Literary Criticism: Old and New Styles
This was given as a lecture in Oxford on 14 February 2001 and published in the issue of Essays in Criticism that appeared in April. It seemed to be one of the few occasions on which it would be proper to exploit one’s age; I read the journal from its inception, and knew F. W. Bateson, who founded it. The talk was written when I was feeling mild irritation about certain excesses of ‘the New Historicism’ and meant to have a little fun at its expense. Some of my hearers were apparently disconcerted by my procedures, not least the dénouement. However, it was a reasonably festive occasion, and most agreed that a little not indecorous levity might well be allowed to qualify, for a moment, the professional gravity of dons.
F. W. Bateson’s Essays in Criticism is more or less exactly fifty years old, so this may be the moment for a nostalgic glance at some of its early numbers. The leading article in the first issue is the late John Holloway’s ‘Matthew Arnold and the Modern Dilemma’; possibly Bateson’s editorial manifesto, ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’, wasn’t ready, for it appeared only in the third issue. The titles of the two essays seem to be gently insisting that the influence of the former Professor of Poetry was still being felt.
Holloway remarks that ‘perhaps two of the most distinctive tenets of modern criticism are that poetry is an imaginative fusion, and that it fuses not few but many elements into a single complex with an organic unity’. This sentence in itself tells us how long a time is fifty years in the history of critical fashions. Expressions like ‘imaginative fusion’ and, especially, ‘organic unity’ are highly unlikely to occur in a modern critical context. And when Holloway states with approval
that ‘the crucial operation for Arnold is to distinguish major works from minor’, he is endorsing a position now quite generally regarded as naïve and reprehensible. Nor would it now help his cause to quote Arnold in response to his critics: ‘those who are insensitive to poetry … are likely to be insensitive to language as a general means of expression’, though in the view of a few survivors that observation has not ceased to be apt.
Among the other contributors to that first volume there occur some unexpected names: L. A. G. Strong, for instance, and Montgomery Belgion and Middleton Murry. Unlike its contemporary, and for a year or two its rival, Scrutiny, Essays in Criticism had not, or not yet, divested itself of all relations with the critical world outside the universities, the London literary scene so often deplored by Dr Leavis. Belgion, who had been a regular contributor to T. S. Eliot’s Criterion, is now forgotten, except, perhaps, as the author of an anti-Semitic review once wrongly attributed to Eliot. Murry was an active literary journalist and editor, close to, and from time to time at war with, both D. H. Lawrence and T. S. Eliot. The Problem of Style is still mentioned occasionally, which is remarkable enough for a critical work published in 1922, but it is Murry’s marriage to Katherine Mansfield that brings him more often to notice. Strong was primarily a novelist, though he wrote a book about Joyce and taught for a while at Oxford, where Bateson probably met him. Few will regret that the appearance of such writers in Essays in Criticism was fugitive, but their rapid disappearance does hint at the increasingly academic orientation of literary criticism.
Bateson himself contributed an amusing refutation of an article by Leslie Hotson on Shakespeare’s ‘mortal moon’ sonnet, in which he warned against ‘the limitations of pure scholarship’, and also the inaugural entry, on ‘Comedy of Manners’, in what was intended to be a cumulative Dictionary of Critical Terms. The general intention was that the journal would carry on indefinitely, scholarly enough and critical enough; and so it has, to the great credit of the founding editor and his successors.
As an aspiring youngish critic I shared the general excitement caused by this new venture; it promised to be the riposte to Scrutiny so many of us wanted, or at least a complement to it. Of course we did not then
know that the days of Scrutiny were numbered – it expired in 1953, a rather unexpected event that enhanced the importance of Bateson’s venture. There was in those days a general belief, now weirdly archaic, that literary criticism was extremely important, possibly the most important humanistic discipline, not only in the universities but also in the civilized world more generally. These were the times when reputable London publishers were actively soliciting books from young critics. Of course we shouldn’t deny that Scrutiny had a large part in bringing about that state of affairs, but the eyes of the London scouts were now on Essays in Criticism. Naturally we all wanted to contribute, and I was very pleased with myself when, with my learned footnotes drastically trimmed, I made it into the second volume.
