Critics to polemicize further on behalf of Eliot's or their own earlier revisionary judgments of English literary history. The same qualities that Eliot found primarily or only in minor poetry are now found in the works of the established literary canon. Eliot's narrative of English literary history as the story of a split between an orthodox minor tradition and a heterodox major line is thus displaced into allegorical explications of the "internal structures" of the canonical texts, which all exhibit the features of paradox, irony, or ambiguity formerly attributed specific:ally to the metaphysicals and the moderns. The question of what difference it makes when the larger historical allegory drops away is thus a question about the "moment" of the reassimilation of the alternative or "minor" tradition into the established canon, and about the effectiveness of that reassimilation in establishing a new institutional hegemony for the New Criticism. It is a question of how the socioinstitutional conditions of literary criticsm itself are registered in the allegorical reading of literary structure. We can put this question in more concrete terms, terms that recognize the peculiar significance of The Well Wrought Urn as a text which defines the moment in question. If that text discovers that all canonical literature (or literature per se) speaks the "language of paradox," it still reads paradox as the evidence of a "unity of experience" no longer available to dissociated moderns, though we moderns may continue to contemplate what we have lost in the experience of the literary artifact. What circumstances, then, will cause that historico-political meaning of paradox to disappear, while the thesis that poetic language is intrinsically paradoxical succeeds so spectacularly? I should like to argue that we will not be able to understand how paradox "modulates" (Graff's term) into an implicitly apolitical (purely formal) concept without recognizing that Brooks's concept is "ideological" in the sense I have already indicated, namely, that the explicit political significance of his concept of paradox cannot account for its political effects, a fact which is proven by the very ease with which the explicit political meaning drops away in the 1950s. The ideological effect rather inheres in the discrepancy between the level of doxa (what is unquestioned, impense') and what is openly adovcated, an "orthodoxy." What needs to be explained then, is not simply the relation of the poem to particular beliefs, political or otherwise, but the institutional status of literary criticism in relation to the socioeconomic conditions of modernity. Let us recall, then, that in 1939, in the chapter of Modern Poetry and the Tradition entitled "Notes toward a Revised History of English Literature," Brooks can still reproduce almost exactly the judgments implicit in Eliot's criticism, an indebtedness Brooks later acknowledged in these terms: I was particularly stimulated by two paragraphs in one of his essays on the metaphysical poets. In this brief passage, he suggested that the metaphysical poets were not to be regarded as a rather peculiar offshoot of English poetry, but had a deep, hidden connection with its central line of development. This, to me [was a] new way of looking at the tradition of English poetry.2~ The hiddenness of that connection, the peculiar centrality of a tradition which is perceived to be marginal-these are of course motifs with which we are very familiar. Yet it would be a mistake to find in Brooks's criticism only a replication of Eliot's literary historical motifs, as such a replication would not have sufficed in the 1930s to ground a new literary pedagogy. The pressure to produce such a pedagogic method is simply institutional. Eliot's cultural criticism presumes as its site of enunciation the "workshop" of the poet, or the journal of the authoritarian cultural critic. The New Criticism develops in the 1930s in competition with other pedagogic methods to which it also owes a considerable debt, chief among these the methodology developed by I. A. Richards. For Richards had already, in the 1920s, confronted the fact of modern "dissociation," and had produced a form of critical pedagogy more or less reconciled to the secularity presumed to characterize modernity. As we know, this pedagogy sought to place criticism on scientific grounds, a project whose immediate context is the logical positivism emergent between the wars. These circumstances are worth recollecting (if all too cursorily) because they suggest the heavy polemical burden initially borne by the New Criticism, the burden of a double antagonist: both modernity and the particular accommodations to modernity competing for hegemony in literary culture. We may invoke these antagonists by way of accounting for Brooks's rewriting of Eliot's literary history in Modern Poetry and the Tradition in order to demonize science: "We have argued... that the critical revolution in the seventeenth century which brought metaphysical poetry to an end was intimately bound up with the beginnings of the New Science.''22 This hypothesis was unnecessary to Eliot's narrative, but it is quite crucial to Brooks's. Aside from betraying the large epistemological anxieties to which literature has been periodically subject, it gives Brooks a way of apparently emptying the doctrinal content from every literary work, as a prolegomenon to the reading of the work. Hence the "heresy of paraphrase," as defined in The Well Wrought Urn: The position developed in earlier pages obviously seeks to take the poem out of competition with scientific, historical, and philosophical propositions. The poem, it has been argued. does not properly eventuate in a proposition: we can only abstract statements from the poem, and in the process of abstraction we necessarily distort the poem itself. This position is
oddly enough very close to Richards's, in that it seems to regard every
"proposition" with pretension to truth value as by definition
a scientific proposition. If there exists any other kind of truth, it
cannot by definition be expressed in the form of a proposition. Brooks's
theory concedes a very great deal to the epistemological tyranny of
science (really, to the positivist "philosophy of science"
regnant between the wars), but only because that concession is strategic,
because scientific truth has already been stigmatized as the origin
of our dissociated modernity. The important point to note here is that
when the "proposition" is conflared with the claim to scientific
truth, then any proposition one might be tempted to derive from a poem
can be stigmatized as putatively "scientific," as subject
to the norms of scientific verification. It is not surprising, then,
that all statements of any kind derived from a poem fall under the heading
of "paraphrase." |
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Clearly
the object of this strategy is not simply to remove the poem from competition
with scientific truth, but to remove certain other truths from that competition.
These truths are no longer expressed as propositions or statements but
are rather embodied in the form of the poem, in the very antagonism between
poetry (or literature) and the epistemological bully whose name is science.
This strategic indirection of an alternative non-scientific truth commits
the poem to a kind of gestural aphasia, an aphasia repeated in the process
of reading the poem. The teacher or interpreter of the poem can only point
to the truth which must not be spoken, but the very unspokenness of that
truth elevates it to a status vastly greater than that of scientific truth,
which always falls to the level of mere fact. Perhaps even more important,
the interpretire method enjoined by this theory can safely bypass what
looks like statement in a poem, secure in the knowledge that its truth
lies elsewhere, in certain aspects of its/corm, in what Brooks calls "paradox."
If this form, the form of paradox, can then be given a certain meaning,
we shall see that this meaning is curiously self-reflective: it is that
paradox names the very condition by which the poem does not name the truth
to which it nevertheless gestures. The condition of paradox is precisely
the fact that a certain truth (doxa) stands alongside (para) the poem
itself. We shall further see that this condition characterizes what was
once a mode of historical existence, a relation to truth that is for Brooks
pre-modern, but which now survives only in the structure of the literary
arti-fact. In this way the paradox specific to any given poem recapitulates
the historical narrative that subtends New Critical practice, making possible
the "allegory" Graffdescribes as characteristic of early New
Critical readings. Insofar as every successful poem achieves the condition
of paradox, it annuls the specific statements which may appear to be asserted
in the poem, and becomes a kind of hologrammic image of literature as
a whole. We may now demonstrate this hologrammic effect by considering at greater length Brooks's reading of a particular poem, "The Canonization," which also happens to be the poem he offers as exemplifying the principle of paradox in the chapter of The Well Wrought Urn entitled "The Language of Paradox." The subsequent history of criticism has transformed the title of the poem into a pun intended neither by Donne nor by Brooks; but the pun is a fortunate contingency, since what is at issue in the reading of "The Canonization" is nothing less than the reintegration of the "metaphysical" poets into the "central stream of the tradition": "One was to attempt to see, in terms of this approach, what the masterpieces had in common rather than to see how the poems of different historical periods differed-and in particular to see whether they had anything in common with the metaphysicals and with the moderns" (WWU, 193).23 The definition of paradox in this first chapter of The Well Wrought Urn entails, to begin with, the usual distinction between poetry and science: "There is a sense in which paradox is the language appropriate and inevitable to poetry. It is the scientist whose truth requires a language purged of every trace of paradox" (WWU, 3). This tells us not so much what paradox is, only that it