By that time the journal was already more decidedly academic. Those London bookmen and men of letters had disappeared by the second number, to be replaced largely by youngish English dons. Here was Ian Watt’s celebrated essay on Robinson Crusoe and a piece, hardly less durable, by J. W. Saunders on ‘The Stigma of Print’, concerning the constraints on publication experienced by courtly authors in the Elizabethan period. The journal wasn’t all that parochial, and there were essays by some eminent foreign practitioners: Ernst Curtius, Kenneth Burke, Marshall McLuhan, Hugh Kenner, Harry Levin, R. B. Heilman. But on the whole the contributors were keen young British academics.
Altogether it was an achievement that called for editorial flair and determination. 1951 was not a good time to start such a journal; paper was short and so was cash. It remained so; as late as the sixth volume we find Bateson complaining that he had to pay Robert Graves’s agent twenty guineas for one of the lectures Graves delivered as Professor of Poetry – an outlandishly large sum, especially as Bateson was not accustomed to paying his contributors, who were quite eager to work for nothing. The eclectic character of his editing, mixing known and unknown authors, never allowing the journal to become cliquish, didn’t suit everybody, nor did his conviction that criticism should be backed by scholarship, that is, scholarship short of pedantry. But many waited with unusual impatience for the next quarterly number.
Still, as one reads on, even though with a pleasure probably less easily available to more youthful readers, it’s impossible not to feel
that the whole effort looks dated: not dead, but dated. Certainly there was life in it, sometimes bad-tempered life, but then critical vitality has often been bad-tempered and sometimes unreasonable. Leavis was scathing. William Empson, newly returned from China, took a surly interest. His presence was important, but he came down heavily and sometimes too rudely on what he called the ‘quaint rigour of the modern young’, meaning their tendency to take moral positions of which he could not approve. No longer the prodigy he had been, yet still only in his forties, Empson sensed a wide generation gap and clearly thought it indicated a sad decline. In 1956, when he used the phrase I’ve quoted, Seven Types of Ambiguity was already a quarter of a century old, and had virtually no discernible successors apart from Empson’s own books. An obvious explanation of this lack might be that nobody else was clever enough, but he preferred to attribute the decline of criticism to the growth of a malign neo-Christianity, occasionally and deplorably evident in Essays in Criticism. For his part Leavis deprecated the air of optimism that attended the arrival of the new periodical, expressing amazement that some people were prepared to believe the literary culture was in better shape than it had been twenty years before.
Still, I think we can say that despite the carping and the quarrels, despite the great variety of critical approaches that were becoming available – the American New Criticism, the Chicago Critics, the maverick Winters and the maverick Burke and the maverick Frye – there was still a fundamental consensus: literary criticism was extremely important; it could be taught; it was an influence for civilization and even for personal amendment. The claim to an Arnoldian inheritance was justified. Less explicitly, the meliorist impulse of the early I. A. Richards was still present. And in very diverse ways the cultural and educational claims for literary criticism, fostered by these critics, were upheld by such dedicated teachers and editors as Leavis and Bateson.
The way things have changed since then is in large part my subject, but I begin, for reasons that will, I hope, emerge, at a distance from it, with an anecdote about a twentieth-century composer. Richard Strauss, president of the Reichsmusikkammer, had a Jewish daughter-in-law, Alice, whose grandmother lived in Prague. Despite his many
Jewish connections, Strauss was by no means exempt from the charge of anti-Semitism, but he was also a man who loved and protected his family, demanding that all its members should be treated with the same consideration as he himself had a right to expect. He did enjoy many privileges, was on good terms with Goebbels and Goering, and even had access to Hitler; for the top Nazis were involved in musical politics to an extent inconceivable in a British government, taking sides in controversies about atonality and the programmes and plans of the nation’s opera houses.