is a sort of language antithetical to the sort of language science employs; yet we are also told that paradox is "intellectual" and "hard" and that it is not usually thought of as the "language of the soul." In taking over some of the characteristics of scientific language, paradox is already paradoxical; it already refuses to be defined as either the language of thought or the language of feeling. If paradox then coyly implies what Eliot would have considered to be the linguistic expression of an "associated sensibility," it can only embody a state of dissociation which has already set in, after "thought" and "feeling" are perceived as antithetical. The reconciliation of these two antitheses, which has rather a long pedigree in the Romantic tradition, and which communicates distantly with other contemporary notions of alienation, gives us the first historical meaning of paradox. But this sense of paradox can be further generalized along purely formal lines, as the reconciliation of any apparent antitheses. The latter concept underlies all three major tropes defining the rhetorical lexicon of the New Criticism: One perhaps does not need to point out that the importance assigned to the resolution of apparently antithetical attitudes accounts for the emphasis in earlier pages on (1) wit, as an awareness of the multiplicity of possible attitudes to be taken toward a given situation; on (2) paradox, as a device for contrasting the conventional view of a situation, or limited and special view of it such as those taken in practical and scientific discourse, with a more inclusive view; and on (3) irony, as a device for definition of attitudes by qualification (WWU, 257) It would seem,
given this set of definitions, that wit and irony are only versions
of paradox, and that paradox thus bears the ideological weight of the
New Critical agenda, its generalization from the reading of one poem
to the reading of every poem (the canon), and from the canon to the
larger historical and political field. The basic metaphor which underlies the poem (and which is reflected in the title) involves a sort of paradox. For the poet daringly treats profane love as if it were divine love. The canonization is not that of a pair of holy anchorites who have renounced the world and the flesh. The hermitage of each is the other's body; but they do renounce the world, and so their title to sainthood is cunningly argued. The poem is then a parody of Christian sainthood; but it is an intensely serious parody of a sort that modern man, habituated as he is to an easy yes or no, can hardly understand. (WWU, 11) No one would deny
that the distinction between the sacred and the profane constitutes
the thematic infrastructure of the poem, or that the technique of "sacred
parody" is characteristic of "metaphysical" lyric. But
the easy translation of parody into paradox is occasioned by Brooks's
interest, entirely on the surface here, of contrasting the experience
related in the poem to the cruder experience of "modern man."
It is worth underscoring the fact that what Graft calls the "allegorical"
level of New Critical interpretation requires no effort at all to recover,
is in fact too easy to recover. That level of interpretation is "ideological,"
but in the rather obvious sense in which television commercials make
hyperbolic or irrelevant claims about the effects of their products
which everyone recognizes as a design upon his or her desire. Yet it
is by no means evident that recognizing this design completely annuls
the effectiveness of the advertisement, since there may well be other
effects which operate elsewhere than at the level of oven claims, at
the level of aesthetic "form." In a similar way, one might
say that Brooks's too obvious intention to make an invidious contrast
between the modern world and the world of the metaphysicals distracts
one from a certain kind of work which is being done at another level
of the reading. And this discrepancy between the overt claim made for
the experience of the poem and that other "level" of the reading
recapitulates the very distinction which founds the reading, between
the "statements" in the poem and the "paradox" which
supposedly defines its structure. In its original context, however, "The Canonization" communicated a very different message [than the one argued by Brooks]. Donne's readers knew that he was expressing his personal longing for the public world he pretended to scorn in this lyric and they would have read the poem as a more ironic, hence more aesthetically complex, work than the one the formalist critics and scholars utilizing literary and intellectual history have interpreted.24 In Marotti's reading
the irony of the poem is at the expense of the speaker, who overcompensates
for his withdrawal from the public world by hyperbolic claims for an
erotic relationship. The sacred parody which Brooks reads as conveying
an ironic superiority toward the "friend," and by extension
toward the "modern" reader, is in this "contextual"
interpretation a hyperbole which renders the poem "more ironic"
when the site of ironized understanding is displaced to the "context."
We need not pause here over the well-worn methodological issues raised
by Marotti's distinction (between "formalist" and "anti-formalist"
interpretation) in order to recognize the peculiar weakness of Brooks's
allegory as an interpretation of the poem, an interpretation which violates
a cardinal principle of New Critical reading by taking at face value
what the speaker of the poem says, even by proposing an identification
of the reader with that speaker. This depletion of the poem's irony
nevertheless does not in the slightest vitiate the persuasiveness in
historical context of Brooks's essay, the context of The Well Wrought
Urn's programmatic rereading of the English literary tradition. This
persuasiveness inheres not so much in the essay's generalizations about
history, or about the desiccated secularity of modern life, as it does
in its generalization of paradox as the "language of poetry."
A second allegory emerges from behind, or is carried forward by the
first, in which "The Canonization" somehow inscribes the essential
condition of the poetic or the literary. And if no peece
of Chronicle wee prove, We'll build in sonnets pretty roomes; Brooks explicates
this passage as follows: |
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It is
a measure of just how effective this moment has been for the subsequent
history of literary criticism that the great inconsistency of Brooks's
attributing to the poem a "doctrine" which it unequivocally
"asserts'' has been forgiven, if it has even been noticed. The point
is not simply that the poem is an artifact, or that as an aesthetic utterance
it excludes the kind of political assertion one would associate with the
prince, with the social space of the political. The literary critical
doctrine which the poem asserts, by virtue of the second allegory, really
achieves its effect only by having followed so directly from the first;
in this way the distinction between the sacred and the secular is carried
over into a characterization, respectively, of the social space of literature
and some other, antithetical social space. If that other social space is thus to be defined as "secular," it would have to include in Brooks's terms virtually everything within the experience of modern life, the space which is perceived to be inherently hostile to literature. Conversely the space of literature is obviously not the same space as that of religious withdrawal-the "hermitage" of which Donne speaks-such as actually may survive in the modern world, and which secular culture suffers to exist because it is no longer significant enough to extinguish. Just as the sacred parody defined the space of erotic withdrawal in Donne's poem, so it defines the social space of the reading of the poem in the second allegory. This space is unmistakably institutional-it is where literature is read, the site of Brooks's address to the professors of literature: "The urns are not meant for memorial purposes only, though that often seems to be their chief significance to the professors of literature" (WWU, 21). The ad-dressee here is specifically the philologist, with whom the New Critic contended for hegemony in the university, and against whom Brooks directs a running polemic in The Well Wrought Urn. The effect of this polemic is not simply to rehearse once again the imaginary identification of literary culture with the clergy but to redefine the social space of literary culture as necessarily institutional. The school becomes the site at which the practice of reading can be cultivated in such a way as to preserve the cultural capital of literature (signified in the Brooksian allegory as a kind of sacredness), just because its social space can be conceived as a space of deliberate and strategic withdrawal, as the withdrawal of literary culture from "the world." The aura of sacredness which is communicated first to the poem and then to the social space in which the poem is read defines that space not simply as an "elsewhere," but as transcendent, the latter because that space acquires the auratic properties of the sacred. In the same way the truth the poem communicates becomes transcendent, and its refusal to speak directly, to assert propositions, is the guarantor of its possession of that other kind of truth, a "paradoxical" truth. The truth of every poem thus retreats before the act of interpretation; our arrival in its pretty room discovers an empty shrine, but a shrine nevertheless. The poem enjoins upon us the recognition of the externality of dogma and conceals from us the fact that we are already within its truth, that its truth is this externality: the poem as paradogmatic text. In this sense every poem becomes an image of the very institutional space in which it is read, a perfect mirror in the imaginary of that space, alerting the company of professional readers that the retreat of literary culture