Strauss pulled various strings to get the grandmother away from Prague to Vienna, where, he believed, she would be safer. When he failed the old lady was sent to the concentration camp of Theresienstadt. Assuming that his fame, his position in German society and his personal appearance would be enough to ensure her release, Strauss had himself driven in a large car to the camp gates, where he announced to the SS guards ‘I am the composer Richard Strauss.’ What the guards said is not exactly known – presumably it was the equivalent of ‘Is that so?’ – and he was sent packing. His name, in this context, lacked power.1
This rebuff must have been a shock to a man commonly regarded as among the most celebrated of all living musicians. He seems to have had a quasi-magical confidence that when his name was uttered the gates of the camp would open. They did not open, and he was, in both senses, driven away. Curiously enough, when, years later, the victorious Americans arrived at his villa in Garmisch and gave him and his family twenty minutes to leave, he told them he was Richard Strauss, and they at once departed and left him in peace.
Names can have power, but not always. ‘What cares these roarers for the name of king?’ cries the Bosun in the opening scene of The Tempest. ‘Heaven in my mouth / As if I did but only chew his name’ says Angelo in Measure for Measure (ii.4.4 – 5), the original form of this statement having almost certainly been ‘God in my mouth’, before the law of 1606 forbade such language. The name of God connotes the power of God conveyed in the Eucharist, but Angelo, full of guilty desire, devalues or desecrates it, sacrilegiously reducing it to a useless piece of bread. When Richard II speaks of ‘aged Gaunt’ the old man indignantly accepts that as his proper name: he is named Gaunt and
he is gaunt; Richard sneers at him as a sick man playing with his name, and Gaunt replies that the king seeks ‘to kill my name in me’ (ii. 1. 86) which is usually taken to mean that he has extinguished the Gaunt line by exiling Bolingbroke; but he also means that his own authority has departed – as Richard confirms when he gets angry and points out that it is he who has the power, including the power to behead the old man; and the power is related to his name:
I had forgot myself, am I not king?
Awake, thou coward majesty! thou sleepest.
Is not the king’s name twenty thousand names?
Arm, arm, my name!
(iii.2.83 – 6)
Indeed Shakespeare more than once insists that the audience give some thought to the power of names. They have an obvious importance in recognition scenes, for example in the climactic, protracted interview between Marina and her father in Pericles v.i. He enquires insistently about her parentage and her kinsfolk. Then he asks for and obtains her name, which, she says, ‘was given me by one that had some power / My father, and a king’, the suggestion being that her name reflects his power. ‘How, a king’s daughter? / And call’d Marina?’ Pericles now surely has evidence enough; if he accepted what Marina has said so far the business of recognition would already be at an end. But he goes on in a dazed way, asking why she is called Marina, wanting to know who was her mother. She replies by naming her nurse. Still incredulous, he asks where she was ‘bred’, and is circumstantially answered; finally she names her father as Pericles. She asks Pericles his name (‘title’) and he gives it; but it is only when she does name her mother correctly that he is ready to say he is convinced. In the related texts, Laurence Twine’s The Pattern of Painful Adventures and George Wilkins’s novel The Painful Adventures, names are also exchanged, as could hardly be avoided – they are as necessary in these circumstances as birthmarks – but that is all; there is no more fuss, no more redundant demands for proof. It is Shakespeare who draws the matter out and makes names agents of power and revelation.
When Coriolanus confronts Aufidius in his house, Plutarch has him say that at this stage he has nothing left but the name Coriolanus, won
in battle from the people he now seeks as allies; but Plutarch says no more on that score, just giving Coriolanus a longish speech explaining that he understands he might not be welcome. But Shakespeare (Coriolanus v. 5) deals with the matter as if it were a long-drawn-out recognition scene. Aufidius demands the Roman’s name; Coriolanus says Aufidius must name himself; Aufidius repeats his demand, ‘What is thy name?’, four times before Coriolanus offers, not his birth name but his ‘surname’ or cognomen, Coriolanus. ‘Only that name remains’. At the end of the play Aufidius denies him even that stolen surname, calling him only ‘Martius’; and that name is disallowed because of its relation to ‘Mars’: ‘Name not the god, thou boy of tears!’ (v.6.100). His cognomen was peculiar to him and it is lost; now even ‘Martius’ is rejected. He has lost both his significant names and is now insultingly called just ‘boy’. He repeats the insult with furious dismay. The word ‘name’ echoes through this play, and I don’t think we can avoid the conclusion that Shakespeare is playing a game, no doubt a serious game, about names and naming.2 He has touched on it quite seriously before:
what should be in that ‘Caesar’?