into the university can be understood as a kind of transcen-dence of the cultural conditions of modernity. This is Brooks's solution to the same problem which Leavis hoped to solve by reconstructing literary culture as an incognito clergy-but a very different solution. It is also a solution fraught with contradictions, the most important of which is registered by the very ambiguity of the "urn" as a figure for the poem. While that figure does convey straightforwardly both the artifactual nature of the poem and its sacred aura, it offers a much less straightforward figure for the paradogmatic status of the literary work. If the urn were merely empty, that would suggest that its contents (its doctrine) were elsewhere, in a relation of transcendence to the (secular, scientific) doctrines which circulate as truth in the modern world. But the urn contains the ashes of something no longer living, and thus the figure stumbles unwittingly on the very social conditions for which it attempted to compensate: the perceived decline in the cultural significance of literature itself, the perceived marginality of literary culture to the modern social order. It would not do for Brooks to represent the truth toward which literature gestures as, in the terms of his allegory, mere ashes. Brooks is sufficiently aware of this implication of his allegory to attempt a confiation of Donne's "well wrought urn" with the urn in Shakespeare's '"The Phoenix and the Turtle," which urn, as it happens, contains the ashes of a phoenix: '"The urn to which we are summoned, the urn which holds the ashes of the phoenix, is like the well-wrought urn of Donne's 'Canonization' which holds the phoenix-lovers' ashes: it is the poem itself" (WWU, 21). Paradox has a doctrinal content after all, and Brooks cannot quite resist hinting at the doctrine he has in mind by offering as his privileged examples of paradox two biblical citations: "He who would save his life, must lose it,'' and '"The last shall be first" (WWU, 18). Here again, however, the hint is too blatant to be effective in its own terms, and the truth of the paradoxes in question beg to be read otherwise, perhaps as: '"he who would save the truth claims of literature must give them ups; and '"literary culture, though it may appear to be marginal, has now found a site at which it can exercise renewed power." The rebirth of the phoenix thus signifies the Eliot-like wish-fulfillment fantasy of a return to Christian orthodoxy; but that wish drops away virtually as soon as it is expressed and the phoenix rises instead as the figure for a resurgent literary culture, a '"new criticism" which establishes hegemony in the university by displacing the philologists, whose relation to literature was merely '"memorial," merely the preservation of the ashes of literary culture. Doxy With someone like
you, It remains to be
seen whether the retreat of literary culture to the university was really
strategic. I would argue that Brooks betrays considerable ambiv-alence
about the strategic withdrawal of literary culture to the confines of
the academy whenever he reverts to Eliot's revisionary narrative of
literary history: "A history of poetry from Dryden's time to our
own might bear as its subtitle 'The Half-Hearted Phoenix'." (WWU,
20). What could this possibly mean if not that one implication of the
reading of "The Canonization" is that much of English literature
after Dryden is defective in terms of wit, ambiguity, paradox? The history
of English literature is the history of the decline of literary culture
itself. The momentary reassertion of the radically revisionist construction
of the English literary canon thus stands in uneasy relation to the
programmatic agenda of reading the major canonical poets "as one
has learned to read Donne and the moderns" (WWU, 193).2s If the
revisionist canon was the basis for a cultural jeremiad against modernity,
a jeremiad in which the authority of literary culture was pitted against
competing modern cultural authorities (whatever these may be), the programmatic
attempt to demonstrate the continuity of every canonical English writer
with the metaphysicals on the one hand, and the moderns on the other,
was the strategic imperative of a more narrowly institutional campaign,
a campaign for hegemony within the university. putting the emphasis on the literary text itself had a more humble advantage: it seemed a tactic ideally suited to a new, mass student body that could not be depended on to bring to the university any common cultural background-and not just the student body but the new professors as well, who might often be only marginally ahead of the students. The explicative method made it possible for literature to be taught efficiently to students who took for granted little history. (173) This is carefully
worded and does not claim for New Critical pedagogy much more that its
being at the right place at the right time. It would be a mistake to
conclude on the basis of its resounding success that the technique of
close reading was designed with the "mass student body" in
view. Brooks and Warren's Understanding Poetry, for example, was first
published in 1938, at a time when the university was still a very exclusive
institution, when one could still assume the relative cultural and class
ho-mogeneity of its constituency. There is no reason to assume that
the basic principles of New Critical pedagogy were not formulated in
a context highly sympathetic to elitist notions of High Culture. The
version of formalism espoused by the New Critics never assumed that
the readers of literature should be other than very well educated, else
it would be difficult to see how these readers could follow the historical
allegory continually being invoked in early New Critical interpretive
essays. Even as late as The Well Wrought Urn, Brooks remarks that an
apparently accessible poem such as Gray's Elegy is not so intelligible
to modern readers as it may seem, because so much of the poem's meaning
depends on allusions to work which is no longer familiar: "How
important they [allusions] are may be judged by the response to the
poem made by an audience which is really completely unaware of them:
our public school system, it may be said, is rapidly providing such
an audience for the purposes of making such a test" (WWU, 107).
If the technique of close reading proved so congenial to the graduates
of this same public school system, this fact presents a historical problem
which is on the face of it not easy to explain. The question of
what poetry communicates, if anything, has been largely forced upon
us by the advent of "modern" poetry. Some of that poetry is
admittedly highly difficult-a great deal of it is bound to appear difficult
to the reader of conventional reading habits, even in spite of the fact-actually,
in many cases, because of the fact-that he is a professor of literature. Much modern poetry
is difficult. Some of it may be difficult because the poet is snobbish
and definitely wants to restrict his audience, though this is a strange
vanity and much rarer than Mr. Eastman would have us think. Some modern
poetry is difficult because it is bad .... Some modern poetry is difficult
because of the special problems of our civilization. But a great deal
of modern poetry is difficult for the reader simply because so few people,
relatively speaking, are accustomed to reading poetry as poetry.... It would be disingenuous
not to admit that in some respects this polemic is as viable now as
it was when Brooks and the New Critics first advanced it; but this is
not to say that the polemic is incapable of being read in historical
context. The question before us is not whether difficulty should be
a positive or negative criterion of value-one assumes that difficulty
justifies itself, like anything else, in the specificity of its circumstancesrebut
what difficulty means in a given context of its deployment as a concept.
I have quoted Brooks's polemic at length in order to appreciate the
sliding status of difficulty as a quality at once peculiar to the practice
of modernist poetry and yet somehow characteristic of poetry in general,
of "poetry as poetry." I would suggest that in possessing
this (paradoxical?) quality of peculiarity and generality, the concept
of difficulty corresponds to the waffling in Brooks's judgment between
the narrow canon of metaphysicals and moderns authorized by Eliot, and
the much larger "traditional" canon, which is identical to
the established literary curriculum in the university. The very difficulty
of demonstrating the difficulty of much "traditional" poetry
accounts for the strenuous polemic of The Well Wrought Urn, since Brooks
must convince his readers both that the difficulty of modernist poetry
is justified and that all poetry is inherently difficult-the former
proposition by means of the latter.26 |
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If she
had been asked, the reader of the confession magazines would no doubt
have conceded the cultural superiority of literature, whether or not she
ever felt inclined to read any works so designated. Therein lies the peculiar
power of mass culture, since the waning cultural centrality of literary
works in the face of new mass cultural forms never entailed a denial of
the nominally superior value of literature. In this context one may appreciate
the historical irony of the later reappearance of "The Canonization"
as an exemplary text for explication in the fourth edition of Understanding
Poetry (1976). There Donne's poem is contrasted not with secular, scientific
culture, its antagonist in The Well Wrought Urn, but with a lyric from
Tin Pan Alley called "Let the Rest of the World Go By." The
choice of a "popular song from the 1920s" may reflect a certain