Why should that name be sounded more than yours?
Write them together, yours is as fair a name;
Sound them, it doth become the mouth as well;
Weigh them, it is as heavy; conjure with ’em,
‘Brutus’ will start a spirit as soon as ‘Caesar’.
(i.2.142 – 7)
But it won’t; Caesar proves to be the magically effective name. What Cassius is doing is raising a large issue (the belief that demons inhabit a world where names are important, are indeed inherent in the demon or spirit itself) and doing it in a sceptical manner that suits his suasive intentions. Indeed it seems that Shakespeare’s interest in the story of Caesar arose partly from the fact that he took names seriously, or at least took seriously the thought that names could be serious matters; or was just interested in the idea. (The name ‘Cinna’ is a name of ill omen; it gets a poet treated as a politician, part of the joke being that in this play the poet is a feeble and ridiculous figure.) The fear that
Caesar might be named king and thereafter enjoy a limitless increase of power is one of Brutus’s worries: ‘He would be crown’d: / How that would change his nature, there’s the question’ (ii.1.12 – 13). And this is only an extension of more general interest in names: in Two Gentlemen of Verona a name is written down and torn up, wounded as if it were a person (‘I throw thy name against the bruising stone’s’, (ii.2.108). Iago informs Othello that ‘good name in man and woman … Is the immediate jewel of their souls’ (iii.3.155 – 6). This contradicts what he has recently been saying to Roderigo about reputation (ii.3.262 – 70), but here he is sanctimoniously proposing the conventional view.
One moment in Coriolanus (v.2) provides an oddly comic sidelight on the play’s fascination with names. Menenius visits the Volscian camp outside Rome in order to persuade Coriolanus to abandon the siege and save Rome. He is stopped by sentries, and tells them his name. They reply that ‘the virtue of your name / Is not here passable’. He insists, unable to believe his name will not prevail. Coriolanus himself then appears, but rejects his friend. The sentries tease Menenius as he departs: ‘Now, sir, is your name Menenius? ’Tis a spell, you see, of much power’. Menenius has an impotent name, for the source of its power was not in the name itself but in the word of Coriolanus. No such embassy is mentioned by Plutarch. It is part of Shakespeare’s game.
Can one find ways of making critical capital out of the juxtaposition, after a brief journey through the records, of Strauss at Theresienstadt and Menenius at the camp of the Volscians outside Rome? Typically, one would give the Strauss anecdote the position of privilege assigned to such anecdotes in the practice of the new historicists. For example: in 1831 the American Baptist magazine published an essay by a distinguished clergyman, the Reverend Francis Wayland, later president of Brown University. Discovering that his fifteen-month-old son was very self-willed, he set about to ‘subdue’ the child, withholding food and then offering it as a bribe for submission. With great difficulty he achieved his end; the child’s disposition became ‘mild and obedient’, his will was broken – an effect the father hoped would persist through life. He would now kiss the father he had long shunned, indeed kiss anybody his father told him to.
Stephen Greenblatt uses this narrative as a way into King Lear.
The minister has used the same sort of love-test as Lear. Cordelia, withholding love, is deprived not of food but of her inheritance. Students of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama agree with such historians as Keith Thomas and Lawrence Stone in seeing Shakespeare’s age as one which believed in the need for severe restraint on adolescence and early adulthood. The will must be curbed. The difference between the two cases turns on the age at which it was thought a suitable exercise of patria potestas to force the child into submission. What interests this new historian is the similarity between the cases, and their historical connection. Paternal power in the later case has been devolved from the state, domesticated; in the earlier it has evident political and public authority, but the situations are essentially similar. Greenblatt’s argument allows for the cultural changes of 200 years, notably the triumph of Protestantism; but in a slightly modified form the love-test survives these changes. He ends his study with some poignancy, revealing that Wayland’s tormented child was later to write a twovolume biography of his anxious father, whereas Lear ‘dies looking on his daughter’s lips for the words she never speaks’.3
This accomplished performance (here imitated by me) involves the use of anecdote, apparently come upon at random, in a fashion that is a mark of new historical writing. The initial incident recounted (for instance, the story of Wayland’s successful manoeuvre) need not belong to the same period as the target work, if we can call it that – in this case King Lear. There can be a 200-year gap between instances which can’t conceivably have been brought together before. In my example the gap between Strauss and Menenius is more than 300 years. All we have to do is fill it, for otherwise the preliminary anecdote will have no purpose. Some ingenuity is called for, and there is some explaining to do.