High Cultural disconnection from popular culture, but it is more likely
that the song is standing in rather coyly for more recent music, whose
lyrics would only make the comparison with "The Canonization"
more embarrassing: "The reader may question the propriety of comparing
this massive poem with the flimsy little lyric from Tin Pan Alley quoted
above on page 130. Surely one does not need to bring up a howitzer in
order to annihilate a gnat.''28 There follows nevertheless a rather painstaking
demonstration of the superiority of Donne's poem to the gnat-like popular
song. The very belatedness of this polemic attests, however, to the persistence
of the gnat, which is only a gnat in the hopeful perspective of its determined
opponents, those who, as Brooks writes in The Well Wrought Urn, resist
rather than give in to "the spirit of the age" (WWU, 235). In its immense capaciousness, the mass culture of modernity never coveted the institutional space to which literary culture retreated. In that space a polemic against mass culture could be developed and blandly received by a generation of university students who willingly credited the cultural capital of literature, who learned to recognize the superiority of literature to mass cultural artifacts, but who continued to consume both kinds of arti-facts in the distinct spheres of their consumption. It may be said that "minority culture" came to be identified with the social space of the school, but it would be more accurate to say that it was internalized as a mode olccon-sumption in the graduate of the university. The capacity to experience the social space of the schools and the social space of mass culture as disjunct effectively institutionalized two modes of consumption, one consequence of which was to make literary works more difficult to consume outside the school? The polemic on behalf of the difficulty of literary language, and against the degraded simplicity of mass culture, did not have to be aimed at an audience of the socially elite, only university students, whoever they might be. It was even possible, after its triumph in the university, for New Critical pedagogy to be disseminated at the lower levels of the school system, since it was only necessary, in order to maintain the cultural capital of the literary curriculum, for the constitutive difficulty of literary language to be asserted there as well. We may fairly describe the effect of New Critical pedagogy as "paradoxical," since its most strenuous effort to impose a divorce between literary culture and mass culture produced in the end a curious kind of rapprochement. If this cultual detente does not represent an "association of sensibility," its submission to a certain cultural logic of inclusiveness renders unintentionally ironic such Brooksian attempts to characterize modernity as the following: But if Donne could have it both ways, most of us, in this latter day, cannot. We are disciplined in the tradition of either-or, and lack the mental agility-to say nothing of the maturity of attitude-which would allow us to indulge in the finer distinctions and the more subtle reservations permitted by the tradition of both-and. Flesh or spirit, merely a doxy or purely a goddess (or alternately, one and then the other), is more easily managed in our poetry, and probably, for that matter, in our private lives. But the greater poems of our tradition are more ambitious in this matter: as a consequence, they come perhaps nearer the truth than we do with our ordinary hand-to-mouth insights. (WWU, 81) When the choice
is between literary culture and mass culture, however, there is no question
of "both-and." There is no question of which might be represented
as a goddess, which by the doxy; the example of the woman absorbed in
her confession magazines confirms that. If mass culture can be stigmatized
by association with the lurid taste of the female consumer, literary
culture on the other hand becomes the site of a certain kind of worship,
not of a goddess, but of its own version of transcendence, the experience
to be found only in reading "the greater poems of our tradition."
How very ironic, then, that neither the polemic against secularity nor
the polemic on behalf of Eliot's canonical choices proved capable of
imposing Brooks's "either-or" upon the generation of postwar
readers. The effect of New Critical pedagogy was rather to produce a
kind of recusant literary culture, at once faithful to the quasi-sacred
authority of literature but paying tribute at the same time to the secular
authority of a derogated mass culture. For the recusants the artifacts
of mass culture might be consumed with a certain guilt, or a certain
relief; but for those whose allegiance was sworn to the secular authority,
that culture provided everything there was to consume.
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