In defence of the method, it can be argued that the petit récit, the anecdote that apparently lies to the side of the main current of narrative history, can upset the conventional grand récit – in Greenblatt’s words, ‘puncture the historical grand récit into which it [is] inserted’. One can, as it were, roam backwards through history, always looking for counter-history, for what looks, to the conventional historian, either trivial or without relevance. In this way one may come upon connections not previously suspected.
The virtues of this procedure are celebrated in an essay to be found in a collaborative work of Greenblatt and Catherine Gallagher entitled Practicing New Historicism (2000). These authors argue that anecdotes which serve their purpose must be ‘outlandish and irregular’ if they are ‘to preserve the radical strangeness of the past’. By the application of such unconsidered bits of archival information literary texts can be ‘rubbed against the grain of received notions about their determinants’. And these counter-histories ‘would be all the more exhilarating to launch if their destinations were as yet undetermined and their trajectories lay athwart the best traveled routes’. When you arrive you find that the anecdote may have bound ‘history and counter-history, into a knot of conflicted interdependence’ (p. 68). And thus ‘literature’s own dormant counter-historical life might be reanimated: possibilities cut short, imaginings left unrealized, projects half formulated, ambitions squelched, doubts, dissatisfactions, and longings half felt, might all be detected there’ (p. 74).
This cult of the anecdote is intended to introduce into the writing of literary history some of the advantages enjoyed by dissident historians, historians of the apparently marginal, such as those of the Annales school, and to exploit the discoveries of Foucault which question the validity of existing accounts of political and cultural orders. Lurking behind this approach, which is certainly exciting in some ways, is an assumption – partly it seems traceable back to Herder – that ‘poetry … is not the path to a transhistorical truth, whether psychoanalytic or deconstructive or purely formal, but the key to particular historically embedded social and psychological formations’ (p. 7). The new history will not, like the outmoded ‘close readings’, ‘build toward an intensified sense of wondering admiration, linked to the celebration of genius’, but rather it will be ‘skeptical, wary, demystifying, critical, and even adversarial’. However, in spite of all this, ‘major works of art remain centrally important’, though ‘jostled now by an array of other texts and images’ (p. 9).
I will return to the matter of ‘the central importance’ of works of art, merely mentioning that by no means all new-historical practitioners would accept it, and adding further that although we have to accept the word of these exceptionally able writers it is sometimes hard to see how they can hold that view against the weight of their theoretical
position. Anecdotes, it seems, are best when wayward, when least obviously associated with the ordinary run of historical narrative. The argument for anecdote has the authority of Foucault’s remarks on the illumination provided by ‘that which is thrown out of official history, the “other” of power’ (p. 70).
Joel Fineman, a critic who had close associations with the founders and sponsors of this ‘intellectual posture’, speaks of its ‘characteristic air of reporting, haplessly, the discoveries it happened serendipitously to stumble upon in the course of undirected, idle rambles through the historical archives’.4 Fineman provided a theory of the anecdote, and the hostility of his tone in this passage is only apparent, but it is worth quoting because it does indicate that the methodology can be as random as the anecdote it looks for. The plot of new historicism consists in establishing the substance of the anecdote as somehow, despite its apparent waywardness or seeming irrelevance, a source that illuminates or qualifies understanding of the complex culture of the time, especially as that has been described in their blinkered way by more conventional historians; and secondly, in finding a way of connecting the anecdote to some text of more central interest, whether that text is of the same period as the anecdote or not. Clearly the task is easier if anecdote and central text are roughly coeval, but more fun (and this, I repeat, is a kind of game) may be had if they are centuries apart.
Since I have been imitating or mimicking this ‘intellectual posture’, it may be thought right that I should provide some sort of historical thread connecting Strauss and Menenius. For instance, and here I borrow a point from Geoffrey Hartman, there is a distinction, formulated by Saussure, between ordinary nouns such as table and chair on the one hand, which point to a referent in the world of things, but rely on a concept of table and chair to signify; and on the other hand names, which are pure signifiers that have only a referent (the person indicated) and no concept or signified. The only kind of name that escapes pure signification is a nickname.5 We may remember that in the dialogue between John of Gaunt and Richard II, which I mentioned earlier, the name of Gaunt is actually reduced to a nickname.
But this is a modern formulation and there is plenty of evidence that names were not usually thought of in this way, namely as pure signifiers.
The Cratylus inaugurated the long debate about ‘the correctness of names’; it is a matter some think can be determined by etymology, and Socrates does a lot of etymologizing himself, but doesn’t accept the view of Cratylus that this is the right way to get at the natural meaning of names. However, he does not go on to assert that their meaning is merely conventional – that we willingly call somebody John or Peter without at all having to attribute to him some petrine or johannine essence. We are told that Cratylus finally refused to believe that anything stayed still long enough to be referred to, and, giving up words, confined himself to pointing. However, his earlier position, that names were of the nature of the named, was used by Christian cabbalists in support of their view that not only words but their letters could be put to magical use. Parallel Hebraic practices, equally extreme, are well known. Some words, replaced in writing by the Tetragrammaton, were so directly involved with the nature of their referent, in this case God, that they could not, without blasphemy, be spoken at all, and indeed the Tetragrammaton is specifically designed to be unspeakable.
The idea of vis verborum was strong among Platonists and related to magical efficacy, and so the orthodox felt a need to distinguish, in this matter of the power of words, between magic and religion. The power of the words spoken by the priest at the Eucharist (hoc est corpus meum) was not a magical power, though Thomas Aquinas held that transubstantiation could occur only if these words, along with hic est calix sanguinis mei, were spoken, with no others. Such a consecration is valid regardless of whether the priest is in mortal sin or a heretic, but it would be invalid if spoken in the vernacular. The reason why this was not magic was that God performs the validation, provides the power, as we might say. Magical spells, despite their resemblance to these sacred words, could not only be diabolic. A major difference, yet both sides depend on ‘a theory of language according to which there is a real, not conventional, connection between words and what they connote’.6 The matter was clearly of high importance at the time of the Reformation. The power of names was also detected in writings not in themselves magical or liturgical. The Bible offers a precedent: ‘As his name is, so is he; Nabal is his name, his folly is to him’ (I Samuel 25: 25).
It is clear that the habit of seeking the nature of a name by etymology was commonplace from the Greeks to the Renaissance and much later. It could be ridiculed – lucus a non lucendo was originally a serious Stoic proposition; humanity had much corrupted the divine originals. Quintilian says ludus can mean ‘school’ because there is no playing there. The encyclopaedic and universally known Isidore of Seville was a notorious etymologizer. And, to abbreviate this excursus, one still hears people attempting to defend usage or explain sense by etymology.
All these instances call for a search for power within the word, and that search, taking different forms in different epochs, is an indication of a perpetual quest for such power. So we may say of names that when properly conferred and used they bestow power, as when Jacob was blessed and renamed Israel; and we note that Jacob’s request that his opponent should give his name is refused. Names withheld may be powerful; names proclaimed may be powerful. They can be used as an exercise or demonstration of power or privilege, they can be wounded (as Hardy saw when he picked up Lucetta’s ‘poor wounded name’ from Two Gentlemen of Verona for the title page of Tess). If they fail when used in an attempt to exercise power the consequence is ridicule and scorn.
The experience of Richard Strauss was the result of the same tradition that found out the emptiness of Menenius’s claim, and both suffered political failures, presuming as they did on the delegated power of a great person or institution, Coriolanus or the Nazi party. Such power as the names possessed was easily nullified by the authority deputed to ignorant soldiers.
We have seen the quality of royalty drained away by a change of name. King Edward to Duke of Windsor is a change representing the disastrous loss of a power not inherent but conferred. A princess is painfully reduced when no longer a royal highness. New names, names of power, are continually created. We may say that there is much power in a name but that it is always, and always has been, an unstable commodity, its permanence at the mercy of the power that awarded it.
Offering an exercise in a modern critical mode, I have traced a connection between an anecdote, the story of Richard Strauss, and an apparently unrelated episode in a play of Shakespeare’s. Such a procedure would have been inconceivable to the critics who wrote for
Bateson fifty years ago. Almost everything depends on the choice of the initial anecdote. The guards at Theresienstadt are not impressed by the name of Strauss. The Volscian sentries refuse to acknowledge the power of Menenius’s name. The game consists in closing the gap between these moments, and the wider and less probable the gap the better the game.
I had another look at the early issues of Essays in Criticism to see if anybody had written about Coriolanus. Sure enough, there was in the fourth volume a piece by D. J. Enright called ‘Coriolanus: Tragedy or Debate?’. Enright argued that although we hear a great deal of talk about Coriolanus we are not presented with ‘a creature who is, at any remove, truly human and truly living’. The character of the hero remains ‘shadowy’. Consequently the play suffers from ‘low tension’. It has no ‘tragic conflict’ and ‘evokes only intellectual curiosity’. Not only is it a ‘success of an altogether lower order than Macbeth’, it were best not to think of it as a tragedy at all, but as a debate. I. R. Browning, replying to Enright, emphasizes Shakespeare’s alteration of Plutarch’s Coriolanus, his substituting anger and hate for Plutarch’s ‘noble carelessness’; and he directs attention to the role of Volumnia, who ‘made a man’ of her son. Coriolanus performed his bloody deeds in order to be loved; like a child he seeks love and attention by making a nuisance of himself.
Professor Enright is a poet and critic who, in the following half-century, has put us all in his debt. The point of referring to this youthful essay is simply to show that it is a work of its moment, as it happens, by an admirer of Leavis. It does what Arnold said one should do, and puts one play in a lower rank than another, even denying it the honorific of tragedy. No young critic would write in this way nowadays. One might add a different point: that this critic was and is a poet of distinction and has little to say about the verse of Coriolanus, to which the expression ‘low tension’ has surely no relevance at all.
Browning, though his main interest is again in character, ‘the truly human’, etc., is perhaps more forward-looking; his emphasis on the hero’s mother and the importance of anger is of interest to modern critics of a psychoanalytical bent. Volumnia is not a nourishing mother: ‘Anger’s my meat: I sup upon myself’, she says (iv.2.50) and Coriolanus is a male version of her, committed to a ‘phallic standing alone’. Blood
is more beautiful than milk. And so on. I refer, inadequately, to a rather famous study by Janet Adelman,7 a learned and ingenious feminist, who takes the argument about anger a good deal further than anybody, except perhaps Empson in his mood, would have ventured fifty years ago.
This is an image of what one might call the progress of criticism. Everybody knows that there has been a dash for interdisciplinarity – that literary criticism is now on terms of a sort with anthropology, linguistics, psychoanalysis, feminism, ‘queer theory’, certain varieties of philosophy – and the kinds of history, or counter-history, I have been talking about. This is a matter of fashion, partly, but it probably also represents a radical change. The remark of Matthew Arnold I quoted, at the outset, from Holloway’s essay, implies a canon. The idea of canon is, in principle, abhorrent to the new criticism; though there may, in some important practitioners, be a vestigial respect for some great works of art, the general attitude appears to be, rather simply, that there are no criteria for such valuations, that they are merely an unreflective tribute to works we have been taught to admire.
However interesting we may find the best of modern criticism, it is certain that its achievements are won at a considerable cost. It has much broader interests than the criticism of fifty years ago, and the ‘quaint rigour’ of the young has taken a different and less pious form, but it has marked disadvantages: its principles actually prevent it from attending closely to the language of major works (in so far as that description is regarded as acceptable) – to the work itself, rather than to something more congenial, and to some more interesting, that can be put in its place. Nobody, I think, would want to go back; but it is reasonable to be apprehensive about the future, and the possibility that literature itself, let alone literary criticism, may not easily survive the onslaught of undisciplined interdisciplinarity. I don’t think even Freddy Bateson could start a journal resembling Essays in Criticism today.
Perhaps I had better say, in conclusion, that the connection between Richard Strauss and Menenius seems to me to be quite illusory.